Part 3 Chapter 1
Michael Corners had worked in Azkaban for most of his adult life. It was not a career that anyone would be proud of, certainly, but it was dependable, and there were few other positions in the magical world suitable for a man of his particular talents. Or rather his lack of talents. With hardly enough magic to earn himself a Hogwarts letter, he hadn't been qualified for warding or curse-breaking. He hadn't been very good at arithmancy, which disqualified him from spell-crafting and enchanting. Runes were always a sore spot for him, which contributed greatly to his absolute incompetency in all matters magical.
There were many things that Michael Corners lacked. Sympathy and common decency were a few examples of the kind, but these deficits proved to be exactly the sort of thing that people looked for when they went hiring for Azkaban guards. All it took to convince him to take the job was decent pay and a guaranteed retirement, which the Ministry was quick to provide to anyone willing to suffer Azkaban prison's horrors willingly.
There was a certain price that was paid by those who spent the majority of their days within the castle's walls. Most people couldn't stand it for more than a few years, which made it almost impossible to keep the prison fully staffed. Michael had seen them come and go. Baby-faced fellows with too much naivety and too little resilience to stand a chance, really. There was another one, a new guy, and it fell to Michael to show him the ropes, as usual.
"Alright," he declared, startling his companion from his reverie. They had been standing at the end of a corridor in the upper level, listening to the conversations of the other guards as they milled around the guardhouse, mumbling about Ministry business and trivial matters that nobody really paid any attention to except for the Warden.
The kid's wide blue eyes stared at him for a moment, and Michael resisted the urge to sneer at the guy. "First thing, we get to feed the inmates. Grab one of those carts and we'll get moving."
Doing as he was told, the young man rolled up his sleeves and pushed the cart over towards Michael, who watched him with a bored expression on his wrinkled face. He explained the workings of the damn cart, how it was connected to the storehouse, how it dispensed the slop into a bowl. Then they began the long, demoralizing trek throughout all four levels of Azkaban prison.
The uppermost levels, one and two, were above ground, and there was just enough of the dusty sunlight peering in through the windows that the castle didn't appear all that unfriendly. Aside from the dementors that swung out into the corridor every once and awhile, sapping the joy and energy out of anyone unfortunate enough to be near to them, it was a rather relaxing walk.
The prisoners here were in various states of degeneration. The upper levels didn't have any serious nutcases, although anyone that suffered under the hands of dementors on a daily basis was bound to be a little unhinged. They wore a variety of tattered robes, these inmates, usually whatever they had been wearing when they were arrested. So long as it wasn't enchanted, criminals basically got tossed into a cell in whatever was on their backs when they arrived.
Robes hung off their emaciated frames like drapery. Some of the prisoners crawled desperately towards the cell door as the new guy slid their bowl through the little slot designed specifically for that purpose. Others cowered away from the sound of the cart. Michael ignored all of them, instructing the unfortunate man on the proper way to provide food to the more dangerous inmates without being pulled against the cell and choked to death.
That had happened last year. Right nasty business on level three.
There was one prisoner on the first level that Michael always found most curious. It was the mass-murderer Sirius Black, a man that everyone expected to be stark-raving mad when they showed up for their first day on the job. Most of them were surprised to find him quite composed, and this rookie was no exception. They reached that cell after taking a left turn in the corridor, following the winding path of the thick stone walls, and the cart clattered to a halt.
Black's eyes opened, dead and gray, but he said nothing. He was sitting cross-legged in the very center of his cell, shirtless. Tattered trousers hung from his bony waist, obviously too large for him, and only the knot tied by the ratty cord around his hips held them above his ankles. Dark tattoos covered his entire body, triangles and semicircles, pentagons and jagged, twisting lines. Once pulsing with power, now dead.
His hair was twisted, long, and shaggy. It hung down to his shoulders where it flayed and scattered in a horrendous manner, tangling hopelessly with the mass of graying hair that hung from his neck and jaw. His beard was bushy and thick, streaked with white, and the only visible portions of his pale face were his sunken eyes and his hooked nose.
The young man pushing the cart hesitated. "Go on," Michael told him, gesturing at the cell.
The man leaned down and slid the bowl through the bars. The empty bowl from yesterday was there already, and it was retrieved in the same motion.
Black stood and stepped towards the door in a single lithe action, making no sound as he retrieved the bowl and glared at them, watching each and every one of their movements as they shuffled further on down the corridor.
Once they had walked a good distance, past another twelve or thirteen cells, the rookie paused. "That was Sirius Black," he said, as if it had only just dawned upon him.
"Aye," Michael replied. He gestured to the withering, pathetic creature that was crouched beside the cell. "Go on. Careful of this one. Damn hag doesn't know when to quit…"
As usual, the impudent young man didn't listen, still thinking over his encounter with the infamous criminal. As he bent to slide the bowl through the bars, the woman lurched forward and seized his neck through the wrought iron, dragging him forward and slamming his head into the grate. The sound of ringing metal reverberated down the corridor, and she heaved as if to have another crack at it, but Michael was there.
He was against the bars with that same bored expression on his face, grabbing the painfully thin woman by her spidery gray hair. Just as she drew the rookie in to bang his skull on the bars, Michael snapped her head against the metal in the same manner, except with the full strength of a healthy adult man. Needless to say, his action was more effective than hers.
Something crunched in the impact, and she released the new guy, who fell back against the cart, choking on air and groaning in pain. Michael watched the glistening blood dripping from the woman's nose for a moment, standing close to the bars in a silent dare.
Try it.
"Curse you," she hissed, crouching over her spilled meal. her fingers sought out the soaked stones of her cell, scooping dumplings and something that might have been meat at some point, now mixed with grime and unmentionable filth, into her hands. All was deposited back into her bowl as she scuttled back to the parasite-infested bedroll.
Michael drew the rookie up, put his hands back on the cart. "Be more careful," he admonished. "These people didn't get thrown in here for selling roses in Hogsmeade."
The man nodded, shakily, and they continued on and on. Down they went, to level two. It was darker, fouler, and more oppressive here. And it was here that they came across an unfortunately common spectacle.
The prisoner was standing at the stone wall with his fingers splayed across the cold, unforgiving rock. Michael knew what was about to happen—he'd seen it before—but he didn't look away. It didn't matter to him. Nothing mattered.
The inmate glanced at them, staring with empty eyes. He was already dead, it seemed. What happened next was just reiterating the fact. With a suddenly violent motion, something that might have seemed impossible from such a frail, tortured creature, the man crushed his skull against the stone.
"Merlin!" the rookie exclaimed, reeling away from the sickening sound of splintering bone. Bright, arterial blood sprayed across the wall as the inmate slumped forward, unconscious and dying swiftly. At once, a dementor swept through the bars of the cell, seeming incorporeal as it hung low over the bleeding man's ruined face, turning it up gently so the graying light of the sun could illuminate it fully.
Michael shook his head. Dementors loved this the most, the moment of death. It was their ultimate goal, he knew. He had been here long enough that he was quite familiar with the dementors, almost fond of them in many ways, and he had seen this sort of behavior out of them before.
They craved the exquisite pleasures of a man's dying terror, of his mortal agony, of final despair. This dementor held the ruined face of the prisoner intimately between its hands and shuddered in orgiastic pleasure as the man's blood poured out onto the stones from the great dent in his skull, from the gaping crack in bone which had been weakened by malnutrition.
Michael pushed the stricken rookie and the cart to the next cell. He would come back later to deal with the corpse…
At the end of the day, they were back in the guardhouse, and Michael pulled out his cigar, lighting it up in the cramped common area as he sat down at the knotted oak table. The other man fell, trembling, into a seat opposite him, looking ten years older than he had looked just this morning. There was little light in his eyes now.
"What do you think?"
The man's eyes focused on him, only to slip away to gaze at the wall. "What do I think?" he whispered, almost as if he didn't understand. He repeated it louder. "What do I think?"
Michael raised one bushy white eyebrow.
"I think that you're a heartless bastard," the younger man hissed. "I think that we'll all burn in Hell for the things that we've allowed to happen in this castle. I think…"
His tirade was cut off quite suddenly by a shudder that ran through the very stones under their feet. The other guards, all tired and pale, drained and weary, froze in the midst of their conversations. The strange phenomenon died as soon as it began.
The door to the Warden's office banged open. "Alright, who was it?" he barked, turning his thunderous expression upon the uncomprehending guards. "Which one of you dimwits tampered with the wards? Do you think this is a joke?"
They heard it then, a great screeching cry. It echoed up from beneath their feet, swelled around them like a gust of wind, hummed and buzzed in the hollows of their skulls, and then swept through the slitted windows of the castle as if it had never been. It crawled up from the winding staircases, a terrible cacophony that pounded in their heads like hammers, and for a moment no one could do anything but cringe against the noise.
"The lower levels!" the Warden shouted over the din. The guards stared at him blankly. "Come on, you idiots!"
The man grabbed the nearest guard and practically threw him towards the stairs. This brought the rest of them to their feet, and they swarmed out of the guardhouse in a disorderly charge, heading towards the source of the hellish choir which was beginning to shake the stones of the castle. Some of them grabbed torches from the walls, but others simply conjured lights with their wands and tried to keep up with the mad rush.
The moist depths of the lowest level were the epicenter of the noise, and the moment the guards poured out into the tight square atrium, absolute silence settled over the castle. Michael was pressed in the middle of the crowd, but he pushed his way to the front and led the way down the right-hand passage, towards the place that he knew was the heart of Azkaban's wards.
There were not many people that knew of the secret chamber. The Warden, of course, and a few of the oldest veterans of the guards. It was to this chamber that they went, a crowd of confused, terrified men, and when they reached it, they saw something that boggled the mind.
Michael froze at the threshold to the warding chamber, stared out over the assembled horde of dementors, and felt in that moment that he would die. Laying his eyes upon this unholy host should have been enough to strip his soul from his body, but instead it only rendered him paralyzed by fear.
And there, at the head of the writhing mass, a single man stood, frozen like a statue, wreathed in white magic, clothed in a thick black cloak which hung motionless from his shoulders even as his magic whipped around him in a cyclone. The guards trembled at the spectacle, and even the Warden held his tongue as he watched what was sure to be the death of this intrepid inmate.
For a moment, even Michael felt the plight of the haggard man that stood there, unbalanced by an old injury, before impossible odds. Then he heard the man speak.
"I have come to set right a terrible wrong," he intoned. His voice was dry like grinding rocks, but it pulsed outward from him in waves and manifested in the vibrations of the gut. It was like listening to an avalanche speaking English. "I have come to do what William the Conqueror failed to do a thousand years ago, when he stood upon these very stones."
The dementors hissed and screeched, flexing and pulling as a mass until one of their number was pushed to the forefront. It was one of the larger ones, a powerful example of his kind, and he hung suspended in the light of the prisoner's magic. "Who are you?"
None of the guards had ever heard a dementor speak, and the sound took the breath from their lungs and replaced it with ice.
"I am Sephtis," was the immediate reply. "I have claimed the wards of this castle. I have trapped you and your accursed brethren here, in this chamber. Soon, it will be finished."
"It would be a favor to us, for you to release us from these mortal prisons of flesh," the dementor hissed.
Sephtis stepped forward, and the dementors screeched as they recoiled from him. His magic swelled and crawled across the stones in white tendrils. Michael was shaking with the amount of power that was at evidence here, he could feel it in the earth and in the air. The guards behind him murmured quietly to each other, drawing back.
"Then why are you afraid?" Sephtis asked the demon rhetorically. "Ah. It is because you know that I am not here to free you. I am here to destroy you."
The dementor laughed, and was joined by a chorus of breathy cackles. "I built this castle, I carved these runes. They cannot destroy us, little mage," it rasped. "Nothing can destroy us."
"I can," Sephtis replied. "Come forth and die."
The dementors responded to this challenge as might be expected. The host of them swelled up, as if pressing against an invisible dam, and finally surged forward in a wave of leathery skin and flapping black robes. The sound of their terrible screeching rose to a frenzied pitch now, forcing the guards to their knees. Michael's eyes watered as he stared, unbelieving, at the white magic that began to pulse around the darkly clad prisoner.
Sephtis. That was his name. Michael would never forget that name.
The dementors broke over his dome of magic like water upon a rock, but they were burned by it as well. flames crawled across their clothing, and Sephtis raised his hands after a moment, surrounded entirely by the chattering forms of his enemies. Then his magic exploded from him in a thin blade, cutting in all directions. It plucked the swarm from the air and threw them down against the stones, where they writhed and howled at the magic that had cut them. Black ichor and acrid smoke spilled from the wounds on their unnatural bodies.
Sephtis pressed his hands together and the castle's stones glowed briefly red as power surged through them, running along the ground and into the prisoner's feet.
He's siphoning from the wards, Michael realized. He hadn't known that such a thing was possible.
The white magic swelled again, reaching out its tendrils to choke the life from the dementors that still sought to bring down their executioner. The clawed across teh stones, reaching for him even as the flesh was stripped from their bones. The prisoner seemed to tower above them, majestic, as they burned, screeching like the victims that they had so abused for centuries, twisting as their forms were stripped from them.
The mass of smoky spirits had gathered above the prisoner, and for a moment Michael thought that it was done. He couldn't believe what he had witnessed.
But then a flickering, orange flame grew in the air around Sephtis, growing in intensity with every breath. After a moment, it swept around and took the form of a vicious, winged snake. Jaws wide, it curled up into the air and swallowed up the unnatural black smoke.
For a moment, the spectacle froze. In fact, time itself seemed to hesitate, as if the whole universe had gasped at the audacity of this wizard's actions. The flames didn't move, didn't dance. There was no sound at all, and the air hung deathly still in the chamber.
Then the runes pulsed along the walls and ceilings, illuminating a maze of intricate patterns, carved in six different languages over the course of a thousand years. A pulse reverberated beneath their feet as the precursor to the shockwave that blasted outward from the fiery conjuration, and Michael trembled as the furious air rushed over his body. It snuffed the torches, scattered the remains of the dementor's clothes, and seemed to take with it the very air that was breathed by the shaken guards of Azkaban.
Utter blackness consumed them. Then, a gentle light revealed Sephtis to them. He was standing at the top of the stairs, facing all sixty-odd guards silently, but no one even thought about drawing their wands upon him. They had just witnessed the impossible, and their absolute shock was enough to stay their hands. That and crippling fear of the incredible power that they had seen.
"This island is now mine," the man declared. He might have looked young if it were not for the gaunt, skeletal nature of his face and the dark beginnings of a beard that was clinging to his jaw. He had bright, piercing green eyes, and his black hair hung in a tangled mess around his face.
He was thin, tall, and sharp. But there was a palpable power to him that manifested in a subtle itch under the skin. A buzz at the back of the skull. It made Michael want to back far away, curl into a ball, and close his eyes against the sight.
"Return to the ministry and tell them that Sephtis has claimed Azkaban for his own."
The Warden came forward then, inclining his head nervously and looking for the right words. "What about the prisoners?"
"I will handle the prisoners. They are no longer your concern," Sephtis told the man sharply. "Depart from this place. You have four hours before the wards will eject you."
And with a slight twist, Sephtis was gone. Not even the distinct crack of apparition marked his departure, only the gentle swirl of dust upon the stone.
A/N: Welcome to Part 3! The final section of the story begins here. I wanted to clear up a few small things,
First, Sephtis is Harry Potter. It will become even clearer in the next chapter, but I thought that it was fairly straightforward in the interlude, so I just wanted to clear up any confusion definitively.
Second, there were a few people that seemed to question the fact that Sephtis wasn't incredibly angry at El for allowing him to be thrown into Azkaban in the first place. Well, there are a few things that you might not have noticed when you read through part 2. El did prepare Sephtis for Azkaban by teaching him wandless magic, runes, and the mind arts. The difference between Harry's failure and Sephtis' success is that Sephtis called upon El's power and Harry thought to achieve victory alone. The second reason that Sephtis isn't angry is that he hardly even remembers his life as Harry Potter. The interlude established how thoroughly he was ruined by the dementors. So Sephtis is not angry primarily because he didn't feel abandoned but also because his life as Harry Potter is more like a dream to him than personal experience.
And that's that. I also wanted to offer my thanks for the support this story has seen so far, but I won't get all sappy on you. I hope you continue to enjoy my work.
