AUTHOR'S NOTE: Dementors are sentient. Therefore, could it truly be that they are all evil soul-sucking monsters? Mrs Rowling's book certainly made no effort to indicate they were not, which is understandable inasmuch as she reportedly based them on her struggle with depression, a background which doesn't exactly bring empathy with said depression to the front of one's mind. However, to a reader, I thought the idea practically wrote itself. To my surprise, however, there are very few good Dementors-are-people fanfictions. The two best ones I have been able to find so far are Sweet as a Dementor's Kiss, which is full of ideas but depressing, as the Dementors do not seem to have any way out of their rotten life in this vision; and Dementors, a very good eight-chapters story where Hermione, wrongly sent to Azkaban, end befriending the Dementors. However, neither fit the story I wanted to tell — the story of a Dementor who was not from Azkaban. So here it is.

Reviews would be very much appreciated, and if you catch any mistakes, please do notify me of it; I am not a native English speaker. I cannot promise regular updates for this on a strict schedule, but I will try not to be too long between chapters.

CHAPTER I
The Castle and the Room

I am not sure how I came to be. I have heard that my kind grows from darkness and magic, from the forlornness of a place; and I have been told that we reproduce, like fungi — that mothers spread spores that grow in damp and dark places into newborns, then into adults. I have no memory of being either a spore or a bit of forgotten magic, and I certainly don't feel like a fungus… but I suppose it does not really matters, anyway.

For as long as I remember, I lived in the Castle. I was small, cold and grey, with large white eyes bobbing from a small bony face. The Castle was cold and grey as well, but it wasn't small at all. It was large; it seemed a whole world to me, and for long I did not know there was anything more to the world than the Castle. I usually dwelt in a large area that provided the perfect playground for a curious youth: there many implements of dark wood with stiff legs, between which I glided as fast as I could without hitting anyone of them; there was a large multi-legged structure covered with a fascinating soft, black, dusty substance. You could yank it all you wanted, but it would never break, just fold in fascinating patterns. You could raise it and glide underneath, and hide under the wooden board of the multi-legged object.

When I first entered this den, I had felt a foreign presence; a pulse of magic that was not my own, something quivering, fast, not cold and yet not warm — almost electrical. It was so dark my white eyes did not properly see it, but I felt its soul backing in a corner at first, then coming back to consider me curiously. I felt driven to investigate that soul, instinctively looking for something, but I could not find it. Meanwhile, I felt something nagging at my own consciousness, and I realized that the creature was reading my soul as I was reading his. Could it be another like myself? A playmate? No. When it finally came out of its corner, it had shifted its shape into that of… was it… yes! It was! The creature looked just like the wonderful soft substance on the multi-legged board. Forgive a youngling with no education for not having paid the proper caution and instead yanked at the wonderful dark sheet immediately. Much to my horror, the fabric ripped as soon as I touched it, and unraveled and fell to bits, and I had a growing certitude that it was gone, and I would never be able to yank it again, and it was terrible.

But, once the terror receded, I once more paid attention to the creature's soul that was no longer tied to anything visible, and I understood it had simply pretended to be the fabric, and pretended to tear. I also felt something nice in its soul, a sort of fuzzy, bubbly, chirpy feeling; with a smile, I took a deep breath with my mouth, and the fuzzy bubbly chirpiness moved into my own soul. It was delightful, a feeling of success, victory and pride. The creature had liked turning into the dark fabric and pretending to tear, and now I could feel that in its place. However, I also felt immediately afterwards that the creature wasn't chirpy, or fuzzy, or bubbly, now that I'd sucked it all out; and it had felt so good that I felt ashamed of what I'd done, I felt sad for the odd little thing that liked to pretend to be a tearing dark fabric. Then again, it had scared me; I supposed it had deserved it. Still, better not do that again. I might suck out all the fuzzy bubbly chirpiness out of it, forever; and I don't think any amount of scaring made it deserve something like that. I did not have a choice in the matter, in the end, because the creature immediately became scared of me, and, invisible, it floated out from underneath the multi-legged board out of my sight and reach.

It was nice and dark in there; so I decided that was where I would sleep. I was pleasantly surprised to find the creature had obviously been nesting there for a little while, and so there were little bits of a pleasant emotion left here and there, like a diffuse scent of homeliness and coziness. I felt it, and rather than suck it all in at once, I decided to enjoy it passively whenever I slept.

I do not think I slept with any real pattern or timing as I later learnt most things did. It was an endless series of playing and exploring, and retreating to the den as soon as my long, thin arms felt tired and I longed for the diffuse feeling of homeliness. The more time I spent there, I noticed, the more homely it got, my own emotions mixing with those of the previous occupant. I knew of no night and day to time myself on, for the room's only windows had long ago been walled up.

During my waking periods, I met other odd living beings. The first I met was a small furry thing with a long slippery tail and four crooked legs; it was a mouse. The mouse seemed rather interesting to my seeing eyes. Its four legs looked much more like my two arms than anything I'd ever seen, complete with small hands with fingers at their extremities; it had a neck and a head, with eyes and nostrils and a mouth. Yet I soon found, when I looked with my soul's eyes, that I had more of a resemblance with the shape-shifting creature. The mouse never looked into my mind, and seemed barely aware that I looked into its own; and what little mind there was to look into! It was a small, tight, stingy pack of hunger and fear and sleepiness, pulsing not with magic but with the very fast beating of a small sack of red liquid inside its chest. I knew this because within minutes of my entering its mind, the mouse convulsed before it fell completely still, eyes wide open. I felt the tiny little soul rise from its little brain, nothing but a dot of light and emotion, before fading away. It had not disappeared outright, I was sure of it; its emotion hadn't dissipated in the air where I could taste them; instead it was as if it had moved someplace else, someplace that I could not reach into by gliding or even jumping.

This was the first time I saw something die, and I found it quite puzzling. However, wherever the dot of stupid consciousness had gone, it probably didn't need its little furry body anymore, so it probably wouldn't mind if I had a closer look at it. (As if it would ever have managed to hold an actual opinion anyway, I thought with a hint of smugness.) With this in mind, I picked up the small and warm piece of flesh. It certainly did look like my own body, but smaller and distorted in odd ways. And much, much less tough, as I soon discovered when trying to hold it from its muzzle resulted in the muzzle breaking off, and… forgive me. I do believe a detailed discussion of such actions would be uncomfortable to most readers. Let us say that, if a little clumsily, I learnt the basics of animals' anatomy that day. Drawing on our similarities, I assumed my own insides must be at least somewhat similar to the mouse's, though, after putting my hand on my chest, I felt no heart beating inside it.

I met other mice later on; I must admit that the first time, I purposefully forced myself into the mouse's mind. It was not cruelty, though I now regret doing it; it was merely curiosity. I wanted to check whether my effect on the first mouse had been unusual, and if the insides of one mouse looked like the insides of another one. After events unfolded in a nearly identical way as during my first try, I gave up and steered clear of mice, for their own sake. As long as I approached slowly, they usually felt my aura and ran away on their own, anyway.

A little while later, I also found a thing of beauty in a corner of the room. White, almost transparent wires netted into a pattern regular and creative, flawless and yet artistic. Truly a work of genius. Yes, I thought; I could be proud of that web. I had done fine work.

Wait.

It took me a little while to understand I was actually draining the emotions of some other being, the true creator of the web, one so small my true eyes had missed it when my soul's eyes had not. It was a small, black, male spider. It had more legs than the mice, and those legs looked in some way more like my arms: thin, stiff, articulated at precise joints so that they would not bend any other way. Not only did it have many legs, but it had many eyes as well, though they were very, very little. Its soul was scarcely any bigger than the mouse's, but what I found in it was decidedly more engaging. It was peaceful, attentive, waiting expectantly for any vibrations of the silk of its superb web; just a hint of hunger behind it, it was mostly abstract instinct. I preferred being myself, and think higher thoughts, but I would have been quite happy as a spider, whereas I found the life of a mouse lowly and even somewhat scary — always running, always worrying.

The Spider did not know I was there, for it was entirely focused on its webs; therefore it did not fear me, and so it did not die. I would have hated to bring about the end of such an interesting creature, so I quietly glided away and avoided the Spider's corner from then on.

The room was large and wonderful, but it was not the only place in the Castle, as I soon realized. There was a door, and it led into a corridor; and there were other doors in the corridors that led to other rooms. It took me very long to figure out how to open a door, even though I felt at once there was space behind it when I passed in front of it. I tried to push it with my head and with my fists, I tried to squeeze myself underneath, to no avail. Observing the hinges allowed me to understand how the board would turn to the left to leave an open hole; but how to make it do this? I eventually understood that the odd implement sticking out of the door — a door-handle — was involved, somehow, in the process. I also noticed that a hand like mine seemed the perfect tool to hold the handle. Could it be the door had been made just for me? Or maybe for a very big mouse, if there was such a thing. Now, pulling or tugging produced no clear result. On the other hand, pushing downwards did seem to be in the right direction, as I heard a mechanism click whenever I did so. Yet the door did not yet open, whether I pulled or pushed.

I allowed myself to look with my soul's eye, something I had not thought of doing on an inanimate object; and I felt something. Something very odd. It felt in some ways like a soul or an emotion, it was an invisible energy; but it was not the organic pulsing of a soul, it was as if someone had taken the matter in which emotions and souls were carved, and carved into a completely different way. The invisible bauble of energy was to souls what a wooden board was to a mouse. Or something like that, anyway. I tried to suck the energy out, and it came, not warm and chirpy, but sustaining all the same. Along with it came a little fragment of memory that had attached itself to it, not even a clear emotion; the feeling of moving my lips a certain way (a way, I realized, that I could not manage, for my lips were much stiffer than those of the memory's owner), and hearing an odd sound coming from my throat, a regular, controlled sound much more distinct than a breath, but lower in tone than a mouse's squeaking: "Coloportus", it said. And the feeling of the warm energy fusing out of my… hand?… through… a stick… Then the feeling and the words had attached themselves to the warm energy on the door. When the last of the memory and the warm soul-like energy had left the door and sunk into my own cold soul, nothing stopped me from opening the door when I once more pushed down on the handle.

And that was how I discovered magic.