7. Connection
It might have been all the repeated mentions of Potter's magnificent
Patronus that first sparked the idea in my overworked mind. Anyone with half
a brain could see that there was a connection between the Patronuses and the
Dementors – but no one had wondered (as far as I could tell) what that
connection really was. After all, Muggles don't stop their morning
procedures to contemplate how the toilet or the faucet work, nor do Witches
and Wizards in general worry about how spells and charms operate – it is
simply enough that they do.
Hence, my editor looked two steps away from pulling me off the story when
I came in muttering about trying to find out how Patroni work. He wondered –
weighing his words between earnestness and sarcasm – if I had missed the
Hogwarts class when Expecto Patronum was discussed. 'Patroni are the
embodiment of their casters' positive thoughts,' he told me, quite possibly
reciting old Flitwick's lecture verbatim. If I didn't believe him, I could
check the library - 'it's called research.'
Though too tired to argue coherently, I asked him why those happy
thoughts would attack the Dementors and why the latter would flee before the
former. Before he fled from my unfocused, staring eyes and convoluted
reasoning, my editor told me that if I wanted to know why Dementors feared
embodied Happy Thoughts, I should either go interview a Dementor or drop the
story.
I did neither, of course. But I did go to the library, and I did
interview, once again, the closest thing I could find to a companionable
Dementor, though the First One would undoubtedly resent the comparison. My
agitated mind simply refused to accept what was, I thought, a wishy-washy
explanation of a spell that might provide an invaluable clue to solving the
mystery of the Dementors.
At first, I thought I would get nothing but tedious repetition from the
First One. The Dementors fear life, he said. They fear being infected by it.
It was only after the interview, alone in the Pergamentus Library that the
First One's prattling came to make sense.
Ancient scrolls talk of the Empty Ones. Dementor was a term coined in
1616 by Akil Attenville, a witchdoctor criticising the use of the beings as
guardians of the newly established Azkaban prison. He argued that a person's
sanity and soul should never be stolen in such a demeaning way, no matter
the crime committed. Attenville meant that these Dementors reflected the
demented attitude of a society gone mad. The Empty Ones dehumanised their
creators and where we once had used mentors to guide people onto a better
path, we now provided de-mentors to destroy a damage already done.
His arguments never quite gripped the conscience of the Prophet's readers
back when his heated articles were published, largely due to his own
highbrow rhetoric. I spent hours deciphering and summarising them for my
first substantial piece in weeks. When my editor saw it, he nearly choked on
the thick scent of controversy. But he published. And the debate was
re-awoken, reaching heights that its long-dead originator could have only
dreamed of.