Disclaimer: These characters are not mine (except for Niamh). Blah, blah, blah.

Chapter One- The Location of Azkaban, a flying cockroach and a restless night.

Ginny sat in the library with Neville and Luna. Ostensibly they were completing their school assignments, but a close observer would have noticed that between them they had failed to write so much as a single line on their parchments.

"Okay," Ginny addressed the other two, "obviously things are getting worse by the day. When they put Remus in Azkaban we all thought it was just the ministry being their stupid selves, but I think we can all agree now that it's simply not the case. Voldemort has to be behind this..."

Luna interrupted, "Yes," she agreed, "My father told me all about it. Voldemort arranged for all of the top ministry members to be possessed by the spirits of his demon servants. He discovered the secret, ancient text of Kalt'n Drath which details rituals of soul extraction and demon possession. The only way to tell whether or not someone is really who they say they are, is to use frogs- Norwegian Swoggle Frogs are the best, they have the ideal enzymatic composition in their skin. Anyone who has been possessed or who has had their soul extracted will turn blue if they come into contact with swoggle toxin. There's an article all about it in the Quibbler. I can lend it to you if you like." She blinked vacuously at Ginny and Neville, who exchanged pained glances with one another.

"Right," Neville interjected, "we'll keep that in mind Luna. Thank you for your ...er... insight," he finished diplomatically.

"Yes, thank you," Ginny added. She paused a moment to gather her wits and the entire table was silent, "How Voldemort is doing this probably doesn't matter. What matters is how we're going to deal with it. We have to break everyone out from Azkaban. It isn't going to be easy- especially now that they've taken Ron and Hermione as well, but we have to succeed. Failure just isn't an option," the set of her jaw showed the other two students just how serious Ginny was, "I only wish we knew what happened to make the Death Eaters move on Ron and Hermione- we've all been trying so hard to keep a low profile," she sighed, "well, we'll probably never find out. We just have to deal with everything as best we can," the others nodded their agreement, "Now we just need to figure out exactly how we're going to do that."

"You're right," Neville pushed his fingers through his already disheveled hair. In recent months it had grown longer as he had grown thinner. None of the three were as healthy and robust as they had been even just half a year before. All had the appearance of being undernourished and hollow eyed, "Our first priority is to determine the location of Azkaban Island," Ginny nodded in agreement.

Luna spoke up hopefully, "There's an article in a back issue of the Quibbler about Azkaban. It think it's one of the best pieces of investigative journalism I've ever read," Ginny and Neville waited patiently to hear the rest of Luna's tale. It was usually easier to listen quietly than to try and interrupt her. Also, if she could manage to hold onto a sliver of hope, then who were they to take it away from her? "The article states that Azkaban Prison is on the ancient Minoan island of Thera. Muggles all thought that Thera was destroyed thousands of years ago by a volcano, but it was really just converted to a prison island and hidden by an Arnethist Cloaking Spell. Only the Keeper of the Spell can tell anyone how to reach the island. What we need to do is to find the keeper and..." Luna drifted off as she became aware that Ginny and Neville had tensed up.

Draco Malfoy was approaching their table. Ginny and Neville glared at him. Luna blinked owlishly. Draco smirked as he came to a stop in front of them. Crabbe and Goyle, his imbecilic lackeys were not quite quick enough in pulling to a stop, so they bumped him slightly from behind. Draco turned on them in anger and by the time he had finished expressing his anger, each sported a pair of antlers. Crabbe and Goyle in their confusion, tangled antlers with each other and fell to the ground. Neville's jaw dropped. Ginny just laughed.

"Oh," said Luna as she eyed dimwitted duo and their antlers, "when did those get there?"

Ginny laughed harder, "I guess Draco need to work harder at screening his lackeys against dullness. Crabbe and Goyle are so thick that if you stabbed a sword into them, it wouldn't come out the other side!"

"Truer words have never been spoken," Neville agreed.

"When someone is stabbed with the Sword of Nur, it dissolves into molten metal inside of them. They melt from the inside out," Luna contributed.

Ginny and Neville exchanged a glance before asking in unison, "The Quibbler, right?" Luna nodded placidly.

Meanwhile, Draco was shifting from his usual pallor through pink and red to a deep angry purple. Before he could manage to find his voice, Ginny, Neville and Luna stood up as a unit and sauntered past him and out of the Library.

"Do you know," Ginny addressed her friends in a voice loud enough to be heard by Draco and anyone else who happened to be studying in the Library at the time, "I can't imagine what could possibly be of interest to those three in a Library. I always thought that one needed to be literate in order to find anything useful here. My mistake," the door swept shut behind the departing trio.

Harry Potter sat in the corner of his cell at Azkaban Prison as he had for the past six weeks. He watched as a cockroach and a dust bunny at the opposite corner of the cell floated rhythmically up and down between the ceiling and the floor. There wasn't really much to do in prison. He could talk with some of the other prisoners in his section, but there wasn't really much new to say when the scenery remained so consistently dull- gray cinder blocks today and gray cinder blocks tomorrow.

Gray cinder blocks into eternity...

Harry was very bored. Nothing less than extreme-gray-cinder-block-screaming-bloodshot boredom could have provoked him to do something as stupid and useless as cause vermin to fly through the use of wandless magic. Harry had become quite good at wandless magic. He had begun to practice when Lupin was sent to Azkaban. While most people had been convinced that the Ministry had locked Lupin away for no other reason than that he was a werewolf, Harry had been convinced that Voldemort was somehow behind it. He had suspected for quite a while that the Ministry of Magic was in large part under Voldemort's control. The arrests that followed, including his own, only served to cement his suspicions.

Harry had at the time of Lupins arrest been almost certain that he would at some point be taking the inmate's tour of Azkaban, so the first wandless spell he worked at mastering was the Patronus charm. It wasn't quite as easy to focus the magical energies without a wand, but with the use of some of the occulomency techniques Snape had taught him he eventually managed to conjure a faint wisp of a non-corporeal patronus. With long hours of practice, he managed eventually to master the wandless version of the spell to the same degree as the version with the wand. Given that success, Harry had begun to practice with other useful spells as well. Then he began to experiment. He was most proud of his Variant Patronus charm. The Variant Patronus involved the creation of a localized non-corporeal patronus that was slow to dissipate. As it remained stationary and lasted for hours, it would be of much use during a Dementor attack in an open area, but it was ideal for use by prisoners at Azkaban.

Harry had kept up a constant patronus shield in his cell for the duration of his stay. He was very relieved to have been able to do so- some of the order members who had already been imprisoned when he arrived had been in quite poor shape. He had learned the locations of their cells as best as he could and had cast distance patroni so that they might recover as best they could free from the interference of dementors. The field created by the spell was large enough that there was a certain amount of margin for error- usually the field was large enough to cover between four and six cells. This meant that it was not only Order members who were gaining protection from the dementors. Harry hadn't quite decided how he felt about that yet. He generally thought that it was wrong to expose people to dementors, but he didn't want the true criminals of Azkaban to have it too easy. Although, who was to say how many trapped within the walls of Azkaban truly were criminals anymore? With that thought, Harry decided that he would cast a Patronus Shield over as much of Azkaban as he was able. Maybe eventually he and the other inmates would be able to fight back- to escape...

Later that evening, as Ginny climbed the stairs to the girl's dormitories, she found her spirits declining. In the library with Neville and Luna, she had almost been enjoying herself- especially when Draco and his lackeys had interrupted them. Sometimes a bit of mischief was just the thing to cheer a girl.

On the other hand, now she was feeling a bit of a backlash. All of the negative thoughts she had managed to push aside during that brief interlude had returned with a vengeance. Now she felt not only sadness at the arrests of her brother and her friends, she felt guilt. Her mind kept on screaming at her, How dare you feel happiness when they may never experience it again? Tears had begun to trail down her cheeks by the time she arrived in her room.

"Gin, what's wrong?" asked Niamh Conmor, another of the sixth year Gryffindors who was also getting ready to go to bed, "Is there anything I can do?"

Ginny smiled sadly, Niamh was really a sweet girl. She was muggle born and had been terribly excited to receive her letter of acceptance from Hogwarts, but sweet as she was, Ginny was beginning to find that she was afraid to trust her thoughts with her though they had known each other and been friends since their very first year at Hogwarts. She was having a hard time trusting anyone. At the back of her mind she knew that someone had to have betrayed Ron and Hermione, but so few had known of their plans to free Harry and the others... who could it have been? Ginny was frustrated on top of depressed.

"Nothing Niamh," she finally answered, "I'm fine. I'm just a little sad. I miss my brother..." she trailed off. Was it safe to say even that much? Could she talk about any of them without fearing for her own safety? There were too many questions. Too many suspicions.

Ginny went through the motions of getting ready for bed, but she knew her mind was too restless for her to have any hope of getting to sleep. With a sigh, she pulled the curtain around her bed and tucked herself under the covers. She might as well try anyway, she would be of no use to anyone if she wasn't well rested.

Four hours later, she finally drifted into a disturbed sleep.

A/N: Thank you to everyone who read this story and thank you to Khadon for beta reading. I like getting lots of reader feedback- it's pretty much what motivates me to keep up with a story. My other story hasn't been updated in over two months for that exact reason- no one read it, so there was no point in continuing. I might pick it up again if people start reading it.

Anyway, I'm getting very off topic... whatever. I'll try to update within a reasonable amount of time.

Ciao for now!