Prologue
The dark stone walls were slick with sea spray; every corridor awash in a sickly white-grey light that made the prison feel colder than it already was. The wind from the North Sea was frigid and piercing, and the coarse, striped uniforms were of little protection against it. Throughout the stone fortress roamed the black and floating guards, their rattling breaths mingling with the moans of half-dead prisoners too weak even to drag themselves away from the hooded figures. The chill in the air only added to the lack hope—the crushing mental fever caused by fear, malnutrition and loneliness. To survive this hell, you had to be already insane. Any normal person sentenced here would go mad eventually. It was a simple matter of time. This was Azkaban. This was the cold, dark hell of the wizarding world in which people were tossed into, locked away, forgotten about by all but the emotionless dementors that fed on their souls.
If you peered into any given cell, you would see a gaunt, haggard prisoner in a tiny stone room. They were likely huddled in the corner, as far away from the dementors as they could get. In the opposite corner you would find a soiled mattress, swollen with mold and insects. Most slept on the floor, cold and slimy though it was. Their uniform, once striped black and white, was beige and grey from years of exposure and filth and hung slack on their emaciated frame. Their face was shocking; a skeleton draped with a thin layer of skin—so pale it was almost translucent in the bleached, milky light that snuck in through a window no bigger than their fist. But the itching and skin sores caused by the infestation of lice, and the constant, inescapable dampness that rotted their teeth and nails was nothing in comparison to the horror of the guards—the dementors that patrolled Azkaban with their dead, scabby hands and soulless cruelty. There was no conscience amongst dementors; no humanity. They preyed on the souls here indiscriminately and without warning. It would almost seem less cruel if the otherworldly guards of Azkaban were full of malice and hatred—if they weren't so deadened. It seemed almost a…business transaction. Something so ordinary that they couldn't be bothered even to feel anything about it. Although (by order of the Ministry) dementors were not permitted to administer the dreaded kiss without authorization, it wasn't rare to find a prisoner dead in their cell following an encounter with a guard. True, death from natural causes was not uncommon, but the contorted, sick look of terror left on their faces would suggest that the end of their life was anything but common. Not that the technicalities of it truly mattered—the only visitors to Azkaban were high-ranking Ministry officials (occasionally the Minister himself) and Aurors who were depositing new prisoners.
No, whether a prisoner was murdered or they died of sickness and decay was of little consequence. No one ever truly left Azkaban, even the rare few who survived their sentence and were released. The type of psychological torture that went on within those walls…no one left that behind. Instead, they remained there, locked up, in their own minds. Nightmares, flashbacks, pale and sweating panic attacks—no one left that island in the North Sea. In that way, Azkaban was always a death sentence, no matter how much time you served. Some understood this before arriving, but everyone learned. Their lives as they knew them were over—the reason why every single day, without exception, at least one prisoner's life ended at their own hands. There were no traditional means of killing oneself. There were no bedsheets or anything protruding from the walls for this exact reason, but desperation always finds a way. Prisoners found starved to death surrounded by a week's worth of daily slop; cracked bones and bloody skulls with broken noses and crushed eye sockets from hurling their bodies into the stone wall over and over again; lying in a pool of dark and brackish blood, their mouths smeared red from chewing through their own wrists.
And afterwards—when they were found by the cold and toneless dementors who could no longer sense a life force from within their cell—they were buried on the island outside the wall of the prison, consigned beneath the freezing, bitter earth where they would remain until their bodies were eaten away at by the sea and salt.
Some—those who were family to victims of the Dark Lord and his Death Eaters, or staunch upholders of wizarding law—condoned and even celebrated the practices that took place at Azkaban. Others—what some would call sympathizers—were appalled by what went on behind the iron walls. Many of them protested what they claimed was barbaric and sadistic treatment. The rest—the vast majority of the wizarding world—had no idea what went on within this forbidding stone fortress. But the only people we have not heard from—arguably the most important voices in this debate—are the prisoners themselves.