The dementors seemed more belligerent than others of their ilk, grudgingly getting herded away from the barrier by the patronuses on display, and having to be bodily shoved up the stairs. The glowing blue wards dimmed only slightly with the removal of the dementors, but with the creatures gone, it was obvious that the markings were creating basically a "porch" around a doorway that went deeper into the level. The glowing runes were essentially bisecting the antechamber that led into what had to be Ekrizdis' private set of rooms in the second basement. Five more mummified bodies of former apprentices had fallen just outside of the wards. They looked like they'd been shoved across, and then been beset by the dementors.

THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN (MAIN QUEST)

A secret from your past has escaped.

* Get to Hogwarts
* Learn about the crimes of Sirius Black
* Learn about Dementors
* Learn more about Ekrizdis
* Investigate Azkaban for what Ekrizdis left behind
* Defeat the guardians
* Descend to the basement laboratory
O Learn the goals of Ekrizdis
O Make a decision about Ekrizdis

Once the dementors were clear, Harry was able to get a better look at what Ekrizdis had become. Wearing once-expensive robes in a style common in Hogwarts' portraits from the 1400s, the dyes had faded to shades of gray; whatever colors were left were washed out by the blue of the wards. The wizard beneath was nearly-skeletal, skin like yellow parchment stretched over his skull, and robes clearly sagging against a body that was just as emaciated. What was probably a once-lustrous dark head of hair and beard was even more flat and greasy than Snape's, but at least gave the man's face some macabre definition.

And his eyes were sullen orbs of red light.

"Guests!" Ekrizdis croaked, his voice dry as if it hadn't been used in centuries. He coughed to clear his airways of dust, his tongue visible as almost a strip of jerky inside his jaw, too-white teeth flashing as he spoke. "I do hope this is a social visit. And from the great Albus Dumbledore and Harry Potter, no less." His accent was strange. Undercurrents of Greek supported a flat style of speaking English that had been trained before the Great Vowel Shift, but there were nonetheless elements of modern British pronunciation in there. If nothing else, he wasn't forming sentences like a character from Shakespeare, but like any modern English speaker. His voice was far deeper and richer than his decayed body would suggest.

Harry had caught the lich glancing at the names and details over their heads, especially since he had to look up so far to read Dumbledore's name atop his stack of guilds. It was Remus who said, "Wards against dark creatures, if I'm not mistaken. Powerful ones."

"A last ditch barrier, which has served to imprison me nearly as long as it kept out the creatures, I'm afraid," Ekrizdis explained. Decaying undead mages weren't supposed to be friendly. The juxtaposition was almost more unsettling than if he'd been monologuing and threatening.

"And it stopped these poor souls from getting in?" Dawlish asked, inspecting the five bodies on their side of the wards.

The lich's sallow skin stretched in a rictus that might have been a sad look. "Ah, no. Those were the lucky few that managed to escape into the haven with me. But their health began to fail, and, no matter what I tried, I could not save them. I was forced to eject them, one by one, lest they release a creature that was trapped in here with the rest of us. Well, with only me, by the end."

"Polaris Black got sick and died, and then a dementor popped out of her," Harry explained, mostly for Dawlish's benefit.

Ekrizdis genuinely grinned, his parchment-like face pulling into a smile. "Polaris got out? Marvelous! I'd seen her leading a few to the escape tunnel, but never knew how many made it. I chose to fall back with these five into what became an unfortunate trap for the rest of our lives. How long did she fare?"

"A couple of years, I think," Harry tried to remember. "We found her father's journals. He didn't think much of you."

"I probably could have been kinder to the parents of my people," Ekrizdis admitted. "But the things they told me… I did not think that Polaris' father should be the future of wizardkind. Anyway! You're welcome to come in, rather than just standing on my doorstep. I'd offer you tea, but I'm afraid I've been quite out for four-hundred years now."

"I don't feel good about that," Dawlish said, as Harry looked at Dumbledore for approval.

"But Auror Dawlish, I haven't even a wand," the lich shrugged expansively, showing off desiccated hands that at least didn't have the claws one might expect of a lich; he had decently-manicured fingernails. "Even the best crafted of them really aren't meant to last centuries, and I've been unable to get another for obvious reasons. I'm quite at your mercy, and just trying to be a good host. Frankly, I'd lost hope of anyone finding this place, especially since I could see that it's been inhabited for quite some time. I made my secrets too secure, it seems."

"It's a prison," the auror shrugged, as if that explained everything. Then he realized, "Wait, I didn't introduce myself."

"A talent of mine," Ekrizdis said. "Please, do come in. I only got out of my chair because I noticed your approach. I haven't stood this long in centuries. At least let us repair to the sitting room."

"I'll, uh, stay out here in case the dementors return," Remus offered, eyeing the wards. Harry wasn't sure whether stopping dementors and liches would also stop werewolves, and the professor didn't seem to be either.

"I have quite a few questions," Dawlish said, not offering to stay behind. "We'd thought you long dead, but if you're still kicking around, I have even more."

"I suspect there will be issues of jurisdiction," the lich's sallow skin stretched in a smile. "But please, do enter freely." With that, he turned and walked back into his rooms.

"Stay wary," Dumbledore cautioned them all, as Dawlish preceded them into the room. Once neither the auror nor lich were looking, Dumbledore carefully but quickly withdrew a large glass jar from a magically-expanded pocket. "For direst need," he told Harry, whose eyes widened.

Harry just as quickly pushed the basilisk fang into his inventory, worried that Dumbledore felt so insecure as to trust him with the deadly weapon. At least he didn't feel anything upon crossing the ward, but his combat log noted:

Not dark-aspected. No effect from ward boundary.

Through the door was a cluttered sitting room, lit relatively dimly by a few magical torches. It felt like one of the Hogwarts teachers' offices mixed with a classroom. Perhaps this had been as far as Ekrizdis' apprentices had come when they lived, and where he taught them. The room was several yards across in each direction, and featured copious bookshelves and desks.

But over the centuries, it had become less a teaching space, and more a general domicile where the lich could lurk on the edge of his imprisonment. All the surfaces were cluttered with piles of books and half-completed notes. He'd seemingly been through an entire painting period, and half-used art supplies and stacks of badly-rendered canvasses were piled in a corner. It was very much the main living area of someone who'd functionally been on house arrest for five-hundred years, and had been undead for most of them.

Perhaps the most interesting artifacts of the room were the gadgets. On a central table, an opened wooden box was full of rune-inscribed objects linked together in an almost alchemical fashion, but which looked like one of the crystal radio kits from old magazines. From this kit-bashed Wizarding Wireless, a news reporter was explaining, "...there remain no sightings of Sirius Black this year, but we understand that Albus Dumbledore and the Boy-Who-Lived—Harry Potter himself—are touring Azkaban today. Perhaps they're trying to find a clue to what the prison's one escapee is up to! And now, a new song from the Weird Sisters. It's called 'Magic Works'…"

But Harry didn't have much time to appreciate that Ekrizdis had cobbled together a working radio from the parts he'd been trapped with, because he'd done that one better: around the room, three mirrors had been enchanted for full television access. He'd turned them sideways to better fit the aspect ratio of BBC broadcasts, and even figured out how to render closed captioning in block-printed text along the bottom. On one mirror, an episode of EastEnders was in full swing. On another, a recording of the Vienna opera was playing. The third didn't seem to be the BBC at all, showing what was presumably an American broadcast of a show where police officers were chasing down suspects.

"You've got telly," Harry observed, fascinated.

"Of course. The radio explained it half a century ago and I figured it out. It was a maddening few centuries before the wireless," the lich shrugged, settling back into a frequently reparo-ed leather armchair with a good view of all three mirrors.

"How could you possibly have intuited that information was being broadcast over the airwaves in your confinement?" Dumbledore asked. Radio itself was a bit new-fangled for him.

"Extreme boredom leads to enhanced sensitivity. Around seventy years ago, there was a growing buzz in the back of my head. I had to learn what had changed outside."

"So that's how you're talking the Queen's English," Dawlish figured, never himself realizing that it would be possible to get television programming on a magic mirror and almost wanting to abscond with one of them to hand to the Department of Mysteries and demand, "Make this!" He pulled his gaze away with some difficulty and asked, "So you've just been stuck in here for five centuries, and watching telly for the last few decades?"

"Do I just sit here and watch the world?" Ekrizdis summarized. "It would be tempting, but no. If nothing else, I find I have little need of sleep and even international programming lacks something in the wee hours. No, I've continued my work, though more slowly with my limited resources."

"Dark magic," Dawlish growled. He'd been trying to give the seemingly-immortal dark magic abomination a chance to save himself. He'd never encountered a wizard this far gone to the dark arts, but there were laws on the books for it. Plus, even a few years of solitary confinement tended to drive people mad, so five centuries of it seemed like it would have a profound effect on even a brilliant wizard's mind. That madness combined with clear dark-magic-powered immortality was the worst kind of problem an auror could face.

The lich waved his suggestion away, insisting, "I understand you've all become much more squeamish about that kind of thing in the last few centuries. Again, there are jurisdictional concerns. Am I to be prosecuted for magic that wasn't a crime in my time, on an island that wasn't part of the kingdom of Britain?"

"If you've been continuing doing it, yes," the auror explained, with dangerous calmness.

"I'd honestly need someone with a recent education to check my work, then. The Wizarding Wireless doesn't exactly provide a detailed explanation of what is considered dark magic. I may well be using things with total innocence that have been banned and just not mentioned on the radio because they're such common knowledge. I was surprised to find that things like painless death magic were forbidden some years ago, though I suppose that the tendency to bypass shields makes them rather dangerous in common hands…"

Dawlish had smoothly drawn his wand, and was glancing at Dumbledore to see if he had backup as he said, "You're dodging the question, and I think you know that what you're doing is dark magic and illegal. Why don't we open those wards, I march you upstairs, we get you a protective detail to keep off the dementors that probably rightly want to eat you, and you start answering questions about dozens of sailors turned into inferi and forty-nine apprentices who died horribly in a ritual you were leading?"

The undead wizard sighed. He glanced at Dumbledore, who'd surreptitiously drawn his own wand. He looked at Harry, who hadn't armed himself, but had taken a step back behind a desk in case this somehow turned into a big fight between high-level wizards. Then there was just a blur of motion, wands flying through the air, and the two living adult wizards slumping to the floor. "What did Han Solo say? 'It was a boring conversation anyway.'"

Harry had to check the combat log to see what had even happened.

Ekrizdis of Lamia wandlessly casts Disarming Charm at Albus Dumbledore: Success
Ekrizdis of Lamia wandlessly casts Disarming Charm at John Dawlish: Success
Ekrizdis of Lamia casts Stunning Spell at Albus Dumbledore: Success
Ekrizdis of Lamia casts Stunning Spell at John Dawlish: Success

The lich was marveling at the headmaster's wand, which he'd seemingly caught out of the air and used to stun the two. Dark wood with small nodules along its length, Ekrizdis seemed to recognize it. "Well, well, well. Amazing. This will be a help." He gave a smile that was probably meant to be apologetic to Harry, but came off as terrifying after he'd so casually defeated the most powerful wizard in Britain and an auror that was actually aiming at him. "Sorry, but I think we both know that John Dawlish was never going to have been a value-add to our conversation, and Albus Dumbledore seems the type to have just tried to manipulate it to his own ends. Your werewolf guildmate seems reasonable, and I think he can probably manage across the wards when he's not transformed if he would like to come along."

"What's going on in there?" Remus asked, his hearing good enough to realize that whatever Dawlish had started hadn't gone to plan.

Ekrizdis chuckled, like wind whistling through an old graveyard. "Why, unless I'm badly mistaken, I'm about to have a meeting of the minds with one of the few other people in history to obtain the same gifts as I have. It's been so long, and I'm so eager to discuss the great things we could do together, Harry Potter…"