Azkaban was not built for redemption.
It was built for silence.
For screaming.
For forgetting.
Eli Archer learned that the moment the iron doors slammed shut behind him and the world of light and reason disappeared. The Dementors didn't wait to introduce themselves. They greeted him like old friends — tearing through his memories, feasting on the warmth he clung to, and leaving behind the echoes of a fifteen-year-old's silent cries.
There were no guards inside the cellblocks. Just cold stone, flickering torches, and the constant scraping whisper of madness inching down the hallways.
Most prisoners shouted.
Some wept.
Eli did neither.
He remembered.
Not the false memories they forced into the courtroom, not the night of the party or the betrayal in Iris Potter's fearful eyes.
He remembered the soul he had absorbed — the old Legilimens from another world. A man who had seen every betrayal, every lie, every name etched into the dark corners of the wizarding world.
And Eli trained his mind.
At night, as Dementors prowled and whispers slithered in the dark, Eli sat cross-legged in his cell and strengthened his Occlumency. He built mental walls. Towers. Labyrinths.
He cast silent illusions within his own thoughts, replaying spells he had never been taught, duels he had never fought, lessons from professors who existed only in another life.
He remembered Dumbledore — not the one who stood silent at his trial, but the one from the books and the films.
He remembered Sirius — heroic, loyal, tragic. Not the man who carved lines into his bones with a Crucio fueled by rage.
Eli's body withered, but his mind sharpened.
For two years, he barely spoke. He watched as the prisoners around him fell — some to madness, some to the walls, some to the Dementors' kisses. They called him "The Quiet Raven." The guards joked about the "half-ghost Muggleborn." But none dared come too close.
Because the Dementors didn't hover long in his cell anymore.
They came. They circled.
And they left.
Something inside him had changed.
On the night of his third year, he stared into the crumbling stone wall of his cell and etched a symbol with a sliver of broken rock:
An eye. A wand. A flame.
The sigil of a truth he was beginning to uncover.
The knowledge from the absorbed soul wasn't just memory. It was legacy. The man who died in him had been hunted by Unspeakables for forbidden magic, and Eli had inherited every scar of that pursuit.
He could feel it awakening inside him — slow, subtle, waiting.
But he would not rush.
They stole his childhood.
They shattered his name.
Let them think he was broken.
He would rise when the world least expected. And when he did, he wouldn't ask for justice.
He would take it.