Azkaban did not dream.
But Eli did.
He had to.
At night, while the other inmates whimpered or screamed in their sleep, Eli drifted into a place that wasn't quite memory and wasn't quite imagination. A liminal void — black and silent — except for one voice.
"You should have died, boy."
The voice came from within him, ancient and weathered, wrapped in disappointment… and approval.
"But you didn't. You held me. You consumed me. And now, we are one."
At first, Eli thought it was the madness talking. But the visions began.
He saw spells never recorded in any Hogwarts book: magic that bent time, that unraveled truth, that turned thoughts into weapons.
He saw runes not of Celtic or Norse origin, but alien — layered with quantum spirals and multidimensional matrices.
He saw duels fought on floating islands, men and women riding on beasts that shimmered between worlds, wands that sang in resonance with the caster's bloodline.
And he saw… names.
Names he should not have known.
Tom Marvolo Riddle — not just as Voldemort, but as a brilliant, ambitious boy with hollow eyes and poisoned dreams.
Gellert Grindelwald — not as the history books wrote him, but as he truly was: visionary, madman, lover, tyrant.
And Dumbledore.
A Dumbledore who lied, who sacrificed the few for the many, over and over, until he believed his own manipulations were mercy.
Eli awoke each time with his heart racing, his head burning.
And then, it started.
When the Dementors passed his cell now, they shivered.
He was no longer prey. The foreign soul inside him had unlocked something primal — a form of magic that didn't rely on wandwork or incantations, but will. Magic from a world where wizards operated like gods and reality bent at the weight of thought.
Eli began using it in small ways.
A cracked rock in his hand would shimmer and become a warm ember, burning just enough to ward off the worst of the cold.
The iron shackles around his wrists would unlock for minutes at a time, enough for him to stretch, to breathe, to reclaim the dignity Azkaban tried to take.
In one session of deep focus, he projected his consciousness beyond the prison — not far, just a ripple — and heard thoughts from another cell block.
He was no longer learning Hogwarts magic.
He was learning conceptual magic. Soulcraft. Thought-forging. Memory weaving. The essence of magic as the old civilizations once practiced it — pure, raw, unfiltered.
And the soul inside him — once dominant, now merged — whispered constantly.
"You are not bound by this world's rules. Not anymore."
"They tried to erase you. Now, rewrite the story."
Eli scratched into the wall another sigil — a spiral swallowing a star.
It was a ward. A sigil of mind and space. The beginning of his Sanctum — not in the physical world, but within his soul. A space where he could store memories, hide truths, and build a fortress no Legilimens could breach.
By the end of his fourth year in Azkaban, he was no longer just a prisoner.
He was a Seeker. A Scholar of the Forbidden. A Vessel of a forgotten soul, reborn into a world that had tried to bury him.
Eli Archer, the Quiet Raven, was becoming something the wizarding world had no name for.
And when he emerged… he would remember everyone who broke him.