July, 1991. Savage waves battered the black stone walls of Azkaban, breaking themselves against the prison fortress in sheets of white foam. Far above the raging sea, an owl that had flown all the way from the Scottish Highlands struggled through the salt-heavy wind, clutching a Hogwarts acceptance letter marked by the Quill of Acceptance.
"For most people, life goes from school to prison," Roger Williams muttered, dragging a broom across the corridor floor. "A proper prison pipeline, I suppose. Me? I started at the end."
He had grown up here, though there was no official record of him. He was not a registered prisoner, not a staff member, and certainly not a child anyone at the Ministry had ever bothered to acknowledge. From the moment he had first opened his eyes, he had belonged to Hogwarts' unofficial fifth house: Azkaban, the advanced institution for witches and wizards with nowhere else to go.
Outside the fortress, the exhausted owl flapped desperately through the mist. It dodged the Dementors drifting in the air like scraps of rotten shadow, its whole body shivering with terror as it finally landed on a narrow windowsill. The little creature peered inside with wide amber eyes, unable to understand why there was a young wizard here who needed a Hogwarts letter.
A Dementor glided closer, and the owl nearly toppled off the ledge in panic. It dropped the envelope through the window and fled at once, beating its wings hard enough to vanish into the storm.
Inside the room, Paul the caretaker was stirring a battered cauldron. The rusted old thing was filled with a blue-green paste that bubbled lazily over the heat, giving off a smell somewhere between boiled seaweed and old socks. "Damn the Ministry," he snarled, jabbing his wand at the mixture. "Damn Millicent Bagnold. Damn the Wizengamot. Damn every last powdered old fossil in London."
The bureaucrats in London never cared about Azkaban. They dumped their rubbish here by the cartload, locked the doors, and pretended the place ran itself. They never sent extra help, never approved a transfer, and never remembered that Paul was the only wizard caretaker trapped in this rotting pile of stone.
Poor Paul did not even know Millicent Bagnold was no longer Minister for Magic. Cornelius Fudge had taken the post, though no one had bothered telling the man marooned with Dementors and lunatics.
"Is that my transfer letter?" Paul cried, spotting the envelope on the floor. He lunged for it with both hands, hope blazing across his worn face for the first time in months.
One glance killed the hope stone dead. It was not a transfer notice at all, but a blasted Hogwarts acceptance letter.
"Why this?" Paul hissed. He turned toward the corridor, where Roger was still sweeping with a broom nearly taller than himself. "Roger, go and see Jessica."
"Mr. Paul, are you serious?" Roger looked up at the wall clock, wondering what fresh madness had crawled into the caretaker's skull. Paul never let him visit his mother this early unless something was wrong, or unless he was in a mood strange enough to become dangerous.
"Of course I'm serious." Paul shoved the letter behind his back and waved him away with sharp, twitchy impatience. "Go on, then. Move."
Eleven years earlier, Jessica Williams and her husband, Theodore, had been hunted down by Barty Crouch Sr. as suspected Death Eaters. Theodore had died holding Crouch off long enough for his wife to run, while the baby in Jessica's arms had been struck by the Imperius Curse in the chaos. Crouch had believed the child was already dead and had thrown Jessica into Azkaban with the infant still clutched against her chest.
Roger's transmigration had made the child open his eyes again. That tiny, impossible movement had given the broken woman a reason to keep living.
At Jessica's desperate pleading, Paul had taken the baby out of the cell. He had even written letters to London at first, demanding that someone come and collect the child, but the swine at the Ministry had replied as if he were mad. They claimed isolation was affecting his mind and suggested he was suffering from delusions.
With no other choice, Paul had kept the boy. Fortunately, Roger had never cried much or caused trouble; otherwise, Paul might have thrown him into the sea and called it mercy. In the end, he had treated the child like a stray cat he had found in the rain, something to feed, scold, and keep around because Azkaban offered so few distractions.
Roger set the broom down carefully and slipped toward the stairs. He moved lightly, keeping his steps quiet as he descended through the damp stone corridors to the lower cells.
At the far end of the passage was a tiny room where his mother, Jessica, was kept. The air there was colder, and the darkness felt thick enough to breathe.
"Lumos," Roger whispered.
A faint light bloomed at the tip of his wandless finger, soft and pale, barely enough to push back the dark. It revealed the narrow cell window, the rusting bars, and the shocking scratches carved into the walls by prisoners who had gone mad before her. Those marks were masterpieces left behind by Dementors, little signatures of despair scratched by human hands.
"Roger, is that you?" A weary, hoarse voice came from the corner. Jessica struggled upright, bracing herself against the wall as though standing were an act of defiance.
"Mum, Paul must be in a better mood today," Roger said. He pressed close to the cell door and reached through the small barred opening. "He let me come down early."
"Really?" Jessica's voice brightened, only for fear to swallow it almost at once. "No, you can't stay long. There are Dementors everywhere down here." Her fingers closed around his, thin and cold, and then tightened sharply. "What happened to your hand?"
In the dim light of Lumos, she had seen the bruises staining the back of his hand purple. Roger shifted his fingers slightly, trying to hide them, but there was nowhere to hide anything from a mother who had nothing left to look at except her son.
"It's nothing." Roger extinguished the light, and in the sudden dark, he saw faint crystalline glimmers slide past the little window. Jessica was crying again.
Her tears would not stop. If she had not taken him with her back then, if she had let him die, if she had fought harder, run faster, chosen differently—every thought circled back to the same blade. It was all her fault.
"Mum, don't cry," Roger said softly. "If it weren't for you, I might really have died."
He held her bony hand and wondered how thin she had become behind that door. He knew her mostly by voice, touch, and silhouette, and the idea that his mother might one day become nothing more than bones under prison rags filled him with a cold anger he had nowhere to put.
"I'm sorry, Roger," Jessica whispered, wiping at her face with her sleeve. "I failed you. I should have given you a better life than this."
"I'm eleven this year," Roger said, forcing his voice to stay light. "And I can use magic too. Do you think I'll get a Hogwarts letter?"
He was grateful to Paul for raising him, in the bitter way one could be grateful to a man who had kept him alive without ever letting him live. But he had never stopped thinking about leaving Azkaban. Whenever a wizard came to deliver a prisoner, Paul locked Roger inside a dark room until the visitor left, as if the boy were something embarrassing that had to be hidden from the world.
Roger remembered the story of Harry Potter clearly enough. Hogwarts professors sent countless letters when they had to, making certain every young witch and wizard received an acceptance. For Muggle-born children, they even visited the home in person.
"Mum?"
"Hogwarts professors won't come here," Jessica said at last. Her answer landed like cold water in the dead of winter. "They only visit Muggle families."
"Maybe the rules have changed now," Roger said, though even he could hear how weak it sounded.
"Maybe," Jessica murmured.
Who did he think he was? Not Harry Potter, not some famous child the wizarding world would bend itself around. He was an existence unknown to everyone, a dead little Death Eater no one had bothered to count.
Despair and coldness spread through Roger's chest. He had been locked away in forgotten Azkaban like a prisoner, though he did not even have the dignity of a name on the registry. In the eyes of the world, he was not innocent, guilty, alive, or dead. He was simply nothing.
"Cough, cough…" Jessica's violent coughing snapped him out of it.
The damp air, the Dementors' constant presence, and the miserable food had worn her body down year after year. She was growing weaker by the day, to the point where even standing for a conversation had become difficult. Roger gripped her hand and made a silent vow: if no letter came for him, then he would break out of prison himself, no matter the cost.
He closed his eyes, letting his consciousness sink into the data panel only he could see.
Roger WilliamsMagic Power: 1.2 / 2.3Mental Power: 12Talents: Dark Affinity, Strong Will, Night VisionSkills: Wandless MagicSpells: Lumos Lv3 (36 / 50), Expecto Patronum Lv1 (0 / 1)
Below the panel sat an orange rounded button that read: Life Simulation. Roger took a slow breath, invested 1 point of magic power, and began simulating his future.
[1] You search the room for a wand and discover your Hogwarts acceptance letter.[2] Paul tears the acceptance letter to pieces, and you are thrown into a cell....Insufficient magic power. Please invest more magic power to continue the simulation.
With only 0.2 magic power left, Roger's head began to throb. He rubbed his temples and stared at the simulation results, the answer becoming horribly clear. The acceptance letter had already arrived, but Paul had hidden it.
Judging by Paul's behaviour in the simulation, he would never allow Roger to leave Azkaban. Thinking about it, the British Ministry of Magic had practically worked the man to death on the principle that useful people should be used until they broke. If Roger left, Paul would have no company at all except Dementors.
"The recipient has to be someone Paul would willingly send a letter to," Roger murmured.
He looked at Jessica, who had drifted into an exhausted sleep from sheer weakness, and forced himself to recall every detail he could from the Harry Potter story. "This person has to be famous," he thought. "Someone with real influence in the wizarding world. Someone who could get both us and Paul out of this place."
Roger calculated silently, crossing out most of the names in his memory one after another. "Their identity has to be clean. They can't be a Death Eater, and they need a strong reason to help."
He ruled out old pure-blood families like the Malfoys almost immediately. Those polished parasites would never care whether strangers lived or died. Roger searched his memory more carefully, and slowly, a beautiful figure came into focus.