The New Trio and the Madness Within

Chapter 1: Break Outs and Owl Post

Hi guys, so here's the first chapter of book three. A new POV has been added, and you can expect the occasional update with what Dolohov is up to.

Enjoy!

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Antonin Dolohov was a man of simple pleasures: torture, murder, and doing the tasks his Lord demanded of him. If he could have all three, he was ecstatic. He didn't talk much, which was possibly why he'd had a secret for sixteen years. It wasn't a particularly big secret, but he hoarded his privacy like a dragon hoarded treasure, but when he'd been stuck in a high security cell in Azkaban for twelve of those sixteen years, keeping his Animagus status a secret had been child's play. Other than the tiny barred door and window, his cell was in perpetual darkness, so whenever he felt the presence of Dementors nearby, he could simply slip into the darkness and shift, and he would barely be affected. Now, he'd had a vague plan for escaping this hell hole for years, but he had no idea how to find the Dark Lord, let alone bring him back.

However, because he still retained some form of sanity, he had noticed that two years ago, his Dark Mark had become just the slightest bit darker than the barely-there red it had become when the Potter boy had destroyed his Lord's body. It wasn't much, but it was enough for him to use it in an Arithmantic ritual to pinpoint the Dark Lord's position. The downside to the ritual was that it required a blood sacrifice; he would have to make a shallow slice into the Mark and collect the blood that welled there. He preferred avoiding pain if at all possible, so he had to find a way to get through it unharmed. Eventually, he came up with the idea of using someone else's Mark, but then the difficulty arose of picking the right person, because obviously he couldn't do the ritual here, so he'd have to help them escape with him. They had to be loyal to the end, and willing to undergo pain and difficulty to find their Lord. They had to be smart, but not smarter than he was, because when on the run from Wizarding Authorities, the smarter you were, the longer you could hold out-he had no illusions that if he freed someone like Rookwood and escaped with him, then the ex-Unspeakable would no doubt take over his little operation, and he preferred to be in charge, thank you very much. If he was the mastermind behind the escape, then he damn well better be the one behind everything else they did.

This thought led him to the perfect partner for an operation like this: Bellatrix Lestrange. In a criminal organisation where the vast majority of members were violent, sadistic men, the few female members had to be more violent and more sadistic than her comrades. Bellatrix had taken it a step further, though-she'd become very masochistic as well, knowing her Lord sometimes used torture to de-stress, she had volunteered. Antonin had heard whispers that she'd undergone a Dark Arts ritual that replaced pain with pleasure, but he'd known her before she'd entered the Dark Lord's services-hell, they'd been in the same year at Hogwarts, and he'd been the one to recruit her into the Death Eaters-and even then she'd been known to have a pain kink.

Anyway, back to his previous train of thought. Even with his skill in Occlumency, it was still hard to concentrate in Azkaban sometimes.

Once he'd decided that he'd escape with Bellatrix, he'd snuch out of his cell and into hers. To say that she'd been surprised when a white wolf walked into her cell, calm as you please, then turned into Dolohov was actually pretty accurate, because in a world of magic, there was very little that was considered impossible, and even less that could truly surprise people who'd grown up in this world. This just meant that Antonin appreciated her shocked expression while it lasted.

He'd taught Bella the Animagus transformation for the past year and a half, in the hope that her form would be something small that could escape easily. The easy part was the meditation; the hard part was the actual transformation, depending on the size of your animagus form. The closer you and your form were in size and/or weight, the easier the transformation was. It had been fairly simple for him as a wolf because, although it weighed quite a bit less than he did, he was a master Occlumens, and the mental organisation which went along with that had helped him immensely to visualise him becoming the animal. Sadly, Bellatrix had no form of Occlumency whatsoever, so the first six months of the two extra years they spent on the island prison was spent teaching her the necessary meditation and mental organisation techniques necessary. He was extremely excited when she discovered her form to be that of a Margay, the smallest 'big cat', which was known for its small but deadly size, its skill with its needle-like claws, and its ability to climb down a tree face first as if it were as easy as climbing up one.