Draco Malfoy, Broken

Chapter 39 - The Plot Thickens

Chapter 39 – The Plot Thickens

Published: 1/31/2019

Harry had never been so far ahead in his homework. After two days of being confined to the library, he was done with every essay he was assigned and got started on some future ones. He even studied Potions, willingly. But towards the end of Saturday he found a book called The Origins of Dementors. He curled up in a library chair and read it until Madam Pince kicked him. He read the book while he walked back to the dorm and sat down in the eighth-year common room for a few hours until he finished it and reflected on his readings.

Dementors hadn't been around that long, compared to other magical creatures. The writer, a wizard named Sigmund Deprimero, only found evidence of their existence coming out of the muggle Dark Age. They were called the Black Death and the Grim Reaper by both muggles and magical beings. The plague itself was blamed on the creatures, but Deprimero argued that the dementors were born out of it. The mixture of extremely high death rates, famine and religious persecution were feeding grounds for human despair.

However, the writer argued that the mere presence of decay, unhappiness and fear wasn't enough to spawn the creatures into existence. He believed that wizards and witches had in fact created them through dangerous experimentation. Deprimero reasoned that, with the stifling of the human population and therefore the wizard population, a group of magically-inclined witches and wizards intended to extract the negative emotions using magic, but had unwittingly created an entirely new being, born from literally from despair.

Soulless, as it had been ripped from its host, the negative beings sought to do what they were created for: extracting the worst feelings and memories out of a person. However, being without magic or a soul, they couldn't remove the emotions completely from the body, just feed off the stress of their target. Theend result was that the dementors had no compassion, qualms or inhibitions. They were drawn by a desire to feed and nothing else. No social interactions, family or religious ties. They were specters, already detached from life... from their original soul.

Deprimero argued that their main drive, to remove souls from their victim's bodies, is nothing more than their need to acquire a soul of their own. He insisted that was the main proof of his theory of wizard experimentation. The drive to be complete. However, he wrote that the original experiment, if there even was one, had to only be have a few token subjects. The dementors were able to spawn more of themselves. Deprimero made clear that there was no breeding or nests. They grew out of darkness and despair, full-grown, with all the same abilities as the originals.

In fact, no one knows how they are spawned. He found some evidence that minimally a dementor had to be present, but there were no signs of copulation or even the creation of offspring. No sex was determined to be found on dementors. The author's main theories were a sort of fission, budding or the release of spores in a dark, damp area near a troubled muggle area.

Deprimero followed and studied the dementors for decades. Talking to the caretakers and tracking the movements of several different dementors, he was able to gain more insight into the fiends than any other wizard had ever done. He stalked evil incarnate, he wrote. He actively tracked the movements of four dementors, three lodged in Azkaban and one that was still loose in the wild (as the Ministry hadn't gathered them all at that point).

He found them to be more intelligent than most give them credit for. The deliberate act of staying in the wizard prison itself was indicative of a higher understanding. They would stop feeding if ordered, but on the other hand, were able to make their own decisions as far as who to target and ignore the orders from the Ministry. The essentially rogue, wild dementors were a nuisance and actively tracked down one at a time. But they were able to evade capture, often using sophisticated means, more than an animal on the run, almost with humanistic instincts.