"Wow. So he was an unregistered Animagus?"
Harris Raymons sounded surprised. "According to our information, Peter Pettigrew was terrible at Transfiguration. How could he possibly have become an Animagus?"
"That's because two other unregistered Animagi helped him," Sirius said through gritted teeth.
Thinking back on it now, there really had been a lot of suspicious points in that confrontation with Peter Pettigrew.
That cowardly little rat had not collapsed in terror in front of him.
Clearly, Voldemort had been the one who gave him the nerve.
"I see." Harris Raymons looked at Sirius with a trace of pity.
Who could have imagined that a close friend you had personally helped along would turn around and stab you in the back? The thought alone was tragic.
"In any case, you don't want the man you hate living comfortably while you suffer here, do you?" Harris Raymons said. "I imagine right now you want nothing more than to tear him to pieces."
"That's right. I do want to tear him to pieces... but I have a question." Sirius stared at Harris Raymons. "Why are you telling me all this? Why do you want to save me?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know?" Sirius looked at Harris Raymons with open suspicion.
Harris Raymons shrugged. "I'm just following orders."
"Whose orders? Who sent you to save me? And what do you people want?" Sirius was already beginning to doubt Harris Raymons's motives. "I don't believe anyone would be this kind to a stranger for no reason, unless they had some ulterior motive."
"No comment. I can only tell you that everything I've said is true. You don't really have a choice except to believe me, do you? Without me, you can't leave this place," Harris Raymons said calmly.
Sirius's expression shifted uncertainly.
"Who says I have to rely on you?" Sirius slowly pushed himself to his feet. That gaunt body seemed to contain an endless will.
"Thank you for telling me Peter Pettigrew is still alive," Sirius Black said seriously. "But that doesn't mean I'm going to trust you completely."
Harris Raymons blinked in frustration.
Was he just naturally untrustworthy? One after another, nobody seemed willing to believe him.
Fortunately, Harris Raymons had thick enough skin that Sirius's distrust did not set him off.
"I understand if you don't trust me," Harris Raymons said. "But you still need to escape this prison, don't you? Without my help, how exactly do you plan to leave this place?"
"I have my own way... Sorry, but you need to go." Sirius tilted his head, listening. "The guards are coming. You'd better not let them find you."
Footsteps were echoing from the corridor outside. Dementors definitely could not make that kind of noise.
"Fine. Have it your way." Harris Raymons sighed. "I hope I see news of your successful escape in the papers."
Sta the raven tilted its head, having listened to the whole conversation, then hopped away from the cell door and slipped into the shadows before the guard arrived.
The guard's footsteps paused and resumed, but he soon reached Sirius's cell.
The guard outside had a newspaper tucked under one arm, and behind him floated two wobbling metal buckets.
Of course, Azkaban did not rely solely on Dementors as prison guards. Those things had neither brains nor feelings. They certainly did not know how to feed prisoners.
So the Ministry of Magic assigned people specifically to deliver meals to the inmates and to watch over the Azkaban dock, sending less capable Aurors to do the work.
Hardly anyone wanted to work in Azkaban. Even if Dementors did not attack Aurors, every single one of them carried an aura that lowered the surrounding temperature and dragged down people's moods.
When enough Dementors gathered, the temperature around them could drop below freezing, and people living there would slowly grow depressed.
So the working conditions in Azkaban were atrocious, both physically and mentally. Even with good pay and frequent shift changes, almost no one wanted to come.
Which meant it was easy to imagine that the Aurors working here as guards were rarely in a good mood.
After stopping, the guard took the newspaper in hand, then with the other hand pulled out a chunk of black bread from one of the buckets and casually tossed it into Sirius's cell.
Then he scooped a ladle of mush from the second bucket and dumped it into the dish beside the bars.
"Hey. Food's here." The guard knocked on the bars with a bad attitude, then without caring how Sirius reacted, tucked the newspaper back under his arm and moved on to the next cell.
Sirius pretended to look dejected as he picked up the dusty black bread from the floor, his gaze drifting casually over the newspaper.
The front-page headline seemed to be about a family winning some sort of prize, though no one in the picture looked especially happy. The photo had been taken at St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries.
A family both lucky and unlucky. But it had nothing to do with him. He did not know any of the people in the paper.
Sirius lowered his head and silently chewed the bread, washing it down with the thin, tasteless soup.
He needed to gather his strength and prepare to leave this place.
The river of time surged onward without rest, and under the influence of outside forces, it returned to its proper course.
...
Diagon Alley was still as prosperous as ever. Leonard walked through it hand in hand with Claudia, shopping while his mind drifted elsewhere.
His visit to Grindelwald had yielded a great deal. Every secret hidden in history had given Leonard something valuable.
It turned out that not all of the ancient Eternal Wizards had specialized in ancient magic. It turned out that the so-called Deathly Hallows were the remains left behind by Old Peverell, the Eternal Wizard known as Death. And there was also Tiamat, the source of Blood-wizards, known as the Lord of All Things.
Names that should have belonged only in myth had suddenly crashed straight into Leonard's view and shattered his worldview to pieces.
And after hearing all of this from Grindelwald, Leonard had arrived at a completely new judgment of the situation now facing him.
Most importantly, there were the Ravens. The origin of their ancient magic remained a mystery, but from Grindelwald's vague description, Leonard guessed that they very likely possessed clues about the World Tree, or had even come into contact with it before.
On top of that, besides ancient magic, they likely also carried some inheritance connected to Tiamat. That would explain why they were hunting Blood-wizards on such a large scale.
As for the inheritance of that unlucky Death, Peverell, it had nothing to do with them at all.
The Elder Wand was in Dumbledore's hands. The Invisibility Cloak was with Harry Potter. And the Resurrection Stone was still hidden in the Gaunt family's ancestral home.
Although Leonard did not know what miraculous effect might come from gathering the "corpse" of an Eternal Wizard like Peverell back together, the best possible outcome would probably just be an absurdly powerful ability to survive. The kind where you could still claw your way back out of the coffin after death.
Even if it felt a bit like desecrating a corpse, Leonard still could not help bringing him up again.
After all, among the Eternal Wizards, Peverell was the one Leonard currently understood best.