Protection: The Sword and the Shield

The Great Shift

......Azkaban Island, Location Unplottable

Azkaban Wizarding Prison was an institution almost as old as Hogwarts. The island and castle existed for many centuries before the founding of the school. The kingdom of Azkaban was, in fact, an attempt by wizards to create a wizarding equivalent to Camelot and for many years it had succeeded in that endeavor. During the golden age of wizarding life where magicals were considered valuable members of the European community, Azkaban was considered one of the great cities of the magical world.

Then the world's opinion on magic changed. No one knows what caused the great shift but within two generations, witches and wizards started to be hunted. Some believed it to be the rise of Christianity, others thought it was due to the economic and societal stability that was regularly afforded to magicals, especially the near absence of disease.

Whatever the reason; Azkaban changed from a center of wizarding commerce, to a sanctuary for those escaping persecution and not powerful enough to protect themselves. The Lord of Azkaban, Jessop Randall, became angry at the suffering of his fellow magicals and it did not take long for that anger to turn to hate. It was easy to spread his hate within the community of people who had all been victims of persecution by the muggles and a new Dark Lord rose.

Despite the persecution, most of the wizarding community in Europe had responded quickly to the change of attitude and raised wards that hid them away from the new attitudes of the muggles. The statute of secrecy became a common sense rule long before magical governments decided to codify it as a law. It was only the weak and unaffiliated that found themselves at Azkaban, and it was them that made up the bulk of the new Dark Lords followers.

Despite modern traditionalist views, non-magicals were quite capable of fighting and winning against magicals even in the time before modern weaponry and after thirty years, the war between Azkaban and the European Monarchies became one of attrition. Lord Randall became sure that if the other magical fiefdoms would join his cause he could conquer Europe, but they had quickly adapted to an insular life and had struck deals with the muggle monarchies that gave them autonomous rule.

Lord Randall saw this as a betrayal and shifted his war from the muggles to his fellow magicals and plunged the magical world into civil war. The war was to be short lived as Azkaban was not powerful enough to take on all of magical and muggle Europe.

Clouded by hate and desperation, Lord Randall delved deep into the Dark Arts and performed a ritual. The ritual was sabotaged by a spy within his followers and when the wild magic settled Lord Randall and his closest followers became what modern people refer to as Dementors and the island was contaminated with Dark Magic.

It took the creatures a day to suck the souls of everyone on the island. The creatures, luckily, could not cross water on their own and Azkaban remained a black spot on the magical map for a hundred years. It took the combined efforts of two men and two women to tame the land and allow for Magicals to return to it.

It was the first of the truly legendary acts of the founders of Hogwarts. They cleansed the land of Dark Magic, bound the un-killable creatures to the land and developed a spell to ward them off should they escape. It was many years later after the establishment of the school and the deaths of the founders that the Wizengamot turned the island into a prison to house a Dark Magic user that they had no other place for.

......Azkaban Wizarding Prison

None of the guards knew what to make of the influx of prisoners that had arrived over the last week. Unlike the people being held there, they all knew of the massive shake-up at the Ministry of Magic, having listened to the trials on the Wizarding Wireless and read of it in newspapers. But despite knowing what had happened and why, they were still amazed to see so many well-known witches and wizards being brought in for processing.