Dementors

The Dementor is a large, cloaked, humanesque figure, which towers over a normal man. Under normal circumstances they stay entirely under the cover of their cloaks, so no part of their body can be seen. Occasionally, though, a glimpse may be caught: anyone unlucky enough to catch sight of the creature’s hand will see that it is skeletal, glistening, greyish, slimy and scabbed, like something that has died and decayed underwater. The only other part of a Dementor’s body which can ever been seen is its head, which is considerably worse: scabbed skin covers the sockets where its eyes should be, and it has a gaping shapeless hole of a mouth which it can use to literally suck the soul from its victim.

Dementors are the guards of the wizard prison of Azkaban. Their origin is unknown, and it is also unclear how anyone reached agreement with them to carry out this role, as they are speechless, sightless and psychopathic. They feed on positive human emotions – happiness, hope, excitement. Their mere presence sucks every happy feeling or memory from any human present, leaving only cold dark despair in its place. The worst experiences of the victim’s life will flood through them as everything positive is stripped away. This effect causes the vast majority of Azkaban inmates to go insane in a very short length of time. Any wizard exposed to a Dementor for long enough is also likely to lose their powers.

Dementors glide rather than walk, and although sightless can sense human emotions and are drawn to them. Their breath stinks of decay and sounds like a death rattle as it is drawn into their body – it is as though they are sucking more than just air from the atmosphere around them. The one thing a Dementor likes more than feeding on human emotions is to feed on a human’s soul. The act of sucking their victim’s soul out of their body is known as the Dementor’s Kiss. In theory, application of the Kiss is strictly controlled by the Ministry of Magic and used only in the case of the most evil killers. In practice, a Dementor will Kiss anybody it can get close enough to.

Despite the tentative agreement which exists between Dementors and humans on the issue of governing Azkaban, the creatures are definitely not to be trusted.

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