Prologue
When the news of Pandora Lovegood's death was delivered to Antonin Dolohov from the lips of the one man who ever cared enough to visit him in the dark confines of Azkaban, some might relay that the very foundations of the massive stone building shook from his screams of rage. It was unlikely that many of the prison's other inhabitants, or many that resided outside that godforsaken hell-hole for that matter, had any idea why this information mattered at all to the former death eater. But his two best friends, one in another cell at the end of the hall from the one in which Antonin currently resided, and the other standing directly outside Dolohov's cell having been the one to bear the message of the horrible news, they both knew all too well what the deceased witch had once meant to their friend. What she had never stopped meaning to him.
Corban Yaxley watched with a sense of helplessness that he despised, his hands gripping the bars that separated him from his oldest friend, as Antonin raged as Corban had never witnessed him rage before. He wanted to break down the door. He wanted to do something, anything. But even if he could, even if the action wouldn't land him right in a cell of his own. What could he possibly do or say that would be enough to ease the news that the only woman that his best friend, his brother, had ever loved was gone from the world?
Antonin stood in his cell screaming. Screaming louder than he had screamed inside these walls in years. He clawed at his face as though the physical pain could overwhelm the horrible feeling building inside of him. Grasping for anything to calm the storm that his emotions were becoming. Anything to dull the pain of the way that her face flashed in his mind now, as though they had never been separated. The windblown mess of her hair. The way that her nose had crinkled and her eyes had lit whenever he had entered a room. The idea that the very purest and gentlest of women, a woman that he had never ever deserved, was no longer breathing was too much to bear.
If you asked either of the other two men later in life... Corban Yaxley and Rodolphus Lestrange would tell you that this was the day that Antonin Dolohov had begun to truly lose his mind.