"Your journey ends here, Tom Riddle."
The prison carriage drawn by Thestrals came to an abrupt halt. Outside, the wind roared like an enormous machine, forcing the Auror driving the carriage to shout at the top of his lungs.
Even without that reminder, Cyrus could clearly sense how different this place was. The air had reached freezing point, and the cold pierced his skin, his marrow, and even his soul like steel needles.
When the curtain at the front of the prison carriage was lifted, that bone-deep chill grew even more relentless.
Some of the restraining magic on Cyrus was released, but his hands remained tightly shackled, and his whole body crashed heavily onto the carriage floor. The Auror grabbed his shoulder and hauled him up.
He was a powerfully built Auror with graying hair and not a trace of a smile on his face. In a place like this, though, even the most optimistic person probably couldn't smile. Cyrus had learned his name when he was loaded into the prison carriage: John Dawlish.
"Get out!" Dawlish unceremoniously dragged Cyrus out of the carriage.
Cyrus immediately felt even colder.
The wind howled with enough force to nearly knock him off his feet. It was as though hundreds of Snapes were hiding in it, all casting Sectumsempra at once; every gust cut like a knife. But Cyrus almost ignored the temperature, his attention captured instead by the terrifying sight before him-even Voldemort's memories contained scarcely any images of Azkaban.
Cyrus's impression of Azkaban came solely from a few scattered descriptions in the novels he had read in his previous life.
But being there in person made that feeling far more vivid.
An enormous black vortex filled his vision. The gale seemed to have swept up every dark cloud in the world,