This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 96. The previous thread is at almost 300 comments.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system.
Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, .
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:
You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
There has previously been some speculation that the dark lord in Harry's birth prophesy is death rather than Voldemort. I think this interpretation just got a lot stronger.
James and Lilly had defied Voldemort but not death. The new lines back an interpretation that the Peverells thrice defied death with the three deathly hollows and Harry is born to the Peverell line.
This is, in some ways, a more natural interpretation of that clause since James and Lilly were in the Order and were defying Voldemort on a daily basis not just 3 times. The line of the Peverells makes the number three make sense rather than being arbitrary.
Great idea, but what of the rest of the prophecy ?
That I can't think how to interpret it... how did Death mark Harry his equal ?
That could be any of love, rationality, or hope, the most common hypothesis of what powers Harry have.
The remnant would be memory then ? If death defeats Harry, Harry is dead, but people will still remember him, probably for a long while, and if Harry defeats death, the memory that death existed will stay forever in everyone. Or the remnant of death would be death of non-sentient beings ?
Dementors symbolise death. Dementors can destroy humans (by their kiss), and Harry can destroy dementors (by True Patronus). That if anything marks him as Death's equal. If not, dementors obeying him can be understood as him being Death's equal.
[tinfoil hat]
Suppose that Killing Curse just bounced off the night Voldemort died, just refused to work for some reason. If "magically embodied preference for death over life" haven't worked on someone, I would pretty much say that it means something.
Also, possible foreshadowing in chapter 5:
Funny to think about, but probably I just see patterns where there are none.
My a bit stretched interpretation is that Bayesian Conspiracy and Chaos Legion are Harry's remnants.
[/tinfoil hat]
Or it's the ritual to create dementors. Quirrel says that "the spell to dismiss Death is lost" and nobody knows how to destroy a dementor.
I can't believe no one has pointed this out yet. One line differs from the HPMoR prophecy and the canon one:
This has obviously been rewritten to take out any reference to life or death, and instead talking about destruction and existence. Eliezer must have done this because "killing death" doesn't make sense. I would say 75% chance this theory is either true or discussed at some future point in the fanfiction.
Just remembered a serious objection, originally from Tarhish on reddit:
(from here, it's only 4 months old, you still can upvote that)
This argument can be somewhat handwaved away by "James is ascendant of Ignotus Peverell, and prophecy talks about several possible futures", but still.
The legend in canon says exactly that; the Peverell brother who got the Cloak was most successful, and lived a long time because the Cloak allowed him to evade death (until one day he took it off and got screwed).
This is a misuse of jargon.
Complexity means it requires additional things to happen even if you had no evidence.
For example, a more complex hypothesis than "Bob is a human" is "Bob is a human who lives at 123 Fake St."
Voldemort being called the dark lord is evidence, and learning about new evidence does not itself make a hypothesis more or less complex. It's just evidence.
You're right. Thanks for the correction!
Because there will still be an infinite (countable) number of finite hypotheses which could be considered and only a finite amount of probability to divide among them, which necessarily implies that in the limit more complicated hypotheses will have individual probability approaching zero. This will be true in the limit even if you define 'complexity' differently than the person who constructed the distribution.
Given that the brothers lived 800 years ago and the magical world is quite small that's very probable.
Just spelling out that we have a much better idea now what the first lines of the book mean:
The silver likely refers to:
There'd been some discussion of why HPMOR!Hogwarts was founded around 1200, as opposed to canon Hogwarts, which was "established around the 9th or 10th century." This chapter seems to make the reason clear: the founders were near-contemporaries of the Peverells, who kept their canon birthdates. Godric Gryffindor in particular seems likely to have been involved.
This is a quote from canon, in a scene where Harry is nearly possessed by Voldemort; it's Voldemort's memories of the night he died. It's italicized, as with Harry internal conversations, suggesting that this is part of Voldemort in Harry, remembering the night he died. (?)
My model of the Peverells has them substantially earlier than Hogwarts (because the Elder Wand seems like a more powerful artifact than the Sword of Gryffindor).
Aha! The prophecy we just heard in chapter 96 is Old English. However, by the 1200s, when, according to canon, the Peverell brothers were born, we're well into Middle English (which Harry might well understand on first hearing). I was beginning to wonder if there was not some old wizard or witch listening, for whom that prophecy was intended.
There's still the problem of why brothers with an Anglo-Norman surname would have Old English as a mother tongue... well, that could happen rather easily with a Norman father and English mother, I suppose.
And the coincidence of Canon!Ignotus Peverell being born in 1214, the estimated year of Roger Bacon's birth, seemed significant too... I shall have to go back over the chapters referring to his diary.
Godric was the highest-profile member of a small group who led armies in battle, raised a castle by magic alone, and vanquished at least one and probably many Dark Lords. The Peverells created a small number of artefacts whose very existence faded into obscure myths known only to the learned. The difference in fame is entirely logical based on what we know.
It strikes me that this is even more obviously a turning point than it already is.
First: This is the first hint to Harry that he is not alone. All this story, Harry has been defined by his aloofness; the one person as "sane" as he is cannot be trusted, and for all that Hermione tries she's just more of a apprentice than a co-hero, she's not on the same scale that Harry acts on.
No longer. Harry knows, now, that there are more like him, and they too are smart, and competent, and they have gifts for him from hundreds of years in the past.
Second: This also solves one of the problems I had been worrying about, which was: How can Harry solve Death without it looking like a Deus ex Machina? Sanderson's First Law: magic cannot be used to solve a problem except where it is foreshadowed and constructed from existing effects. There's been a few ideas tossed around - Summon Death + True Patronus and the like - but they all seem to have... unhelpful side effects. (In particular, actually ending "Death" would be a bad thing, because Death kills bacteria as much as it kills humans. You want to destroy "Death of Humans" or come up with a mass-producible immortality elixir, not kill Death outright.)
Relevant quote, conversation with a Sorting Hat:
It seems that something broken was healed at last.
PS: Tangentially related to the Harry's inability to rely on others: chapter 31, chapter 70 (Maybe if there were more heroes, their lives wouldn't be so lonely, or so short.), chapter 93.
Just because something is defined on a higher layer of abstraction doesn't mean that there is "no such thing", any more than there is "no such thing as an apple" just because physics doesn't draw object boundaries. Humans draw object boundaries, and in the HPVerse, magic listens to humans. I think the strongest thing you can say is "There is no such thing in reductionist physics as a consciousness", which is not the same as "consciousness doesn't exist" even in our universe, and doubly so in Harry's where magic gives concepts direct relevance.
Maybe someone (the Peverell brothers) already did something like this, just incompletely. The data is saved... but not respawned; just collected somewhere. This may be what is referred to as "souls".
Of course, humans being what they are, even if some wizards notice the souls, they don't start thinking about reincarnating them.
Now I have the image of someone wearing "armor" made of live animals of some sort in order to absorb Killing Curses.
There's a new Dark Wizard in town, boys and girls... and he's COVERED IN BEES!
You jest, but it seems -- depending on whether one believes that AK works on animals or not -- that you have just come up with a way to block the unblockable curse. That's some serious lateral thinking, right there.
More likely still is that people really don't think on the matter much and so don't have well formed or necessarily consistent views of souls.
For those who don't know, the actual origin of "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death" is Corinthians 15:26, specifically, the King James version.
The last one of {X; X is enemy && X shall be destroyed } is death.
It can be true assuming that the remaining enemies are indestructible.
Well, the Christus Victor theology of the resurrection of Christ is basically that Christ broke our slavery to death by going through the process Himself, which caused a divide by zero error and broke death permanently.
Any guesses why Draco is contacting Harry?
My second guess is that Minerva got in touch with Draco. She knows Harry taught him the Patronus from a conference in the headmasters office and has seen Harry's reaction to losing Draco.
At first I dismissed it at a silly thing for her to try, but now that she will be really making an effort it seems much more likely.
It's just over 24 hours since Hermione died - he probably just found out. It's the sort of reason you'd get in touch with a friend you used to know pretty well until recently.
Different usages: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/falsifiable
I'm referring to the first usage -- it can't be counterfeited.
Ugh. Apparently the two definitions partition the set of all things.
Great, now everything is falsifiable.
The first definition of "falsifiable" means that it's easy to fake - if a Patronus is falsifiable under this definition, you don't get much information when you see a Patronus, since it could easily be something else and you couldn't tell the difference.
The second definition of "falsifiable" means that it's easy to prove that it's not fake - if a Patronus is falsifiable under this definition, you get a lot of information when you see a Patronus, since it is very difficult for something that looks like a Patronus to actually be a fake.
Because the two defintions are pretty much opposites, between them they cover everything - the ones that are easily fakeable and the ones that are not easily fakeable.
Heh. Mine are something like 95% and 1%. I'd actually consider it more likely for it to be Lucius's patronus, than it to be Quirrel's.
It's seems that McGonagall and Quirrell are responsible for Harry spending the day with Lupin, and that Dumbledore knows exactly what they're doing. It's not entirely clear whether McGonagall and Quirrell knew that Lupin would decide to take Harry to Godric's Hollow, but Quirrell at least could probably guess.
All three of these people knew what Harry would find on his parents' grave. I don't recall McGonagall ever encountering Harry's transhumanist ideas, but Quirrell and Dumbledore would certainly know how Harry would choose to interpret the inscription.
Which makes it look as though one or more of these people might be indirectly trying to encourage Harry's efforts to resurrect Hermione.
As I interpreted canon: Canon!Voldemort also didn't recognize the symbol. Inference: Grindelwald studied the Deathly Hallows particularly and thus learned that symbol, to use as his own. The Deathly Hallows in general are well-known enough to have sayings like "Wand of elder, never prosper" but not the symbol.
... On a side note.
That's a prophecy. Which means it'd be recorded in the Hall of Prophecy.
I'm starting to wonder exactly how many very good reasons Dumbledore had for keeping Harry out of that Hall.
Wow, this was awesome! I wish I had read the canon so I would have had a chance to think about/predict what would happen when Harry read that inscription. This was just beautiful - a reminder of the heritage that transhumanists often forget we have. True, we have precious little tradition or precedent to fall back on - but in every generation in every era in every part of the world, there have been people who knew death for what it was and loathed it.
HPMOR is starting to be one tear jerker after another. I hope we'll get to see a couple more moments of levity, or - ideally - a moment of euphoria, when Hermione joins millions and millions of others we thought lost to history.
Edit: I really wish the word "pro-life" were available to describe this position.
Like racism, sexism, ageism,...? In a crowded world will "lifeist!" become a snarled curse at anyone not dutifully shuffling off stage after their threescore and ten?
No. At people who don't want equal rights for zombies.
Which is a bit frustrating in a couple ways, seeing as Paul (the most popular candidate for the originator of said line) was talking about a literal resurrection of everyone, hopefully during his lifetime, and canon Harry then proceeded to defeat death by dying and coming back.
That was what frustrated me the most - how canon could preach to us about accepting death as inevitable while giving its main character the power to defeat death. It's sad that the narrative just accepts it as okay that the main character and the subject of the prophecy gets to be resurrected, but for anyone else to seek that would be folly.
Vague stylistic thought - I don't have anything specific to base this on, but this chapter feels like something EY has been saving up, and is now throwing in as he's decided it's time to start the ending.
(By the way, tags on the opening post are wrong. There should be a tag reading "harry_potter", not two separate tags for the first and last name.)
Given the increasing number of prophecies that could refer to Harry, it's no wonder why Dumbledore refused to bring Harry to the Department of Mysteries. I mean, besides the possibility that he'd get knocked out by the storm of orbs. We know of four so far--at the time that Dumbledore refused to take Harry to the Hall of Prophecy, Harry only knew about the one.
Isn't the fact that people like Dumbledore don't invest significant amount of time into thinking about ressurection a sign that they really do believe in life after death?
I'm an idiot. I'm not sure why I didn't see this before, except that it was 2 am when I first read the chapter.
I've read the other posts below, but I think we are missing something specific here.
Spoken in the presence of them. Not by them.
It was spoken to them by ... (read more)
Harry perhaps now recognizes himself not as an originator of a plot against Death, but as an intermediate result of that plot.
Has it been pointed out yet that while Hermione lay dying and Harry was trying to save her, he neglected to cover her in the cloak that hides the wearer from death, and also neglected to notice this fact during the time afterwards when he was getting mad at himself for everything he had screwed up?
Prediction: HPMoR will end after 108 chapters.
(Warning: TV Tropes link. Notably, Failed Utopia #4-2 is listed as an example (because 107 clauses in a wish to make people happy are not enough); moreover, Death Note also has 108 chapters. There, now you don't have to click on the link if you don't want to.)
I think this chapter explained something which has struck me as strange for a long time:
If the killing curse can be stopped by love, how come only Harry ever survived? Its not like Lilly is the only person who ever loved anyone, nor the only person who would sacrifice themselves to save another.
Maybe the Potters possessed a new, experimental deathly hallow, one capable of stopping the killing curse (or, alternativly, an old one whoes purpose has been forgotton). It must have limits on its power, otherwise James and Lilly would have lived, and probably wou... (read more)
... (a few paragraphs, whose action gives no great reason to think that eye contact was broken) ...
Uh-oh.
Don't know if this has been suggested before, but:
Possibility: Harry's "Father's rock" is the Resurrection Stone. Giving this one low probability, since it has thus far demonstrated no other magical properties, and just seems like a way to get Harry to grind his Transfiguration and mana stats.
Possibility: Harry's "Father's rock" is the Philosopher's Stone. Giving this one even lower probability.
Possibility: The Philosopher's Stone is actually the Resurrection stone, or a similar magical construct. Middling probability; Dumbledore refers... (read more)
I find myself confused by why Harry's interpretation of "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death" is the logical one. The use of the word "last" in conjunction with Harry's interpretation either makes the statement pessimistic - that death is clearly more intractable than all our other problems, and thus will be last to be defeated - or implies that death logically takes the backseat to all other problems. I feel like the quote makes much more sense in the context of death being the final obstacle for each individual to grapple ... (read more)
There's another reasonable interpretation: that once you've solved death, that's the last real problem you have, and everything else can be fixed given enough time, and there is no need to destroy one's enemies ('do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?').
With enough time, even Satan can be redeemed (which is, of course, a serious heresy).
I understand it as, "when death is defeated, there won't be real enemies anymore, because there is nothing so terrible someone can do to you or your friends if they can't kill". Of course it's not fully true, Neville's parents who were driven insane by torture are in a state as bad as death if not worse. But then, it can be considered that destroying their personality is killing them. And most importantly, it's a motto, mottos are always a bit oversimplification and exaggerating.
I definitely see much more twisting in understanding this motto as "destroyed" is just "make peace with" than as "last enemy" meaning that once death if defeated, there aren't any true enemies left.
It's a semantics thing. Once death is destroyed, no (human) enemy can be; they can be disabled, rehabilitated, but no enemy can ever be killed again, because nobody can ever be killed again.
The absolute end of Death also requires the absolute end of Endings.
I'm not sure I follow the second sentence. It doesn't seem responsive to the first.
People don't know how to pretend to care, thus them being terrible at it - see, for example, not even spending five minutes to try to think of a way to bring their friends back to life.
Unless, of course, the machinery for caring is much simpler when it's simply "care" vs "not care". Pretending to care could be a much more complicated neurological adaptation that would be more wasteful than just implementing a nice "Sympathy" subsystem.
I mean, the way humans model each other's behavior is by looking at our own self in other people's scenarios, and then making minor adjustments for accuracy's sake, since they think a little differently. I mean, why would you invent an entire subsystem just for understanding other people? That's insane! YOU HAVE AN ENTIRE BRAIN ALREADY, AND EVERYBODY'S BRAIN IS REALLY DAMN SIMILAR, RIGHT?
Now, once you have this "self modeling and adjustment" system in place, actual caring makes a lot of sense. oh, pretending to care about your family and tribe is useful? here, i'll just slap on an extra module here. we'll call it Sympathy. It kinda works like this: you'v got that model of your brother you use to predict his behavior, right? It's running on the same hardware YOUR mind is, and you care about YOUR mind, right? so we'll just switch that "care" knob to the on position for your bro, alrigh... (read more)
I'm re-reading HPMoR right now, I'm at chapter 31. I'm fuzzy on what happens in most of chapter 32 on.
Stupid question: is Quirrel Voldemort? I don't really care about spoilers.
At this point, it would be the greatest fake-out in literary history if Quirinus Quirrell was actually just Quirinus Quirrell.
Surprise! It's actually Nymphadora Tonks!
Basically, yes.
Slightly pedantic answer: they're still different people, but Voldemort appears to be possessing Quirrell, through some means different than the means used in canon, so that it isn't too easy for Harry to figure out what's going on.
Fully nuanced answer: referring to the villain as "Voldemort" may be misleading, because in this version it appears the person who was born Tom Riddle has gone through all kinds of identities and personas and the "Voldemort" persona seems to be less important to him than in canon. Also, though I consider it unlikely, I'm not sure we can entirely ignore the possibility that Riddle magically forked himself, and there are multiple spirits descended from Riddle running around. Also, for all we know the original Quirrell could be flat-out dead, and Riddle (or this particular spirit descended from Riddle) grabbed the body of a random muggle to use while impersonating Quirrell (again, may not be terribly likely).
In addition to the rot13'd reason:
It's true in Canon.
Voldemort is the only one with a plausible motive to want Bellatrix Black out of Azkaban.
Quirrel drops a bunch of hints directly:
He says he has resolved his parental issues to his satisfaction, and he says they were killed by Voldemort.
After he got what he needed from the Muggle martial arts dojo, Voldemort comes along and destroys it. Later, when discussing the chamber of secrets with Harry, he mentioned that Voldemort would not leave an important source of power lying around for anybody else to use it, so he probably killed Slytherin's creature.
He tells his whole defense class that he used to want to be a dark Lord.
He tried to become the ruler of magical England by setting himself up as "David Monroe" against Voldemort. Later, once Harry wants to stop being stuck in Hogwarts, he suggests pretending to be Voldemort to set Harry up as a hero everyone else depends on.
He doesn't want Dumbledore to know whom he really is.
At the end of the Azkaban arc, it turns out that is a very large number of identities, so it's not particularly implausible to think that he is Voldemort too.
Also, mysterious feeling of doom. And Quirrel can sense Harry's feelings. And their magic can't interact.
I was wondering why/why not about the idea of Harry talking to Bathilda Bagshot in this chapter, and thoroughly convinced myself that Harry would have avoided doing so even had he thought about it (does he even know that she lives in Godric's Hollow?). The main reason would be that he believes that Dumbledore/Moody is watching him, which would vacate the point of talking to a historian over Dumbledore directly. The next biggest is that she most likely reports to Dumbledore, or has at least been warned that Harry would be there. The only gain that would com... (read more)
Looking at this with my current eyes, I see no reason to anthropomorphize the Dark Lord more than necessary. I think it is reasonable to say that Harry is "born" of the Peverell brothers, who have ... (read more)
Given the fact that there is a Tracey, then that act of conception must have completed. So, either McGonagall caught them at exactly the right moment, or the Davises had just kept on going after they were caught...
No matter how it happened, this scene must have played out hilariously.
Source of confusion: Harry isn't dead. Why hasn't the Mysterious Enemy (ME) had him killed?
1) Harry isn't a target: he's just in the way of some other objective.
Let's lay that theory aside for the moment, on the grounds that it's not fun. The next most likely is:
2) ME's objective is to make Harry behave in a particular way.
So Harry is intended to go huge and dramatic. But that's a somewhat stupid plan on the part of ME, too prone to random factors derailing it. Except that we've already seen plans like that working, in one particular case: where time-turne... (read more)
If the invisibility cloak is so good at shielding people from death AND the Potter/Peverell family is focused on defeating death, why didn't James put baby Harry and Lily under the cloak as soon as they knew Harry was a target?
Harry is going about his daily life under cloak w/ broomstick now; surely his parents--who spent more time with Mad Eye than Harry has--would appreciate the need for constant vigilance when Voldemort wants to kill your baby.
Does Harry already know or suspect at this point that Dumbledore has the Elder Wand? Either way, this looks like a piece of foreshadowing worth paying attention to regarding Dumbledore's fate.
It strikes me as strange taking the words "The last enemy to be destroyed is death" as a family motto and manifesto, considering that it orginates from 1 Corinthians 15:26, concerning the resurrection of the dead, Jesus Christ's second coming and the abolishment of death. While it is similiar to Harry's goal, it certainly opposes it by way of means. Harry seeking the abolishment of death through mortal, albeit supernatural and magical, means opposes the divine plan of God. That Harry took this as a mission pasted down the Potter line generation to generation seems a lot more unlikely than it being a suitable epitaph on a gravestone.
Christmas and Easter both borrow heavily from pre-Christian European traditions. Presumably those threads are carried over even more strongly than in muggle Europe.
... wow.
New Predictions:
-Gur Erfheerpgvba Fgbar vf abg npghnyyl na rkgnag negvsnpg, be ng yrnfg abg havdhr. Uneel Cbggre jvyy ohvyq vg. (Evatzvbar?) (Zbqrengr-ybj pbasvqrapr)
-Zber trarenyyl, gur Qrnguyl Unyybjf ner abg arprffnevyl rkgnag negvsnpgf. Uneel jvyy ohvyq gurz, qhcyvpngr gurz, hctenqr gurz, be hfr gurz va jnlf gung zbfg crbcyr svaq uvtuyl habegubqbk va beqre gb qrfgebl Qrngu be erfheerpg Urezvbar. (Uneel unf gur Pybnx bs Vaivfvovyvgl, naq Qhzoyrqber vf fhttrfgrq gb unir gur Ryqre Jnaq, ohg jr qba'g npghnyyl xabj gung, naq tvira ubj inthr vg jnf... (read more)
Ignotus(?) Peverell created the Cloak of Invisibility, was immortal while he wore it, then passed it on to his son. As a consequence, he died and his son became immortal (presumably until he, in turn, passed it on to his child). Why didn't Ignotus simply make another Cloak of Invisibility for his son, or have his son make one for himself? They had the necessary knowledge, and however ardurous, demanding or costly the ritual, one would think it was worth performing just a few times a generation to keep oneself and one's family from dying.
Prediction: Harry will have to make an unbreakable vow not to use the elixir of life himself in order to get the Philosopher's stone from the Mirror or Erisid
Greetings, forum!
So, I confess myself a bit suspicious of whether the last bit really means what it's supposed to do/what the Patronus claims it does. The reason being that in both English and German, the direct object of the respective modern cognates of [ge]win[n]an, "to win" and "gewinnen", indicate the prize, not the foe: The latter is in both cases indicated as an indirect object employing a suitably confrontational preposition.
Like so: In order to win (gain) ... (read more)
Puzzle:
Who is ultimately in control of the person who calls himself Quirrell?
If Voldemort is possessing the-person-pretending-to-be-Quirrell using the path Dumbledore & co. are familiar with, or for that matter by drinking unicorn blood, then why isn't Voldy's magic noticeably weaker than before? Quirrell seems like he could at least hold his own against Dumbledore, and possibly defeat him.
If Voldemort took control of the-person-pretending-to-be-Quirrell's body outright using incredibly Dark magic, then why would Quirrell openly suggest th... (read more)
Regarding the "he's here... he is the end of the world" prophecy, in view of the recent events, it seems like it can become literally true without it being a bad thing. After all, it does not specify a time frame. So Harry may become immortal and then tear apart the very stars in heaven, some time during a long career.
It occurred to me while reading Chapter 96 that Voldemort is a descendant of Cadmus Peverelle, and Ignotus Peverelle is buried at Godrick's Hollow. My first impulse was to wonder if Voldemort would pop up and stab Harry at the end of this chapter (I quickly discounted it because of what Eliezer said about there being padding before the final arc and about ending on this sort of cliffhanger, rather than the in-universe reason of it being the wrong brother). Now I'm wondering if anyone knows where Cadmus is buried. I know Moody and Snape figured Voldemort di... (read more)
He's already collected Harry's blood, but there's little point in performing the ritual before he's used up his current body.
I don't speak Old English, unfortunately. Could someone who does please provide me with a rough translation of the provided passage?
More fridge logic:
The Dark Mark. Everything we know about it is that there are very specific restrictions on how the bearer can conceal or display it, and what they can say about it.
Snape, who is subject to the restrictions about what he can say about it, provided information (consistent with all previous information, all of which he is well aware) that Harry, by describing how to use the restrictions on speech to identify bearers, removed those restrictions. Snape then allegedly described the restrictions, and the description he gave is roughly the stupi... (read more)
This is going to be vitally important in the future. Thoughts on what it could be?
Storehouse of lost knowledge from the Peverells is my guess, perhaps their notes or a Slytherin-esque way around the Interdict.
If not, the notes would be enough for Harry to start brainstorming a way around the Interdict.
What is meant by the three sons? Harry, Draco, and someone else? Quirrell perhaps? Using the three Deathly Hallows?
I interpreted this to mean that long ago, there were 3 Peverell brothers, each of which created one of the Hallows. Harry is descended from this family. Note that it doesn't say that "Pevererll's sons" will necessarily be the ones to use their devices to defeat Death, only that the devices are theirs.