To Slay a Unicorn
`“… but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” Atticus Finch
“Crime… befouling the castle… suggested sentence… ”
“I want to see some punishment!” Argus Filch
“… it is a monstrous thing, to slay a unicorn,” Firenze
Let’s take a look at Harry’s first detention and the lessons that it taught him, shall we?
The first thing to note is that it was over two weeks between the offense and the assignment of the detention, whereas all other canon detentions were assigned (and normally served) nearly at once. In fact, Harry had entirely forgotten he had further punishment coming:
The following morning, notes were delivered to Harry, Hermione, and Neville at the breakfast table. They were all the same:
Your detention will take place at eleven o’clock tonight. Meet Mr. Filch in the entrance hall. Professor M. McGonagall
Harry had forgotten they still had detentions to do in the furor over the points they’d lost.
[snip]
At eleven pm, Mr. Filch escorted the four children to Hagrid’s hut and threatened them that they’d be going into the forest. But they didn’t find out what they’d be doing until, at “the very edge of the forest,” Hagrid held his lamp up to illumine “a narrow, winding earth track disappearing into the thick black trees.” .
“Look there,” said Hagrid, “see that stuff shinin’ on the ground? Silvery stuff? That’s unicorn blood. There’s a unicorn in there bin hurt badly by summat. This is the second time in a week. I found one dead last Wednesday. We’re gonna try an’ find the poor thing. We might have to put it out of its misery.”
“And what is whatever hurt he unicorn finds us first?” said Malfoy, unable to keep the fear out of his voice.
“There’s nothing that lives in the forest that’ll hurt yeh if yer with me or Fang,” said Hagrid. “And keep ter the path. Right, now, we’re gonna split into two parties an’ follow the trail in diff’rent directions. There’s blood all over the place, it must’ve bin staggerin’ around since last night at least.”
“I want Fang,” said Malfoy quickly, looking at Fang’s long teeth.
[snip]
The forest was black and silent. A little way into it they reached a fork in the earth path, and Harry, Hermione, and Hagrid took the left path while Malfoy, Neville, and Fang took the right.
They walked in silence, their eyes on the ground. Every now and then a ray of moonlight through the branches above lit a spot of silver-blue blood on the fallen leaves.
Harry saw that Hagrid looked very worried.
“Could a werewolf be killing the unicorns?” Harry asked.
“Not fast enough,” said Hagrid. “It’s not easy ter catch a unicorn, they’re powerful magic creatures. I never knew one ter be hurt before.”
[snip]
“Don’ worry, it can’t’ve gone very far if it’s this badly hurt, and then we’ll be able ter-GET BEHIND THAT TREE!”
Hagrid seized Harry and Hermione and hoisted them off the path behind a towering oak. He pulled out an arrow and fitted it into his crossbow, raising it, ready to fire. The three of them listened. Something was slithering over dead leaves nearby; it sounded like a cloak trailing along the ground. Hagrid was squinting up the dark path, but after a few seconds, the sound faded away.
“I knew it,” he murmured. “There’s summat in here that shouldn’ be.”
“A werewolf?” Harry suggested.
“That wasn’ no werewolf an’ it wasn’ no unicorn, neither,” said Hagrid grimly. “Right, follow me, but careful, now.”
[snip]- They met Ronan, who told them, twice, “Mars is bright tonight” and “Always the innocent are the first victims.” Bane cantered up, and concurred with the first.
[snip] Hermione saw red sparks, indicating the other party was in danger; Hagrid went off to rescue them. Hagrid returned with the other children in tow, fuming. Malfoy, it seemed, had sneaked up behind Neville and grabbed him as a joke. Neville had panicked and sent up the sparks.
“We’ll be lucky to catch anything now, with the racket you two were makin’. Right, we’re changin’ groups-Neville, you stay with me an’ Hermione, Harry, you go with Fang an’ this idiot. I’m sorry,” Hagrid added in a whisper to Harry, “but he’ll have a harder time frightenin’ you, an’ we’ve got get this done.”
So Harry set off into the heart of the forest with Malfoy and Fang. They walked for nearly half an hour, deeper and deeper into the forest, until the path became almost impossible to follow because the trees were so thick. Harry thought the blood seemed to be getting thicker. There were splashes on the roots of a tree, as though the poor creature had been thrashing around in pain close by. Harry could see a clearing ahead…
Something bright white was gleaming on the ground. They inched closer.
It was the unicorn all right, and it was dead….
Harry had taken one step toward it when a slithering sound made him freeze where he stood. A bush on the edge of the clearing quivered…. Then out of the shadows, a hooded figure came crawling across the ground like some stalking beast. Harry, Malfoy, and Fang stood transfixed. The cloaked figure reached the unicorn, lowered its head over the wound in the animal’s side, and began to drink its blood.
“AAAAAAAARGH!”
Malfoy let out a terrible scream and bolted-so did Fang. The hooded figure raised his head and looked right at Harry-unicorn blood was dribbling down its front. It got to its feet and came swiftly toward Harry-he couldn’t move for fear.
Then a pain like he’d never felt before pierced his head; it was as though his scar were on fire. Half-blinded, he staggered backward. He heard hooves behind him, galloping, and someone jumped clean over Harry, charging at the figure.
The pain in Harry’s head was so bad he fell to his knees. It took a moment or two to pass. When he looked up, the figure was gone. A centaur was standing over him….
[snip]
Bane and Ronan galloped up just as Firenze was lowering himself on his front legs so Harry could clamber onto his back. Bane was furious at Firenze for letting a human ride him “like a common mule.”
“Do you realize who this is?” said Firenze. “This is the Potter boy. The quicker he leaves this forest, the better….”
After hearing this, Ronan became ambivalent; Bane continued furious, saying,
“Centaurs are concerned with what has been foretold! It is not our business to run around like donkeys after stray humans in our forest!”
Firenze suddenly reared on his hind legs in anger, so that Harry had to grab his shoulders to stay on.
“Do you not see that unicorn?” Firenze bellowed at Bane. “Do you not understand why it was killed? Or have the planets not let you in on that secret? I set myself against what is lurking in this forest, Bane, yes, with humans alongside me if I must.”
[snip]
Finally, Firenze explained a bit to Harry as he carried him to safety:
“… it is a monstrous thing, to slay a unicorn,” said Firenze. “Only one who has nothing to lose, and everything to gain, would commit such a crime. The blood of a unicorn will keep you alive, even if you are an inch from death, but at a terrible price. You have slain something pure and defenseless to save yourself, and you will have but a half-life, a cursed life, from the moment the blood touches your lips.”
Harry stared at the back of Firenze’s head, which was dappled silver in the moonlight.
“But who’d be that desperate?” he wondered aloud. “If you’re going to be cursed forever, death’s better, isn’t it?
“It is,” Firenze agreed, “unless all you need is to stay alive long enough to drink something else-something that will bring you back to full strength and power-something that will mean that you can never die. Mr Potter, do you know what is hidden in the school at this very moment?”
“The Sorcerer’s Stone [sic]! Of course-the Elixir of Life! But I don’t understand who-”
“Can you think of nobody who has waited many years to return to power, who has clung to life, awaiting their chance?”
It was as though an iron fist had clenched suddenly around Harry’s heart. Over the rustling of the trees, he seemed to hear once more what Hagrid had told him on the night they had met: “Some say he died. Codswallop, in my opinion. Dunno if he had enough human in him left to di.”
“Do you mean,” Harry croaked, “that was Vol-”
*
Let’s consider Firenze for a moment. Why did Firenze find himself at odds with his fellows over saving Harry Potter that night, and later over teaching at Hogwarts? What did he know or believe that they did not?
Remember that eventually the entire herd (apparently) fought Voldemort and his Death Eaters when they invaded the school grounds (but not the forest). Yet they tried to kill Firenze for becoming Albus Dumbledore’s employee. His servant.
The difference of opinion, then, is not over whether Voldemort should be stopped (or at least fought). It’s over how low one may stoop to stop Voldemort, acting like a mule, allying oneself with humans. Or maybe just with Albus.
And also, it seems, a difference of opinion on what they’ve read in the stars-if something is actually foretold to come to pass, it’s wrong to try to avert it.
Remember the scorn Firenze heaped on human Astrology in OotP? Parvati started to rattle off what she’d been taught: “Mars causes accidents and burns and things like that, and when it makes an angle to Saturn, like now”-she drew a right angle in the air above her-“that means that people need to be extra careful when handling hot things-”
“That,” said Firenze calmly, “is human nonsense.”
Parvati’s hand fell limply to her side.
“Trivial hurts, tiny human accidents,” said Firenze, as his hooves thudded over the mossy floor. “These are of no more significance than the scurrying of ants to the wide universe, and are unaffected by planetary movements… I, however, am here to explain the wisdom of centaurs, which is impersonal and impartial. We watch the skies for the great tides of evil or change that are sometimes marked there. It may take ten years to be sure of what we are seeing.”
Firenze pointed to the red star directly above Harry.
“In the past decade, the indications have been that Wizard-kind is living through nothing more than a brief calm between two wars. Mars, bringer of battle, shines brightly above us, suggesting that the fight must break out again soon. How soon, centaurs may attempt to divine by the burning of certain herbs and leaves, ty the observation of fume and flame…”
Um. So. All the centaurs agreed the night of Harry’s detention that “Mars is bright tonight,” indicating to them that the “brief calm” might soon be over. And all of them were ultimately willing to charge into battle against Voldemort himself and his followers.
Firenze alone, however, thought that “running around after stray humans like a donkey” was an appropriate response to the unicorn-killer at large in their forest that night. Note, by the way, that Bane didn’t just charge Firenze with letting Harry RIDE him---he said Firenze had “run around after” the boy. So Firenze didn’t just show up fortuitously; he had gone looking for Harry.
At whose request?
And if the stars don’t tell even the wisest centaur details about individual human lives, from where did Firenze garner such detailed information as that the Flamels’ Philosopher’s Stone was currently being kept in Hogwarts Castle? And that Voldemort himself was alive and in hot pursuit of it? And that Voldemort might be desperate enough to drink unicorn blood as a stopgap measure until he could get his hands on the Stone, and that that was why those two unicorns had been slain? And that Voldemort himself, therefore, was in the forest that night, and THAT’s why “Mars was bright”?
(Note that “a period of calm between Wizarding wars is ending,” even if correctly interpreted, doesn’t necessarily mean that the ORIGINAL WAR is breaking out again-a second could be starting- You’d need additional information than Mars to be sure the last war is resuming with the same protagonists as before. Note that Ronan and Bane both saw Harry Potter with Hagrid, and neither of them showed any particular signs of feeling, then or when Firenze urged it, that the Boy-Who-Lived deserved special treatment from them.)
Really, the herd’s response here (and in book 5) is the Ministry’s reaction to Bertha’s disappearance and Frank’s death all over again-Firenze thought the unicorns’ deaths terribly significant, and Bane and Ronan (and, presumably, the rest of the herd) thought the deaths terrible but not significant. But of course in GoF, Albus had been sitting on the information that Bertha disappeared near to where he knew (but the Ministry didn’t) Voldemort to be lurking. Likewise Albus knew, but hid the information, that Frank Bryce was directly connected to Voldemort’s family and to Voldemort’s first successful mass murders and cover-up. Albus had access to information that the Ministry did not.
So too it seems with Firenze.
But, Firenze, here’s the problem: if “the planets [have] not let you in on that secret,” [that the unicorn was killed to enable Voldemort to steal the stone and to return as strong as before], who has?
And just how straight was the information that your unnamed terrestrial source fed you?
*
Because the interesting thing, the really interesting thing, about Harry’s detention that night, was that it produced a long-term effect directly the opposite of what one normally expects (and one assumes that the disciplinarian hopes) a detention to produce.
Detention is supposed to serve as both a punishment and a deterrent. One is supposed to come out of it, as Hagrid did out of his stint in Azkaban, at least determined to avoid that punishment again-and therefore to avoid the transgression that led to one’s being punished. Even if one can’t quite grasp why what one did was wrong (or considered wrong) in the first place. If one hasn’t the moral sensitivity, intelligence, and judgment to understand why doing X was wrong, at least one can understand that doing X again will bring consequences one wholeheartedly wishes to avoid. Similarly (it is hoped), others observing the punishment will see and feel the same. Ideally in time the miscreant punished and other potential wrongdoers will eventually internalize that doing X must be WRONG, if it brings such draconian punishment on one.
Azkaban worked that way for a while on Hagrid, unreflective as he was.
And the points-loss did work that way on Harry. For two weeks after he suffered it, he stringently avoided getting into trouble. Which included even ignoring hints that Quirrell was succumbing to the pressure he was under from Voldemort’s agent. [Which happened to be, not Snape, but the back of Quirrell’s head-but hey, the kid did correctly identify that Quirrell was under increasing pressure.]
When Harry overheard Quirrell sobbing, “No-no-not again, please---“ then “All right-all right---“ he did talk it over with Ron and Hermione. In the library, where they might easily be overheard.
Ron, who hadn’t been directly involved in the disgrace, immediately said, “So what do we do, Harry?”
The light of adventure was kindling again in Ron’s eyes, but Hermione answered before Harry could.
“Go to Dumbledore. That’s what we should have done ages ago. If we try anything ourselves we’ll be thrown out for sure.”
“But we’ve got no proof!” said Harry. “Quirrell’s too scared to back us up. Snape’s only got to say he doesn’t know how the troll got in at Halloween and that he was nowhere near the third floor-who do you think they’ll believe, him or us? It’s not exactly a secret we hate him. Dumbledore’ll think we made it up to get him sacked…. And don’t forget, we’re not supposed to know about the Stone or Fluffy. That’ll take a lot of explaining.”
Hermione looked convinced, but Ron didn’t.
“If we just do a bit of poking around-“
“No,” said Harry flatly, “we’ve done enough poking around.”
And. The very next morning, the long-delayed detention was finally scheduled for that night. In fact, it had been delayed so long that Harry had forgotten it was still due. All other detentions we heard about at Hogwarts were assigned at the time of the offense. One was subsequently postponed at the pleasure of the headmaster; no one else could make the assigning teacher do so (Slughorn tried and failed).
Minerva, it would seem, felt she should consult Draco’s Head of House before determining the terms of the firstie’s detention-which turned an hour later into a quadruple detention, terms and time to be determined when she determined Draco’s.
Who, then, persuaded her to delay indefinitely on setting the terms and scheduling the date?
Well, who had the power to do so?
From an educational point of view, of course, Harry’s forgetting is exactly why punishments should follow closely upon the transgression. Punish a puppy at a random time long later, it won’t associate the swat now with its having had an accident in the house two weeks ago.
But of course the timing would rather depend on the lesson one wanted to be learned.
On reflection, I really do think that the lesson Minerva wanted to teach her cubs that night she caught them out was not the lesson Dumbledore wanted Harry (and his backups) to learn. So although Dumbledore didn’t countermand the points loss that Minerva had already imposed, when he saw it had had the desired (by Minerva) effect, he eventually persuaded her to assign a detention that would, with Harry at least, cancel that effect.
Although the lesson Minerva taught Harry and Hermione unintentionally that night was one Dumbledore was quite happy with.
Harry and Hermione, after all, were sure, after listening to Minerva deal with Draco, that if he approached Authority with a story difficult to credit involving a known enemy of his, he’d be dismissed without even a hearing. Without being given the slightest chance to present his evidence. No matter how correct his suspicions were.
Ron “wasn’t convinced” by Harry’s reasoning that it would do no good to lay their suspicions about Snape and the Stone before Dumbledore; Hermione, who’d witnessed Dumbledore’s deputy in action, was.
(And indeed Minerva did later dismiss Harry out of hand when he accused Snape of being about to steal the Stone.)
If you want to teach children that they can’t trust authority, having a deputy who bulls ahead doling out punishments based on her blind preconceptions without even trying to determine what was really going on, without even allowing a child to tell his side, is a useful accessory.
But back to that specific detention. Delayed until Harry had forgotten all about it, then sprung on the kids at fifteen hours notice.
And what was its effect on Harry? What did he learn from it?
Well, what did he tell Ron, waiting sleepily in the common room for Harry and Hermione’s return?
“Snape wants the stone for Voldemort… and Voldemort’s waiting in the forest… and all this time we thought Snape just wanted to get rich…”
I had forgotten that, you know. It’s been so long since my first time reading the book, I had forgotten that the kids, in all their suspicions of mean ol’ Snape who wanted to kill Harry and steal the stone, thought right up until that point that he must be acting (evilly) on his own behalf.
Longer term, the encounter with “the hooded figure” reactivated Harry’s scar. And his Erised-induced nightmares, which had died down by late February, ousted by Quidditch and schoolwork and panic over Hagrid’s dragon. Read about Harry, post-detention:
Harry did the best he could, ignoring the stabbing pains in his forehead, which had been bothering him ever since his trip into the forest. Neville thought Harry had a bad case of exam nerves because Harry couldn’t sleep, but the truth was that Harry kept being woken by his old nightmare, except that it was now worse than ever because there was a hooded figure dripping blood in it.
Maybe it was because they hadn’t seen what Harry had seen in the forest, or because they didn’t have scars burning on their foreheads, but Ron and Hermione didn’t seem as worried about the Stone as Harry. The idea of Voldemort certainly scared them, but he didn’t keep visiting in dreams, and they were so busy with their studying they didn’t have much time to fret about what Snape or anyone else was up to.
[snip-and then Harry decides that the Stone will be stolen that night, and Minerva refuses to hear him]
“Well, that’s it then, isn’t it? Harry said.
The other two stared at him. He was pale and his eyes were glittering.
“I’m going out of here tonight, and I’m going to try and get to the Stone first.”
“You’re mad!” said Ron.
“You can’t!” said Hermione. “After what McGonagall and Snape have said? You’ll be expelled!”
“SO WHAT?” Harry shouted. “Don’t you understand? If Snape gets hold of the Stone, Voldemort’s coming back! Haven’t you heard what it was like when he was trying to take over? There won’t be any Hogwarts to be expelled from! He’ll flatten it, or turn it into a school for the Dark Arts! Losing points doesn’t matter any more, don’t you see?... I’m going through that trapdoor tonight and nothing you two say is going to stop me! Voldemort killed my parents, remember?”
Yep. Harry learned his lesson in that detention, all right. He went from keeping his head down no matter what, to being freshly obsessed with Voldemort and willing to risk death, expulsion, peer ostracism… anything. Because keeping Voldemort from attaining full power and immortality was worth any cost.
So it’s unfortunate that some of the “information” on which Harry based that turnaround was, um, contraindicated by other evidence.
We’ll get back to that issue.
*
First, let’s consider why Tom Riddle would WANT the Philosopher’s Stone. It doesn’t create wealth, just gold, and Tom is smart enough to figure out that that makes its money-making capacity quite strictly limited. (The only real value of gold is that its supply is limited and other people want it. Glut the market and gold is valueless, plus in the interim there’s the tedium of exchanging the gold for money or things of actual value). The Stone could be used to produce quite a tidy income, but not world-conquering wealth. Which leaves the Elixir of Life as Tom’s desirata.
Why should Tom, in book one, want the Elixir? Or, for that matter, why should he drink unicorn blood.
We’ll address the latter first. What good could drinking unicorn blood do Tom Riddle?
“The blood of a unicorn will keep you alive, even if you are an inch from death,” stated Firenze, and we have no reason to doubt him.
Which would be answer enough, if Tom had still been alive. But he wasn’t, even if he wasn’t as dead as we might have preferred. He was discorporate. Riding Quirrell.
Which of course was the answer. Tom insisted on Quirrell drinking the blood to keep Quirrell’s body alive. Because Quirrell’s body was failing. Even our Harry of little brain noticed that Quirrell was getting “thinner and paler” throughout March [PS 14]. By late May, when Quirrell forced his way through the depths of the forest to the dead unicorn’s side, the trek that took agile boys over half an hour of walking, must have taken him over twice as long (Harry’s group was alarmed by the “slithering” soon after the parties separated, then they stopped to chat with the unicorns, then stopped again when they saw the red sparks, waited for Hagrid to return with the second party, and reorganized the groups). When Quirrell finally entered the clearing, moreover, he was so weak with exhaustion he could only CRAWL.
Drinking unicorn blood as a stopgap was probably what Tom and Quirinus were arguing about the day before Harry’s detention, and what Harry heard Quirrell capitulate about, sobbing, Quirinus had already agreed in principal to go after the stone, on a suitable occasion when Dumbledore could be arranged to be absent; indeed, we assume he’d already tried at least once, maybe twice, to steal it. He’d likewise already made one attempt to kill Harry. So what could he still be trying to draw the line at? A cursed half-life, that’s what.
And why would Tom wish that on him?
Let’s jump to what Tom told his faithful Death Eaters in the graveyard about what it was like to be discorporate [GoF 33]: “I was as powerless as the weakest creature alive, and without the means to help myslf… for I had no body, and every spell that might have helped me required the use of a wand….
“I remember only forcing myself, sleeplessly, endlessly, second by second to exist… Only one power remained to me. I could possess the bodies of others. But I dared not go where other humans were plentiful, for I knew that the Aurors were still abroad and searching for me. I sometimes inhabited animals-snakes, of course, being my preference-but I was little better off inside them than as pure spirit, for their bodies were ill adapted to perform magic… and my possession of them shortened their lives; none of them lasted long…
“Then… four years ago… the means for my return seemed assured. A wizard-young, foolish, and gullible-wandered across my path in the forest I had made my home. Oh, he seemed the very chance I had been dreaming of… for he was a teacher at Dumbledore’s school… he was easy to bend to my will… he brought me back to this country, and after a while I took possession of his body, to supervise him closely as he carried out my orders. But my plan failed. I did not manage to steal the Sorcerer’s Stone. I was not to be assured immortal life. I was thwarted… thwarted, once again, by Harry Potter….”
Silence once more; nothing was stirring, not even the leaves on the yew tree. The Death Eaters were quite motionless, the glittering eyes in their masks fixed upon Voldemort, and upon Harry.
“The servant died when I left his body, and I was left as weak as ever I had been,” Voldemort continued.
Now compare this to what Albus told Harry about Tom and the stone [HBP 23]:
“But there are several reasons why, I think, a Sorcerer’s Stone [sic] would appeal less than Horcruxes to Lord Voldemort.
“While the Elixir of Life does indeed extend life, it must be drunk regularly, for all eternity, if the drinker is to maintain their immortality. Therefore, Voldemort would be entirely dependent on the Elixir, and if it ran out, or was contaminated, or if the Stone was stolen, he would die just like any other man. Voldemort likes to operate alone, remember. I believe that he would have found the thought of being dependent, even on the Elixir, intolerable. Of course he was prepared to drink it if it would take him out of the horrible part-life to which he was condemned after attacking you, but only to regain a body. Thereafter, I am convinced, he intended to continue to rely on his Horcruxes. He would need nothing more, if only he could regain a human form.”
Tom would drink the Elixir only to regain a body. The Elixir was a path to the goal, not the goal.
Mind you, there’s no reason that I know of why Tom couldn’t have picked up enough Alchemy to have some very interesting plans for a philosopher’s stone if he could get his hands on one. Although one would think a discipline that relies on purification, and whose underlying metaphor is marriage wouldn’t have much appeal for Tom. Maybe Tom had some esoteric potion in mind that could use the Elixir of Life or the stone itself to reconstitute his vanished body.
But why multiply hypotheses? We need not posit that the Elixir can have an effect on a disembodied spirit or can be used in some Dark ritual to reconstitute a vanished body to see why Tom would want it. Maybe he just wanted the Elixir for the same purpose he finally used the unicorn blood: to hold a possessed slave’s body alive while his possession was slowly killing it. Either indefinitely, in lieu of reconstructing his own, or so that he would have no time constraint on his doing so.
A further point in favor of that hypothesis: Tom never, that we saw, tried to possess Peter Pettigrew or any other of his servants. He can’t have been happy depending on someone he couldn’t control completely for his rebirthing ritual, and yet he didn’t possess Peter at all. Why not?
Out of the goodness of his heart? Because he was afraid it would disillusion his other slaves about their master’s benevolence? Because Death Eater hoods don’t sufficiently cover the back of the head?
Well, at least the last has some plausibility. But hiding the second face is a practical problem with practical solutions. (Indeed, if Tom destroyed the original personality entirely instead of leaving it semi-intact to resist him, would the body have resumed a single face: Tom’s own?) A second turban-wearer might draw suspicions, but there are other options for disguise, from wigs to glamours to perhaps Polyjuicing at need into the host’s pre-possession body (I stole that idea from the Canadian house elf smuggling fanfic)….
No, the reason why Tom didn’t just take over Peter’s body is that he couldn’t afford to waste it.
Tom’s possession of an animal’s body weakens and eventually kills it. Even when that body is a wizard’s.
He needs, ultimately, his own body back. Or, alternatively, one that cannot be killed by his possession of it.
Say… because it’s drinking the Elixir of Life as needed.
And even that, I think, would be seen by Tom as second-best.
Remember how the Lexicon demonstrated, years ago, that Tom was probably not riding Quirinus when Harry met him in Diagon Alley, but was doing so at the Sorting Feast?
What happened in between? Well, immediately after meeting Quirrell for the first time, Harry visited Gringotts. On which occasion Hagrid abstracted a certain item from a certain vault, and bore it back to Hogwarts. Later that same day, a powerful Dark wizard broke into the same vault, to find it empty…..
And when we next see Quirrell, at Hogwarts, he was being ridden.
Maybe Tom mounted him for the break-in, and then was afraid if he DIS-mounted Quirrell would repent and try to get away. Maybe Tom mounted him for the break-in, let go for a month, and then re-mounted him once he was sure the stone was hidden at Hogwarts. (Had it been hidden elsewhere Albus might have received a letter of resignation.) Certainly Tom needed Quirrell under absolute control while he was directly under Dumbledore’s observation.
But either way, Tom probably possessed Quirinus in the expectation that he would soon be able to brew the Elixir of Life to keep Quirrell’s body alive as long as he needed to.
And perhaps with another expectation. Animal bodies, Tom said, were “ill adapted to perform magic.” Perhaps so were human ones, even wizard ones, to perform Tom’s magic. Aside from his own body, of course.
Without a body, Tom said, the only power remaining to him was that of possession. Within an animal’s body, he said, he was “little better off.” As in, “better off “ in that he was relieved of the pressure of clinging to existence second-by-second, but “little better off” because he had no further access to his powers than before? Perhaps. And within a wizard’s body…? We don’t know. We don’t know how much of Tom’s original powers were wielded by Quirrell!mort.
Or how much of Quirrell’s original powers were, once his strength started being sapped by his possession.
Ginny’s experience may be indicative. Intermittent full possession did not affect her physically that anyone in her circle (admittedly, Gryffindor, and thus oblivious) noticed. But when Tom possessed her in full and continually for just over half a day (mid morning to after dusk), she seemed to Harry to be dying.
Harry (and, apparently, Diary!Tom) thought that Tom would be corporeal and independent if his soul’s host, Ginny, died. But Harry was entirely uninformed, and so, probably, was 16-year-old Tom.
My guess is that if it were that easy to regain a physical body-just possess someone and suck the life out of them-then adult Tom would have done it. I should imagine, in fact, that adult Tom must have tried it, at least once, during that ten-year exile in Albania before that Hogwarts teacher Quirrell came snooping around sight-seeing.
Tom admitted that he’d tried inhabiting animals, and that he’d been afraid of the Aurors noticing if he tried the same attempts with humans, or particularly with wizards. Note that he didn’t state that he’d never made the experiment.
Thus explaining Tom’s decision to leave partial autonomy to Quirrell. I mean, no one can believe that Tom left Quirinus the ability to bleat protests about Tom’s orders out of respect for another soul’s autonomy….
So. I suspect that Diary!Tom would have returned to the book had Ginny died, as the main soul-fragment apparently returned to ether/exile in Albania when Quirrell did.
Something ventured; nothing gained.
Note too that the only thing we know for sure that Ginny did magically while she was possessed was to release and, presumably, to control, the basilisk. The roosters were strangled, not AKed. Releasing the basilisk required only that she speak Parseltongue, as Harry and discorporate!Tom can. So we know that Ginny!mort had young Tom’s knowledge and soul-based powers, but we have no evidence she wielded any of Tom’s other magical powers. Or that Diary!Tom did. In fact, note that when Diary!Tom was corporeal enough to hold Harry’s wand, he used it exactly once-and then produced nothing better than a bang. Even after Fawkes blinded the basilisk, Diary!Tom egged her on to continue attacking Harry rather than performing any magic himself against either the boy or the phoenix.
Which I take as confirmation that Tom, while possessing an animal, has no access to magical powers the animal lacks, save his soul-associated powers (Parseltongue, possession, and probably persuasion). And that this holds true when he’s possessing a human animal, even one which possesses magic-he has all of his knowledge, but only the powers of the host.
Let’s assume that I’m correct, and that what Tom told his followers about possessing animals does indeed apply to his possession of human animals: it weakens and eventually kills them, and while in their bodies Tom’s magic is largely limited to what’s natural to his host.
We do know that Quirrell!mort made only one overt attempt on the stone at Hogwarts before he drank the unicorn blood: at Halloween. Which failed, due in part to Snape’s vigilance. And only one overt attempt on Harry’s life before the detention in the forest: at Harry’s first Quidditch match, in early November.
As Tom’s possession of Quirrell weakened Quirinus’s body, did it also weaken his magic?
It seems so. It seems that both of them weakened as the possession continued. For look what happened as soon as Quirrell drank the cursed blood and was reinvigorated by it:
The hooded figure raised his head and looked right at Harry-unicorn blood was dribbling down its front. It got to its feet and came swiftly toward Harry-he couldn’t move for fear.
Then a pain like he’d never felt before pierced his head; it was as though his scar were on fire.
Right. Months of seeing Quirrell daily, and no attacks on Harry’s safety nor twinges in his scar since fall-and now both. Mind, Tom might have been deliberately suppressing the scar-twinges lest they alert Harry (which here wouldn’t be an issue, not if he expected to kill the kid forthwith), but still-the pain was blindingly strong now, which suggests Tom might be stronger as well.
*
Only-if Quirrell had been so weakened by his long possession, and Tom in him was weakened by his weakness, how did he have the strength to kill the unicorn? I mean, he didn’t have the strength even to walk up to the body, he crawled-yet the night before, he’d had the power to deal the creature a death-blow?
Hagrid assured us that “they’re powerful magic creatures. I never knew one ter be hurt before.”
For that matter, why didn’t Quirrell just slurp up some of that nice fresh blood the night before, when he’d actually wounded the beast? The blood was splashed all over the place; Quirrell didn’t even have to catch the animal, just lick some off the leaves.
Okay, so maybe one has to drink the blood actually from the body (or from the corpse), although Firenze didn’t say so.
So then why didn’t Quirrell drink from the first unicorn he killed? We saw no increased vigor in Quirrell the week before Harry’s detention. Plus, a single dose was apparently sufficient, at least for some time; there was no further unicorn-slaughter after that night. Quirrell doesn’t apparently need repeated doses, at least not immediately. So why kill twice?
Okay, so maybe he lost the first one after he’d fatally injured it. Tough luck, Tom! As he must have lost this one the night before, to have to come back for it.
Then there’s the fact that the path with its artistic splashes of blood led straight to the clearing, yet Quirrell!mort entered from the far side. As though, y’know, he’d circled around and observed from multiple directions before he entered. Like he was afraid that the unicorn corpse displayed so prettily in the moonlight, its legs sticking out at odd angles, its mane spread out all pearly white, the wound in its side still oozing silver, just beckoning someone to come lap up the nice blood … might be a trap.
And then he saw the kids coming, with Fang-it was now or never, then, because they’d call Hagrid and he’d lose his chance to drink.
*
Furthermore, look at the timing.
Just over two weeks before the detention in question, Hermione and Harry were caught by Filch at the base of the Astronomy tower. Draco had previously been caught by McGonagall in the same location, and Neville caught wandering the school looking for Harry and Hermione to warn them that Draco was trying to catch them with the dragon. McGonagall docked 20 points from Slytherin, 150 from Gryffindor, and assigned the four truants detention-at an indefinite future time and place.
The points loss resulted in ostracism for Harry, and to a lesser extent for Hermione and Neville. He felt guilty enough to offer to resign from the Quidditch team.
“Last Wednesday,” a unicorn was killed, presumably by the same M.O. as the second one. Quirrell!mort apparently did not take advantage of its blood; he showed no increase in vigor, and Harry’s scar did not react in any way.
The day before, Harry overheard Quirrell sobbing and agreeing to do something he didn’t want to do. Harry concluded that Snape had finally managed to bully Quirrell into revealing his share of the enchantments on the Stone. Immediately afterwards, he met Ron and Hermione in the library and discussed the matter with them. Ron pointed out that if Snape had found information on how to get around Fluffy, his path to the stone might now be clear. Harry agreed, but insisted that he would neither “poke around” himself nor go to Dumbledore to lay charges that wouldn’t be believed.
A few hours later, another unicorn was grievously wounded. The next morning at breakfast, the four kids were notified by Minerva that their detention was to be served at 11 that night.
Did Minerva even know what the detention was to be? Or was she simply told: send them to Filch at 11 pm; he’ll have a nasty, dirty job for them that will cure them of any further impulses towards nighttime wanderings?
Filch knew that they were to go with Hagrid to the forest. But it was only when they reached the forest that Hagrid told the kids that the job was to track a seriously injured unicorn and if need be, to kill it, to put out of its misery. (Which morphed somehow later into “catching” the person responsible… who’d be extraordinarily dangerous.)
Hagrid also told the kids that he could tell by all the blood spilled that the unicorn had to have been injured the night before.
Let’s get this straight-the detention was arranged in the morning. The unicorn had been mutilated the night before. The job was to find the beast and kill it. And Hagrid let the animal suffer mortal agony all day long-in order to wait until long after dark to even start tracking it?!. So that he could send two eleven-year-olds off by themselves with Fang at midnight to look for the dead or dying animal?
This was the gamekeeper’s idea of how to do his job? No, I think not. Hagrid would only have waited on strict orders, and only Albus could make him accept orders at once so apparently senseless and so actively cruel to the suffering beast.
Moreover, the blood was splashed right up to very entrance to the forest. Right where Hagrid (or another) could be sure to spot it.
Only when Hagrid (or someone) followed the blood-trail into the wood, the blood was splashed up both forks in the path-in such a way that a gamekeeper with fifty years experience had not a clue in which direction to look for the injured and probably dying beast.
So that when the gamekeeper returned AFTER DARK, he had to split his search team to cover both forks. Because there was nothing to show him in which direction the animal had headed.
And by sheer coincidence, he set Harry on the correct path to find the body.
Oh, and the gamekeeper did say, based on his professional experience, “Don’ worry, it can’t’ve gone very far if it’s this badly hurt.”
BEFORE the half-hour-plus hike by able-bodied boys to where the body lay.
Okay. Maybe the unicorn was attacked by someone far up the right-side fork of the path. It fled, panicked, down the path, and in its panic took the side-turning that led to the edge of the forest. Where it froze, terrified still further at finding itself at the opening onto the Hogwarts grounds. So it retreated, backtracking along the path, until it found its original path, and this time swerved left to continue along the path that led back deep into the forest.
Without ever leaving tracks that showed which direction it was going.
So unicorn tracks, unlike any natural beast’s, are absolutely unidirectional-they look exactly the same coming and going.
They must be, or Hagrid would have seen at a glance that the unicorn ran up the left-hard fork (if it did).
I mean, I’m not a gamekeeper, but I can look at a single deer print and tell which direction the deer was pointed at the time. Give me a couple in a row, and I can tell whether it was walking or running!
Telling the direction prints are leading is not hard. As rocket science goes, this is along the lines of registering that a dropped object falls DOWN [when subject to Earth’s gravitational field}.
And Hagrid had obviously seen the tracks in daylight, since he knew before he took the kids into the forest that he’d need to split them into two teams….
Or he hadn’t, and was just relying on what he was told. By a source he trusted.
Which would be…?
Or the tracks really were absolutely unreadable. In which case they had probably been made that way by someone. BY MAGIC. There was blood splashed everywhere, and a confused trampling back and forth, farther up both forks than Hagrid’s cursory investigation could eliminate before the detention. Given the time he had.
And then the unicorn’s body was way way further up the path than Hagrid had predicted the animal could possibly stagger on its own.
Maybe Hagrid was right. The unicorn was too badly injured to get very far. On its own. It had been, ah, assisted to that clearing.
For that matter, there’s a very simple explanation for why Hagrid couldn’t tell which direction the tracks led, given the Potterverse. And it would also explain why Hagrid thought it a fine idea to send half the kids in his care off into the forest without a lamp and with only Fang for escort. And didn’t once reconsider that decision even AFTER he was sure there was “summat” in the forest that night that didn’t belong there, “summat” powerful and evil enough to kill a unicorn. Even after he was scared himself by the sound of “summat,” even after he’d been panicked enough to threaten Ronan with his bow, even after he’d seen sparks that indicated two of the kids were in trouble (conceivably in mortal danger). Three alarms, the explicit assessment that the unicorn-killer was at large that night, and Hagrid’s only response was to switch the kids so that Harry would be in the group that was without light, unprotected, and headed (still) straight to the mortal danger?
The Confundus Charm is a wonderful thing: we saw Mundungus put his own life in danger under its influence. “It’s impossible to tell which way the unicorn went. You’ll have to split the kids into two groups to track it. And Harry’s brave, he won’t be scared being with only Fang. His group can take the deosil path.”
There’s no obvious reason for Quirrell to fatally injure a unicorn, showily sprinkle its blood at the very edge of the forest, and muddle the backtrail so the gamekeeper couldn’t tell at a glance in which direction the dying animal’s tracks led. There’s likewise no obvious reason for Quirrell to fatally injure a unicorn and WAIT UNTIL THE NEXT DAY to drink its blood.
But if we posit that someone fatally injured a unicorn as a lure to a third party, too weak himself to kill a unicorn, yet desperate enough to consider drinking unicorn blood if a dying one were waved under his nose, the whole situation makes much more sense.
Of course the “someone” would need to be near-desperate himself.
Have I mentioned recently what I theorize to have been Albus’s belief about Tom Riddle’s Horcruxes at this point in time? That Albus believed (correctly, as it transpires) that Harry was Tom’s Horcrux, but at that time believed Harry to be Tom’s sole Horcrus?
So that if Harry were to die, so too would Tom? Instantly-his being snuffed out with Harry’s death.
It’s unthinkable to imagine killing an innocent little boy to destroy even a psychopathic mass-murderer. Unthinkable, I tell you!
But-if the boy himself insisted on risking himself, even knowing he faced probable-or certain-death-if HE felt destroying his enemy was worth it-if he listened to the worst consequences he could face and shouted “SO WHAT?”-then shouldn’t the kid be given the chance he begged for?
But if the kid showed reluctant to get involved, he’d have to be shown the error of his ways.
Of course, if Albus wanted Harry to change his mind about being strictly law-abiding, if Albus wanted the child to risk death flinging himself between Voldemort and the stone, he’d need to persuade Harry of two things: that it was Voldemort, not just mean ol’ Professor Snape, trying to steal the Stone; and that Voldemort’s getting his paws on it would be, not just unfortunate, but catastrophic. The end of life as we know it.
Not that it would maintain the status quo for a while longer: Voldemort in possession of a relatively weak wizard’s body and magic while he struggled to regain his full powers, and subject to being exiled again to incorporeality should that relatively weak wizard eventually die or be killed.
No, to risk himself Harry must believe that Voldemort’s attaining the stone would mean his instant return to full power and actual immortality.
We return to the misinformation Firenze passed to Harry:
“It is,” Firenze agreed, “[Death is better than drinking unicorn blood] unless all you need is to stay alive long enough to drink something else-something that will bring you back to full strength and power-something that will mean that you can never die. Mr Potter, do you know what is hidden in the school at this very moment?”
But that’s not what the Elixir of Life does in the Potterverse. Drinking a dose does NOT mean “that you can never die.” For that matter, just getting hold of the stone doesn’t, that we know, even give one instant possession of the Elixir; one has to brew it first. Finally, Tom Riddle was at that point without a body to be brought “back to full strength and power!” However Tom planned to use the Stone and the Elixir, his slave’s taking one sip of the Elixir could not instantly restore Tom.
Alchemy is a human art; so which human was the source of Firenze’s misinformation? Well, which alchemist did Firenze explicitly accept as his ally and master in book five, forsaking his herd to do so? Mind you, I think Firenze was taken in himself; why else did he think rescuing Harry from the unicorn-killer was worth fighting with his herd over, unless he (unlike they) believed at that time that in doing so he was thwarting Voldemort?
*
What would have happened had no unicorns been slain in the making of the confrontation between Harry and Voldemort?
On Quirrell’s side, had he never drunk the unicorn blood, he might well have been too weak to essay the set of challenges. Which, one notes, required mental acuity (the chess game, Snape’s logic problem), specialized knowledge (Fluffy, the Devil’s Snare, the troll), moderate magical ability, and a degree of physical fitness (catching the key, surviving the fall, and assorted scrambling).
The maze required none of Tom Riddle’s extraordinary magical abilities or special powers at all.
But too much physical exertion, magic, and focus, perhaps, for a dying host to manage, however prodded by its parasite it was.
However, even if Quirrell HAD had the energy to attempt the challenges and to struggle successfully to the end of them, there he would have sat, in front of the Mirror of Erised, until…?
Well, NOT until Harry found him and obligingly removed the Stone for him. On Harry’s side, in his chastened frame of mind pre-detention, Harry would never have gone through the trapdoor merely to keep “Snape” from stealing the stone and making himself rich. Had Harry not encountered Voldemort, had his scar flame to life, reawakened his Erised nightmares, and been (mis)informed that Voldemort’s laying hands on the stone would ensure Voldemort’s immediate return to full strength and achievement of true immortality, Harry would not have been willing to throw away both his life and his place at Hogwarts to prevent Voldemort from acquiring the stone.
So Harry wouldn’t have bolted down the trapdoor after “Snape,” nor dragged his friends.
So what would have happened instead?
Quirrell would still probably have died, but not at Harry’s hands. He might have died in his attempt on the stone, too weak to survive one of the challenges; he might have been trapped by the Mirror and died its captive (or more likely, been captured by Albus in turn), or he might never have made it through the trapdoor at all, and simply faded and died as we saw possessed!Ginny apparently doing in CoS.
Either way, Harry would have seen Voldemort make a concerted attempt to return to life and full power-and fail, through no direct action of Harry’s. (Or even, possibly, of Dumbledore’s.)
Rather undercuts the idea that only HARRY can vanquish Voldemort, doesn’t it? That it’s his destiny, his job, and no one else can possibly do it? That the future of the (Voldie-free) universe depends entirely on Harry, and on Harry’s willingness to sacrifice ANYTHING at Albus’s word to take Voldie down.
If Harry had seen Quirrell!mort self-destruct at eleven, then on his seventeenth birthday when Albus explained that Harry had to suicide to permanently destroy Tom-in-him, Harry might have said something grossly impertinent like, “Er-why?
“Even if you’re right and I’m his Horcrux, why can’t we find some way of containing him-temporarily, if that’s the best we can do-that doesn’t involve killing me?”
I don’t think that that was a conversation Albus was prepared to engage in with Harry.
When you look at it like that, it rather seems that if Tom hadn’t taken the strong step of shedding unicorn blood to keep his recalcitrant, futilely-kicking host-er, excuse me, his devoted servant -alive even involuntarily, even cursed (meanwhile setting Harry up for that detention, and for confronting him) … Albus would have had to do it for Tom.
Did I mention that I’ve been positing that Quirrell had been weakening over time? That Quirrell’s weakening was the whole reason why Tom insisted on Quirinus’s drinking the cursed unicorn blood in late May: to pep him up again, enough to make a run at the maze of challenges hiding the stone?
Did I mention that I have posited that Tom himself was restricted by the weaknesses of his host body?
Did I mention that, per Hagrid, lethally injuring a unicorn requires a LOT of magical power?
Oh, I didn’t!
I’m mentioning all three now.
One last point: let’s revisit the end of the detention chapter.
But the night’s surprises weren’t over.
When Harry pulled back his sheets, he found his invisibility cloak folded neatly underneath them. There was a note pinned to it:
Just in case.
Gee. Who could have been responsible for that?
*
It is a monstrous thing, to slay a unicorn.
“Crime… befouling the castle… suggested sentence… ”
“I want to see some punishment!” Argus Filch
“… it is a monstrous thing, to slay a unicorn,” Firenze
Let’s take a look at Harry’s first detention and the lessons that it taught him, shall we?
The first thing to note is that it was over two weeks between the offense and the assignment of the detention, whereas all other canon detentions were assigned (and normally served) nearly at once. In fact, Harry had entirely forgotten he had further punishment coming:
The following morning, notes were delivered to Harry, Hermione, and Neville at the breakfast table. They were all the same:
Your detention will take place at eleven o’clock tonight. Meet Mr. Filch in the entrance hall. Professor M. McGonagall
Harry had forgotten they still had detentions to do in the furor over the points they’d lost.
[snip]
At eleven pm, Mr. Filch escorted the four children to Hagrid’s hut and threatened them that they’d be going into the forest. But they didn’t find out what they’d be doing until, at “the very edge of the forest,” Hagrid held his lamp up to illumine “a narrow, winding earth track disappearing into the thick black trees.” .
“Look there,” said Hagrid, “see that stuff shinin’ on the ground? Silvery stuff? That’s unicorn blood. There’s a unicorn in there bin hurt badly by summat. This is the second time in a week. I found one dead last Wednesday. We’re gonna try an’ find the poor thing. We might have to put it out of its misery.”
“And what is whatever hurt he unicorn finds us first?” said Malfoy, unable to keep the fear out of his voice.
“There’s nothing that lives in the forest that’ll hurt yeh if yer with me or Fang,” said Hagrid. “And keep ter the path. Right, now, we’re gonna split into two parties an’ follow the trail in diff’rent directions. There’s blood all over the place, it must’ve bin staggerin’ around since last night at least.”
“I want Fang,” said Malfoy quickly, looking at Fang’s long teeth.
[snip]
The forest was black and silent. A little way into it they reached a fork in the earth path, and Harry, Hermione, and Hagrid took the left path while Malfoy, Neville, and Fang took the right.
They walked in silence, their eyes on the ground. Every now and then a ray of moonlight through the branches above lit a spot of silver-blue blood on the fallen leaves.
Harry saw that Hagrid looked very worried.
“Could a werewolf be killing the unicorns?” Harry asked.
“Not fast enough,” said Hagrid. “It’s not easy ter catch a unicorn, they’re powerful magic creatures. I never knew one ter be hurt before.”
[snip]
“Don’ worry, it can’t’ve gone very far if it’s this badly hurt, and then we’ll be able ter-GET BEHIND THAT TREE!”
Hagrid seized Harry and Hermione and hoisted them off the path behind a towering oak. He pulled out an arrow and fitted it into his crossbow, raising it, ready to fire. The three of them listened. Something was slithering over dead leaves nearby; it sounded like a cloak trailing along the ground. Hagrid was squinting up the dark path, but after a few seconds, the sound faded away.
“I knew it,” he murmured. “There’s summat in here that shouldn’ be.”
“A werewolf?” Harry suggested.
“That wasn’ no werewolf an’ it wasn’ no unicorn, neither,” said Hagrid grimly. “Right, follow me, but careful, now.”
[snip]- They met Ronan, who told them, twice, “Mars is bright tonight” and “Always the innocent are the first victims.” Bane cantered up, and concurred with the first.
[snip] Hermione saw red sparks, indicating the other party was in danger; Hagrid went off to rescue them. Hagrid returned with the other children in tow, fuming. Malfoy, it seemed, had sneaked up behind Neville and grabbed him as a joke. Neville had panicked and sent up the sparks.
“We’ll be lucky to catch anything now, with the racket you two were makin’. Right, we’re changin’ groups-Neville, you stay with me an’ Hermione, Harry, you go with Fang an’ this idiot. I’m sorry,” Hagrid added in a whisper to Harry, “but he’ll have a harder time frightenin’ you, an’ we’ve got get this done.”
So Harry set off into the heart of the forest with Malfoy and Fang. They walked for nearly half an hour, deeper and deeper into the forest, until the path became almost impossible to follow because the trees were so thick. Harry thought the blood seemed to be getting thicker. There were splashes on the roots of a tree, as though the poor creature had been thrashing around in pain close by. Harry could see a clearing ahead…
Something bright white was gleaming on the ground. They inched closer.
It was the unicorn all right, and it was dead….
Harry had taken one step toward it when a slithering sound made him freeze where he stood. A bush on the edge of the clearing quivered…. Then out of the shadows, a hooded figure came crawling across the ground like some stalking beast. Harry, Malfoy, and Fang stood transfixed. The cloaked figure reached the unicorn, lowered its head over the wound in the animal’s side, and began to drink its blood.
“AAAAAAAARGH!”
Malfoy let out a terrible scream and bolted-so did Fang. The hooded figure raised his head and looked right at Harry-unicorn blood was dribbling down its front. It got to its feet and came swiftly toward Harry-he couldn’t move for fear.
Then a pain like he’d never felt before pierced his head; it was as though his scar were on fire. Half-blinded, he staggered backward. He heard hooves behind him, galloping, and someone jumped clean over Harry, charging at the figure.
The pain in Harry’s head was so bad he fell to his knees. It took a moment or two to pass. When he looked up, the figure was gone. A centaur was standing over him….
[snip]
Bane and Ronan galloped up just as Firenze was lowering himself on his front legs so Harry could clamber onto his back. Bane was furious at Firenze for letting a human ride him “like a common mule.”
“Do you realize who this is?” said Firenze. “This is the Potter boy. The quicker he leaves this forest, the better….”
After hearing this, Ronan became ambivalent; Bane continued furious, saying,
“Centaurs are concerned with what has been foretold! It is not our business to run around like donkeys after stray humans in our forest!”
Firenze suddenly reared on his hind legs in anger, so that Harry had to grab his shoulders to stay on.
“Do you not see that unicorn?” Firenze bellowed at Bane. “Do you not understand why it was killed? Or have the planets not let you in on that secret? I set myself against what is lurking in this forest, Bane, yes, with humans alongside me if I must.”
[snip]
Finally, Firenze explained a bit to Harry as he carried him to safety:
“… it is a monstrous thing, to slay a unicorn,” said Firenze. “Only one who has nothing to lose, and everything to gain, would commit such a crime. The blood of a unicorn will keep you alive, even if you are an inch from death, but at a terrible price. You have slain something pure and defenseless to save yourself, and you will have but a half-life, a cursed life, from the moment the blood touches your lips.”
Harry stared at the back of Firenze’s head, which was dappled silver in the moonlight.
“But who’d be that desperate?” he wondered aloud. “If you’re going to be cursed forever, death’s better, isn’t it?
“It is,” Firenze agreed, “unless all you need is to stay alive long enough to drink something else-something that will bring you back to full strength and power-something that will mean that you can never die. Mr Potter, do you know what is hidden in the school at this very moment?”
“The Sorcerer’s Stone [sic]! Of course-the Elixir of Life! But I don’t understand who-”
“Can you think of nobody who has waited many years to return to power, who has clung to life, awaiting their chance?”
It was as though an iron fist had clenched suddenly around Harry’s heart. Over the rustling of the trees, he seemed to hear once more what Hagrid had told him on the night they had met: “Some say he died. Codswallop, in my opinion. Dunno if he had enough human in him left to di.”
“Do you mean,” Harry croaked, “that was Vol-”
*
Let’s consider Firenze for a moment. Why did Firenze find himself at odds with his fellows over saving Harry Potter that night, and later over teaching at Hogwarts? What did he know or believe that they did not?
Remember that eventually the entire herd (apparently) fought Voldemort and his Death Eaters when they invaded the school grounds (but not the forest). Yet they tried to kill Firenze for becoming Albus Dumbledore’s employee. His servant.
The difference of opinion, then, is not over whether Voldemort should be stopped (or at least fought). It’s over how low one may stoop to stop Voldemort, acting like a mule, allying oneself with humans. Or maybe just with Albus.
And also, it seems, a difference of opinion on what they’ve read in the stars-if something is actually foretold to come to pass, it’s wrong to try to avert it.
Remember the scorn Firenze heaped on human Astrology in OotP? Parvati started to rattle off what she’d been taught: “Mars causes accidents and burns and things like that, and when it makes an angle to Saturn, like now”-she drew a right angle in the air above her-“that means that people need to be extra careful when handling hot things-”
“That,” said Firenze calmly, “is human nonsense.”
Parvati’s hand fell limply to her side.
“Trivial hurts, tiny human accidents,” said Firenze, as his hooves thudded over the mossy floor. “These are of no more significance than the scurrying of ants to the wide universe, and are unaffected by planetary movements… I, however, am here to explain the wisdom of centaurs, which is impersonal and impartial. We watch the skies for the great tides of evil or change that are sometimes marked there. It may take ten years to be sure of what we are seeing.”
Firenze pointed to the red star directly above Harry.
“In the past decade, the indications have been that Wizard-kind is living through nothing more than a brief calm between two wars. Mars, bringer of battle, shines brightly above us, suggesting that the fight must break out again soon. How soon, centaurs may attempt to divine by the burning of certain herbs and leaves, ty the observation of fume and flame…”
Um. So. All the centaurs agreed the night of Harry’s detention that “Mars is bright tonight,” indicating to them that the “brief calm” might soon be over. And all of them were ultimately willing to charge into battle against Voldemort himself and his followers.
Firenze alone, however, thought that “running around after stray humans like a donkey” was an appropriate response to the unicorn-killer at large in their forest that night. Note, by the way, that Bane didn’t just charge Firenze with letting Harry RIDE him---he said Firenze had “run around after” the boy. So Firenze didn’t just show up fortuitously; he had gone looking for Harry.
At whose request?
And if the stars don’t tell even the wisest centaur details about individual human lives, from where did Firenze garner such detailed information as that the Flamels’ Philosopher’s Stone was currently being kept in Hogwarts Castle? And that Voldemort himself was alive and in hot pursuit of it? And that Voldemort might be desperate enough to drink unicorn blood as a stopgap measure until he could get his hands on the Stone, and that that was why those two unicorns had been slain? And that Voldemort himself, therefore, was in the forest that night, and THAT’s why “Mars was bright”?
(Note that “a period of calm between Wizarding wars is ending,” even if correctly interpreted, doesn’t necessarily mean that the ORIGINAL WAR is breaking out again-a second could be starting- You’d need additional information than Mars to be sure the last war is resuming with the same protagonists as before. Note that Ronan and Bane both saw Harry Potter with Hagrid, and neither of them showed any particular signs of feeling, then or when Firenze urged it, that the Boy-Who-Lived deserved special treatment from them.)
Really, the herd’s response here (and in book 5) is the Ministry’s reaction to Bertha’s disappearance and Frank’s death all over again-Firenze thought the unicorns’ deaths terribly significant, and Bane and Ronan (and, presumably, the rest of the herd) thought the deaths terrible but not significant. But of course in GoF, Albus had been sitting on the information that Bertha disappeared near to where he knew (but the Ministry didn’t) Voldemort to be lurking. Likewise Albus knew, but hid the information, that Frank Bryce was directly connected to Voldemort’s family and to Voldemort’s first successful mass murders and cover-up. Albus had access to information that the Ministry did not.
So too it seems with Firenze.
But, Firenze, here’s the problem: if “the planets [have] not let you in on that secret,” [that the unicorn was killed to enable Voldemort to steal the stone and to return as strong as before], who has?
And just how straight was the information that your unnamed terrestrial source fed you?
*
Because the interesting thing, the really interesting thing, about Harry’s detention that night, was that it produced a long-term effect directly the opposite of what one normally expects (and one assumes that the disciplinarian hopes) a detention to produce.
Detention is supposed to serve as both a punishment and a deterrent. One is supposed to come out of it, as Hagrid did out of his stint in Azkaban, at least determined to avoid that punishment again-and therefore to avoid the transgression that led to one’s being punished. Even if one can’t quite grasp why what one did was wrong (or considered wrong) in the first place. If one hasn’t the moral sensitivity, intelligence, and judgment to understand why doing X was wrong, at least one can understand that doing X again will bring consequences one wholeheartedly wishes to avoid. Similarly (it is hoped), others observing the punishment will see and feel the same. Ideally in time the miscreant punished and other potential wrongdoers will eventually internalize that doing X must be WRONG, if it brings such draconian punishment on one.
Azkaban worked that way for a while on Hagrid, unreflective as he was.
And the points-loss did work that way on Harry. For two weeks after he suffered it, he stringently avoided getting into trouble. Which included even ignoring hints that Quirrell was succumbing to the pressure he was under from Voldemort’s agent. [Which happened to be, not Snape, but the back of Quirrell’s head-but hey, the kid did correctly identify that Quirrell was under increasing pressure.]
When Harry overheard Quirrell sobbing, “No-no-not again, please---“ then “All right-all right---“ he did talk it over with Ron and Hermione. In the library, where they might easily be overheard.
Ron, who hadn’t been directly involved in the disgrace, immediately said, “So what do we do, Harry?”
The light of adventure was kindling again in Ron’s eyes, but Hermione answered before Harry could.
“Go to Dumbledore. That’s what we should have done ages ago. If we try anything ourselves we’ll be thrown out for sure.”
“But we’ve got no proof!” said Harry. “Quirrell’s too scared to back us up. Snape’s only got to say he doesn’t know how the troll got in at Halloween and that he was nowhere near the third floor-who do you think they’ll believe, him or us? It’s not exactly a secret we hate him. Dumbledore’ll think we made it up to get him sacked…. And don’t forget, we’re not supposed to know about the Stone or Fluffy. That’ll take a lot of explaining.”
Hermione looked convinced, but Ron didn’t.
“If we just do a bit of poking around-“
“No,” said Harry flatly, “we’ve done enough poking around.”
And. The very next morning, the long-delayed detention was finally scheduled for that night. In fact, it had been delayed so long that Harry had forgotten it was still due. All other detentions we heard about at Hogwarts were assigned at the time of the offense. One was subsequently postponed at the pleasure of the headmaster; no one else could make the assigning teacher do so (Slughorn tried and failed).
Minerva, it would seem, felt she should consult Draco’s Head of House before determining the terms of the firstie’s detention-which turned an hour later into a quadruple detention, terms and time to be determined when she determined Draco’s.
Who, then, persuaded her to delay indefinitely on setting the terms and scheduling the date?
Well, who had the power to do so?
From an educational point of view, of course, Harry’s forgetting is exactly why punishments should follow closely upon the transgression. Punish a puppy at a random time long later, it won’t associate the swat now with its having had an accident in the house two weeks ago.
But of course the timing would rather depend on the lesson one wanted to be learned.
On reflection, I really do think that the lesson Minerva wanted to teach her cubs that night she caught them out was not the lesson Dumbledore wanted Harry (and his backups) to learn. So although Dumbledore didn’t countermand the points loss that Minerva had already imposed, when he saw it had had the desired (by Minerva) effect, he eventually persuaded her to assign a detention that would, with Harry at least, cancel that effect.
Although the lesson Minerva taught Harry and Hermione unintentionally that night was one Dumbledore was quite happy with.
Harry and Hermione, after all, were sure, after listening to Minerva deal with Draco, that if he approached Authority with a story difficult to credit involving a known enemy of his, he’d be dismissed without even a hearing. Without being given the slightest chance to present his evidence. No matter how correct his suspicions were.
Ron “wasn’t convinced” by Harry’s reasoning that it would do no good to lay their suspicions about Snape and the Stone before Dumbledore; Hermione, who’d witnessed Dumbledore’s deputy in action, was.
(And indeed Minerva did later dismiss Harry out of hand when he accused Snape of being about to steal the Stone.)
If you want to teach children that they can’t trust authority, having a deputy who bulls ahead doling out punishments based on her blind preconceptions without even trying to determine what was really going on, without even allowing a child to tell his side, is a useful accessory.
But back to that specific detention. Delayed until Harry had forgotten all about it, then sprung on the kids at fifteen hours notice.
And what was its effect on Harry? What did he learn from it?
Well, what did he tell Ron, waiting sleepily in the common room for Harry and Hermione’s return?
“Snape wants the stone for Voldemort… and Voldemort’s waiting in the forest… and all this time we thought Snape just wanted to get rich…”
I had forgotten that, you know. It’s been so long since my first time reading the book, I had forgotten that the kids, in all their suspicions of mean ol’ Snape who wanted to kill Harry and steal the stone, thought right up until that point that he must be acting (evilly) on his own behalf.
Longer term, the encounter with “the hooded figure” reactivated Harry’s scar. And his Erised-induced nightmares, which had died down by late February, ousted by Quidditch and schoolwork and panic over Hagrid’s dragon. Read about Harry, post-detention:
Harry did the best he could, ignoring the stabbing pains in his forehead, which had been bothering him ever since his trip into the forest. Neville thought Harry had a bad case of exam nerves because Harry couldn’t sleep, but the truth was that Harry kept being woken by his old nightmare, except that it was now worse than ever because there was a hooded figure dripping blood in it.
Maybe it was because they hadn’t seen what Harry had seen in the forest, or because they didn’t have scars burning on their foreheads, but Ron and Hermione didn’t seem as worried about the Stone as Harry. The idea of Voldemort certainly scared them, but he didn’t keep visiting in dreams, and they were so busy with their studying they didn’t have much time to fret about what Snape or anyone else was up to.
[snip-and then Harry decides that the Stone will be stolen that night, and Minerva refuses to hear him]
“Well, that’s it then, isn’t it? Harry said.
The other two stared at him. He was pale and his eyes were glittering.
“I’m going out of here tonight, and I’m going to try and get to the Stone first.”
“You’re mad!” said Ron.
“You can’t!” said Hermione. “After what McGonagall and Snape have said? You’ll be expelled!”
“SO WHAT?” Harry shouted. “Don’t you understand? If Snape gets hold of the Stone, Voldemort’s coming back! Haven’t you heard what it was like when he was trying to take over? There won’t be any Hogwarts to be expelled from! He’ll flatten it, or turn it into a school for the Dark Arts! Losing points doesn’t matter any more, don’t you see?... I’m going through that trapdoor tonight and nothing you two say is going to stop me! Voldemort killed my parents, remember?”
Yep. Harry learned his lesson in that detention, all right. He went from keeping his head down no matter what, to being freshly obsessed with Voldemort and willing to risk death, expulsion, peer ostracism… anything. Because keeping Voldemort from attaining full power and immortality was worth any cost.
So it’s unfortunate that some of the “information” on which Harry based that turnaround was, um, contraindicated by other evidence.
We’ll get back to that issue.
*
First, let’s consider why Tom Riddle would WANT the Philosopher’s Stone. It doesn’t create wealth, just gold, and Tom is smart enough to figure out that that makes its money-making capacity quite strictly limited. (The only real value of gold is that its supply is limited and other people want it. Glut the market and gold is valueless, plus in the interim there’s the tedium of exchanging the gold for money or things of actual value). The Stone could be used to produce quite a tidy income, but not world-conquering wealth. Which leaves the Elixir of Life as Tom’s desirata.
Why should Tom, in book one, want the Elixir? Or, for that matter, why should he drink unicorn blood.
We’ll address the latter first. What good could drinking unicorn blood do Tom Riddle?
“The blood of a unicorn will keep you alive, even if you are an inch from death,” stated Firenze, and we have no reason to doubt him.
Which would be answer enough, if Tom had still been alive. But he wasn’t, even if he wasn’t as dead as we might have preferred. He was discorporate. Riding Quirrell.
Which of course was the answer. Tom insisted on Quirrell drinking the blood to keep Quirrell’s body alive. Because Quirrell’s body was failing. Even our Harry of little brain noticed that Quirrell was getting “thinner and paler” throughout March [PS 14]. By late May, when Quirrell forced his way through the depths of the forest to the dead unicorn’s side, the trek that took agile boys over half an hour of walking, must have taken him over twice as long (Harry’s group was alarmed by the “slithering” soon after the parties separated, then they stopped to chat with the unicorns, then stopped again when they saw the red sparks, waited for Hagrid to return with the second party, and reorganized the groups). When Quirrell finally entered the clearing, moreover, he was so weak with exhaustion he could only CRAWL.
Drinking unicorn blood as a stopgap was probably what Tom and Quirinus were arguing about the day before Harry’s detention, and what Harry heard Quirrell capitulate about, sobbing, Quirinus had already agreed in principal to go after the stone, on a suitable occasion when Dumbledore could be arranged to be absent; indeed, we assume he’d already tried at least once, maybe twice, to steal it. He’d likewise already made one attempt to kill Harry. So what could he still be trying to draw the line at? A cursed half-life, that’s what.
And why would Tom wish that on him?
Let’s jump to what Tom told his faithful Death Eaters in the graveyard about what it was like to be discorporate [GoF 33]: “I was as powerless as the weakest creature alive, and without the means to help myslf… for I had no body, and every spell that might have helped me required the use of a wand….
“I remember only forcing myself, sleeplessly, endlessly, second by second to exist… Only one power remained to me. I could possess the bodies of others. But I dared not go where other humans were plentiful, for I knew that the Aurors were still abroad and searching for me. I sometimes inhabited animals-snakes, of course, being my preference-but I was little better off inside them than as pure spirit, for their bodies were ill adapted to perform magic… and my possession of them shortened their lives; none of them lasted long…
“Then… four years ago… the means for my return seemed assured. A wizard-young, foolish, and gullible-wandered across my path in the forest I had made my home. Oh, he seemed the very chance I had been dreaming of… for he was a teacher at Dumbledore’s school… he was easy to bend to my will… he brought me back to this country, and after a while I took possession of his body, to supervise him closely as he carried out my orders. But my plan failed. I did not manage to steal the Sorcerer’s Stone. I was not to be assured immortal life. I was thwarted… thwarted, once again, by Harry Potter….”
Silence once more; nothing was stirring, not even the leaves on the yew tree. The Death Eaters were quite motionless, the glittering eyes in their masks fixed upon Voldemort, and upon Harry.
“The servant died when I left his body, and I was left as weak as ever I had been,” Voldemort continued.
Now compare this to what Albus told Harry about Tom and the stone [HBP 23]:
“But there are several reasons why, I think, a Sorcerer’s Stone [sic] would appeal less than Horcruxes to Lord Voldemort.
“While the Elixir of Life does indeed extend life, it must be drunk regularly, for all eternity, if the drinker is to maintain their immortality. Therefore, Voldemort would be entirely dependent on the Elixir, and if it ran out, or was contaminated, or if the Stone was stolen, he would die just like any other man. Voldemort likes to operate alone, remember. I believe that he would have found the thought of being dependent, even on the Elixir, intolerable. Of course he was prepared to drink it if it would take him out of the horrible part-life to which he was condemned after attacking you, but only to regain a body. Thereafter, I am convinced, he intended to continue to rely on his Horcruxes. He would need nothing more, if only he could regain a human form.”
Tom would drink the Elixir only to regain a body. The Elixir was a path to the goal, not the goal.
Mind you, there’s no reason that I know of why Tom couldn’t have picked up enough Alchemy to have some very interesting plans for a philosopher’s stone if he could get his hands on one. Although one would think a discipline that relies on purification, and whose underlying metaphor is marriage wouldn’t have much appeal for Tom. Maybe Tom had some esoteric potion in mind that could use the Elixir of Life or the stone itself to reconstitute his vanished body.
But why multiply hypotheses? We need not posit that the Elixir can have an effect on a disembodied spirit or can be used in some Dark ritual to reconstitute a vanished body to see why Tom would want it. Maybe he just wanted the Elixir for the same purpose he finally used the unicorn blood: to hold a possessed slave’s body alive while his possession was slowly killing it. Either indefinitely, in lieu of reconstructing his own, or so that he would have no time constraint on his doing so.
A further point in favor of that hypothesis: Tom never, that we saw, tried to possess Peter Pettigrew or any other of his servants. He can’t have been happy depending on someone he couldn’t control completely for his rebirthing ritual, and yet he didn’t possess Peter at all. Why not?
Out of the goodness of his heart? Because he was afraid it would disillusion his other slaves about their master’s benevolence? Because Death Eater hoods don’t sufficiently cover the back of the head?
Well, at least the last has some plausibility. But hiding the second face is a practical problem with practical solutions. (Indeed, if Tom destroyed the original personality entirely instead of leaving it semi-intact to resist him, would the body have resumed a single face: Tom’s own?) A second turban-wearer might draw suspicions, but there are other options for disguise, from wigs to glamours to perhaps Polyjuicing at need into the host’s pre-possession body (I stole that idea from the Canadian house elf smuggling fanfic)….
No, the reason why Tom didn’t just take over Peter’s body is that he couldn’t afford to waste it.
Tom’s possession of an animal’s body weakens and eventually kills it. Even when that body is a wizard’s.
He needs, ultimately, his own body back. Or, alternatively, one that cannot be killed by his possession of it.
Say… because it’s drinking the Elixir of Life as needed.
And even that, I think, would be seen by Tom as second-best.
Remember how the Lexicon demonstrated, years ago, that Tom was probably not riding Quirinus when Harry met him in Diagon Alley, but was doing so at the Sorting Feast?
What happened in between? Well, immediately after meeting Quirrell for the first time, Harry visited Gringotts. On which occasion Hagrid abstracted a certain item from a certain vault, and bore it back to Hogwarts. Later that same day, a powerful Dark wizard broke into the same vault, to find it empty…..
And when we next see Quirrell, at Hogwarts, he was being ridden.
Maybe Tom mounted him for the break-in, and then was afraid if he DIS-mounted Quirrell would repent and try to get away. Maybe Tom mounted him for the break-in, let go for a month, and then re-mounted him once he was sure the stone was hidden at Hogwarts. (Had it been hidden elsewhere Albus might have received a letter of resignation.) Certainly Tom needed Quirrell under absolute control while he was directly under Dumbledore’s observation.
But either way, Tom probably possessed Quirinus in the expectation that he would soon be able to brew the Elixir of Life to keep Quirrell’s body alive as long as he needed to.
And perhaps with another expectation. Animal bodies, Tom said, were “ill adapted to perform magic.” Perhaps so were human ones, even wizard ones, to perform Tom’s magic. Aside from his own body, of course.
Without a body, Tom said, the only power remaining to him was that of possession. Within an animal’s body, he said, he was “little better off.” As in, “better off “ in that he was relieved of the pressure of clinging to existence second-by-second, but “little better off” because he had no further access to his powers than before? Perhaps. And within a wizard’s body…? We don’t know. We don’t know how much of Tom’s original powers were wielded by Quirrell!mort.
Or how much of Quirrell’s original powers were, once his strength started being sapped by his possession.
Ginny’s experience may be indicative. Intermittent full possession did not affect her physically that anyone in her circle (admittedly, Gryffindor, and thus oblivious) noticed. But when Tom possessed her in full and continually for just over half a day (mid morning to after dusk), she seemed to Harry to be dying.
Harry (and, apparently, Diary!Tom) thought that Tom would be corporeal and independent if his soul’s host, Ginny, died. But Harry was entirely uninformed, and so, probably, was 16-year-old Tom.
My guess is that if it were that easy to regain a physical body-just possess someone and suck the life out of them-then adult Tom would have done it. I should imagine, in fact, that adult Tom must have tried it, at least once, during that ten-year exile in Albania before that Hogwarts teacher Quirrell came snooping around sight-seeing.
Tom admitted that he’d tried inhabiting animals, and that he’d been afraid of the Aurors noticing if he tried the same attempts with humans, or particularly with wizards. Note that he didn’t state that he’d never made the experiment.
Thus explaining Tom’s decision to leave partial autonomy to Quirrell. I mean, no one can believe that Tom left Quirinus the ability to bleat protests about Tom’s orders out of respect for another soul’s autonomy….
So. I suspect that Diary!Tom would have returned to the book had Ginny died, as the main soul-fragment apparently returned to ether/exile in Albania when Quirrell did.
Something ventured; nothing gained.
Note too that the only thing we know for sure that Ginny did magically while she was possessed was to release and, presumably, to control, the basilisk. The roosters were strangled, not AKed. Releasing the basilisk required only that she speak Parseltongue, as Harry and discorporate!Tom can. So we know that Ginny!mort had young Tom’s knowledge and soul-based powers, but we have no evidence she wielded any of Tom’s other magical powers. Or that Diary!Tom did. In fact, note that when Diary!Tom was corporeal enough to hold Harry’s wand, he used it exactly once-and then produced nothing better than a bang. Even after Fawkes blinded the basilisk, Diary!Tom egged her on to continue attacking Harry rather than performing any magic himself against either the boy or the phoenix.
Which I take as confirmation that Tom, while possessing an animal, has no access to magical powers the animal lacks, save his soul-associated powers (Parseltongue, possession, and probably persuasion). And that this holds true when he’s possessing a human animal, even one which possesses magic-he has all of his knowledge, but only the powers of the host.
Let’s assume that I’m correct, and that what Tom told his followers about possessing animals does indeed apply to his possession of human animals: it weakens and eventually kills them, and while in their bodies Tom’s magic is largely limited to what’s natural to his host.
We do know that Quirrell!mort made only one overt attempt on the stone at Hogwarts before he drank the unicorn blood: at Halloween. Which failed, due in part to Snape’s vigilance. And only one overt attempt on Harry’s life before the detention in the forest: at Harry’s first Quidditch match, in early November.
As Tom’s possession of Quirrell weakened Quirinus’s body, did it also weaken his magic?
It seems so. It seems that both of them weakened as the possession continued. For look what happened as soon as Quirrell drank the cursed blood and was reinvigorated by it:
The hooded figure raised his head and looked right at Harry-unicorn blood was dribbling down its front. It got to its feet and came swiftly toward Harry-he couldn’t move for fear.
Then a pain like he’d never felt before pierced his head; it was as though his scar were on fire.
Right. Months of seeing Quirrell daily, and no attacks on Harry’s safety nor twinges in his scar since fall-and now both. Mind, Tom might have been deliberately suppressing the scar-twinges lest they alert Harry (which here wouldn’t be an issue, not if he expected to kill the kid forthwith), but still-the pain was blindingly strong now, which suggests Tom might be stronger as well.
*
Only-if Quirrell had been so weakened by his long possession, and Tom in him was weakened by his weakness, how did he have the strength to kill the unicorn? I mean, he didn’t have the strength even to walk up to the body, he crawled-yet the night before, he’d had the power to deal the creature a death-blow?
Hagrid assured us that “they’re powerful magic creatures. I never knew one ter be hurt before.”
For that matter, why didn’t Quirrell just slurp up some of that nice fresh blood the night before, when he’d actually wounded the beast? The blood was splashed all over the place; Quirrell didn’t even have to catch the animal, just lick some off the leaves.
Okay, so maybe one has to drink the blood actually from the body (or from the corpse), although Firenze didn’t say so.
So then why didn’t Quirrell drink from the first unicorn he killed? We saw no increased vigor in Quirrell the week before Harry’s detention. Plus, a single dose was apparently sufficient, at least for some time; there was no further unicorn-slaughter after that night. Quirrell doesn’t apparently need repeated doses, at least not immediately. So why kill twice?
Okay, so maybe he lost the first one after he’d fatally injured it. Tough luck, Tom! As he must have lost this one the night before, to have to come back for it.
Then there’s the fact that the path with its artistic splashes of blood led straight to the clearing, yet Quirrell!mort entered from the far side. As though, y’know, he’d circled around and observed from multiple directions before he entered. Like he was afraid that the unicorn corpse displayed so prettily in the moonlight, its legs sticking out at odd angles, its mane spread out all pearly white, the wound in its side still oozing silver, just beckoning someone to come lap up the nice blood … might be a trap.
And then he saw the kids coming, with Fang-it was now or never, then, because they’d call Hagrid and he’d lose his chance to drink.
*
Furthermore, look at the timing.
Just over two weeks before the detention in question, Hermione and Harry were caught by Filch at the base of the Astronomy tower. Draco had previously been caught by McGonagall in the same location, and Neville caught wandering the school looking for Harry and Hermione to warn them that Draco was trying to catch them with the dragon. McGonagall docked 20 points from Slytherin, 150 from Gryffindor, and assigned the four truants detention-at an indefinite future time and place.
The points loss resulted in ostracism for Harry, and to a lesser extent for Hermione and Neville. He felt guilty enough to offer to resign from the Quidditch team.
“Last Wednesday,” a unicorn was killed, presumably by the same M.O. as the second one. Quirrell!mort apparently did not take advantage of its blood; he showed no increase in vigor, and Harry’s scar did not react in any way.
The day before, Harry overheard Quirrell sobbing and agreeing to do something he didn’t want to do. Harry concluded that Snape had finally managed to bully Quirrell into revealing his share of the enchantments on the Stone. Immediately afterwards, he met Ron and Hermione in the library and discussed the matter with them. Ron pointed out that if Snape had found information on how to get around Fluffy, his path to the stone might now be clear. Harry agreed, but insisted that he would neither “poke around” himself nor go to Dumbledore to lay charges that wouldn’t be believed.
A few hours later, another unicorn was grievously wounded. The next morning at breakfast, the four kids were notified by Minerva that their detention was to be served at 11 that night.
Did Minerva even know what the detention was to be? Or was she simply told: send them to Filch at 11 pm; he’ll have a nasty, dirty job for them that will cure them of any further impulses towards nighttime wanderings?
Filch knew that they were to go with Hagrid to the forest. But it was only when they reached the forest that Hagrid told the kids that the job was to track a seriously injured unicorn and if need be, to kill it, to put out of its misery. (Which morphed somehow later into “catching” the person responsible… who’d be extraordinarily dangerous.)
Hagrid also told the kids that he could tell by all the blood spilled that the unicorn had to have been injured the night before.
Let’s get this straight-the detention was arranged in the morning. The unicorn had been mutilated the night before. The job was to find the beast and kill it. And Hagrid let the animal suffer mortal agony all day long-in order to wait until long after dark to even start tracking it?!. So that he could send two eleven-year-olds off by themselves with Fang at midnight to look for the dead or dying animal?
This was the gamekeeper’s idea of how to do his job? No, I think not. Hagrid would only have waited on strict orders, and only Albus could make him accept orders at once so apparently senseless and so actively cruel to the suffering beast.
Moreover, the blood was splashed right up to very entrance to the forest. Right where Hagrid (or another) could be sure to spot it.
Only when Hagrid (or someone) followed the blood-trail into the wood, the blood was splashed up both forks in the path-in such a way that a gamekeeper with fifty years experience had not a clue in which direction to look for the injured and probably dying beast.
So that when the gamekeeper returned AFTER DARK, he had to split his search team to cover both forks. Because there was nothing to show him in which direction the animal had headed.
And by sheer coincidence, he set Harry on the correct path to find the body.
Oh, and the gamekeeper did say, based on his professional experience, “Don’ worry, it can’t’ve gone very far if it’s this badly hurt.”
BEFORE the half-hour-plus hike by able-bodied boys to where the body lay.
Okay. Maybe the unicorn was attacked by someone far up the right-side fork of the path. It fled, panicked, down the path, and in its panic took the side-turning that led to the edge of the forest. Where it froze, terrified still further at finding itself at the opening onto the Hogwarts grounds. So it retreated, backtracking along the path, until it found its original path, and this time swerved left to continue along the path that led back deep into the forest.
Without ever leaving tracks that showed which direction it was going.
So unicorn tracks, unlike any natural beast’s, are absolutely unidirectional-they look exactly the same coming and going.
They must be, or Hagrid would have seen at a glance that the unicorn ran up the left-hard fork (if it did).
I mean, I’m not a gamekeeper, but I can look at a single deer print and tell which direction the deer was pointed at the time. Give me a couple in a row, and I can tell whether it was walking or running!
Telling the direction prints are leading is not hard. As rocket science goes, this is along the lines of registering that a dropped object falls DOWN [when subject to Earth’s gravitational field}.
And Hagrid had obviously seen the tracks in daylight, since he knew before he took the kids into the forest that he’d need to split them into two teams….
Or he hadn’t, and was just relying on what he was told. By a source he trusted.
Which would be…?
Or the tracks really were absolutely unreadable. In which case they had probably been made that way by someone. BY MAGIC. There was blood splashed everywhere, and a confused trampling back and forth, farther up both forks than Hagrid’s cursory investigation could eliminate before the detention. Given the time he had.
And then the unicorn’s body was way way further up the path than Hagrid had predicted the animal could possibly stagger on its own.
Maybe Hagrid was right. The unicorn was too badly injured to get very far. On its own. It had been, ah, assisted to that clearing.
For that matter, there’s a very simple explanation for why Hagrid couldn’t tell which direction the tracks led, given the Potterverse. And it would also explain why Hagrid thought it a fine idea to send half the kids in his care off into the forest without a lamp and with only Fang for escort. And didn’t once reconsider that decision even AFTER he was sure there was “summat” in the forest that night that didn’t belong there, “summat” powerful and evil enough to kill a unicorn. Even after he was scared himself by the sound of “summat,” even after he’d been panicked enough to threaten Ronan with his bow, even after he’d seen sparks that indicated two of the kids were in trouble (conceivably in mortal danger). Three alarms, the explicit assessment that the unicorn-killer was at large that night, and Hagrid’s only response was to switch the kids so that Harry would be in the group that was without light, unprotected, and headed (still) straight to the mortal danger?
The Confundus Charm is a wonderful thing: we saw Mundungus put his own life in danger under its influence. “It’s impossible to tell which way the unicorn went. You’ll have to split the kids into two groups to track it. And Harry’s brave, he won’t be scared being with only Fang. His group can take the deosil path.”
There’s no obvious reason for Quirrell to fatally injure a unicorn, showily sprinkle its blood at the very edge of the forest, and muddle the backtrail so the gamekeeper couldn’t tell at a glance in which direction the dying animal’s tracks led. There’s likewise no obvious reason for Quirrell to fatally injure a unicorn and WAIT UNTIL THE NEXT DAY to drink its blood.
But if we posit that someone fatally injured a unicorn as a lure to a third party, too weak himself to kill a unicorn, yet desperate enough to consider drinking unicorn blood if a dying one were waved under his nose, the whole situation makes much more sense.
Of course the “someone” would need to be near-desperate himself.
Have I mentioned recently what I theorize to have been Albus’s belief about Tom Riddle’s Horcruxes at this point in time? That Albus believed (correctly, as it transpires) that Harry was Tom’s Horcrux, but at that time believed Harry to be Tom’s sole Horcrus?
So that if Harry were to die, so too would Tom? Instantly-his being snuffed out with Harry’s death.
It’s unthinkable to imagine killing an innocent little boy to destroy even a psychopathic mass-murderer. Unthinkable, I tell you!
But-if the boy himself insisted on risking himself, even knowing he faced probable-or certain-death-if HE felt destroying his enemy was worth it-if he listened to the worst consequences he could face and shouted “SO WHAT?”-then shouldn’t the kid be given the chance he begged for?
But if the kid showed reluctant to get involved, he’d have to be shown the error of his ways.
Of course, if Albus wanted Harry to change his mind about being strictly law-abiding, if Albus wanted the child to risk death flinging himself between Voldemort and the stone, he’d need to persuade Harry of two things: that it was Voldemort, not just mean ol’ Professor Snape, trying to steal the Stone; and that Voldemort’s getting his paws on it would be, not just unfortunate, but catastrophic. The end of life as we know it.
Not that it would maintain the status quo for a while longer: Voldemort in possession of a relatively weak wizard’s body and magic while he struggled to regain his full powers, and subject to being exiled again to incorporeality should that relatively weak wizard eventually die or be killed.
No, to risk himself Harry must believe that Voldemort’s attaining the stone would mean his instant return to full power and actual immortality.
We return to the misinformation Firenze passed to Harry:
“It is,” Firenze agreed, “[Death is better than drinking unicorn blood] unless all you need is to stay alive long enough to drink something else-something that will bring you back to full strength and power-something that will mean that you can never die. Mr Potter, do you know what is hidden in the school at this very moment?”
But that’s not what the Elixir of Life does in the Potterverse. Drinking a dose does NOT mean “that you can never die.” For that matter, just getting hold of the stone doesn’t, that we know, even give one instant possession of the Elixir; one has to brew it first. Finally, Tom Riddle was at that point without a body to be brought “back to full strength and power!” However Tom planned to use the Stone and the Elixir, his slave’s taking one sip of the Elixir could not instantly restore Tom.
Alchemy is a human art; so which human was the source of Firenze’s misinformation? Well, which alchemist did Firenze explicitly accept as his ally and master in book five, forsaking his herd to do so? Mind you, I think Firenze was taken in himself; why else did he think rescuing Harry from the unicorn-killer was worth fighting with his herd over, unless he (unlike they) believed at that time that in doing so he was thwarting Voldemort?
*
What would have happened had no unicorns been slain in the making of the confrontation between Harry and Voldemort?
On Quirrell’s side, had he never drunk the unicorn blood, he might well have been too weak to essay the set of challenges. Which, one notes, required mental acuity (the chess game, Snape’s logic problem), specialized knowledge (Fluffy, the Devil’s Snare, the troll), moderate magical ability, and a degree of physical fitness (catching the key, surviving the fall, and assorted scrambling).
The maze required none of Tom Riddle’s extraordinary magical abilities or special powers at all.
But too much physical exertion, magic, and focus, perhaps, for a dying host to manage, however prodded by its parasite it was.
However, even if Quirrell HAD had the energy to attempt the challenges and to struggle successfully to the end of them, there he would have sat, in front of the Mirror of Erised, until…?
Well, NOT until Harry found him and obligingly removed the Stone for him. On Harry’s side, in his chastened frame of mind pre-detention, Harry would never have gone through the trapdoor merely to keep “Snape” from stealing the stone and making himself rich. Had Harry not encountered Voldemort, had his scar flame to life, reawakened his Erised nightmares, and been (mis)informed that Voldemort’s laying hands on the stone would ensure Voldemort’s immediate return to full strength and achievement of true immortality, Harry would not have been willing to throw away both his life and his place at Hogwarts to prevent Voldemort from acquiring the stone.
So Harry wouldn’t have bolted down the trapdoor after “Snape,” nor dragged his friends.
So what would have happened instead?
Quirrell would still probably have died, but not at Harry’s hands. He might have died in his attempt on the stone, too weak to survive one of the challenges; he might have been trapped by the Mirror and died its captive (or more likely, been captured by Albus in turn), or he might never have made it through the trapdoor at all, and simply faded and died as we saw possessed!Ginny apparently doing in CoS.
Either way, Harry would have seen Voldemort make a concerted attempt to return to life and full power-and fail, through no direct action of Harry’s. (Or even, possibly, of Dumbledore’s.)
Rather undercuts the idea that only HARRY can vanquish Voldemort, doesn’t it? That it’s his destiny, his job, and no one else can possibly do it? That the future of the (Voldie-free) universe depends entirely on Harry, and on Harry’s willingness to sacrifice ANYTHING at Albus’s word to take Voldie down.
If Harry had seen Quirrell!mort self-destruct at eleven, then on his seventeenth birthday when Albus explained that Harry had to suicide to permanently destroy Tom-in-him, Harry might have said something grossly impertinent like, “Er-why?
“Even if you’re right and I’m his Horcrux, why can’t we find some way of containing him-temporarily, if that’s the best we can do-that doesn’t involve killing me?”
I don’t think that that was a conversation Albus was prepared to engage in with Harry.
When you look at it like that, it rather seems that if Tom hadn’t taken the strong step of shedding unicorn blood to keep his recalcitrant, futilely-kicking host-er, excuse me, his devoted servant -alive even involuntarily, even cursed (meanwhile setting Harry up for that detention, and for confronting him) … Albus would have had to do it for Tom.
Did I mention that I’ve been positing that Quirrell had been weakening over time? That Quirrell’s weakening was the whole reason why Tom insisted on Quirinus’s drinking the cursed unicorn blood in late May: to pep him up again, enough to make a run at the maze of challenges hiding the stone?
Did I mention that I have posited that Tom himself was restricted by the weaknesses of his host body?
Did I mention that, per Hagrid, lethally injuring a unicorn requires a LOT of magical power?
Oh, I didn’t!
I’m mentioning all three now.
One last point: let’s revisit the end of the detention chapter.
But the night’s surprises weren’t over.
When Harry pulled back his sheets, he found his invisibility cloak folded neatly underneath them. There was a note pinned to it:
Just in case.
Gee. Who could have been responsible for that?
*
It is a monstrous thing, to slay a unicorn.