Dark Devices: Albus and the Suicide Stone

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

“What was the temptation, the one that worked?” Margaret Atwood, “Marrying the Hangman”

In my essay “Death Unhallowed: The Suicide Stone,” I suggested that Albus put on Tom’s Horcrux-ring and invoked its curse because he’d been directed to do so by what appeared to him to be the spirits of the dead. But that raises as many questions as it answers, really. Severus implied that the lethal curse on the ring was utterly obvious: “It carries a curse, surely you realized that?” …

Dumbledore grimaced. “I… was a fool. Sorely tempted…”

“Tempted by what?”

Dumbledore did not answer. (DH 33)

Let’s explore this temptation a little further.



Because Dumbledore implicitly admitted that yes, he did realize that the ring carried a curse of extraordinary power. So either the temptation so overwhelmed Albus that he forgot, momentarily, about the danger he’d already sensed. Or, he believed he was being offered something that was worth his certain death.

Or, he was tempted BY death. He was made to want to die.

*

Let’s explore the second possibility first in order to discard it. In that scenario, Albus saw what seemed to him to be a trusted spirit who told him if he put on the ring, something would happen fully worth Albus’s death.

Now, Albus’s death from Tom’s curse would make Tom the undisputed master of the Elder Wand with the possibility that Tom would eventually realize this and take it. In fact, if Albus had died at the Gaunt’s hovel, it was likely enough that Tom would find the corpse. Wanna bet he wouldn’t play with the dead man’s wand just to gloat—and realize whoo boy, this wand is even better than my Fawkes-feather one! Moreover, Albus had no backup plans in case of his own death (that we know of). We do know that neither of Albus’s primary puppets had then any idea what Albus’s final plans for disposing of Riddle were, or of their own allotted parts in fulfilling those plans. Could Albus count on his portrait being able to direct matters well enough to avert Riddle’s permanent takeover of the WW?

I can’t think of what one could offer Albus for which he’d willingly trade his total defeat by Tom. In fact, the only way I can imagine Albus deliberately putting on that ring in this scenario is if he was made to believe essentially what Harry did about surrendering unarmed to Voldemort: that taking that specific action was needed to end the war. So if Albus was made to believe that putting on that ring would dispose of ALL the Horcruxes and take out Tom’s main consciousness too, I do credit that he would have done so.

But anything less, no, it wouldn’t have been worth it.

Now come up with some story along those lines that would be credible to canny old Albus, and someone dead he’d trust to hear it from, and a reason why it had to be done on this very instant, and I’ll credit that it happened that way.

*

In the King’s Cross chapter of DH Albus (if that was Albus) told Harry outright that the first alternative is what had really happened.

“When I discovered it, after all those years, buried in the abandoned home of the Gaunts—the Hallow I had craved most of all, though in my youth I had wanted it for very different reasons—I lost my head, Harry. I quite forgot that it was now a Horcrux, that the ring was sure to carry a curse. I picked it up, and I put it on, and for a second I imagined that I was about to see Ariana, and my mother, and my father, and to tell them how very, very sorry I was….

“I was such a fool, Harry. After all those years I had learned nothing. I was unworthy to unite the Deathly Hallows, I had proved it time and again, and here was final proof.”(DH, 35)

Of course we evaluate this statement knowing that Albus was deliberately misleading Harry, since Albus did not put on that ring in order to raise anyone dead. Raising the dead is done by turning the Stone thrice.

Our knowledge of what happened afterwards comes from Severus’s memory of putting a stopper in Albus’s death.

And now Harry stood in the headmaster’s office yet again . It was nighttime, and Dumbledore sagged sideways in the thronelike chair behind the desk, apparently semiconscious. His right hand dangled over the side, blackened and burned. Snape was muttering incantations, pointing his wand at the wrist of the hand, while with his left hand he tipped a goblet full of thick golden potion down Dumbledore’s throat. After a moment or two, Dumbledore’s eyelids fluttered and opened.

“Why,” said Snape, without preamble, “why did you put on that ring? It carries a curse, surely you realized that? Why even touch it?”

Marvolo Gaunt’s ring lay on the desk before Dumbledore. It was cracked; the sword of Gryffindor lay beside it.

Dumbledore grimaced.

“I… was a fool. Sorely tempted…”

“Tempted by what?”

Dumbledore did not answer.

“It is a miracle you managed to return here!” Snape sounded furious. “That ring carried a curse of extraordinary power, to contain it is all we can hope for; I have trapped the curse in one hand for the time being….“

“If you had only summoned me a little earlier, I might have been able to do more, buy you more time!” said Snape furiously. He looked down at the broken ring and the sword. “Did you think that breaking the ring would break the curse?”

“Something like that… I was delirious, no doubt….” said Dumbledore….

Fawkes the phoenix was gnawing a bit of cuttlebone.

(DH 33)

“I …. was a fool. Sorely tempted” is not how most people would usually rephrase “I was so desperate to apologize to my dead family that I suffered a momentary lapse of judgment.” It sounds here like Albus may be admitting to having suffered, ah, a relapse… been tempted into his old ways… saw the sudden opportunity to fulfill a lifelong ambition and become the Master of Death and grew, perhaps, a trifle overexcited at the thought. Albus’s telling Harry afterwards that he had been unworthy to unite the hallows does rather suggest that the thought of doing so had recently crossed Albus’s fertile mind.

However, we ARE talking about “Power of Love” Albus here, who said, with apparent sincerity, that the flaw in his brilliant plan for taking out Voldie was that he’d come to care for Harry too much (OotP 37). Love, like truth, is apparently a beautiful and terrible thing to Albus, to be treated with great caution—or more precisely, to be avoided whenever at all possible. So maybe canon!Albus really would describe an overwhelming desire to apologize to the baby sister he had killed and the parents whose trust he had failed so terribly as a “sore temptation” which a more “worthy” wizard would have resisted.

However, even if becoming Master of Death, not apologizing to the dead, had been Albus’s sore temptation, that still doesn’t account for his putting on that ring. To become the Master of Death, one unites the three hallows, not dons some ring containing one of them.

*

We received a completely different accounting of Dumbledore’s reason for being injured in HBP, when Albus boasted to Harry about destroying the second Horcrux:

“The ring, Harry. Marvolo’s ring. And a terrible curse there was on it, too. Had it not been—forgive me the lack of seemly modesty—for my own prodigious skill, and for Professor Snape’s timely action when I returned to Hogwarts, desperately injured, I might not have lived to tell the tale. However, a withered hand does not seem an unreasonable exchange for a seventh of Voldemort’s soul. The ring is no longer a Horcrux.” (HBP 33)

Now of course here too Dumbledore was deliberately misleading Harry: he implied that incurring the curse (by donning the ring) was necessary to destroy that piece of Tom’s soul. Whereas instead the exact opposite was true: putting on the ring was not merely extraneous to the goal of destroying the Horcrux, it nearly prevented Dumbledore from being able to do so (or to do anything else ever). Nor was he honest with Harry about the fact that the curse was still killing him: “a withered hand,” not “my eventual death,” did not seem an unreasonable exchange to him.

We heard about Dumbledore’s injury a few more times in HBP. There was Severus’s explanation to Bellatrix: “The duel with the Dark Lord last month shook him. He has since sustained a serious injury because his reactions were slower than they once were.”

Now, this is clearly a story that Snape and the headmaster have agreed upon in advance. It may not agree precisely with what Dumbledore has told Minerva, the Minister, et al., but wherever it doesn’t coincide, it will seem to Riddle that Dumblodore, not Snape, has been shading the truth (presumably to reassure, falsely, his friends and followers).

It’s obvious why Snape and Dumbledore might find it advantageous here both to butter up the Dark Lord and to induce him to start underestimating Dumbledore. But note the more subtle lie. In reality, Albus was injured because of his error in judgment in putting on the ring. But he’s having Severus spread the story that physical weakness led to an accidental injury. I.e. Dumbledore is having Severus help him to hide that Albus had been “a fool, sorely tempted.” By something.

And some version of this particular false story must also be what Albus was spreading among his other followers and acquaintances, to agree with Snape’s disinformation.

Then there’s the first time Harry pressed him about the injury (HBP 4). “I have no time to explain now,” said Dumbledore. “ It is a thrilling tale, I wish to do it justice.” False: he doesn’t wish to do it justice; he doesn’t want to talk about it at all. Why not? If Albus is planning to have Harry hunt Horcruxes, shouldn’t Harry be apprised of the potential hazards? Including the temptation to take foolish risks?

Another point. The Stone was cracked in two. But the ring itself was wearable (Albus wore it on the visit to Horace). It could be, of course, that Albus repaired the gold band after he removed Tom’s curse, and that the Stone simply proved irreparable. Though still functional.

Or it could be that Albus was aiming specifically for the Stone, not the band, when he swung the Sword of Gryffindor.

Now, if Tom had known there was something special about that black stone, rather than just valuing the ring as proof of his family’s antiquity, he might well have made only the Stone, and not the ring as a whole, into his Horcrux. But he never knew the Stone’s significance; he thought it just the seal of the Peverell’s, as his uncle’s mind had informed him. So Tom had no known reason to bind his soul only to the Stone and not to the whole object. (Would he, say, have bound his soul specifically to Helga’s cup’s handle? Or to the engraving of the badger? Why pick a specific feature?) And Albus knew by the night he found it that Tom didn’t know what the Stone really was.

So it’s curious, that’s all, that we see Death’s Stone cracked but the gold band intact when Albus finished with the ring. Later, of course, he disassembled the ring to pack the still-broken Stone into that Snitch.

Also curious, on reflection, is Severus’s outburst, “It is a miracle you managed to return here!”

Because… how did Severus know for sure that Albus’s injury was incurred away from Hogwarts? I accept that Severus could easily tell from the condition of the hand that Albus had for some reason waited (nearly too long) before summoning him, but could even Severus really tell from examining an injured wizard that the other had been elsewhere when he’d donned the cursed ring?

There might be several answers. If Albus had told Severus in advance that he was going out on a potentially dangerous mission, he might have assumed the injury happened there. But it seems uncharacteristic of Albus to have told Severus this. He didn’t for the Cave expedition, after all; he told Harry to expect to find Severus tucked up in bed asleep. And in that case there was the additional issue of assuring the students’ safety to have induced Albus to warn Severus. The expedition to the Gaunts’s old house took place during the summer holidays. Moreover, if Snape HAD known in advance that Dumbledore might be putting himself in danger, even if Albus ordered him not to invite himself along, surely Severus would have insisted on awaiting his true master’s return at Hogwarts, healing potions at the ready, not waited at Spinner’s End to be summoned by a dying man, almost too late? So that scenario is OOC for both

Or Severus might have just assumed that Dumbledore had gone out and found the ring himself, rather than the ring having been brought to Dumbledore by one of Dumbledore’s other agents. Still, why would he further assume that Dumbledore would take the risk of putting on the ring in the field? If Dumbledore were tempted to put on the ring to test it in some way, wouldn’t it be better to do that within the safety of the Hogwarts wards, not who-know-where surrounded by who-knows-what other hazards?

Or it could be, of course, that the summons had been a Patronus saying, “I’ve been injured by one of Voldemort’s Darkest curses and urgently need your assistance, Severus. I’m trying to make it back to Hogwarts; meet me there.”

Or it might even be that Albus was more conscious when Severus first reached him than when we saw him, and that he’d murmured something like, “I barely made it back here.” We don’t know, after all, for how long Snape had been working on Albus when the memory-strand cut in. If the summons had not made it clear why Dumbledore needed him so urgently, Severus might have come, examined Dumbledore, and had to leave to fetch the golden potion while Dumbledore slipped further into unconsciousness. He might have had to BREW the golden potion. Heck, for anything we know he might have had to INVENT it. (Although in the latter cases, Severus’s crossness at Dumbledore’s delay in summoning him would seem a bit misplaced; surely a few minutes’ delay on Dumbledore’s side made little difference if it was hours before Severus could treat him effectively?) But anyhow, Albus might have told Severus he’d barely managed to make it to his office before Albus slipped into the semiconscious state we saw.

I dunno, maybe the curse was simply one that Severus would expect to leave characteristic marks in the immediate environment when it was activated—blast marks or something.. But Dumbledore’s robes aren’t mentioned as having been singed, just that hand blackened.

And Severus sounded quite certain.

So it does seem most probable that Dumbledore himself had somehow contrived to convey to Severus the information that the headmaster had been injured elsewhere and traveled back to his office before calling for help.

We do know, or we think we know, that Dumbledore took assorted actions between first donning the ring and finally collapsing insensible in his chair, including returning to Hogwarts from the Gaunts’ ruins, swinging that sword against the ring, and belatedly summoning Snape. So informing Severus explicitly that he’d been away from Hogwarts when he incurred the injury might have been among those actions that we know Albus must have performed but that we weren’t privileged to see.

And Severus was astonished that with so severe an injury, even the great Albus Dumbledore could have traveled under his own power. “Miracle” is not a term we’ve often heard from Snape’s mouth..

Finally, Albus’s statement in King’s Cross, “When I discovered it, after all those years….I lost my head,” strongly implies, though does not quite explicitly state, that finding the Stone was a surprise to him as well as a temptation. Yet he’d seen the ring before—possibly on young Tom’s hand (though Tom may have taken care not to wear it in front of Dumbledore—it does, after all, tie him to a murder scene), certainly in Bob Ogden’s and Morfin’s memories, maybe also in Horace’s.memory by then. Unlike Morfin or Tom, Albus knew that the symbol on that dark stone was not the Peverell coat of arms.

If Albus had seen it on Tom’s hand and recognized it, he would have assumed that Tom wanted it for the same reasons that Gellert had—to raise and control an army of the dead. If so, he must have been quite bemused when Tom did not, and must have chuckled when he realized that Tom didn’t know what he had.

Same if he recognized it for certain later in one of the memories.

However, Albus might well not have been sure that the black stone engraved with the sigil of the Deathly Hallows was The Stone. We do know, however, that he must have wondered enough to test it—unless we think that Albus, who gave up the quest for the Second Hallow decades ago (just ask him!), compulsively tests every dark pebble he comes across just in case it might be The One. (Flash to Albus crawling across a beach of cobbles: picking up a pebble, turning it three times, casting it aside and reaching for the next….)

So we may infer that Albus knew, before ever he saw the physical ring, that it was at least possible that it housed the Resurrection Stone. And it’s obvious that the two most likely Horcruxes to be cached in the Gaunt ruins would be one of the family heirlooms—the locket or the ring. The ring, in fact, is much more likely, because Tom’s possession of it is the symbol of his triumph over his Pureblood ancestors.

One suggestive slip of the tongue: Albus consistently referred to the Peverell ring as Marvolo’s, although Tom in fact stole it from its rightful owner Morfin. Of the various places Albus could first have seen it, it’s only in Bob Ogden’s memories that the ring belongs to Marvolo. If Albus had seen it first on Tom’s hand (in life or in Horace’s memory), it would have been associated originally with Tom; if in Morfin’s memory, with Tom’s uncle. Calling it Marvolo’s ring rather suggests that Albus saw it first in Bob Ogden’s memories, and with enough time lag before he sought out Morfin’s memories to have established a habit of thought. Moreover, this would imply that the ring made a strong impression on Albus from the moment he first saw it clearly. An obsession, even.

So Albus had to have gone to the hovel hoping to find the ring there, and at least half-hoping that in finding that ring, he would find the fabled Resurrection Stone at last. And with schemes, therefore, for what he could do with it if he found it—once he’d cleansed it of Tom’s soul, of course, and of any of Tom’s protective curses. Albus was already the master of the Deathstick, and Harry could surely be persuaded to lend—or even give—his beloved mentor the Cloak. Did Albus, perhaps, entertain the notion that the Master of Death could undo Tom’s Horcruxes and send Tom off to his final reward without further ado? (Indeed, if that ring allowed one to command dead souls, why not fragments of souls that should be dead? “Get thee hence, foul fragment!”)

So whatever it was that happened when Albus found the ring, it did not involve Albus “losing his head” in surprised delight at the utterly unanticipated fulfillment of a youthful dream.

Or at the entirely unexpected opportunity to apologize to his dead family.

So, why did you put on that ring, Albus?

*

My mother has told, by my count, seven different stories about my father’s suicide, with varying degrees of vagueness. One to the first investigating officer, one to the coroner, one to us children at the time, various over the forty years since …. None has entirely tallied with any other. And, as I discovered when I finally read the police report, each has disagreed in some way not only with all the others, but with the physical evidence, with other people’s testimony, and/or with our family’s established habits at that time.

There are a few details, however, that my mom has included in every variant.

If most of the details in a set of inconsistent (and all false) stories change, then it could be that the few that don’t are the core of the truth.

Or it could be that they are the core of the lies, shaped to the truth the liar is trying to hid.

My mother’s constants?

She had and has no real idea why he did it (or why he did it at that time).

She had no idea, none, of his intentions when he left her that night. (Or, that morning, depending.)

And no, they hadn’t been fighting. Not at all. (Or, not seriously, depending.)

Determining the truth my mom needs to hide is left as an exercise for the reader.

If someone tells inconsistent stories about an event, and you know that none is fully truthful, it can be the details that stay constant that map the shape of the truth the liar is trying to hide.

*

A Mock Interrogation:

Skeptical reader: How did you come to injure your hand, Albus?

Albus: (Chuckles politely.) Oh, weaker resistance, slower reflexes… Old age, in short.

Skeptic: Oh, don’t even start; I know that injury didn’t come from dueling. It came from the Gaunt ring.

Albus: (Modestly buffing the nails on his intact hand.) Yes, well, the ring had been turned into a Horcrux. It seems to me that a withered hand, even my own, is a fair enough trade for one-seventh of Voldemort’s soul. And by the way, only my prodigious skill allowed me to return to Hogwarts afterwards, as desperately injured as I was. I do hope that you appreciate that, though I’m far too self-effacing to draw your attention directly to that fact.

Skeptical reader: But if the way to destroy a Horcrux were to wear it in a piece of jewelry, we’d be honoring dear Dolores above all others. Try again. Why did you put on that ring, Albus, knowing it was cursed? Why even touch it?

Albus: (Sighs.) It really was old age. The ring had been spelled to be alluring, and I had a momentary, ah, lapse in concentration when first I saw it there in the ruins. A small but in the circumstances, rather unfortunate, aberration, I do concede.

Skeptical reader: A senior moment? Come off it, that’s not what you told Harry or Severus. And Severus felt no lure towards the thing when he first saw it, although it still carried the rest of Tom’s curse. So why did you really put it on?

Albus: (Turns his head away and starts to tear up.) Do you really insist on knowing? Because the instant that I recognized it as the Resurrection Stone I lost my head in my desperation finally to apologize to the baby sister that I’d killed, and I totally forgot that the ring was now a Horcrux, that it was sure to carry a curse. And by the way, I did mention, didn’t I, that this all happened the very moment I dug the ring out of the Gaunts’ ruins and recognized the Stone?

Skeptical reader: Wow. Heavy. How could any reader question such an emotionally-laden narrative? Only—one invokes the shades of the dead by turning the Resurrection Stone over thrice, not by slipping some ring over one’s finger. And you’d known that for over a hundred years. That you might forget to check for entirely extraneous curses is reasonable enough according to your story, but why on earth would your eagerness to use that damned Stone make you forget entirely how to use it?

Albus: (Looks down in shame) All right, you’ve got me. It was really because I was a fool, sorely tempted… damn it, I admit it finally, tempted by my old dream of becoming the Master of Death! It just hit me when I saw it, that I could make that old fantasy come true. And by the way, you understand that it’s a miracle that I managed to return to Hogwarts afterwards and to summon help….

Skeptical reader: Wrong fantasy, Albus. It’s in LOTR that putting on the One Ring makes one Master. This one just kills you. The Hallows Questers, of which you’re one, claim that one becomes Master of Death by uniting the Three Hallows. And you didn’t have the Cloak handy, though you knew where it was. So why even touch the thing until after you’d removed the curse at least, and maybe also Tom’s disgusting and extraneous soul-fragment? We know you removed both eventually, when you wore it to Horace’s. So why even touch it before it was safe? And why put it on at all?

Albus: (Sulks, then brightens.) It was an accident, really. I was still shaken from my duel with Tom, you know. I had picked the ring up at wandpoint and was examining it, and then when I recognized the stone as the Second Hallow I was so startled that I started to drop it. And I just automatically grabbed at it to catch it, and my reactions were too slow to keep it from slipping onto my finger. At the Gaunt hovel. When I first found it. I mentioned that part, didn’t I?

Skeptical reader: You’d seen the ring clearly in the Pensieve, seen the sign engraved on its black stone—didn’t you expect, hope that it might be the Resurrection Stone, and hope to find it in the family ruins? Why would identifying it startle you so much as to make you lose your head ? Or rather, your hand.

Albus: (Pouts and crosses his arms.). Nothing I say is gonna satisfy you, is it? I’m shutting up now. I don’t have to tell you anything. Anyhow, I put the Ring on at the Gaunt hovel, the very moment I identified it. Because I wasn’t thinking. It was almost an accident, practically. So there! (Nods emphatically and retreats to his corner to pout further.)

Skeptical reader: (Agreeably.) Ah. So you’ve kept on telling me. So that part must be true.

*

So here’s Albus’s story. He found the ring at the Gaunt’s hovel. He recognized the stone in it as the second Hallow. He immediately put on the ring (for mumble mumble reason) and was blasted by Tom’s curse.

Now, every curse we’ve seen in canon works instantaneously. I can imagine Tom taking artistic pleasure in a slow one, but not to guard his Horcrux. A Horcrux-guarding curse should be designed to take down, instantly, anyone who interferes with the object. Not necessarily instant death (c.f. the potion guarding the locket), but instant incapacitation.

And indeed we saw Albus, slumped in a chair, with a curse that has spread from his ring finger to blacken and wither his whole hand before Severus arrested its spread at the wrist. Though the blackening itself had only spread through the hand so far, Albus was apparently semiconscious, unable to move or help himself.

However, immediately prior to when we saw him in such a state, Dumbledore’s prodigious skill had allowed him to stay conscious, mobile, and capable of performing great feats both of complicated magic and of physical strength.

He had been alone on this jaunt, remember.

So. Alone, after having been cursed, Albus made his way back out through the spells he’d left in place around the Horcrux resting-place. (Tom was never alerted to any interference at the hovel, so presumably Albus had NOT just razed the place to the ground or dismantled all of Tom’s “many powerful enchantments” while going in. To a casual glance or magical scan, the ruins—and presumably what they hid—were undisturbed.)

Having made his way from the ruins to safe ground, he then Apparated back to the gates of Hogwarts. While the blackening spread from the ring finger and Albus grew increasingly weak and disoriented, he stumbled through the Hogwarts grounds and staggered up multiple flights of stairs to his office. He then took down the Sword of Gryffindor and managed to swing it with enough physical force against the ring to crack the Stone in two. Then he sent a Patronus to summon Severus to try to arrest the curse. And finally he allowed himself to succumb to his injury and collapse into his chair, where we see him lolling semiconscious a little later, too weak to lift a finger.

Um, right. Anyone besides me a little skeptical here?

Okay, fine, Albus does have Fawkes. So maybe Albus summoned Fawkes to him in the ruins, discovered phoenix tears were ineffective to heal him, and had Fawkes not-Apparate him to the office. Then he destroyed the Horcrux first, and summoned Severus second.

That’s much better, but still, it’s an awful lot of work out of someone we see collapsed semiconscious until Snape’s golden potion kicked in.

And then, whichever way the above happened, at some later point, after all the dust had settled, Albus blithely tested the Resurrection Stone (or tested it again). Presumably by using it as directed (what else could be truly conclusive?): by turning it thrice. And Albus discovered, to his great delight, that although the Stone was now in two pieces it still functioned just fine.

We know that he must have tested it subsequent to the stirring events of that night, because there was no point at all in bequeathing it to Harry if he didn’t know that it still worked. And I certainly wouldn’t expect a magical Stone still to function after it had been broken into pieces.

Hold that thought.

Anyhow, that’s Albus’s story, so far as he’s willing to tell it, and he’s sticking to it.

*

If someone tells inconsistent stories about an event, and you know that none is fully truthful, sometimes it’s the details that stay constant that map the shape of the truth the liar is trying to hide.

Why on earth should it matter exactly where and when Albus put on that ring?

Because if Albus had impulsively donned that ring at the Gaunt’s hovel at the very instant that he’d incredulously identified it as Tom’s Horcrux/the way to apologize to his dead family/the way to become Master of Death/Sauron’s Ring/Whatever, it’s perfectly plausible that shock and sudden overwhelming emotion might have made him momentarily oblivious to an otherwise-obvious risk.

What’s the exact opposite of that?

That a continuing pressure ate away and ate away at Albus’s ability to resist until Albus finally gave in and did something that he understood perfectly to be, ah, ill-advised. Lethal, in fact.

Even the obvious lie that Albus had had Severus feed the Death Eaters is still an opposite to this particular alternate possible version of what happened.

*

Now let’s briefly review Harry’s experience with the Stone. He turned it, accepting his doom. Harry begged his ghastly escorts:

“You’ll stay with me?”

“Until the very end,” said James.

“They won’t be able to see you?” asked Harry.

“We are part of you,” said Sirius. “Invisible to anyone else.”

Harry looked at his mother.

“Stay close to me,” he said quietly.

And he set off…. with no idea where exactly Voldemort was, but sure that he would find him. Beside him, making scarcely a sound, walked James, Sirius, Lupin, and Lily, and their presence was his courage, and the reason he was able to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

His mind and body felt oddly disconnected now, his limbs working without conscious instruction, as if he were passenger, not driver, in the body he was about to leave. The dead who walked beside him through the forest were much more real to him now than the living back at the castle: Ron, Hermione, Ginny, and all the others were the ones who felt like ghosts as he stumbled and slipped toward the end of his life, toward Voldemort…..

[Harry found the circle of Death Eaters, disarmed himself, and revealed himself to Voldemort by speaking,]

Harry said it as loudly as he could, with all the force he could muster: He did not want to sound afraid. The Resurrection Stone slipped from between his numb fingers, and out of the corner of his eyes he saw his parents, Sirius, and Lupin vanish as he stepped forward into the firelight.

[And at the very last]

“Harry … wanted it to happen now, quickly, while he could still stand, before he lost control, before he betrayed fear—”

(DH 34)

Two points to make about this. One, the effect of these apparitions’ proximity was to make Harry feel disconnected from his own living body and from the living people he loved.

Two, they lied. They did not stay with him “until the very end” for Harry’s consolation, as they’d promised. They vanished the very instant that Harry revealed himself to Tom.

That was a deeply malevolent action. “Their presence was his courage” for exactly so long as Harry NEEDED “to keep putting one foot in front of the other” to bring Harry to his death. The moment a sudden access of cowardice (or prudence, or distrust of Dumbledore) could no longer possibly save Harry’s life by making him turn and run, the moment that Harry’s death was truly inescapable, the moment, in short, that fear could do nothing but shame Harry before his enemies (which he feared nearly as much as he feared death itself), the apparitions deserted him..

Voluntarily.

“The Resurrection Stone slipped from between his numb fingers,” right. Remember that Harry was still “passenger, not driver” here. This wasn’t a random accident, and it wasn’t Harry’s doing.

Those spirits deliberately abandoned Harry before the end, removing the comforting disconnectedness and “courage” they’d been lending him. To make the boy’s death harder than it had to be, to make him struggle against his fear, not to collapse in sheer panic, not to lose control….

Those things were not the spirits of Harry’s beloved dead, I dearly pray. If they were, then the dead in JKR’s world hate the living past measure

I might not have the highest possible opinion of Lily and the Marauders, but I don’t believe for a moment that any entity resembling their living selves would have voluntarily abandoned their beloved boy to die alone like that, terrified and uncomforted in their enemy’s camp. Hell, I don’t think they’d have abandoned Neville in those circumstances. I’m not entirely convinced that Lily and Remus would have joined James and Sirius in abandoning Snivellus to such a fate.

Indeed, the real spirits of those who’d loved Harry might not have consented to Harry’s death at all. The real memory-shades of James and Lily had instructed Harry on how to escape his seemingly-inevitable death in GoF, remember?

“When the connection is broken, we will linger for only moments… but we will give you time… you must get to the Portkey, it will return you to Hogwarts…. do you understand, Harry?”


And when Harry broke the connection between his wand and Tom’s,


the shadowy figures of Voldemort’s victims did not disappear—they were closing in upon Voldemort, shielding Harry from his gaze—

No, those things Harry saw in the Forest were never his real parents. His real parents would have stayed as long as they could, even if Harry had dropped the Stone. Those shapes were demons of some kind, wearing the forms of the dead, bent on driving, tricking, or luring their victim to hir death, and vanishing the very moment their victim took the irrevocable, fatal, final step. Mission accomplished.


“And so Death took the second brother for his own.” (DH 21)


*

Next, consider Tom’s reaction to the real shades in GoF:


Voldemort’s dead victims whispered as they circled the duelers, whispered words of encouragement to the duelers, and hissed words Harry couldn’t hear to Voldemort….

Voldemort, his face now livid with fear as his victims prowled around him….

(GoF 34)

It occurred to me eventually to wonder what Tommy would have seen had he ever turned his uncle’s ring three times, and how those apparitions would have worked on him.

Tom had no one he’d ever cared for, no beloved dead family or friends who could have lured him to do something foolish and fatal out of Tom’s trust or desire to earn a loved one’s approbation….

But of course the answer is obvious.

That Stone doesn’t necessarily invoke the beloved dead. It invokes the significant ones.

Tom would have seen his victims, and they would have hounded him like the Kindly Ones until he’d do anything to escape them. Anything. (Is this the origin of that myth? How old exactly is that Stone? Beedle’s story proclaimed that Death plucked up an existing pebble from the riverbank… The bank of which river, exactly?)

Invisible to everyone else, Tom’s victims would have prowled around him, and whispered to him, and never let him rest….. No flight from them would have been possible. His former diversions, the living people around him whom he’d delighted in dominating and torturing, would have seemed unreal to him; his own body unreal and unimportant. The only thing real would have been the shadows of his dead victims, swarming like mosquitoes, always after him, tormenting him, whining incessantly in his ears, reminding him that his only hope of being free of them, ever, was to….

Had anyone told young Tom what his new ring might be and do, he’d have tried it—at least if he’d heard Gellert’s theory, that it allowed one to control armies of the dead. And he’d have ended his career at sixteen by destroying his own Horcrux (if it existed yet) and throwing himself off the Astronomy Tower. And almost everyone would have shaken their heads in confusion and sorrow at the inexplicable suicide of such a promising young wizard.

*

Revisit Albus, nearly a year after finding the Stone, drinking Tom’s potion in that cave. I never quite bought that the potion was explicitly designed by Tom to induce Remorse, because why would Tom (who can’t feel it) expect remorse to be so debilitating? Rather, I think Tom designed it (based generally on Boggarts), to make one experience the thing one feared most to face—the one thing the victim “dreaded beyond all things”.

Which in Albus’s case was facing the certainty of his own culpability for others’ sufferings and deaths.

Something which fits damn ill with Albus’s preferred self-image.

We are talking about Albus, after all, the man who, on his own admission, allowed masses of people to be killed by his former lover sooner than face the mere possibility of being told for sure that it was he himself, not the lover, who’d killed his baby sister.

Who therefore had all those entirely preventable deaths burdening his conscience as well… and then add in all of Tom’s victims, whose murders Albus also might have prevented….

Here’s Albus in the cave:


“It’s all my fault, all my fault,” he sobbed. “Please make it stop, I know I did wrong, oh please make it stop and I’ll never, never again…”

… Dumbledore began to cower as though invisible torturers surrounded him; his flailing hand almost knocked the refilled goblet from Harry’s trembling hands as he moaned, “Don’t hurt them, don’t hurt them, please, please, it’s my fault, hurt me instead…”

“I want to die! I ant to die! Make it stop, make it stop, I want to die!”

“KILL ME!”


Had Dumbledore seen invisible torturers before?

*

Why did you put on that ring, Albus?

… and how long did you hold out before you did so?

*

Finally, let’s look at what Dumbledore wrote about the Stone in his commentary on Beedle the Bard. Bear in mind that he’s lying to his Wizarding audience here: the Master of the Deathstick, the wizard who’d verified that the Potters’ heirloom cloak was the Third Hallow, and who may have known the holder of the Peverell Stone, told his audience that it would be foolish to believe any such objects existed.

And here’s what he said about his own ambition:


The legend goes further: if any person becomes the rightful owner of all three, then he or she will become “master of Death,” which has usually been understood to mean that they will be invulnerable, even immortal.

We may smile, a little sadly, at what this tells us about human nature. The kindest interpretation would be: “Hope springs eternal.”

In spite of the fact that, according to Beedle, two of the three objects are highly dangerous, in spite of the clear message that Death comes for us all in the end, a tiny minority of the Wizarding community persists in believing that Beedle was sending them a coded message, which is the exact reverse of the one set down in ink, and that they alone are clever enough to understand it.

What is more, Beedle’s story is quite explicit about the fact that the second brother’s lost love has not really returned from the dead. She has been sent by Death to lure the second brother into Death’s clutches, and is therefore cold, remote, tantalizingly both present and absent. (TToBtB)

He supposedly wrote this about eighteen months before his death—therefore at a point in time where he had hopes that Tom’s ring might contain the Resurrection Stone, but before he had recovered it. If so, he’s trying to dissuade anyone from completing his own quest.

What can we infer that he really believed about the Stone, and about the effects of uniting the Hallows, from this pack of deliberate lies?

Well, we do have his word to Harry that he, himself, had still been interested in both. (And his word to Severus that he’d found something tempting about that stone.)

Regarding the Stone, Albus apparently accepted that what the second brother saw was his lost love, if only sent by Death as a trap. Sent temporarily, not permanently returned.

Gellert, and Gellert’s dearest friend, had been sure that the Stone’s master could, not just summon, but command, the dead. Provided one maintained one’s self-command, as that sap of a second brother had not.

No, the dead wouldn’t be returned to actual life. But they would be returned to acting in the world. And they would obey the Stone’s master, even as they tried to lure him to join them. If it was wielded by someone who understood in advance that what he’d be getting would not be dead people restored to true life, and who wasn’t a sentimental idiot who could be ensnared by his own emotions, the Stone could be quite useful. And safe enough, as long as one was master of oneself.

Regarding uniting the Hallows… Albus had been using the Deathstick for half a century. He knew that it amplified his powers immensely, but that it by no means “must always win duels for its owner.” Or rather, he knew that there were dozens of ways the owner could still be defeated—the wand only guaranteed that no other wizard could cast with more power than the wand’s owner. An AK or knife in the back, physical wrestling, theft, subterfuge… Albus had defeated Gellert; every previous owner of the Deathstick had eventually been defeated.

As for the Cloak, Mad-Eye’s magical eye saw through it, animals smell the person through it, and Albus seemed to be able to sense Harry through it. It doesn’t even protect the wearer from hexes (Draco petrified Harry through it, remember).

So he probably took the rumored effects of uniting the Hallows with a grain of salt. He probably did not think it would make him literally immortal. But it might extend his life, perhaps as the Elixir of Life would by stopping his aging, more probably by amplifying his resistance to curses as the Deathstick amplified his castings. That may be how Albus and Gellert thought the Master of Death would be invincible—invulnerable (or nearly so) to others’ curses, one’s own spells supercharged, master of an army that could not be killed (being already dead).

Albus probably believed some watered down version of that. Not truly invincible, as the dead weren’t truly returned by the Stone nor the Wand truly unbeatable, but close enough for practical purposes. Moreover, in the three gifts there’s one power missing. Maybe the Master of Death, the Uniter, gets the missing power? The wand deals death; the stone summons the dead; the cloak confers protection. What’s missing is the power to banish the dead. And Tom Riddle was a dead man walking.

*

To return, finally, to Albus’s temptation.

I think the first, the original, temptation was to use the Stone. By turning it.

And that he did indeed succumb to that temptation in Yorkshire. So much was true.

When he turned that Stone three times, he might indeed have been expecting, hoping, to get a one-time opportunity to beg forgiveness of Ariana and his parents. (Not selfishly to keep them with him, as that fool of a second brother had. Or as a certain other young fool had once hoped for a pair of dead babysitters.) Albus doesn’t like to think ill of himself, after all; I’m sure he did really want to apologize to them, to make all quits..

Or he might have been hoping to find himself master of an army of the dead to throw against Tom.

Or he might have been just testing—if this is the true Resurrection Stone, I can get the Cloak from the boy and see if a Master of Death can unmake Horcruxes. And even if not, being invincible will surely be for the Greater Good. Let’s try a field test under safe conditions, see if this is truly the Stone…

But whatever his expectations, what did Albus really get?

Why did you put on that ring, Albus?

*

By positing that the Head of Hogwarts has one power never shown in canon, I can come up with a scenario completely compatible with Severus’s memory and fully explaining Albus’s urgent need to hide the truth. Even posthumously. Especially posthumously.

Grant the head of Hogwarts the ability to temporarily blind/deafen, stupefy, or banish all those portraits in that office.

Surely no one would ever hang a Wizarding portrait in a bedroom if such an ability did not generally exist, and surely the former heads’ portraits would hang elsewhere if the current head had no means to assure absolute privacy on occasion? (Imagine trying to confer frankly with Minerva or Horace regarding the Black boys knowing that Phineas was reporting every sentence to Walburga, for example. Moreover, even if all the former heads were unshakably loyal first to Hogwarts and its current head, what of their discretion? Talking as openly as Albus and Severus did about the most secret strategies against Voldemort was insane if all those portraits, many with portraits in other premises and some surely with a penchant for gossip, were avidly listening in.)

Stipulating that Albus had such a power, here’s how it might have happened.

Albus found, in the ruins of the Gaunt hovel, heavily warded, that extremely interesting ring that he’d examined in various memories.

Safety first; Albus made his way out of the maze of enchantments and used his wand to turn the thing three times.

And found himself facing Ariana and the parents who’d sacrificed themselves trying to protect her, their faces contorted with hatred and contempt. But with them was a howling mob, the spirit of every person killed (mostly by Tom and Gellert) due to Albus’s assorted misjudgments, negligence, inaction and hubris. A number of them he knew—Myrtle, Marlene, James, Lily, Cedric, Sirius. Hordes more he had only imagined—Gellert’s last victims on the continent, Muggle children from the orphanage, all of the Death Eaters’ victims... They were crowding each other to get at him, reproaching him, each clamoring to explain how Albus’s failures had led directly to the spirit’s doom.

And they wouldn’t let him alone, and they wouldn’t let him rest. He realized almost at once they were invisible to all others—his personal Furies. And nothing he did sufficed to banish them, or silence them, and everything they said was true. It was his fault. All his fault. As they kept telling him.

And they kept telling him what to do if he wanted them ever to leave him alone—put on that ring. Put on the ring, Albus. You know you deserve it. You deserve to die from Tom’s curse, just as we did. You could have saved us from him; you should join us now.

How long did he last? Two hours? Two days? Remember that they never let up on him for a moment, never let him rest. He might even have tried spells to blind and deafen himself temporarily, but he wasn’t perceiving them with his body. And everything they said was true, and Albus knew it.

Finally he came up with a desperate ploy to banish them—destroy the Stone, the treasure he’d been hunting since he was seventeen. Surely if he broke it the dead must vanish….

He went to his office, ensured privacy, took down the Sword, and swung it with all his strength. Maybe even that didn’t work, and he next turned the Deathstick on the Stone. At any rate, Albus did eventually succeed in splitting the Stone in twin.

And the dead laughed.

It’s not so easy, Albus, you can’t get rid of us that way or any way; we’re a part of you. You’re a part of us. You belong to us. You owe us. Put on the ring.

You belong to us, Albus. You belong with us. Put on the ring.

And nothing was real in the world by now but their hissing voices, their hate-filled faces, their almost-touches like cold knife blades burning against his skin as they crowded him. And everything they said was true, and had always been true. He deserved it.

He stretched out his hand to his fate.

He fell backwards into his chair with a blast of pain, and they were gone. They were finally gone. He may have sobbed then in relief.

He finally noticed Fawkes, for the first time in however long. Fawkes was crying over his blackened finger unavailingly.

And he saw his precious Elder Wand, which would answer to Tom upon his death.

Through the fog of shock and pain, his mind eventually started to work again.

He’d never told Harry, or Severus, what they must do. He was handing his treasure and his world both to Tom if he died now.

And worse, what if everyone found out why he’d done it? Those accusations… Could someone cast Priori Incantatem on the stone, and hear what those shapes had been whispering to him? Know his guilt?

No! He struggled to sit up a little and pulled off the ring, dropping it on the table next to the sword.

He slumped back in the chair and whispered, “Fawkes. I need Severus. Bring me Severus.”

What could he tell Severus and everyone to keep them from knowing or guessing? A mistake. It had been a mistake. He’d been too tempted by the Stone to register the curse. He’d lost his head, back there at the Gaunt ruins, back when he first saw it….

It was even almost true.

A black form bent over him. Albus let his eyes drift shut and mumbled, “Almost… didn’t make it back here. Mistake….”

*

One more thing. Why did Albus give the stone to Harry instead of gift-wrapping it and sending it back to Tom with his compliments and the owner’s manual?

I can think of two reasons, one of them relatively benign. Albus may have thought that the Stone had only worked on him as it did because he bore blood-guilt towards his dead kin and he was capable of remorse. The testimony of the story was that the stone recalled the beloved dead and, where there was no guilt, seduced the victim rather than drove him. But cold Tom was capable of neither love nor remorse, so how could Albus, or anyone, expect the stone to work on Tom?

The other reason not to give the stone to Tom was the opposite. If Albus knew from Harry that Tom in the graveyard had been terrified of his victims’ shades, if Albus remembered from tales far older than Beedle’s that the Kindly Ones didn’t require that their clients feel guilty to bestow their gentle attentions, Albus would have expected the stone to work just fine on Tom. (Indeed, Tom was a true parricide—if anything like the Daughters of Night existed in the Potterverse, they’d have been itching to get their claws into him since Tom was 16.)

1990’s Albus would then have expected Tom to be hounded by his victims to destroy all his known Horcruxes and attempt suicide (but not entirely succeed at the last, given the existence of Harrycrux). Which would leave the WW in the condition that Albus had thought it was in 1981, with Voldemort tethered by a single Horcrux but powerless. And this time, perhaps without the will to try returning. And with Harry nearly adult, nearly old enough to consent to break the last tether. (Of course if the body laboriously made with Harry’s blood were destroyed, so too was the dim chance Harry might be able to return from his death. Still, if Albus timed it exactly right so Harry came of age and faced Voldemort first just before Tom inexplicably went mad and destroyed all his known Horcruxes….)

But if all that were to happen, afterwards anyone who figured out why Tom destroyed himself might start wondering just why Albus had once done something so self-destructive as to put on Tom’s ring.

And come, perhaps, to correct conclusions.

That couldn’t be risked.

Comments

Long comment is long, part 2

[the-bitter-word.livejournal.com]

I think Dumbledore didn't send the ring to Voldemort because he realized that Voldemort had made more than one Horcrux and didn't want Voldemort to know he was on to him. Besides, the ring is his Precious, an actual Hallow, something for which Dumbledore squandered his life!

It's also possible he willed it to Harry hoping Harry would be the True Master of Death after the Hallows hunt, no matter that he lied to Harry about it all being a distraction. Harry is the only one Dumbledore "loved," after all, i.e., the one who worshiped him without question, the one he expected to sing his praises long after he had left this plain. And Harry does sing his praises in the heavenly train station (after a little Dumbledore wheedling and whining) and names his child Albus