Death's own cloak

[sunnyskywalker]

The cloak has always seemed the odd Hallow out. It makes you invisible, but no more invisible than any other invisibility cloak. Dumbledore said vaguely that the cloak could "protect" anyone under it, but we see that you can easily be Petrified while under the cloak, and so presumably other curses won't have any trouble getting through either. Its only other special power seems to be not getting weaker over time. How can that measure up next to a super-powerful, semi-sapient want and a stone that (seemingly) lets you talk to dead people?

I finally realized that there's one power the cloak might well have, which would fit in seamlessly with everything JKR set up for it. It's just that the characters never had occasion to test it.

While I have plenty of objections to the context of Harry walking up to commit suicide by dark lord, if he had ended up there by other means (like, having had the opportunity to try other means of getting the Horcrux out of his forehead and this actually being the last option, or at least realizing he'd been robbed of the chance to try other things and holding it against Dumbledore), it would be a powerful moment: with the fairy-tale resonance previously set up that one removes the cloak in order to face death not as a victim but an equal, Harry takes off the cloak that hides him from death and faces Voldemort's killing curse.

Metaphors are frequently literal in the Potterverse: depression is a spooky cloaked figure lurking about trying to suck your soul out, fear is a monster in the closet, luck comes in a bottle.

What about Death? Dumbledore's vague "protection" gets everyone thinking about a cloak that shields one from harm generally, but maybe that's stretching the tale too far. Beedle didn't say the cloak hid the youngest brother from Death, his brother Grievous Bodily Harm, and their cousin Ouch That Stings: it hid him from Death, and only Death.

What if the cloak can block Avada Kedavra?

That would mean that in taking off the cloak, Harry was literally removing his protection from death - and specifically, a means of death he'd faced and escaped before.

It might protect against other normally fatal actions, too. Perhaps if Harry had put his cloak on in the DoM, he could have walked through the Veil and then walked right back out again. Maybe even with Sirius, if he popped Sirius under the cloak first.

How the cloak manages to shield one from death but not injury, I can't say, though developing oddly specific magic doesn't seem out of character for wizards. Maybe the anti-death property, whatever it is, interferes with any shield charms.

Just for fun, though, here's one possibility: interwoven with the usual demiguise hair are threads from the Veil, or something like it. Being enveloped in something with just a little bit of whatever the Veil is removes your "death" (life force? soul? who knows?) from the world, at least in part; that is, your "death" is already behind the Veil (but anchored to your living body), and so anything that would ordinarily cause your death can't reach it. But since only your death is out of reach, not the rest of you, everything else still touches you as usual.

This could explain why the cloak's power never fades: the demiguise hair (being dead and so probably having some interesting reaction to Veil threads) is affected by being part here and part beyond the Veil, and so time doesn't pass for it as normal. It could also explain a property some here have speculated it also has, that of making a frequent wearer feel "cut off" from the world: you actually aren't all here. (It wasn't designed as a trap, but why would you expect Death's own cloak to have no side-effects for mortals for whom it was not designed, after all?)

If any of the characters had ever figured out this property of the cloak, we might have had some very interesting adventures behind the Veil, and who knows what else.

If I'm right, it would also mean that, had James had the cloak that Halloween night, there is a very slight chance he could have lived long enough, before Voldemort realized the problem and tried a different spell, to give Lily enough precious seconds to grab Harry and jump out the window while Apparating away. Oops. Dumbledore can console himself with the thought that if James was careless enough not to have his wand on him, he no doubt would not have had the cloak to hand either, surely...

Comments

[duniazade.livejournal.com]

That's a brilliant interpretation!

It gives me a lot of plot bunnies. :D

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

To take this speculation one step further, maybe you can't die at all as long as you're wearing the cloak, no matter how grievously you're injured. For example, if hit with a curse that caused your heart to explode in your chest, your soul would still remain bound to your body and in the physical world until the cloak was removed, so you'd still be technically 'alive' in some metaphysical sense.

Hmm. The legend also says that the third brother *chose* to remove the cloak and embrace death. Maybe as long as you're not hit with a spell or injury that paralyzes or inhibits you (eg limbs removed or transfigured into something useless), you'll still maintain some degree of autonomous motion even if otherwise mortally injured. If so, the cloak would turn you into some kind of ensouled zombie (would you begin to rot under the cloak if your body could no longer function but your soul was still present?). You might not die, but you'd really wish you could. And there's a very simple way to achieve that....

I think we may have another booby here, just not one as obvious as the other two. There's a reason 'Death Takes a Holiday' stories are usually horror, after all... and if Death was truly furious at being thwarted in claiming the brothers, wouldn't a decent consolation prize be to have the 'wise' brother who continued to elude him eventually come begging to him for release?

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

A second thought on what it means for the uniter of the Hallows to be The Master of Death, Death's Equal, and, by Albus' interpretation, Immortal.

Suppose the cloak does work by binding the soul to the physical body, but does nothing to protect that body from harm. Now add the other two items as described in Beedle. The all powerful Elder Wand, capable of killing any opponent. The Resurrection Stone, capable of calling shades of the dead back into the world of the living. And the master of the hallows under the Cloak. Their soul bound to their body by the Cloak long after that body had ceased to function naturally. Perhaps long after that body had rotted away to nothing but bone?

A familiar image, no? An invisible, living skeleton stalking the land, choosing who dies and who lives....

I believe it was Nietzsche who once warned that those who fight monsters must beware lest they become monsters themselves.




(In the interest of fairness, the Grim Reaper is traditionally a neutral figure (the true equalizer of society), not a malevolent one. In some fairy tales, like Godfather Death, he is even benevolent (within limits).)

[sunnyskywalker]

Oh, I like this! The cloak > Grim Reaper connection is excellent!

If the Master of Death doesn't use the wand only for killing, he could probably cast some soul-sucking curses, and we'd get a kind of ur-dementor in there too. Or can the Stone not just return departed shades -- apparently -- but suck a shade right out of a living person, if you know how to use it? Maybe you can only unlock that feature once you have all three...

So many excellent possibilities could come from this.

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

Are we assuming the shades are real souls - who somehow are unanimous in their 'Yay! Let's all commit suicide!' philosophy - or are they some sort of demon disguising themselves as the dearly departed specifically to better tempt the user into suicide?

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

Maybe what they are is not either one, but a kind of holographic, interactive program designed to look like a given person's loved ones, but programmed to say things that will make death look attractive and/or encourage a person to die/commit suicide. After all, if the stone belonged to Death, of course whatever it produces is going to make death look good. Since Death is a supernatural being, it could have had access for centuries to technology humans have only recently invented.

[oryx_leucoryx]

In the legend the stone was a random pebble that Death picked up. Death didn't need the stone, nor did he ever have it for long. But he must have given it a power he had. Hmm, was the pre-Peverel Death more powerful than present-day Death?

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

This assumes that there was a real Death that created the Hallows and gave them to humans. Which is possible in Rowling!verse, but I find it a bit unsatisfactory. My current head!canon is that they were made by wizards - incredibly powerful, brilliant wizards, yes - but still mortal and fallible. The legend about meeting Death grew up around them later and was a corruption and romanticization of what had actually happened.

The 'bridge' the brothers created that so angered Death was, in reality, the Veil we see in the DoM. I think they wove the Veil of Thestral hair treated in a potion consisting, at least in part, of Unicorn blood (willingly given) and Phoenix tears. The selection of the stones for the arch and the final construction were guided by the Darkest, most ancient arts, the Great Mysteries and Cthonic Rites, all taken to the utmost limits of possibility.

This was the first time that mortals had created a standing portal to the afterlife (or whatever dimension it connects to in reality), and the entities that lived on the other side were Not Pleased. Not. One. Bit. The brothers, unfortunately, didn't realize how angry the Denizens of the Other Side were, and instead sought their knowledge, assuming they would respond in good faith instead of seeking to wipe out the interlopers.

I have some ideas on how the Denizens managed to sabotage the two older brothers' requests so thoroughly, but we're focused on the cloak. I believe that the cloak is relatively benign specifically because the youngest brother didn't ask for help in designing it from whatever lay beyond the Veil. He wove leftover Thestral hair from the creation of the Veil into the cloak he was making, but his goal was never an Ur-Invisibility Cloak for this side of the Veil - his goal was to create something that would allow him to pass through the Veil and return safely. While he was on the other side, his goal was to observe the beings that existed there without disturbing them or alerting them to his presence - much like any naturalist might camouflage themselves and mask their scent while trying to observe creatures in their natural habitat. Thus, a Cloak that can 'hide one from Death.'

We know Peeves could perceive Harry's presence under the cloak, but he couldn't distinguish him from a ghost. Did we ever see a ghost notice Harry under the Cloak? Could Moody's Mad Eye also perceive ghosts when they had turned themselves invisible, or just humans? Dumbledore claimed a hominem revelum spell could detect Harry under the Cloak, but if someone cast a spell to detect ghosts, might that throw up a false positive for someone under the Cloak?

I think that the Cloak's apparent indestructibility was more a happy side-effect of the materials used in its crafting than the goal. If it is also capable of keeping its wearer alive (or at least their soul bound to their flesh) indefinitely, that effect is likely an incidental corollary to whatever spells were woven into it to allow safe passage through the Veil.

(Of course, I also think the Cloak didn't work as intended. You could indeed pass through the Veil safely, but because you were still bound to the mortal world you could never pass far beyond it - perhaps only as far as the cracks of mortal light creeping around the edges of the Veil might reach. Who said probing the Great Mysteries was easy?)

[sunnyskywalker]

I love both your bridge/Veil Arch creation process and your wizarding naturalist :D

[sunnyskywalker]

Could be illusions or demons or maybe "echoes" (whatever came out of Voldemort's wand from Priori Incantatem), or possibly real souls who have been effectively Imperiused? Ugh, imagine real souls that can be yanked away from wherever they were and mind-controlled by anyone who happens to get their hands on the special rock.

I very much hope they aren't real.

His brother Grievous Bodily Harm

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

and their cousin Ouch that Stings!

Have I mentioned recently how much I love the way you LOOK at things?

And the whole is very thought-provoking.

Re: His brother Grievous Bodily Harm

[sunnyskywalker]

Why thank you! :-)