HBP Chapter Twenty-Six: "The Cave"

[for-diddled.livejournal.com]

* I don’t know why, but whenever I read this chapter’s title it makes me think of My Immortal. “Harry was expecting Dumbledore to take him to the 3 bromsticks, but instead they went into………… DA CAVE!!!!!!!”

* Tom must have had some pretty awesome wizarding skills to magically get himself and two other people down the cliff at age ten. Harry, naturally, can’t do this after his sixth year at wizarding school, and has to climb down the muggle way.

* Wait, so how can you tell that a place has “known magic”? I don’t think we’ve been given any indication before that you can sense where a magical enchantment has been cast. Maybe it’s just a super special power that only Dumbledore has.

* So Harry and Dumbledore swim through the water to enter the cavern. For some reason this fact strikes me as rather Freudian.

* Dumbles works out where the concealed entrance is by running his hands along the cave walls, which again is something we’ve never seen before. What is this skill? And why isn’t it taught at Hogwarts? Maybe Dumbledore’s just been slipping curiosity-reducing potion into the Hogwarts pumpkin juice for the last x number of years, and doesn’t teach people how to recognise magic in order to reduce his chances of being found out. Naturally now that Voldemort’s come back the Headmaster needs to keep people even more docile than usual to stop them questioning his war strategy, so he’s been upping the dose over the past two years. That explains why nobody really cares about the attempted murders, and why Ron and Hermione don’t want to investigate the Draco mystery. (Harry does because his deep and enduring love for Draco is even stronger than the curiosity-killing potion.)

* “‘Harry, I’m sorry, I forgot,’ [Dumbledore] said.” Yeah, well done Professor, forgetting that your favourite pupil and the only hope of the wizarding world is catching hypothermia right next to you. What was that you said last chapter about caring for the safety of your students?

* “Once again, Lord Voldemort fails to grasp that there are much more terrible things than physical injury.” Yeah, but if you’re going to have to fight off a horde of inferi, being physically injured isn’t that good a situation to be in.

* That said, a little bit of blood wouldn’t hurt you that much, especially not since you could magically heal yourself immediately afterwards. Why not make it a really big payment, like having to kill somebody to get in? That way no good guy could ever get to your Horcrux, because they’d all be too noble (alright, alright, stop laughing) to do so.

* I’m not sure why Dumbledore thinks that trying out a spell which is bound to fail and alerts whatever’s guarding the Horcrux to your presence is “a very good idea”, but oh well.

* “‘Magic always leaves traces,’ said Dumbledore.” Not that you need to know what these traces are, Harry, or how to recognise them, even though you’ll be spending most of next year hunting for a series of hidden magical objects, and being able to tell where somebody’s cast a spell would be very helpful for that sort of thing.

* Dumbles said that weight won’t be an issue when crossing, because Voldie would care more about magical power, and bewitch the boat to only take one wizard at a time. Erm… if you say so, Dumbledore. I mean, sure, maybe he has done that; then again, maybe he hasn’t, or maybe he has, but in such a way that the boat will still capsize if it’s overloaded. You’re taking an awful risk based on a guess about a boat you just discovered thirty seconds ago, aren’t you?

* Speaking of wild guesses: “I do not think you will count, Harry: you are underage and unqualified.” Gosh, how convenient that Voldemort tied his super security system to the government’s statutes about when you can and can’t perform magic unsupervised.

* “Voldemort’s mistake, Harry, Voldemort’s mistake… age is foolish and forgetful when it underestimated youth,” says the man whom even death can’t prevent from manipulating his teenage protégé.

* The corpses floating in the lake are pretty cool, but seem suspiciously similar to the Dead Marshes from The Lord of the Rings.

* I’m not sure why wizards would view death as this great unknown mystery, when their world is full of ghosts, sentient portraits of dead people, and a stone able to summon back spirits from the afterlife.

* Yes, Voldemort, guard your precious soul-fragment with creatures which can be defeated by a basic fire-making spell! That’ll work as a security arrangement.

* So OK, Dumbles, maybe Voldemort wouldn’t want to immediately kill somebody who tried to drink the potion, but again, you’re taking a big risk based on nothing more than speculation and guesswork.

* It would kind of serve Dumbledore right if it turned out that the potion was in fact a poison which takes immediate effect, and he keeled over and died as soon as the first drop touched his lips.

* Wait, so if Voldemort would want to question anybody who gets this far, why didn’t he set up some kind of alarm system to go off when somebody tampers with the potion? He clearly doesn’t check his Horcruxes regularly, so anybody who did get this far would probably be incapacitated and die slowly anyway, in which case why not just fill the basin with poison to be on the safe side?

* Also, why does Dumbledore not try just pouring the potion on the ground, or even using the goblet to scoop out the Horcrux? Or does the Gryffindor code say that only recklessly brave ideas can be considered?

* So Harry tries to get Dumbledore some water, and accidentally ends up raising a whole lake full of zombies against them. Oops. Hey Potter, why didn’t you try conjuring water straight into Dumbledore’s mouth? Sheesh.

* Dumbledore says it’s “quite understandable” that Harry panicked and forgot to use fire. He’s right, of course, but he’s also highlighting how woefully unprepared Harry is for finding Horcruxes. You’d want to train him up almost like you train soldiers, so that when things start getting hairy he can keep his cool and take appropriate measures almost without thinking about it. Sending Harry as he is now to go after Horcruxes is like dragging somebody from high school, putting a gun in their hands and drafting them into a special ops unit without any basic training.

* “‘I am not worried, Harry,’ said Dumbledore, his voice a little stronger despite the freezing water. ‘I am with you.’” Even though Harry just panicked in the face of an Inferi attack and Dumbledore had to save the day. What a toady that man is.

Comments

[terri-testing.livejournal.com]

As destroying the Horcrux in the Resurrection Stone would have been his One Last Act had Severus not successfully stoppered that death?

Really, now I think of it, this puts a kbosh on my theory that Albus had developed a Horcrux-detection spell. Because if he could tell the locket in the birdbath wasn't one, it's had to see why he put himself through all of that. Why pick that particular means and time of suiciding, if he didn't expect to take the second Horcrux with him?

(I mean, nobly sacrificing himself to kill one-seventh of Riddle's soul is one thing---being a chump who died to recover a fake is another.)

(And maybe Albus originally planned/expected to put on a reprise of the RS-Horcrux destruction' he'd "kill" the Birdbath-Horcrux with the Sword of Gryffindor, showing Harry how it's done, and then call Snape and allow Severus to "treat" him. Only he overestimated his resistance to the potion's effects, along with underestimating Draco, and had to give up that portion of the plan--or was too disoriented to remember it--or too eager to die--before he reached the castle.)

Unless the properties of the potion were such, he couldn't tell what was or wasn't in the Birdbath until the potion was drunk....? The potion WAS impossible to affect magically (couldn't be transfigured, charmed, or banished), so maybe it shielded the contents from magical as well as mortal vision, and DD just INFERRED there must be a Horcrux at the bottom.

As for Draco's plans... I imagine Albus thought, two attempts to smuggle lethal artifacts via the Leaky Cauldron having failed, that what Draco was trying to repair in the RoHT was another cursed artifact that he wouldn't have to try to get past Filch's probity probes. And naturally, nothing that little Draco could possibly manage could inconvenience the great AD in any way, so he wasn't worried about Draco's gleeful "whoops." (Draco's surprise for him, of course, especially could not inconvenience Albus if he had recently died of other causes.) The fact that he picked a night when Draco was in the RoR (and Draco's demeanor might of signalled he was hopeful of being near success), did not change his plans on hearing Harry's news, and deliberately showed himself to Rosmerta really does suggest he was leading Draco on to try his worst....

[nx74defiant.livejournal.com]

It is in character for DD to underestimate Draco. One of DD problems is he thinks everyone else is inferior to him.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Because if he could tell the locket in the birdbath wasn't one, it's had to see why he put himself through all of that. Why pick that particular means and time of suiciding, if he didn't expect to take the second Horcrux with him?

Well, Severus gave him a year back in early July 1996. It was now June 1997. His time was nearly up. There may have been other signs that the curse was progressing and he wouldn't even have the full year. He might have tried to find other Horcruxes but had no leads, and he really wanted to purify his soul before his death.

[lynn-waterfall.livejournal.com]

Perhaps Dumbledore was so sure there was a horcrux in the cave that he simply never bothered to cast a detection spell. Anyone can be so sure about something that they don't think to check it in every possible way, and Dumbledore is more, shall we say, automatically confident of his reasoning than average. And Voldemort was clearly protecting something important there.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Come to think of it, I like the idea that the potion itself blocks the detection spell (not necessarily by intention of its designer). That would give the Severus of UA a reason to feed it to Petunia.

[nx74defiant.livejournal.com]

It never seems to occur to DD that he was wrong. If things don't go according to plan it is someone else fault.

[oneandthetruth.livejournal.com]

Well, sure! He's a narcissistic psychopath. They're only responsible for successes. Failures have to be somebody else's fault because they themselves are too perfect to fail.

[oryx_leucoryx]

Hmm. If Albus expected to manage to demonstrate the destruction of the Horcrux, why would he need the books to be out? I think he wasn't quite certain, so he left the books out, maybe open or bookmarked on the page that explains about basilisk venom, in hope he'd manage to instruct Harry how to do it even if he wouldn't be able to do it himself. Alternately, he really was not expecting to bring back a Horcrux and left the books out for Harry's later benefit, but he was keeping up the pretense for as long as he could (which was why he avoided telling Harry anything that Harry might expect to be demonstrated to him).

[oryx_leucoryx]

Another take: Dumbles used his detection spell, got no response, but convinced himself that absence of evidence was not, in this particular case, evidence for absence, because the potion must have been blocking the spell.