Hate to open an old wound, but...[night of J&L Potters' death]

[mellienel2 at yahoo.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 26195

...I was going through the lexicon essays (read: at work and bored), 
and I'm troubled...

>From the essay on the Infamous Halloween Night
>>Voldemort attempts to kill Harry Potter, but the spell backfires 
and the Dark Lord is hit. He is barely alive and his body is gone. He 
flees. (This spell never comes out of the wand, so we know that the 
spells that DO come out must have happened after this.) <<

We don't know this for sure. A spell isn't really cast if it doesn't 
work -- witness all the blind sparks that go flying when it misses 
its target. Whatever hit harry did cut his skin (had to be a spell, 
because of the suggestion of power behind JKR's choosing a Lightning 
Bolt scar), but then rebounded, destroying Voldy. Well -- at that 
point, the spell was just a mass of energy blindly hitting something 
(Voldemort). 

It's entirely possible that because the spell didn't succeed, it 
doesn't count as a real spell in Priori Incantatem. Say he cast an AK 
meant to kill Lily, and he missed, and then he cast it and was right 
on. Would Lily come out of the wand twice -- once as the intended 
victim, and once as the real victim? No -- the spell needs to have 
connected, to have the essence of its victim in the wand's history. 

If it only scratched Harry, it could have been just light, nothing 
really worth coming out of a wand -- after all, Wormtail uses Voldy's 
wand to make fire, and I'm sure does many little spells with it 
during the time in which he nursed Voldemort -- if those came out of 
the wand, they were little enough not to be noticeable. The 
unsucessful attack on Harry is like this -- an AK turned into a 
Scratch. As it only got a lightning-shaped part of harry, that's the 
most the wand has of him. Kill a person, you have their whole being, 
and that comes out of the wand.

Again -- I'm not saying it's not possible that it was someone else 
who killed J&L ith Voldy's wand (after all -- Pettigrew wasn't at his 
hiding spot when Sirius went to check on him, and it' sa little 
convenient that Pettigrew is good at making things blow up [muggle 
street, Potters' house...]), but it is definitely possible that it 
was Voldy. the Priori doesn't exclude this.

m