Subject: Re: Potion in the Cave

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 146003

Nicky Joe wrote:
> I've been lurking, but this one caught my attention.
> 
> Carol wrote:
> >Voldemort would have no reason to remove his own Horcrux unless he 
> thought it was in danger of being discovered. The potion ...is to 
> prevent it from being taken from the cave once it was retrieved.
> 
(Nicky Joe:)
> This was never quite plausible to me.  I could not understand why LV
would not want to kill the potion drinker immediately - like after the
first sip! - in order to prevent them from getting their hands on the
Horcrux at all.  Why allow them to drink it all down and possibly
escape with the locket?  I really hope JKR has a good explanation for
this one, other than the need to weaken DD for his confrontation with
Snape.  The only explanation I could accept was that there would be
some sort of magical alarm raised for LV when the Horcrux was
discovered - he might want that person alive to question and determine
how he found out about the Horcrux in the first place.  But I would
expect LV to Apparate to the cave immediately after the alarm was
raised, and obviously that didn't happen. <snip>

Carol responds:
After reading your abbreviated quote from my post and your response, I
went back to the original post to see what I actually wrote and
discovered this gem:

"The potion (which I agree is a kind of poisoned memory,
appropriately colored a venomous green like Nagini and the blinding
flash of an AK) would be there as a deterrent to anyone (not
specifically Dumbledore) who got past the other magical protections
(with the water and the Inferi as further protections against anyone
who succeeded in removing from the pensievelike bowl) to prevent it
from being taken from the cave once it was retrieved."

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/145831

What I actually meant was "The potion would deter anyone who got past
the other magical protections from reaching the locket by torturing
them. Anyone who actually succeeded in retrieving the locket after
drinking the potion would be forced to drink the water, arousing the
Inferi, which would prevent it from being taken from the cave once it
was retrieved." And in the unlikely event that the Horcrux thief
actually got past the Inferi and out of the cave, he would die
painfully, without the physical strength or magical power to destroy
the Horcrux. But I don't think LV expected anyone to get that far.
They'd drink the water and stir up the Inferi before they took more
than two or three gobletsful of the horrible poisoned memory.

To respond to your point, I think he wanted to torture anyone who
attempted to retrieve the Horcrux. The effects of the potion (or
poisoned memory) seem to combine mental anguish and physical agony (a
prolonged Crucio?) in addition to the terrible thirst that can only be
quenched by drinking the Inferi-infested water. I'm sure LV thought he
was combining a more than sufficient deterrent with a terrible
punishment. I agree that LV's failure to apparate immediately to the
cave as DD was drinking the potion invalidates the alarm bell theory.

I'm actually more interested in reactions (including yours) to the
Bellatrix scenario I proposed, but I'll wait for more responses before
returning to the thread. But I did feel a need to clarify my meaning
and apologize for the convoluted sentence that necessitated the
ellipses and to thank Nicky Joe for showing me, through the ellipses,
that what I wrote and what I meant were not quite the same. (Now if
that were someone else's sentence and it had showed up in a manuscript
I was editing, I would have shown it no mercy.)

Carol, who would resolve not to write convoluted sentences with
multiple parenthetical phrases or clauses but knows she would break
the resolution within a week