The Green Goo Again, and a new(!) view of the Tower (long)

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 165787

> Carol:
> But I still can't quite get past DD deliberately drinking the stuff.
> He must not have expected to find it there, and he must have thought
> that the Horcrux was real. I think he would only have come down to
> your reasoning once he recognized the potion and determined that it
> was indeed Snape's. (If you're right, that is. I'm still not sure.)

Pippin:
Agreed. From what Dumbledore said earlier about Voldemort's
careless disposition of The Ring and The Diary, he wasn't expecting
the sort of elaborate and dangerous protections he encountered. I
doubt he would ever have taken Harry with him, and possibly wouldn't
have engaged Harry in the horcrux hunt at all if he'd known. 

It was all predicated on the idea that Voldemort thinks no one knows 
about his horcruxes, after all, but evidently Voldemort did think
someone might be coming after this one.  I think if Harry had refused 
to give his word, or hadn't felt able to honor it, Dumbledore would 
have turned back. But I think he feared that there might never 
be a better chance at this horcrux if he did. 
 
Possibly this horcrux was guarded like no other because
Voldemort realized that unlike Lucius, Bella had guessed 
what she'd been entrusted with. When he discovered that, 
Voldemort began to worry that someone else might guess too.

Voldemort then decided to recover the horcrux from her and hide 
it in the cave, concealed with the potion Snape had invented for
the Dark Lord's enemies. But what Voldemort wouldn't know was
that Regulus had discovered Bella's secret already. 

What happened next is unclear.

If  the Vampire!Snape fiasco has taught me anything, it's that my
second-order hypotheses from canon are  highly entertaining 
(well, to me, anyway :) )but largely useless as a means of 
prediction. My sense is we just don't know enough right now 
to guess how the substitute locket ended up in the basin, 
though it's fun to try.

 I don't much like the idea that Kreacher drank the poison, though.
House Elves are more sensitive to poisons than humans, not less. 
Consider poor Winky, sloshed on mere butterbeer.
My guess is that if any House Elf drank twelve draughts of the goo,
it'd be dead.

I still think the switching spell Rowling showed us with the bookcovers
has something to do with it. She certainly made sure we understand just
how it works. Could a switching spell allow Slytherin's locket, with
the horcrux inside, to assume the cover of the Black locket, while
the Black locket, with the note inside, got the Slytherin cover? 

Then Regulus would swap the disguised lockets so that Bella had a 
locket with a genuine Slytherin outside, but the note within, while 
Regulus had a locket with the Black outside but the horcrux inside. 
All it would take is a sleeping draught in Bella's nightcap and 
she'd wake none the wiser, with Slytherin's locket still apparently
safe around her handsome neck.

When Voldemort recovered the locket from Bella nothing would
seem amiss, since the outside would be perfectly genuine and, 
according to Dumbledore, Voldemort can't detect the presence or 
absence of his soul fragments. The seemingly intact Slytherin 
locket  would then go into the green goo. There would be
no reason for Voldemort to tell Snape what use he'd made of
the recipe.

Meanwhile, Regulus got killed before he could discover how to
destroy the horcrux locket, which remained at GP.

But when Dumbledore, who does know how to detect horcruxes,
scooped the locket out of the goo, he suspected a switch.
He was able to reverse the switching spell but not the swap, so
that the locket  then had its proper outside, that of the
Black locket, and its proper inside, Regulus's note. There's
not a lot of canon for Dumbledore's discovery of the theft, but
he does stagger and lean against Harry when Harry tries to
cheer him with the thought that at least they'd got the horcrux.
I think he already knew they didn't.

But meanwhile, perhaps, unbeknownst as yet to our heroes, the 
Slytherin locket at GP (or wherever it is now) has taken on its on 
its rightful form...


It's a little complicated and would probably be easier to 
explain with diagrams. My compliments if you've followed all this.
But I don't think we can rule it out on that ground. I usually
have to re-read the ending chapters of Rowling's books three
or four times before I even think I understand what happened.

Carol:
 Also, I don't think we can dismiss
> the UV quite that easily. It's surely more than a red herring, as
> indicated by all that sinister imagery of flames and bonds at the
> close of "Spinner's End."

Pippin:
I think the UV is like the prophecy. It has some importance, but
not as much as the DE's think. The UV isn't a sacred promise at all
-- it's a travesty of the whole concept, as I think JKR suggests 
by having Snape and Narcissa parody a wedding rite.

 If Narcissa thought Snape valued honor more than life, she'd 
never have asked for a UV in the first place. Snape was indeed bound
by the magic to die if he broke the UVs, but he was *never*,
honor-bound to keep them, except in so far as protecting
and watching over Draco  was already his duty as Head of Slytherin.
But as for committing murder, no such promise could be sacred.

Pippin