Flint?

[pippin_999]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "constancevigilance"
<constancevigilance at y...> 
wrote:
> I'm trying to put together a timeline of when horcruxes were made 
> and with which murders they might be associated. I think I've 
> encountered a problem in the Riddle murder timeline.
> 
> When Tom is asking Slughorn about horcruxes, he is wearing the ring 
> which means he has already killed the Riddles. At this point, he 
> doesn't know how to create a horcrux which means he hasn't created 
> the diary yet. How much time can pass with a murder hanging out 
> there before it can become a horcrux? We don't know, so we don't 
> know if the Riddle murders are available to be used for the ring 
> horcrux. But this is a discussion for another day. Back to the 
> timeline problem.
> 
> Tom creates the diary using his 16-year-old self. Presumably he was 
> actually 16 when he created it and it is likely that he used the 
> murder of Myrtle for that horcrux.
> 
> The Lexicon places the death of the Riddles after Tom leaves 
> Hogwarts, but this doesn't seem possible if he is already wearing 
> the ring when he talks to Slughorn and before he has made any 
> horcruxes. He must have killed the Riddles before Myrtle and before 
> he left Hogwarts.
> 
> A flint or an error in the Lexicon?

Pippin:
I can't speak for Steve, but it wasn't clear to me from GoF exactly
when the Riddles died (fifty years before could be an approximation,
especially given  Jo!math.) However the lexicon takes all numbers 
given in canon as is. 

 I think we all assumed that Tom must have left school by then
because we thought if he'd done underage magic, it would have been 
detected. 

Of course we knew nothing of Morphin. When you assume...

I also think that Tom knew more than he was letting on about Horcruxes
when he questioned Sluggy. He doesn't press Slughorn about the spell,
but goes right on to whether it's possible to make more than one,
and whether seven would be particularly powerful. 

I think he had already made the Diary, with Myrtle, and was 
hoping to make another with his father's death, but wasn't sure it was
possible. As for the source of his  knowledge,  I speculated
pre-HBP about what would have happened if Tom had discovered the 
RoR and asked for a Dark Arts library. I think we found out. 

I get the feeling the torn soul fragment sticks around -- otherwise
you wouldn't need to horcrux it to keep it outside your body.

Pippin
wondering about the possibility that the basilisk was a Slytherin
horcrux. Kneasy?