Order Only: Private Message to Harry and Draco

[alt_hermione]

Harry, Draco let me read over his shoulder last night.

What do you think you're going to do? You could simply disappear as soon as school's over. Come here and not let anyone get you back to Buckingham.

That would let us all think over what to do. Did Moon give you precise notes about the ritual? The more detail we have, the better we can plan how to make sure it can't ever happen.

Comments

[alt_harry]

I could, yeah. But what if that last horcrux is in Buckingham? It's not exactly easy to nip in there to pull off a burglary. It'll be a lot easier if someone's already there.

I told Moon I was writing a story to impress a girl, and that it had a villain in it that just happened to be doing what Voldemort's done with me, kept them safe and uninjured until they were grown. I told him I wanted the magic the villain was using to be something real. Linus had a couple of ideas but here's the one I think Voldemort is actually up to:

'The most shrouded in mystery, and therefore probably best for your purposes as it allows the greatest liberties to be taken fictionally, is a spell supposedly practiced by certain ancient families in the dim recesses of time. When there was great need for a strong leader to provide continuity in times of threat or turmoil, this method allowed the head of a family to take possession permanently of a younger family member, thereby providing unbroken guidance through troubled times. The references suggest that this spell exacts grave payment from its caster (though, of course, not so grave as that experienced by its subject!) in the form of an inability to bear or sire further offspring when in the new body, thus necessitating the next move be into a nephew, niece, foster child, or some such. It all sounded quite dire, and might be exactly what you need, should you wish a villain with a yen to live forever and a fondness for breeding programs to provide appropriate vessels through the millennia. This is further suited to your purposes in that the references specify that the vessel need not be willing to receive the incoming soul — which lets you build quite a harrowing villain indeed. (Nor does the vessel necessarily need to remain unblemished, though obviously if a villain is going to the trouble to find a nice body to move into, they’d probably take care not to muck it up with too much torture, et cetera.) You can find what references there are under the search term “Succession Rite,” though if you’d like to see the primary sources, it would probably quicker for me to assemble them for you than for you to plow through the stacks in search, unless that’s really the sort of thing you enjoy.'

[alt_harry]

He's happy to get me all the additional details I want, so long as it's after NEWTs.

[alt_harry]

Have you ever heard of this? Is there anything in the 12GP library, or the Malfoy one?

Dolohov had heard of it. He clearly knew it was real.