Chapter 160: Horcrux
The rest of the holiday kept Jon rather busy.
His days followed a simple routine: from the Hufflepuff common room, to the Room of Requirement, then to the Great Hall.
Though the snowfall outside the castle had stopped, the grounds were still blanketed in thick snow. Zacharias asked him every day to join in snowball fights or build snowmen. Jon always gave his word, but never actually showed up.
Astoria, meanwhile, had gone home with her sister, since over ten days of break remained.
Jon’s time was absorbed by two main pursuits. One was continuing his work on the potion sequence table...
He had been reconfiguring a batch of Veritaserum in the Room of Requirement, which would be complete by mid-January. Some ingredients—like the signature feather of the Jobberknoll—had to be ordered from Diagon Alley by letter. Others—more common herbs—he had shamelessly asked from Professors Snape and Sprout.
And then there was that book: The Secrets of the Darkest Art. It was, without question, the most profound spellbook Jon had ever encountered.
With Headmaster Phineas Black’s assurance that “the evil of power lies not in the power itself, but in its master,” Jon felt little fear toward dark magic.
Of course, he still maintained the basic respect one should have for unknown forces.
The yellowed, brittle pages of Secrets of the Darkest Art crackled unpleasantly each time he turned them, a sound Jon found especially irritating.
Still, much of its content fascinated him. A prime example was the Fiendfyre Curse.
But what drew his greatest interest was the chapter on Horcruxes.
A Horcrux, much like a lich’s phylactery, served as a method for dark wizards to preserve themselves. Compared to a true Shattered Life Vessel, Jon found Horcruxes pitifully weak.
To create one, a dark wizard had to commit some evil act, like murder, to shatter their soul. A fragment of the soul would then be torn from the body and sealed into a vessel—the Horcrux.
This ensured that even if the body was destroyed, the wizard would not truly die, as part of their soul remained anchored to the world.
Through that remaining fragment, it was even possible to reconstruct a body and achieve resurrection.
But in Jon’s opinion, the soul was one of the most vital aspects of a wizard. To willingly tear it apart in exchange for so-called immortality was far too steep a price.
No wonder Voldemort ended up a twisted, half-human, half-spectral monster.
And the process itself inflicted unbearable pain. For most dark wizards, enduring such agony once—enough to create a single Horcrux—was already an extraordinary feat.
That Voldemort had managed to split his soul into six and a half fragments... truly proved Dumbledore right in calling him an exceptional Hogwarts graduate. The pain he must have endured to achieve it was unimaginable.
Any object could serve as a Horcrux, but transferring a soul into it required immensely powerful enchantments to safeguard its existence.
The Horcrux and its container were directly bound. If the vessel was destroyed, the soul fragment within would collapse.
This damage inevitably weakened the main soul, further shattering what was already unstable. The most immediate consequence was madness: the wizard would lose reason and descend into insanity. Put simply, destroying a Horcrux didn’t reduce a wizard’s magical strength—but it left them mindless.
That certainly matched Voldemort’s later years of madness and reckless behavior.
Jon reread that chapter several times. Unfortunately, while it explained the method of creating Horcruxes, it gave no incantation for splitting the soul.
That was the part Jon most wanted to find.
The omission left him disappointed. Clearly, Voldemort must have discovered the incantation through some other means.
...
On the final day of the Christmas break, Jon returned to the Hufflepuff common room with the book under his arm and was surprised to hear whispers inside.
“What’s going on?” he asked curiously.
“Hagrid...” Ernie Macmillan looked alarmed as he lowered a copy of the Daily Prophet.
“You should call him Professor Hagrid,” Jon corrected calmly.
“Fine... whatever you call him... he’s actually a half-giant!” Ernie handed Jon the paper with trembling hands. “A half-giant! That’s terrifying!”
Seeing the fear etched on Ernie’s face, Jon wondered whether pure-blood families really taught their children to believe giants were so monstrous.
He unfolded the paper and saw Hagrid’s photograph on the front page. The angle of the shot made him look shifty and secretive.
The headline blared: “Shocking! Dumbledore’s Terrible Blunder!”
And of course, the article was written by Rita Skeeter.
Jon skimmed it. As expected, Skeeter smeared both Dumbledore and Hagrid. Under her pen, Hagrid became a bloodthirsty butcher, while Dumbledore was painted as a sinister schemer.
Objectively speaking, Jon thought her description of Dumbledore wasn’t entirely inaccurate.
“My father will definitely protest to Professor Dumbledore!” Ernie Macmillan declared firmly. “He’ll never allow a half-giant to be my teacher!”
“Actually, Hagrid’s not so bad...” a timid second-year girl whispered. “Last year, on the boat ride, I accidentally fell into the lake... and it was Hagrid who swam out and saved me! He even wrapped me in his moleskin coat—though it was so heavy I could barely breathe.”
“Do you have any idea how terrifying giants are?!” Ernie snarled, making a gruesome face that made the girl flinch. “Do you know how many people they’ve eaten? During You-Know-Who’s reign, the worst Muggle massacres—they were the ones behind them!”
Jon didn’t join the argument.
Hagrid had been good to him, and he had no reason to speak ill of him.
Besides, he knew perfectly well that with Dumbledore’s unshakable trust in Hagrid, not even a mountain of Howlers from parents could ever see him sacked.
That was who Dumbledore was: once he trusted someone, he trusted them completely.
And in his lifetime, Jon thought, Dumbledore had only ever made one mistake.
Author's Note
Comments (0)
Please login or sign up to post a comment.