The Life and Lies of Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore by Irvin Khaytman (good fiction books to read txt) 📗

the threat has been nullified). Dumbledore, meanwhile, doubles down on his secrets and his manipulation. It’s time to reset the chessboard for the final match.

Chapter 6:

Albus Dumbledore and the

Half-Blood Prince

When we examine Dumbledore’s plans for how the war with Voldemort would play out, we can only see the plans he formed in July 1996 onwards. This is because there is a crucial paradigm shift in July 1996: Dumbledore no longer expects to live to see the war effort through. He is blindsided during his hunt for the Ringcrux, when he suddenly gets a blast from the past upon finding it:

“When I discovered it, after all those years, buried in the abandoned home of the Gaunts—the Hallow I had craved most of all, though in my youth I had wanted it for very different reasons—I lost my head, Harry. I quite forgot that it was now a Horcrux, that the ring was sure to carry a curse. I picked it up, and I put it on, and for a second I imagined that I was about to see Ariana, and my mother, and my father, and to tell them how very, very sorry I was . . .” (DH719-720)

At this point, Dumbledore has not thought about the Hallows in years; certainly not since returning the Cloak to Harry in 1991. But suddenly, the entire chessboard he’d been setting up is upended: he only has a year to live, at most. The odds of the war ending in that year are so long, even Bagman wouldn’t bet on it. So Dumbledore has to toss all of his plans out the window, and come up with a whole batch of new plans. . . and he has the Hallows as a potential confounding variable now.

Until this moment, Dumbledore fully intended to wipe out the Horcruxes single-handedly. After all, who else could do it? Who else has the magical prowess to deal with Voldemort’s defenses? Who else has the knowledge of Voldemort’s background to figure out what and where the Horcruxes are? And who else has the wherewithal to do it so Voldemort’s none the wiser? Ideally, Dumbledore would get rid of all the Horcruxes, deal with the Scarcrux last of all by instructing Harry to sacrifice himself and defeat Voldemort once and for all.

Also until this moment, Dumbledore fully intended to die (much later) as the undefeated master of the Elder Wand. There are conflicting statements in Deathly Hallows regarding what Dumbledore intended for the Elder Wand, whether he intended to die undefeated or to pass on mastery of the wand to Snape. Credit here must go to mirrormere’s superb editorial, “The Flaw in the Plan,”31 for untangling the conflicting statements about the Elder Wand. I recommend reading the entire piece, but the gist is that when Harry says the following, they should be read as separate statements instead of interconnected ones.

“Snape never beat Dumbledore! Dumbledore’s death was planned between them! Dumbledore intended to die undefeated, the wand’s last true master! If all had gone as planned, the wand’s power would have died with him, because it had never been won from him!” (DH742)

That should be read as:

“Snape never beat Dumbledore! Dumbledore’s death was planned between them!” (true)

“Dumbledore intended to die undefeated, the wand’s last true master! If all had gone as planned, the wand’s power would have died with him, because it had never been won from him!” (true. . . until Dumbledore realized he would be dying in the middle of the war against Voldemort)

This is Harry getting snappish with Voldemort and not explaining himself properly. Then again, he is not a villain, and therefore not as experienced at monologuing for an audience. What he is attempting to communicate is that Dumbledore originally intended to die undefeated “if all had gone as planned.” But when it turned out that Dumbledore would be dying before the war ended, that plan changed.

Choosing a Lieutenant

Anyway, Dumbledore finds out he has a year to live. And this changes everything. Someone else will have to take up the mantle and defeat Voldemort, and Dumbledore will have to split his energies between preparing his replacement and doing all he can now in order to leave less for them to do. So, who should he groom to take over?

Harry seems like the obvious choice in retrospect, but why couldn’t someone else have tackled the Horcruxes while Harry concerned himself only with dealing with Voldemort? “McGonagall is a very worthy second in command,” Jo once said in an interview. Snape is certainly both capable and cunning, though surely a tad busy playing double duty for two bosses. There’s Kingsley, Lupin, Moody, any number of wizards and witches who would take up the mission. As Molly Weasley says, “if Dumbledore needed work doing, he had the whole Order at his command!” (DH88)

In the end, Dumbledore chooses Harry for several reasons, despite his youth and magical inexperience. Harry has experience dealing directly with Voldemort, both from a standpoint of understanding him, and of working through his magical traps. This is, of course, largely by Dumbledore’s own design. Recall that in Sorcerer’s Stone, Dumbledore orchestrated a very elaborate scheme purely to give Harry this valuable experience for the first time. Now, Harry is old hat at fighting Voldemort. When Dumbledore dies, Voldemort is going to have a lot of legroom, and Harry will likely have to be on the run—why not have him doing something useful?

Dumbledore’s first order of business is to get to Slughorn, so Slughorn can provide the last crucial piece of information: how many Horcruxes Voldemort has made. And there is no more time to waste, so he deploys Harry, first to get Slughorn to come to Hogwarts, then by setting Harry the task of retrieving the memory. Dumbledore kills two birds with one stone by making Harry get the memory from Slughorn. Not only does it get Dumbledore the memory at long last, it also provides Harry with experience wheedling information about Voldemort from reluctant people. We see how this comes in