Horcruxes revealed

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: Chapter 23

Quick random thoughts as I was trying to fall asleep last night after reading this chapter and finally discovering the mystery of Horcruxes:

• Wow!
• Talk about selling your soul to the devil.
• Like, how many times now does this mean Harry has to kill Voldemort? Gonna have to go back through the chapter tomorrow when I write about it. Too much to remember.
• What would it be like to do a Zoom meeting with each piece of Voldemort's soul? Would they get along? Would they plot? Would they just hiss at each other?
• Will there be a sixth "Diehard" movie. You could just call it "Diehard 6" to represent the six Horcruxes. Bruce Willis could play Sirius and come back from a faked death as John McClane. You know you'd go see it. 
• Finally, someone should create a phone app game called "Whack-A-Vol."

Didn't you just love it that Dumbledore didn't care what time it was or how tired he was when Harry showed up with Ol' Sluggy's memory? How could either of them have slept anyway?

Sluggy is so gullible and naive, so undone by flattery, so bribeable. Or does he love how it makes him feel important to impart such secrets as he did with Tom Riddle long ago and now with Harry? He's like an anonymous source. Most anonymous sources love the power it makes them feel when they tell a reporter something they shouldn't. Sluggy is a complicated wizard, so take your pick.

As the plot moves we have aha moments. This chapter is obviously an aha, and it's one on which it seems much of the story going forward will pivot. Harry had an aha moment when the memory caused him to remember something Voldemort said during their encounter two years ago: "I was ripped from my body, I was less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost ... but still, I was alive."

Only someone with no love in them could even contemplate the murders it would take to subdivide his soul into seven pieces like a farmer might do with a large plot of land. The way he was talking with Sluggy it seems obvious his decision to chase immortality was made then. What better way — in his twisted, sociopathic mind, heart and soul — to survive a war to "purify" the magical race. Each Horcrux is like an escape tunnel, like another life in a video game, another way to pay back his mother for making him a mudblood. This is fiction, but it makes you shudder to think someone could pursue such evil.

On to the quest to find and destroy the Horcruxes and ultimately Voldemort himself when he has nowhere left to hide or Death Eaters to protect him. Here we go with a countdown so I will get this straight and will have a reference point to look back on should I get confused, which is more than possible.

• Voldemort, we learn from Dumbledore, created six Horcruxes through murders he committed. This is why, when Voldemort's curse to kill Harry backfired it didn't completely kill him off. When Wormtail helped Voldemort regenerate his body from his wandering piece of soul, that allowed the seven pieces of his soul (six of them Horcruxes) to be Voldemort again.
• Harry is reminded that he destroyed the first Horcrux when he stabbed Tom Riddle's diary. That leaves five.
• Dumbledore destroyed a Horcrux when he worked his magic on Marvolo's ring and was left with a withered hand. That leaves four.
• There are theories about what objects could contain the four remaining disembodied pieces of Voldemort's wretched soul. 
• One could be the Slytherin's golden locket Voldemort stole from Hepzibah.
• Another could be Hufflepuff's golden cup Voldemort also stole from Hepzibah.
• There's a complicated theory that involves the snake Nagini as a possible Horcrux (more on that coming).
• And then maybe something that belonged to Ravenclaw or Gryffindor or both.

Dumbledore has been quite the researcher, but he is puzzled by the day Voldemort killed Harry's parents and tried to kill baby Harry. Dumbledore said he thought that murder would be the creation of the sixth Horcrux, but Voldemort's first body, so to speak, died that day. His best guess is that when Voldemort returned he created No. 6 in Nagini when he killed a Muggle man. That's possible, but I don't think Dumbledore is convinced.

That brings us to the discussion of the prophecy, which comes across more like a suggestion the way Dumbledore explains it. Voldemort, he said, created the enemy of Harry because he believed the prophecy of the "Chosen One." Confusing, I know.

I like what Dumbledore says about tyrants fearing the ones they oppress. That is so true of all tyrants from leaders of nations to selfish politicians to insecure bosses.

In the end, it seems Voldemort has set in motion his own downfall in a classic battle of a being with no ability to love vs. a human being with a remarkable ability to love and truly more to fight for.

Now that we know all the stakes, the Order of the Phoenix can go on offense. At least that's what I think will happen. And sadly I don't think Sirius was the final death we will see for the good guys.

Let the Horcrux search-and-destroy mission begin. (And I would like to know for sure who the Half-Blood Prince is.)