I have a question, based on what we know of Voldemort's personality in canon, if the Tom Riddle diary horcrux had managed to get a body, and Voldemort(the one who killed Harry's parents) did as well, would they more likely try to off the other, or could they decide work together, and if they did work together, could such an alliance even last?

I'm asking because a few fanfics that have I've seen have one of the horcrux's gain a body usually have either of the two scenario's and I can't tell what might fit more with canon?


EDIT by Minion:
Xandrel asked for this discussion to be moved into its own thread.

 

To be honest I don't think this question belongs in this thread. It probably does deserve its own thread. I can't think of a way to objectively answer it with purely canon facts.

 

There is one canon fact that assists in this matter: there is such a thing as "the master soul". A horcrux is not equivalent to Voldemort himself: the horcruxes anchor Voldemort to life, but they don't anchor each other to life. Nor does Voldemort anchor the horcruxes to life.

So in canon the "original Voldemort" soul piece has precedence over his horcruxes. There is a very real way in which the horcrux soul pieces are subsidiary to him.

With that in mind, it's not all too far into the land of speculation to postulate that any horcrux which gained its own human body (as opposed to inanimate or animal body) would still be subservient to the real Voldemort.

This can be seen to an extent in the way in which Voldemort commands Nagini completely.

 

I'm not sure 100%, but I recall an interview where someone asked Jo what would happen if Riddle managed to kill Ginny and drain all of her life.

She simply said "Lord Voldemort would return then and there."

 

Nagini cannot show that a horcrux with a body is subservient to Voldemort: I realise Harry is a special case, but he is still a horcrux with a body, and Voldemort cannot control him.

More likely is that Nagini herself was just obedient and loyal - nothing to do with the horcrux.

This begs an interesting question - could a horcrux create a horcrux?

I suspect the answer would have to be no, because otherwise you could glitch!hax it such that you could create a horcrux, give it a body, and have it make you a horcrux in return - keeping you immortal unless both are destroyed at once. But there's no actual particular reason why this should be so, right?

Well, perhaps with a horcrux given a body that reason would be that it itself is just a sliver of a soul. But as with Harry, he had his own soul to work with.

 

I think Harry is a very special case, actually. We know from Hermione's explanation that a horcrux is its body. That's what distinguishes it from humans, where the soul and the body are distinct. But in Harry's case, the fragment of Voldemort's soul inside him is a passenger in a regular human body-soul combination; it's not a proper horcrux at all. It acts as a horcrux, in that it anchors Voldemort to life, but its mechanic is not that of a horcrux. JKR has said this in interview also:

So I'm not sure if Harry can give us any real insight into Nagini as a horcrux, especially when Dumbledore thought that Voldemort had an unusual level of control over Nagini, to the point where he thought Nagini was a horcrux:

 

1. Create a Horcrux.
2. Put it inside a person.
3. That person creates their own Horcrux.
4. Repeat ad infinitum.
5.???
6. Profit!

 

Thank your celestial being of choice Voldemort didn't use a cockroach.

 

7. Collapse in to a hive mind.
8. And suddenly you were in the Evangelion.

 

A Horcrux pyramid scheme such as this would be unlikely to provide the intended benefit. A Horcrux is a partitioned soul made physical—attaching to the Horcrux container. When you use a living being as a Horcrux, the living body is the container not that being's soul. When Neville killed Nagini he destroyed the body beyond magical repair (i.e., he killed it). He did not destroy Nagini's soul (assuming for the moment that a snake has a soul, of course). An alternative example would be when Voldemort killed Harry in the Forbidden Forest, Harry's "soul" was unaffected in the not-quite-the-afterlife even though the "Horcrux" attached to him was destroyed.

Thus if a Horcrux container created another Horcrux it would be the container's soul that is protected, not their body. In the pyramid scheme situation, therefore, if the container's body was destroyed the Horcrux contained within would be destroyed and the container's soul would be protected. Functionally, such a scheme is no different than a regular Horcrux attached to a living being, as you gain no additional protection.

Edit: Unless you're talking about a hierarchy of control based on what Taure said earlier. In which case, wouldn't multiple imperius curses be way less effort?

 

What if we found a way to attach the splintered soul piece to another soul instead of a body? Thus if you killed Nagini, only her body would be gone, but both her soul and Voldemort's piece would remain intact.

 

I don't think there would be canonical support for or against such a proposition. It's just a level of abstraction from canon too far to be clearly answerable.

I'm not one to put hard limits on magic but I believe it would not be possible; there is a sort of cosmic logic that the ephemeral soul is anchored to a physical object that would be too difficult to upend. It becomes a question of metaphysics, I guess.

But let's assume it is possible to attach one splintered soul to another being's soul. For the example you've given, however, and based on what Dumbledore says about the soul piece being "tethered" to the Earth, I would guess that if Voldemort attached his soul piece to Nagini's soul, it would go along with Nagini's soul to the afterlife. Without a body the soul would not be earthly bound. If Nagini herself had a Horcrux, I don't know what would be the result. On the one hand, part of the soul is undamaged and still on earth. But if Harry's experience in the purgatory train station can be a guide, another part of that soul would be on its way to the afterlife. It's got (at least) those two choices and I don't know which way (if either) it would shake out.

 

There's a simple reason why you can't make a soul a horcrux: a horcrux is a piece of soul stored in a container.

The diary stored writing and memories. The locket could store a picture. The cup could store liquid. The diadem, wisdom. The ring stored fingers! I mean, a stone. Harry and Nagini were both living bodies, that stored souls.

Souls can't store anything! So they can't be horcruxes.

 

It could be argued that souls store our personality, memories and emotions.

And in the case of wizards, magic.

 

But it could also be argued that souls are personality, memories, and emotion. And this is the Questions that don't deserve their own thread thread.

 

Or you can avoid all those complications, and simply bury your soul piece in a place that has no known connection to you and no one will think to look in. But you have to be sane for that...

 

The thing is, it could be that you need some form of attachment to an object before the torn off piece of your soul can 'take' to it.
You could bury it somewhere, sure, but that would make it needlessly hard for your followers to find it once you're semi-dead.

 

Like I said before there's not much in canon that would tell you either way. That has more to do with the fact that what a soul is in the HP universe is largely undefined. We know things about it: murder can fracture and split a soul and that anchoring it to an object allows an individual to survive death. We don't know it's metaphysical purpose. It may be memories or it may not be memories. It may be a person's "essence."

I think the best answer is the one I gave before: canonical uncertainty, a personal belief which way it goes, and the logic of how it would work assuming it were possible.

There's a part of me that gets what you're saying but I would submit that any soul container would become intensely personal after creation regardless of the object.

My understanding of Horcruxes is that the creation of the object does not by itself bestow the container with magical protection. It simply puts a part of the soul in the container (there might be an outside case for "magical self repair" and I tend to waffle on it being a necessary part of the Horcrux). In any case, a given creator would want to spend as much time as prudent layering protections upon the container. An individual dark wizard might spend weeks, months, and maybe even years trying to create protections for their Horcrux. That would produce a discoverable personal connection to the object.

 

Moved out of the "questions" thread. You may continue to... do whatever you did with these Horcruxes of yours...

 

What you have to remember is that that the Diary!Soul is that of a 16 year old Tom Riddle, everything he knows about his future self and Harry Potter comes from Ginny, not a link to the Original!Soul.

Now if Diary!Soul was to gain corporeal form it would be that of his 16 year old self as he was when the Horcrux was created, therefore he would only have the power and magical skills/knowledge of 16 year old Tom Riddle. Lord Voldemort - Original!Soul - has countless decades on his 16 year old self, decades in which he learned, perfected and improved upon all aspects of Dark Magic. Knowing Voldemort as we do in canon, I cannot possibly see him teaming up with a teenager, as that is what he will be - a teenager. It doesn't matter that it is a teenage Tom Riddle, he is still a teenager and nothing compared to his future self.