Because the venom wasn't in the body long enough to kill the soul. If it were, Harry would have also died.

 

The title gave me an idea. If by making a horcrux you split need to split your soul what would happen if Harry tried making one? Would the new horcrux contain both Harry's and Voldemort's souls, or even better could Harry make an horcrux with Voldemort's horcrux inside it?

An horcrux inside an horcrux.
inb4Inception.

 

I'd guess that horcrux creation is tied to your magic which is tied to your soul only (not sure about this part). So then Harry creating a horcrux would just split his soul.

 

I think it's not unrealistic that Harry's not a normal horcrux, or that Voldemort does something to make his horcruxes more aware and defensive. Whenever the horcruxes were 'used' or whatever the trio did to destroy them, they had some sort of defense mechanism. But when Harry's horcrux-bit was destroyed, it didn't fight back or anything like that. I think it's possible that Harry's just got a soul fragment in him, while Voldemort does more to make sure his intentional horcruxes can defend themselves to some degree.

EDIT: Or at least, that would make the whole thing more cogent. I doubt Rowling thought that much out.

 

Ignore this post.

 

Indeed. No magic that we know of destroys a horcrux directly. Rather, you destroy the container and thereby the horcrux is destroyed. If the container is not completely destroyed, the horcrux remains.

It's pretty open to abuse, actually. Say you took Tom Riddle's Diary. You cut it into multiple pieces with a normal method (cutting charm, scissors, large knife, whatever). Because the container is not damaged beyond repair (magic can still fix it), the diary, though in multiple pieces, still acts as a horcrux. Take the pieces, hide them in multiple locations. Now to destroy your one horcrux, someone presumably needs to find multiple items and destroy them all.

If Voldemort had cut up each of his 6 horcruxes into 7 pieces (fuck Nagini) and hid those pieces separately, Harry would have to have found 42 items to destroy all the horcruxes lol.

 

Actually, if those all those different pieces of the diary still form one Horcrux, you'd only need to damage one of those pieces. That way, the Horcrux as a complete object is damaged beyond repair, even though the damage is only done to a small part of it.

And no, DarkSoy, I don't think Harry was a true Horcrux either. One of the very few things we know about creating Horcruxes is the need for a specific spell. Voldemort never did that spell however (which is why he never realized the true nature of his connection with Harry), so Harry was never turned into a full Horcrux. Rather, he became a container through the overwhelming damage done to Voldemort's soul and the apparent intrinsic need of a soul piece to attache itself to something.

Personally, I believe that's the reason for the depth of the connection between Harry and Voldemort. Not so much the fact that Harry carries a piece of his soul, but more so that the soul piece was never completely separated. That's why, even though Nagini never showed any trouble, Harry couldn't be near Voldemort without feeling pain.

 

I just remembered something from way back when I first started reading Harry Potter. The AK doesn't damage the body, right? People appear as if they have just fallen asleep? As in no mass trauma, etc. But people are still, obviously, dead.

Could we then make a conjecture that the AK works by removing the soul from the body directly instead of causing a big wound, which leads to death, and so on and so forth.

That would make the AK the best weapon against Horcruxes because instead of going round-about it would remove the soul from the container, unlike Fiendfyre etc, which damage the container to the point that the soul cannot be contained.

God, I hate trying to make sense of Rowling laws.

 

With the example that Taure gave of cutting up the diary: if magic can actually cause that type of fixable damage to its physical form, isn't it only a small additional leap to damaging it beyond repair?

Let's say you cut it up into a few pieces, and Vanish one of those pieces. If it works, that piece can't be recovered, and the Horcrux is irreparably damaged. The basic solution to this is to simply say that the thing can't be Vanished, but now we're talking about making a sort of "blacklist" of spells that don't work, while other spells are allowed to still affect the physical form.

Meh. I guess that works, but then I get to wondering if Horcruxes resist Vanishing by default or if a wizard has to add that protection himself. There may be a clue about this. From the text:

So maybe you *could* damage it that way, if its maker didn't enchant it to resist that sort of thing.

 

That would make the Killing Curse the same as a Dementor's Kiss, which it obviously isn't. The whole soul-body connection is strange anyway, seeing as it apparently is possible for the body to 'survive' without a soul for a while.

I think the Killing Curse simply does exactly what it says. It kills. That's the effect. It doesn't kill by any special means. It's not a Suffocation Curse or a Soul-Expelling Curse. It just kills.

That seems to be the way magic works in that world. You hit something with a Levitation Charm, it levitates. It doesn't negate gravity or anything, it simply makes it levitate. It's magical for a reason. When you point your wand and yell Impedimenta, someone stops moving. And when you point your wand and yell Avada Kedavra, someone stops living. There's nothing more to it than that.

 

Son of a bitch. Harry should have just fed the horcruxes to a pet dementor.

Story idea ahoy!

 

I agree with Nuhuh. I think I remember someone mentioning that what the AK does is sever the soul from the body.
So, assuming the above is true, one could also assume that Horcruxes can be killed by AKs. Just like humans, a Horcrux is a soul (or a part of it) inside something physical. So, my take on the AK is that if it finds a soul, it's 'primary objective', so to speak, it severs it, leaving the body intact. If it doesn't, it just deals massive physical damage, not sure if it's irreparable or not.

I suppose we'll never know, and we'll just have to contend ourselves with whatever makes more sense, at least to us.

Edit: I don't that "it just kills" goes in the HPverse, ViolentRed. I'm pretty sure that the idea is that death is the soul's departure from the body, which doesn't even seem to be the end, judging from Priori Incantatem and Ressurection Stone. I believe that Rowling meant more about the AK than "just kills".

 

Many of the fanfic's I've read (decent ones) have the AK destroying a horcrux. It seems that since it is the most deadly curse in existence, it should be one of the things that can destroy a horcrux.

 

I thought it was established that horcruxes can repair themselves. So if you could split it into pieces, then that was because you'd already destroyed it beyond repair.

I think dementors are the "all or nothing" sort. Kinda like the Killing Curse, which kills all of you, as opposed to rendering useless the limb that was hit.

 

Blazzano: vanished things can be unvanished.

Re: "Horcruxes repair themselves", can someone post the actual quote. Until they do I'm calling bullshit. I'm fairly sure Hermione just talks about horcruxes being damaged beyond repair, not beyond some self-repairing ability.

Edit: wait, it's there. p90. "It has to be something so destructive the Horcrux can't repair itself.".

That said, about a paragraph later she says: "...ripping, smashing or crushing a Horcrux won't do the trick. You've got to put it beyond magical repair."

So it seems that you've got to put it beyond both the Horcrux's self-repair mechanism and the ability of others to repair it.

 

Aye. So no fracturing of horcruxes - as that would be a horcrux of a horcrux.

 

Imagine if Harry's pure, young soul was ripped apart by the violent event of becoming a Horcrux. A small part of his soul then attached itself to the fleeting specter of Voldemort. This would make Harry the Horcrux of his own Horcrux.

And would leave them both unkillable.

 

I agree with this for the most part. IIRC, Rowling stated once that the pain Harry feels when he's near Voldemort is the pseudo-Horcrux trying to reunite with what's left of the original soul. It was never an actual Horcrux anyway, but merely a piece of an already very damaged soul which split off when the Killing Curse rebounded.

And that in itself is a point in favor of the Killing Curse being able to destroy Horcruxes, since the curse rebounding onto Voldemort in 1981 not only blew his soul out of his body and into a wraith-like state, but also blasted off a fragment of it, which then latched onto a one-year-old Harry.

The reason the Killing Curse destroyed the Scarcrux but didn't kill Harry is more complicated. For one thing, the soul fragment was there in the first place. For two, it was Voldemort himself who cast the curse, though the relevance of this aspect is up for debate. Did it only work because it was his own soul fragment, or would the Killing Curse have done the job regardless of who cast it? For three, Harry's life was tied to this world because of Voldemort's using Harry's blood in his resurrection ritual, thus tying Harry to life (or at least, giving Harry the choice in that limbo train station), according to Dumbledore.

I imagine that if Harry had been hit with an AK before LV used his blood, the result would have been a dead Harry and a dead Scarcrux. Of course, I would expect the same result *after* LV's final death.

I also think it is very much up for debate whether a Killing Curse from someone *other* than Voldemort would have had the same effect. In Snape's memory, Dumbledore implies heavily that it must be Voldemort who casts the curse, and that's incredibly vague. For one thing, Dumbledore doesn't *know* that Harry will survive either way, and was only speculating that the blood-tie might save Harry. I'm fairly certain he felt the blood-tie would have a better chance of working if Harry was willing to die and didn't fight back, but again, there's no solid proof of that.

It's all murky and vague and poorly explained, but even in the case of step-by-step clarifications from JKR, there'd be grumbling and parsing and second-guessing from fans. It really reminds me of the "Death of Superman" stunt that DC Comics pulled back in the mid-Nineties, when some other supernatural character explained it to Superman and Lois as a once-in-a-lifetime, all-the-stars-had-aligned-perfectly, don't-count-on-that-happening-ever-again kind of thing.

Oh, and there was never any way for the Scarcrux fragment to resist or fight back, since it was never in charge of Harry the way the deliberate Nagini-crux was in charge of the snake.

This parsing of the semantics around "completely destroyed" or "destroyed beyond magical repair" is a waste of time, and begins to sound like the plot of a terribad fanfic. I can't imagine a Horcrux being more than one discrete item, which I why I think the "I've made a Horcrux out of [Hogwarts] [the Pyramids] [the moon]" stories are so ridiculous.

If that were the case, Voldemort could have Vanished his first Horcrux and, since Vanished items go "into nothingness; that is to say, into everything" as McG put it in DH, Voldemort would have become effectively immortal when the [(weight of book in grams) x (Avogadro's number)] of atomic Horcruxes dispersed into every other item in the universe. And yes, I know that's not an exact number of atoms unless the Diary is 100-percent carbon, but you get the point.

Many of the fanfics I've read have Harry becoming a take-no-prisoners badass motherfucker, but that has zero fucking bearing on what is and is not canon. I've read fanfics where Harry's parents are alive, he hates his father and brother, and proceeds to have some hawt sex with his mother and sister, murder his brother and then send the corpse to his dad. Any of that sound canon-based to you?

 

I've honestly never come across such fics. Even back when I forced myself to read Perfect Lionheart's idea-wank, in order to have a more solid ground to stand on when flaming him, I hadn't seen such a concept.

Ho-ly shit.

 

Here you go. Now suffer.

Holy shi-
The moment I read this I thought of what Voldemort tried to do in Renegade Cause.