The ring was destroyed . Harry knew that it had took part of the man he had looked to as his guide with it. The Cup was no longer a vessel to carry immortality and the diary had died by his own hand.
But the locket taunted him, it hung from a candle stick on the mantel place, if it had eyes Harry would have felt sure that they would have watched him walk around the room. It gave him an uneasy felling as if Voldemort were in the room with him. A dull throbbing in the deepest part of his mind was a constant reminder that the thing was something of great evil and should be destroyed.
"You need to stop staring at that thing your getting worse than Hermione." said Ron helping himself to a second piece of toast.
"It's just annoying to know that the answer is probably just out of reach…."
There was a sharp rapping at the window and Hermione jumped to her feet.
As she let the handsome grey owl drink from her cup she untied the tightly curled parchment from the beasts leg.
"It's from Krum." she said tossing the parchment to Harry who of course caught it effortlessly.
He quickly averting his gaze from Ron who looked like he was struggling to digest this piece of information never mind the toast that seamed to have gotten stuck half way between his plate and his mouth.
Hermione picked up her book and began reading again.
Harry scanned the letter, instantaneously he felt awful. He looked across the table to Ron who had come to terms with his inner battle and now continued to wolf down his toast, only occasionally shooting Hermione looks to gage her reaction.
He looked at Hermione, she absentmindedly tucked her hair behind her ears as she listed the ingredients to a luck potion, one of many she intended to concoct before the show down against Voldemort.
Krum had found no answers, nothing to suggest that his old, if not very dead headmaster had any clue to the ware bouts of the final part of Voldemort's soul.
He crumpled the paper and threw it in the crackling fire.
The flames flared then fell back in to the rhythmic dance they did in the late October wind that blew violently down the flume.
"Anything?" asked Hermione.
Harry shook his head. To her credit Hermione's glaring was cut to a bare minimum, maybe as not to arouse the attention of Ron , but Harry knew he would get a mouth full from her as soon as she thought that Ron was out of ear shot.
Harry had thought long and hard about it, the answers were not to be found in the house, there was only one place that Harry knew held almost all the answers and that was the one place he dared not to go .
To many people could get hurt if Voldemort thought that he was vulnerable.
But the library at Hogwarts was bound to hold some of the answers, and if he could get permission from McGonagall he knew the answers that he needed may also lye in the memory's of Dumbledore, that is if they hadn't died along with him.
The pensive seamed like a strong source for Harry in particular to follow.
Somewhere there was the answer to what happened to the mans hand, an answer to what sort of curse the locket may have upon it. It may also unwittingly have stored answers that Dumbledore had failed to see with his own eyes. Something didn't sit right with Harry.
Dumbledore had known more than he had let on at more than one point in the past, so why should his past not help Harry now, he may be gone in body but his mind in essence lived on .
If he went in to the pensive however he would have to do it alone.
The private thoughts and memory's seamed to be a place that Harry alone had been aloud in to, it felt wrong to take Hermione and Ron along although their take on things may well prove useful.
It was a while before he realised that Ron was talking.
"It's not as if we can just walk up to the gates." he said again conversationally , but Harry could tell by the tone that he wasn't impressed that Harry had, had his thought elsewhere.
"we are still pupils at the school Ron we can do whatever we please." reasoned Hermione.
Harry looked at the two of them.
"You forget who I am sometimes I'm sure you do." he said.
"No one could ever forget who you are mate." said Ron adjusting Hermione's head on his shoulder.
"Then you know that a few ministry approved concealment charms are not going to stop me from entering the school that was my home." he turned his attention to the fire that dance in the hath. Hermione and Ron talked in hushed tones as he let his thoughts wander to the past enchantments on the halls of residence, the halls of his parents before him.
The answers would be in Dumbledore's pensive he felt sure of it.