With Ron's brother gone and he owner of the house gone with him, there were questions raised in Hermione's mind. Going to school in China, she had intended to learn a lot about warding, and she had, but she also learned about statecraft, which basically served as the justification for a lot of the school's and the ministers' actions. Everyone seemed to see himself or herself as part of a larger whole, and a larger effort of cultural, social, magical, and political preservation. The idea of destroying Crouch's government, therefore, made her think about what should replace it.
It was not, in the least, the only thing on her mind. McGonagall explained that as the theory went, a Horcrux was an inanimate object containing a little piece of its creator's soul. To create one, a wizard needed split his soul, possibly by committing murder. She doubted her own soul had been split by the person she killed, though to the present he had never truly left her dreams.
"How does the soul fragment travel from the caster's body to the intended object?" she asked.
"That is a difficult question to answer. The books would have described the dark charm that tether a soul to an unnatural host."
"An unnatural host, Professor?"
"Human bodies are considered perfect hosts for the soul, after that there are animals, but a corpse, for example, is an unfit host, being an inanimate object." She recalibrated her understanding of Inferi to consider their lack of a soul. "Placing one's immortal soul in a living thing, however, would be a poor decision as it can not only move around and think for itself, it will eventually die."
"So a split piece of soul does not normally make a Horcrux without the use of the charm?" she asked.
"No, there would be nothing to take it to a suitable host. Without a host it effectively ceases to be. I presume a host could be transfigured or conjured, as living animals can be procured in such a way, but any dark wizard with the intent to survive any length of time would learn the charm." Right. An inanimate object is really your only shot at sticking around forever.
"Suppose Professor Slughorn was telling the truth. Why would Voldemort not go out of his way to study Horcruxes and create them anyway? I should hardly think one word of caution against a measure of securing his immortality..."
"There is a theory, and I know not whether my colleague would have been made aware of it, that the self is the continuity of memory." Hermione nodded. She had been through that argument before. "A Horcrux may preserve the soul of the caster, and the soul would very much represent the self, but the piece of the soul in the object only contains the self up to the point of its creation. Theoretically, the soul fragment in possession of an object without a mind of its own may take on a mind of its own, and preserve itself at all costs."
"Voldemort might have been afraid of duplicating himself, then," she reasoned. Looking around the table, it seemed everyone else was done with the conversation, not that she could blame them. "His duplicates would know too much about him, and may even have reason to work against him."
She could imagine inanimate objects suddenly being given souls would object to their current situation. Not content to be treated like objects, they would most likely try to get out of that scenario. Professor McGonagall seemed to imply they could do things, and though it seemed unlikely they could grow legs, with a soul fragment and memories up to a certain point, it stood to reason they would have something resembling magical ability. With only a soul, though, what could they do? Possess living things? The ghosts at Hogwarts could at least hold a conversation.
Hermione decided it was better not to rule out more dramatic abilities enshrined in any Horcruxes that might have been created, with or without the books necessary. They contained, after all, pieces of Voldemort's soul. Fortunately, I can distract myself with an argument with Ron.
Marching upstairs, she knocked on the door, though it was not at all likely that he and Hannah were doing anything in there. Unfortunately, he had been basically right about the need to get the Stone, but she was willing to bet he still had no idea how to go about that. If he had changed his plans to prioritize going after the Ministry, that raised a new set of questions.
"Hi, Hermione," the Hufflepuff witch said as she came in. They were sitting next to each other, probably just talking. She wondered how many awkward conversations they had made themselves hold. "Do you think there's any way we could find Voldemort's Horcrux?" she asked. "I've been bouncing some ideas off Ron, but..."
"No, we really don't know that he made one, or if he did he made it without any instruction, so we would have no idea when he got to work on it. If we killed him and took the Stone back, he would at least be less able to stop us from looking."
"That's what Ron said,"
"I also said that we can't leave yet. If anyone's read the interview, I reckon we've got a fair chance of getting more people on our side." The Ravenclaw witch hung her head a moment. Having argued against the idea that they should be recruiting, she expected she remembered better than most when Terry admitted there was something to it. Terry...
"I think you're right about that," she said quietly. "If we get so much as twenty people, it would give us a huge advantage. Against Crouch, though, you would only be wasting your time." The Gryffindor looked like he wanted to object, but let her continue. "As long as we haven't done anything against the Death Eaters, we'll never gain public support, even by joining the order. Saying that we're against both sides means we need to work against both sides." She sighed a little. "I haven't been reading the Prophet, because I've been away, but I would not be surprised to find that they have written a story about how we helped Draco steal the Stone for Voldemort in first year,"
"Then we'll get it back," Ron said. "We'll need to use whatever you and Terry were making up if we're to have any hope of getting past him."
Hermione contained the more pessimistic response she was about to utter regarding the effectiveness of deploying magical creatures from the spirit world as a mechanism of killing a powerful dark wizard, but he was right if his expectations were limited to a distraction. If anything, it will at least interest him. He most likely does not think he needs the Stone at this point, because he would not want to be dependent on it. Her understanding of the character of Voldemort was limited, but he had been controlling one of her teachers for about a year, so there was that.
"What do we do after that, then?" she asked, getting to the heart of the matter. "Suppose Voldemort dies and the last threat to Crouch's government-"
"He's not a threat to them, though. He's done nothing against them. It seems like everyone's waiting for him to make his daring counterattack, but it's prob'ly not going to happen. He wanted Hogwarts to stay up, right? Well, now that it's fallen, how do we know he's not done with the whole bloody island?" The bushy haired witch sighed. We still haven't reached the point.
"The rest of the wizarding world will not be safe for his followers when the resolution from the conference at Ys goes into effect. His only hope of not pitting himself against the entire world is attacking Crouch before Britain is cut off from the continent with the wards, and then he just has to hope that it makes everyone else too afraid to go after him and his followers. Ultimately, his problem is that he just keeps pressing on, never compromising, never deciding that enough is enough, and eventually it's going to kill him. Anyway, the Ministry is aware that his only chance is a direct strike against them, which is why they've taken so many steps to secure the country. Both sides have said that Britain is the tipping point of the conflict for the past thirty years, if not longer-"
"The conflict has three sides, Hermione," the Gryffindor objected. "Once we go after Voldemort, then we only have two. Everyone else against the Order. Terry always said I had too much faith in people, but that's not really it. The people might be rats, but the fact of the matter is that when a rat's cornered, it's got no choice but to fight. No matter how powerful a government makes itself, it can't make people lay down and die, it has to start killing them."
They had had that conversation, she understood. A corrupt government would not enact any of its more objectionable plans without first removing the means for popular resistance, allowing it to kill citizens with impunity. Killing them, however, would be a net loss as long as they were employed and mostly law-abiding. People's lives have value, even to tyrants. What doesn't have value is virtually anything else. As long as the citizens are alive, working, and not killing themselves or each other, the state can survive.
"Fine," she said. "Fine. We hope for some kind of popular rebellion. What happens after that?" He shrugged.
"That's up to the people, not us. Just because we're throwing out the old system-"
"We can't throw out the old one without-"
"Yeah, we can. Basically anything would be better than Crouch."
"We'd be responsible for everything that happened after we-"
"I'm fine with being responsible for that. Might be the people aren't really familiar with governing themselves. I really don't have a damn clue what they'll do, prob'ly just listen to the Prophet and vote for whoever was lined up for a replacement at a general assembly. If that happens, it's beyond saving. The three of us wouldn't represent the land or its people, we'd just be rouge terrorists killing the leadership of what was basically already a foreign country." He sighed. "Can't tell you how many wars were over 'fore they got started. Don't think anyone can, there've been more wars in history and caveman days than there're stars in the sky. There was a historian named Yissur, had to be one of the first people in the world studying Transfiguration, and basically his little kingdom was surrounded by threats. They never knew when someone was going to attack them, but if one little kingdom got them right after they'd fought another, that'd be it for them. Their city would be destroyed, women and children taken as slaves, witches and wizards stoned, and the only thing they could do to get out of that was get stronger."
"They got stronger by attacking the other kingdoms," Hannah guessed after a pause.
"Pretty much. Yissur did the Arithmancy and they had a one part in ten of tossing each one of them, except this little one that was about one part in six. They got a bit more land area out of it, rustics spread out and helped the muggles farm, and the food went toward the military. The other kingdoms were a bit more afraid of them, but they attacked anyway. It was pretty interesting, to me, how they dragged out the conflict to run the other bastards out of steam, but they ended up living long enough to get flattened by the Persian Empire. Wasn't really anything they could've done, since surrendering would have meant everyone would be sold or killed anyway."
Hermione did not know whether her friend was being optimistic or the exact opposite. She had an odd memory of trying to cut a hole in the Trace wards in that apartment in the normal part of London, back when they were still together. At the time, it always seemed like he knew what he would have them do was impossible, and he would bemoan the circumstance, but he never seemed to shrink from the idea.
He answered my question by not answering the question. Whatever government comes after Crouch's, it will not be our responsibility, or we would just be usurping tyrants. She had heard of provisional governments, of course, and it was possible they or the Order would have a hand in that, but it would complicate matters more. For one thing, if this was to be a legitimate popular rebellion, it would have to be an insurrection of the people against the state, not one group against a specific faction of the state. I have to ask if we have any more deep-cover agents in the Ministry. We would have to clear them out of the way before we can declare the rebellion.
Leaving Ron and Hannah to what she presumed to be an awkward conversation, she remembered walking in on them. She had not seen much, and a quick scan of their surface thoughts as they came down the stairs revealed they thought it was Harper or Macmillan, but that only made things slightly less awkward for her. In her conversation with the Hufflepuff witch, she confessed to seeing them, stipulating that she could not see much of her chest as there was someone on top of her, but she only sighed and said it was fine.
"If anything, I should be apologizing," she had said. "We had this... stupid, well, arrangement last year where I would tell you, and Ron would tell Terry. We literally never did it. I don't think either of us wanted it to be out there, to have you two think of us like that, or whatever else. I think I hoped that it would make things less weird, because we could tell he liked you..." The Ravenclaw witch wanted to dash her head against something again. "I had never thought I would be doing that sort of thing at fourteen. If you asked first year, I might have said I would be kicked out and living on Diagon Alley or brewing love potions- I might have even guessed I would be a werewolf, but... with everything that happened, I don't think we saw even a quarter of it coming. We were stressed and we needed an outlet."
"Ron needed an outlet," Hermione joked, trying to lighten things for some reason. She could not bring herself to finish it, though.
"Right, and I needed a plug," Hannah guessed. "We never got to anything like that. There was always something that happened and we would stop, then have an awkward conversation later."
That was about where they were summoned to go downstairs.
Thinking of her friend's idea of going after Dean and seeing if they could get him to go on the Stone retrieval mission as she went, she decided it at least had promise. It would strike a more effective blow against Voldemort than anything he had been doing so far, and theoretically he was good enough in a fight to give them a chance if they were caught. Adding numbers to their campaign would not take away enough of their ability to stay hidden that she would throw it out entirely.
She found Professor McGonagall, which returned her thoughts to the present, as always.
"Excuse me?" she asked, seeing she was looking over a massive book. I never like to be interrupted whilst reading. "Earlier you made reference to a prophecy, one that seems to make a target out of Neville. Is that why I haven't heard of his whereabouts?"
"Yes, Professor Dumbledore made a number of plans contingent on his untimely demise regarding Mr. Longbottom." Hermione could have sworn she caught a smile. Why, though? "I am afraid that I cannot tell you exactly where he is, however, as you would likely recruit him for your plan to retrieve the Philosopher's Stone." Her eyes widened.
"Have you been-"
"It was only a guess, Miss Granger. I had surmised that you and your friends, perhaps Mr. Weasley most of all, would continue to feel guilty about losing it in the first place. Rest assured, when first years are taking it upon themselves to rescue valuable artefacts from the clutches of dark wizards, it was the world that failed them. Our late Headmaster had suspected that Lord Voldemort was after the Stone, and he knew it was not safe in Gringotts. Moving it to Hogwarts, he expected to catch Professor Quirrell stuck on the last trial, but the Inspectors delayed for him long enough to keep him from finding out when it was successfully stolen. He checked every night around midnight to see if it remained, and the facsimile with which his old enemy replaced the Stone fooled him."
She wanted to say there was nothing that could have been done. Another part of her wanted to say that as long as Voldemort existed, no mechanism of bringing him back to full power should have ever been allowed, but she knew that was unreasonable. So nothing reasonable could have been done.
"Ron seemed to believe the Order would attempt to stop us."
"The Order is essentially powerless to stop you, without a school from which to remove you. His brothers told of us his ambitious plans, and if I am to admit it, I had hoped you would make him see sense, and for a while it seems you did, by refusing to take part in them. Understand that I value both rules and valor, Miss Granger, and that these ideals do not contradict each other. Your friend is likely discovering that giving orders has granted him a new perspective, that of the leader, and he realizes now if not before that it is not one to be envied, and requires greater courage of him than he has ever demonstrated."
Hermione nodded.
"Terry was our leader last year," she explained.
"Forgive me if I speak out of turn, or if I unintentionally speak ill of your House, but Mr. Boot was the minister of your little gang, not its leader." The Ravenclaw witch pursed her lips. She supposed Ron had been instrumental in the planning for the duels, and they all really did look up to him, in a way.
"Are you saying I should have stayed with him and helped him recover the Stone?"
"No, it would have been better to talk sense into him, but I suppose your background is a little different from what I had hoped. When I heard you were looking around on the train for Longbottom's toad, I remember thinking to myself that it would be nice to have you in my House. I assumed I would be getting him too, of course. The greater part of all students at Hogwarts followed their parents." There was a pause.
"I'm sorry, but... what was the point of having Houses?" she asked. There were always a ton of different explanations in my mind, but it always seemed like other things divided us more than House loyalty, except for with the Hufflepuffs.
"Originally, of course, it was because the Founders selected the students who would one day join them under their banners, but you might have guessed that from the banners with eagles and lions. In those days each of them would make a bid for a student if he or she were interested, and the student would have the final say. Because we do not tell children about the Sorting before they arrive, they often do not realize they have a choice, and I expect many a boy or girl has ended up in whatever House the hat said was the most appropriate, even if it led to parting with friends. There was a tiny chance that we might end up with all the students going into one House, so the previous Headmaster decided to start the tradition of concealing the mechanism of Sorting."
"So it was all just a tradition? It was all because that was the way we had always done it?"
"No, though I value traditions for their own sake, I have not been the Headmaster of the school for its entire existence. To respect the wishes of the Founders is to reward them for engendering the greatest learning institution this island has ever seen. I find, simply, that students seem to learn the best when they have friends, and that grouping them on common values is the easiest way of ensuring they will form lasting friendships with each other. It is a rare thing indeed that a group of students from all four Houses forms, and if I may give my opinion, it is something to be treasured."