Eliezer Yudkowsky - Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

And meanwhile, just like magic hadn’t defined a Transfigured unicorn as dead for purposes of setting off wards, Voldemort’s horcruxes wouldn’t define a Transfigured Voldemort as dead and try to bring him back.

That was the hope, anyway.

Harry’s scar twinged one last time when the steel ring went on his pinky finger, holding the tiny green emerald in contact with his skin.

Then his scar subsided, and did not hurt again.

An upthrust rock served Harry for a chair, when he staggered over it and sat down motionless, resting after a fashion, shoving back the exhaustion that threatened the corners of his mind. It was not done, there was more to do.

Harry took another deep breath, still inhaling through his mouth, said “ Lumos, ” and looked around the graveyard.

Black robes and severed skull masks, surrounded by pools of blood— Hermione Granger, asleep on an altar.

Voldemort’s empty robes and bloody hands, lying where the Dark Lord had fallen.

Quirinus Quirrell with his shredded robes, fallen in a heap where the Killing Curse had stricken him.

Harry imagined someone else looking at this scene, trying to understand it, and shook his head, because that wouldn’t do, it wouldn’t do at all.

Then Harry shoved himself up from his rock, grimacing as his mind, if not body, protested. He hadn’t been bloodied or beaten much today, but somehow Harry’s body was managing to feel like all the stress had hit it directly.

Harry staggered over toward where Voldemort had fallen, and picked up Voldemort’s left hand from where it lay upon the ground.

Even in just the left hand, you could see the faint trace of snake’s scales; it was very distinctively Voldemort. That was good.

Harry went to the altar where the sleeping Hermione lay, and gently placed the detached hand around Hermione’s neck, carefully moving the fingers to clutch at her throat. It was hard to do, Hermione seemed so peaceful and innocent when she was sleeping, and Voldemort’s severed hand seemed so ugly; Harry bluntly overrode whatever part of his mind was thinking that, since it made no sense in context.

A few weak Severing Charms served to mess up the almost perfectly fine cut the nanofiber had made, which was critical; it would not do to have the hand-stump look like the neck-stumps. The multiple Diffindos scattered small bits of Voldemort-wrist all over Hermione’s shirt, which, Harry had to remind himself, was also part of the plan.

Harry repeated this with the right hand, arranging it symmetrically with the left.

Harry used Inflammare to singe Voldemort’s robes where they lay, and then arranged the singed clothing around Hermione.

Voldemort’s gun, and his wand, went into Harry’s pouch. Harry placed the Stone of Permanency in an ordinary pocket, he wasn’t sure what the Stone might do to his pouch.

The heap of things from inside Quirrell’s robe, also near the altar, yielded the wand that the Defense Professor had used when he was being

Quirrell. Harry went to where Quirrell lay, and straightened out the body as best he could, and put Quirrell’s wand into his hand. Tears predictably came to Harry’s eyes, and Harry wiped them away on his sleeve.

Harry took another deep breath, still inhaling through his mouth, said “ Lumos ” again, and once more looked around the graveyard.

Black robes, severed skull masks, and Hermione Granger lying on an altar with Voldemort’s severed hands clutched around her throat, and Voldemort’s singed clothing scattered around her. Quirinus Quirrell lay dead with his clothes torn and shredded, his wand in his right hand.

That would do.

There remained the problem of calling attention to it.

Harry was very nearly out of magic at this point. But he still had enough left to Transfigure a leaf into the deflated form of a three-meter weather balloon.

Harry’s pouch produced a bottle of oxyacetelene, and a stick of dynamite, and a spool of fuse-cord. Be prepared, that’s the Boy Scout’s marching song, be prepared for a life that includes mountain trolls and who knows what else…

Harry inflated the weather balloon with the oxyacetelene. That would produce a very sharp overpressure when it detonated, maybe as loud as a sonic boom.

He attached the stick of dynamite—it was overkill, for detonation, but it would do.

He attached a 60-second fuse to the stick of dynamite, but did not light it yet.

Harry put on his Cloak of Invisibility, that had been among the piles by the sacrificial altar.

He obtained his broomstick from his pouch, and mounted it.

Harry cast a Quieting Charm around Hermione Granger—it wouldn’t stop all the noise, not even close, and it wasn’t like she’d be permanently hurt if her eardrums burst, but it still seemed polite.

And then that was it. The Quieting Charm had done it. Harry was drained of magic for at least the next hour.

Harry mounted the broomstick, slowly rising into the air, lifting the weather balloon filled with oxyacetelene with him. The castle Hogwarts came into view, distantly gleaming in moonlight a few kilometers away, as Harry rose above the trees; and Harry did his best to figure the distance, and the angle as it would be seen from Hogwarts.

When he had risen high above the forest, Harry used a lighter to ignite the fuse on the dynamite attached to the weather balloon full of oxyacetelene. Then Harry spun the broomstick and darted away—though not directly toward the castle, that might take him too close to the route past-Harry and Professor Quirrell had traversed, it wouldn’t do to have the Professor sense another Harry—

Harry felt a leaden stab of sadness, and refused it.

Thirty-one one-thousand, thirty-two one-thousand, thirty-three one-thousand…

When Harry reached forty, not wanting to take chances with his own eardrums, he glanced at his wristwatch, noting the exact time, and spun his Time-Turner once.

At first Anna had been gratified to see the final Quidditch Cup go on so long—as a Gryffindor she was a bystander at the House Cup thing, it wasn’t like Gryffindor ever won. In contrast, last year’s World Cup of Quidditch, to which her family had bought some very expensive tickets, had been over in ten minutes which was awful . Modern Quidditch games had become too short, the Snitch caught much too quickly. It was a widely-talked problem among aficionados: broomstick enchantments had advanced, while the Snitch stayed the same regulation speed, with the result that Quidditch games had become shorter and shorter. At professional levels the sport of Quidditch had been reduced to a contest of who had the deepest pockets for their Seeker’s experimental racing broom, and the rest of the players might as well have been watching from the stands.

Everyone knew something had to be done, the situation had been getting worse for centuries and now it was intolerable. But the International Confederation of Wizards’ Quidditch Committee was mired in all the usual acrimony of the I.C.W., screaming disputes between Germans and Bulgarians, and somehow nobody could agree on exactly how to fix the rules. To Anna the correct course seemed obvious, just make the Snitch fast enough to restore the four-hour or five-hour games of the early nineteenth century and the Golden Age of Quidditch. Except the Belgians thought the duration of a professional game should be two hours like in La Belle Époque when Belgium had dominated Quidditch, and the lunatic Italians wanted to go back to the week-long Quidditch games of the fourteenth century, and Britain’s even crazier blood purists kept on talking up the occasional day-long Quidditch match as proof that broomsticks couldn’t really have improved since everything was better in the old days which was not how the Interdict of Merlin worked.