Even by the prolix standards of Unfogged, there’s a huuuuuge comment thread at this post on the news that bookies have stopped taking bets on whether teen wizard Harry Potter will live or die in the final book of his series, as the bets are all but unanimously against his survival. (Opinion is so dramatically one-sided that I’m assuming this is the result of a credible leak rather than massive consensus about the appropriate trajectory of the narrative arc.)

One Unfogged commenter finds this odd, since author J.K. Rowling long ago announced that she’d already written the book’s final passage, and the last word would be “scar,” presumably (presumably!) a reference to the trademark lightning-bolt adorning the forehead of the series’ eponymous hero. Since the scar was created by Harry’s nemesis Lord Voldemort, one possibility is that the final line will inform us that the famous mark has faded away with the Dark Lord’s demise.

But here’s another possibility—not so much a prediction as a “wouldn’t this be interesting.” [Below the fold, for those who don’t want events of the series so far revealed.]

The later books introduce magical objects, Horcruxes, which prove to be central to the plot. These may be either inanimate objects or—and this is emphasized—living creatures which can be used to store a fragment of a wizard’s soul, granting a form of immortality. Voldemort has made at least six of these, and can’t be permanently killed until they’re all destroyed. And a murder is required for the creation of each horcrux, since deliberate killing framents the spellcaster’s soul, allowing to be divided up in this way. It has been very strongly hinted that Harry himself is Voldemort’s final horcrux, created on the night of his parents murder either deliberately or as an unintended side effect of the backfired curse that was meant to do him in. The trademark scar, which is shown to be linked to Voldemort, and burn in his presence, is the physical sign of this. If that’s right, it’s likely that Harry himself must die if Voldemort is to be defeated.

Here, then, would be an interesting denouement: Having realized what he is, Harry has a climactic battle with Voldemort in which he kills his nemesis and also sacrifices himself to prevent the bad guy’s resurrection. But this would entail Harry himself committing a murder, however justified. We’re told this would “fragment” his soul, but if Harry’s a horcrux, then he’s already got a kind of hybrid soul with a chunk of Voldemort lodged in it. The fragmentation, then, might just split off the “pure” Harry-soul from its embedded piece of Voldemort.

This raises the question: What happens when someone who’s already enchanted as a horcrux kills someone? If Harry was indeed accidentally turned into a horcrux, we have to assume that the way the enchantment works is that someone does all the preparation for the horcrux spell in advance (as we’ll suppose Voldemort had, planning to use the murders of the Potters to create one using some object or other) and then can effect the transfer of a soul-fragment following the act of murder without any elaborate further ritual, and under certain conditions without even intending it. So it’s not a huge leap to suppose that a murder committed by a person already bearing the horcrux enchantment might re-trigger the initial spell, resulting in the creation of a new horcrux. The final word, “scar,” might not refer to the one on Harry’s forehead, then, but to a new mark that appears on another person, now the bearer of Harry’s purified soul—and perhaps the protagonist of a lucrative new heptalogy.