The silver from the begging of HPMOR seems unicorn blood. Eliezer said:
V’yy fgngr bhgevtug gung ng gur raq bs gur fgbel Urezvbar pbzrf onpx nf na nyvpbea cevaprff.
Tvira havpbea oybbq vf nobhg ceriragvat qrngu, jr unir gur vaterqvragf sbe n zntvp evghny.
Tvira gur cebcurpvrf gung evghny vf cebonoyl tbvat gb unir n punapr bs qrfgeblvat gur jbeyq. V guvax vg cebonoyl qbrf.
Silver seems to be a running theme for anti-death things (add the Silvery Slytherins and the Peverell crest to that list). Unicorn blood is a likely candidate, though. (Also, that bit you mentioned is probably worth rot13ing since it came from a source that he suggested not reading.)
A problem with the "He" who stood in the circle theory is that Quirrel can't have been confident in advance that Dumbledore would make that mistake. Even if Dumbledore didn't think "I'd better use gender-neutral language in case Quirrel is really female," he could easily have said something like "The person in this circle is the defense professor."
Quirrel could have suggested or stipulated that wording when zhe and Dumbledore were working out how to identify Quirrel to the wards, reasonably assuming that Dumbledore wouldn't think the "he" was the suspicious part.
Just spelling out that we have a much better idea now what the first lines of the book mean:
Beneath the moonlight glints a tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line...
(black robes, falling)
...blood spills out in litres, and someone screams a word.
The silver likely refers to:
Neither of them noticed the tall stone worn as though from a thousand years of age, upon it a line within a circle within a triangle glowing ever so faintly silver, like the light which had shone from Harry's wand, invisible at that distance beneath the still-bright Sun.
Interesting. Some of the things that have been described as silver or silvery so far:
All of these seem to have in common that they represent some sort of resistance to death or indifference (usually represented by coldness, like the vacuum of space or Harry's dark side). This has probably already been pointed out a lot, but I predict that whatever is glinting silver in the prologue represents something similar, even if it's something else entirely (e.g. a dagger, the Sword of Gryffindor, etc.)
Edit: also, as someone pointed out earlier, the Philosopher's Stone now turns metals into silver as well as gold (see Hedonic Awareness).
Thanks, I think it's just the fact that a lot of people who never really got into the canon are reading MOR, so plot points that can pretty much go unstated in regular fanfiction have to be re-introduced here. I know a lot of implications/references are lost on me because I'm reading fanfiction without actually being, well, a fan.
It can also be an issue even for canon-knowledgeable readers. A lot of the time readers are used to Harry's thought processes happening in the absence of certain key knowledge from canon (the Philosopher's Stone, etc.), so it's jarring when Harry learns major pieces of information offscreen (the Marauder's Map, etc.)
Neither of them noticed the tall stone worn as though from a thousand years of age, upon it a line within a circle within a triangle glowing ever so faintly silver, like the light which had shone from Harry's wand, invisible at that distance beneath the still-bright Sun.
This is going to be vitally important in the future. Thoughts on what it could be?
Storehouse of lost knowledge from the Peverells is my guess, perhaps their notes or a Slytherin-esque way around the Interdict.
If not, the notes would be enough for Harry to start brainstorming a way around the Interdict.
Maybe certain other Deathly Hallows symbols will now light up in Harry's presence, especially if there is a lost storehouse of some sort with a similar mark.
If it doesn't end up being important, it could just be whatever enchantment is on the Peverell gravestone that makes it recognize someone's anti-Death resolve (possibly only if they're a Peverell descendant) and recite the prophecy, pointed out in the narration so the reader knows where the prophecy was coming from.
Wizards celebrate both Christmas and Easter. No idea why they would, but that is established in HPMoR and in canon. With the exception of Roger Bacon, we have not heard much of anything about religious witches or wizards, but it will strike me as strange the magical world has no religions, if only from the muggleborns and their descendants.
The quote "The last enemy to be destroyed is death" precedes the Peverell brothers by a solid millennia. While the Deathly Hallows is provides (weak) evidence in the other direction, even if it were a family motto, the origination is probably from the bible, as would be common from an old, heraldic family. Still, it is sounds like a suitable epitaph.
And of course, this presumes another deviation from canon, or to say a myth from canon, that the Peverell brothers created the Deathly Hallows, rather than receiving them from Death. Death, who exists in as a semi-sentient semi-being in HPMoR.
On a related note… What happened to the tattered cloak left by the Dementor in Chapter 45? May there be two True Cloaks of Invisibility?
Canon strongly implies that the original story was a dramatization of the story of the Peverells, who actually just made powerful artifacts, iirc. Also, dementor cloaks probably aren't invisibility cloaks, since people and other dementors can see cloaked dementors.
why Avada Kedavra of all things would produce a burned body.
How about Fiendfyre? Does that leave anything behind? I mean, it cut through Hogwarts.
Hey, when was Draco’s mother killed? He should be about the same age as Harry, and yet Harry’s Mum died when he was like a year old, and the war pretty much ended right then. So Narcissa’s burning could not have been long before (well, I guess it could be a few months; but that still leaves Draco a baby; if he were that much older than Harry to have had time to know her, he’d be a second year now).
New idea: going on the "Dumbledore faked Godric's Hollow" theory, what if "Voldemort's" body that gets found is the unrecognizable, burned body of Narcissa Malfoy?
No, the abruptly-ended and grammatically-incorrect sentence preceding this passage indicates actual discontinuity:
"Dumbledore wasn't being very cooperative, and in any case this was several minutes after the critical location within Time"
Notice the lack of punctuation. The end of this sentence has been lopped off, and deliberately. Eliezer Yudkowsky does not make careless punctuation errors.
I interpreted it as Harry being jolted out of his all-consuming inner monologue by Dumbledore suddenly touching his shoulder while he wasn't paying attention to Dumbledore at all.
But Harry didn't see anything helpful he could do using spells in his lexicon, Dumbledore wasn't being very cooperative, and in any case this was several minutes after the critical location within Time
"Harry," the Headmaster whispered, laying his hand on Harry's shoulder. He had vanished from where he was standing over the Weasley twins and come into existence beside Harry; George Weasley had discontinously teleported from where he was sitting to be kneeling next to his brother's side, and Fred was now lying straight with his eyes open and wincing as he breathed. "Harry, you must go from this place."
He wasn't paying attention at all to Dumbledore, Fred, or George, and he's startled by their sudden agency. To me it seems more likely that leaving off in the middle of a sentence as he's startled is a stylistic choice, rather than a particularly meaningful missing period.
The distinction the author draws is that the second box in the earlier problem really does have to be true or false, since "it is a historic statement about the physical world"
If one of the boxes says that exactly one of them was written by Alice, and you know from another source that Alice always tells the truth, Bob always lies, and both boxes were inscribed by one of them, and Alice and Bob never say anything self-referential, then this is correct.
If it says that one of the boxes was labelled by someone who always tells the truth, then it's not just talking about the person who labelled that box. It's also talking about every aspect of reality that they've ever referenced, and if they were the one to write that inscription, then it's self-referential.
Good point--in the original wording, it says it was inscribed by "Bellini", who is established earlier to always tell the truth.
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Less of a joke than a pithy little truism, but I came up with it:
Notability is not ability.