Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe)’s Timeline and Summary
- Harry's still hanging out in London, waiting for summer to end, when Dumbledore retrieves him for a special trip.
- They travel to the house of someone named Horace Slughorn. Dumbledore wants Slughorn to come back to Hogwarts as a Potions teacher, and after meeting Harry, Slughorn agrees.
- Harry ends up in Slughorn's Potions class, where he actually does pretty well. The secret to his success is a used Potions textbook with all kinds of nifty marginal notes that help Harry along.
- In fact, when Slughorn holds a contest for the best potion of the day, Harry wins. His prize is a vial of something called "Felix Felicis," which basically allows the user to succeed in anything they do while under its effects.
- Harry uses the potion to carry out a request from Dumbledore: To obtain the truth about one of Slughorn's memories involving the young Lord Voldemort.
- Once he knows the truth of Voldemort and Slughorn's interaction, Dumbledore and Harry realize that Voldemort has been dividing up his soul in order to make it harder to kill him. He's been storing these bits of his soul in objects known as Horcruxes.
- Dumbledore and Harry set out to find and destroy one of these objects. They encounter quite a few obstacles, but they succeed in finding it. (Or so they think.)
- When they return to Hogwarts, Draco comes to kill Dumbledore but isn't able to go through with it before other Death Eaters and Snape arrive. Snape does the deed and kills Dumbledore.
- Harry chases after Snape afterwards and tries to use that nasty curse on him that he learned from his used textbook. Snape deflects the curse easily, though, since apparently he created it—apparently he was the Half-Blood Prince.
- Harry, Hermione, and Ron make plans for what's next. Harry knows he has to keep hunting for Horcruxes, and it looks like Hermione and Ron won't let him go it alone.
- Oh, and that one Horcrux they thought they had found? It's a fake.