These Are Only Predictions. NOT Spoilers.

Well, it's official. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has been leaked online. The entire text, from beginning to end. (And the poor kid who did it is soon going to be faced with one hell of a lawsuit from Scholastic.)

I'm not going to tell you how to get there. I found out through a blog post at Salon's The Machinist. Click there (no spoilers) if you want to know more.

Since we'll all know, perhaps a bit sooner, what will happen to Our Hero in the last volume of his story, I thought I would take the opportunity to lay out my predictions.

Mostly I just want to see how clever I am at guessing.

First off: the big one. What will happen to Harry?

Well... this is the deal. JKR has backed herself into a corner with this "will he live/will he die" thing. If she simply picks either "live" or "die," she's going to put off half of her fans.

My money's not on "die." As fun as it is to end a long-running series with the death of the hero (cough-cough-C.S. Lewis-cough-cough), I can't see that happening. Especially, as has been mentioned on other sites, because Warner Bros. is going to soon open a Harry Potter theme park. Killing off Harry won't exactly inspire kids to jump onto rides.

So my money's either on "live," or (my wicked suspicion) "disappear." That is to say, for whatever reason Harry's not going to turn up after that final battle with Voldy. But they won't find a body, either, and people will claim to catch glimpses of him now and again. He'll be like the wizarding Elvis.

She'll write it so it leaves enough hope for the fans in the "live" camp, and equally satisfies the people who think he should die.

Of course, coming so soon after the Sopranos finale, this will be seen as anticlimactic. But... can't be helped, I suppose.

I stand in the group of fans who hope that the last chapter will take place with the next generation of kidlets arriving at Hogwarts. Possibly in Diagon Alley or at Platform 9 3/4. Hermione and Ron will drop off their son (named Harry, of course), Tonks and Lupin will drop off their wolf-baby, and (as was predicted so beautifully on The Leaky Cauldron) Dudley will be reluctantly escorting his own wizard child.

JKR has stated that one of the main characters will end up teaching at Hogwarts, though it won't be "who we expect" (i.e. Hermione). Plenty of people have voted for Neville, but I'm beginning to wonder if he won't go down in some kind of blazing sacrifice or if he and Bellatrix won't manage to simulatneously off each other.

So my guess is it will be Ginny meeting the kids at the gate, in her role as "woman who devotes herself thoroughly to her work because she will never love again now that her One True Love From High School has disappeared."

Unless Harry lives, in which case my money's back on Neville. ^__^

As for the characters she is planning to kill... oh, I'm sure it will be the usual suspects. Hagrid, a Weasley or two, a professor or two, anyone in the Order who isn't Tonks/Lupin, and perhaps Luna (she has no future in the "real world," anyway). Obviously Snape will die. It would be interesting if she killed off Petunia. (Was Petunia a witch who "denied the call???")

As for "is Harry a Horcrux," I find myself rather uninterested either way. I've told people IRL that this will probably be the Final Fantasy of HP books -- that is, Harry and his group of friends will travel all over the world to find the lost orbs-I-mean-Horcruxes. And they'll have to fight mini-bosses, like Bellatrix and Snape, before Harry fights the final boss. So that structure in itself is less interesting to me than how JKR plays out the denouement.

But -- as long as they're traveling in search of these things -- I hope she included a trip to Fire World. ^__^