Now let’s talk about poor Ariana, the only daughter of the Dumbledore family whose ability to perform magic was forever ruined by a vicious attack at the hands of those aforementioned Muggle boys. Before her attack, Ariana was a bright and happy girl who showed every sign of being just as brilliant as her brothers, but after the age of six, which is when the attack occurred, her magic became lethal. Basically, Ariana spent the rest of her too-short life trying to suppress her magic as an act of self-preservation, at which point it would simply explode out of her. It’s because of one of these explosive rages that her mother, Kendra, died.
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Aberforth, by his own admission, was the person who could help Ariana keep her temper in check, but life in the Dumbledore house after Kendra’s death was understandably stressful for everybody, and Gellert Grindelwald’s arrival in Godric’s Hollow as a young man didn’t help anything. As Aberforth tells Harry, Ron, and their best friend Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) in the book version of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the three young men argued one day … and it ended it horror.
“‘…I pulled out my wand, and [Grindelwald] pulled out his, and I had the Cruciatus Curse used on me by my brother’s best friend – and Albus was trying to stop him, and then all three of us were duelling, and the flashing lights and the bangs set her off, she couldn’t stand it –’ The colour was draining from Aberforth’s face as though he had suffered a mortal wound,” the book reads. ‘– and I think she wanted to help, but she didn’t really know what she was doing, and I don’t know which of us did it, it could have been any of us – and she was dead.'”
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Ariana is killed by somebody during the duel — Albus and Aberforth never know who it was, though Albus blames himself until his death — so even Ariana’s memory drives a wedge between the two brothers. Thankfully, years after her death, Aberforth is able to use both Ariana’s memory and image, in the form of a portrait, for good.
