Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 34

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Harry, struggling to wake up after his ordeal, thinks about his father. This, if I remember rightly, is our first real information about him. He was a stage magician, good, according to Harry (who was like six at the time of his father's death and not necessarily objective), but too charitable to ever be very financially successful, although it is worth noting here that in the late 1970s, people employed full time in "amusement and recreation industries" made, on average, in the neighborhood of $10,000 a year, about the same as teachers, a bit more than hotel workers and a bit less than auto mechanics. In today's money, that's about $48,388.50 (although differences in cost of living make accurate comparison difficult), enough to live on in the less expensive parts of Missouri, but hardly in line with conventional notions of "making it big". Harry spent his earliest years sleeping in the back of his father's station wagon, which is interesting inasmuch as it means that even during his very earliest years, when he still felt safe and okay and had a living parent, he didn't have a home in the conventional sense. I'd be genuinely interested to know if that station wagon had any kind of threshold worth talking about. Also of interest here, Harry started having nightmares shortly before his father died. Harry isn't particularly sensitive, magically speaking, and he doesn't have any innate capacity for prescience beyond the limited amount that all wizards seem to possess, although I believe it's implied throughout the series that children are broadly more sensitive than adults. We know Malcolm's death wasn't natural, but don't have any of the particulars, so we're left with four possibilities that I can think of. 1. Little Harry was just more sensitive than grownup Harry is. 2. Someone or something was actively trying to warn him, but the message didn't get through very clearly. 3. Whatever got Malcolm has some specific tendency to cause nightmares in people near its victims when it's like, approaching. 4. Whatever got Malcolm was just so fundamentally big or spooky that it caused a serious disturbance in the force. 

Harry wakes up dizzy, nauseated, wracked by abdominal cramps, and in considerable emotional distress. It takes him a minute to get his eyes open, but when he manages it he sees that he's in a small, horrible smelling laundry room, naked and crusted in his own vomit. Justine is also there, looking disheveled and unsettling, and as soon as she notices Harry noticing her, she starts making some fairly unkind accusations about what he's thinking - and scratches his face about it. Harry asks what the vampires did to her, which, I think, says something about him. He's injured, he's poisoned, he just went through an immensely harrowing experience, this young woman he doesn't know well, and with whom he's had what I would charitably describe as mixed experiences up to this point is accusing him of ableism and misogyny and physically assaulting him, and his first response is "Oh no, what happened to you?". (Obviously, in the broader sense, Harry is not like, wholly innocent of either, but he wasn't doing them here). She shows him the vampire bites on her wrists and thigh, and explains that while she was fed upon, that's not the reason she's unstable. This is her baseline, some kind of poorly defined hormonal condition that prevents her from having the emotional control other people do. Medication didn't help, but Thomas feeding on her emotions does, which is part of why she's with him. We'll come back to this when we get to White Night, and probably again when we get to Battle Ground, but I always found Justine's assertion, in White Night, that her stability at that time was due to medication suspicious because she'd made it so clear in this book that meds don't work for her. On a first read I sorta figured were meant to attribute it to the (not insubstantial) advances in psychopharmacy between 2000 and 2007, but at the time of this writing it seems far more likely than otherwise that her newfound emotional control was in fact because it wasn't her, it was He Who Walks Beside, and I am vindicated. 

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Harry tries to force open the locked door, collapses, vomits again, and loses consciousness for a while. He wakes up with Justine trying to wipe his face with a dirty towel, and asks how long they've been there. Justine says the vampires had him for about two hours, and that it's been around another ten hours since then. He says they need to get out of there, and she says they can't, that this is the larder. Harry tries to explain that he's been poisoned, and needs to go to a hospital soon if he's going to survive, and Justine just kind of...shuts off. Dissociates. Almost immediately, the ghost of Paula, who is referred to in this chapter as Rachel, materializes. She isn't strong enough to speak so that Harry can hear her, but they manage to establish enough communication for her to explain that Bianca's fixation on her death is keeping her here, that she's tired, that she doesn't blame Harry for her death, although Harry apologizes anyway, for his role in it. (As an aside, she indicates "Bianca" with a "bottle-shaped curving gesture". Just, y'know, in case we didn't get that there was a gay thing happening between Paula and Bianca). She looks past him at something that scares her, or more likely that she wants Harry to know should scare him, and vanishes. It's Kravos, now wearing Justine's body, which is interesting, as far as how his ability to possess people works. She wasn't asleep, just kind of absent, which implies that sleeping people are similarly absent from their brains or their bodies or whatever Kravos needs access to. That tracks with what we already know, but it's an interesting way to confirm it. Harry challenges Kravos to try to possess him instead, to come in for a battle in the center of the mind. Kravos, who, while not nearly as smart as he thinks he is and inclined to really catastrophic overcomplication, was not actually born yesterday, refuses. He also tells Harry that several of the Red Court became ill after feeding on his blood. This implies that Reds have the necessary internal anatomy to die of amantin poisoning, which would be mildly intriguing on its own, but also it's Kravos's impression that Bianca was hoping would die as food for her children. He doesn't quote Bianca directly here, he's not trying to be helpful, but that Bianca may have meant for Harry to die earlier in the evening, and that she certainly left him in a room with half-turned Susan, knowing that Susan would try to feed on Harry and that this could very possibly kill both of them, seems to me to reinforce that starting a war with the White Council was a stretch goal at best, and more likely a legitimate accident. If she needed Harry or Susan alive for her plans to come to fruition, and knew this, she would not have left them together. 

Harry insults Kravos's intelligence, provoking him into pinning Harry against the door. He doesn't really do anything, although it's clear that he could, just makes some threats about making Harry's last moments a nightmare that seems to last years, and then leaves Justine's body. She kinda collapses into Harry, who isn't currently in any condition to be collapsed into, and they both end up on the floor, with Harry stroking her hair and trying to comfort her while she cries. She eventually relaxes, and Harry starts trying to make a plan, but he hears something in the laundry pile and of course he has to go investigate, although Justine tells him not to, that he won't like what he finds. She's right, of course - it's Susan, half turned and thirsty for blood. 

The post is a lot shorter than the chapter on this one, because a lot of this chapter is buildup, atmosphere, and emotionality, and there's not a lot for me to say about that other than that it's there and it works. It's sad and spooky and suspenseful - I feel for Harry and Justine, and I'm appropriately concerned about Susan's situation at the end. Also, these posts are considerably easier to write when I'm not directing most of my mental energy to other nonfiction writing. I'm not prepared to commit to a schedule or anything just yet, but the trend it gonna be in favor of More Posts. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 33

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Content warning: Harry is violently attacked and sexually assaulted at the end of this chapter. The discussion of this in the book is vivid and disturbing, if not "explicit" in the conventional sense. The discussion of it in this blog post is frank and explicit.

Harry actually had a plan this time. On his cue, Thomas and Michael scatter boxes of aluminum nails at the feet of Lea's horse, causing her, the hounds, and, intriguingly, the horse, the recoil. However much we may be told that the fae don't think like people, their relationship with the evidence of their senses doesn't seem to be much different from ours, so for Lea to flinch when nails are thrown at her feet makes sense. The hounds were of course once human, and it's hard to know how they think, but like, sure. But the horse? Why does that horse know what a nail is well enough to know they're usually iron and shy away from them? Was the horse also once a person? Are fae horses just inherently people? It's not unprecedented for fae steeds to be former humans, and it borders on common for them to be preternaturally intelligent, but this does not strike me as a context where "intelligent" should mean "can be misled by tricks that play on essentially human expectations". Lea covers her fear with indignation, asking how Harry dares to bring iron here and wield it against here. Harry explains that he only needed a just needed to eat something, and starts talking about how he just had to eat something, but now he's ready to go with Lea, and can he choose what he looks like as a dog, can he have white fur and blue eyes? This, I'm almost certain, is a Tam Lin reference. "For I will ride a milk white steed / the nearest to the town / because I was an earthy knight / they gave me that renown". (This does not appear in every recorded version of the ballad, and this exact wording is my best recollection of how it was said in Seanan McGuire's An Artificial Knight). Lea's "night black steed" helps set this up - this phrase is less frequent, but appears in the Tricky Pixie version, which is probably the best known in urban fantasy circles, and is certainly the one I would reach for if I wanted my wording to evoke Tam Lin in an urban fantasy novel. This is a very clever piece of foreshadowing. In this very book, Harry takes Janet's role, venturing into the dark and the unknown to rescue a transformed lover, at great risk including from that lover (because of the transformation) and largely through simple unwillingness to let her go. Of course, in the longer course of the series, Harry is our Tam Lin - literally a mortal man, who, in the aftermath of a bad fall is taken up as a knight by a faerie queen. It is perhaps worth noting here as well that in some versions of the ballad, Tam Lin's only relative, at least the only one named or referred to, is his grandfather. 

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Lea stops Harry's tongue with magic, but she's figured out that something is up, and assumes Michael and Thomas are going to do something, but Michael swears on the blood of Christ that they're not, and she seems to take that seriously. She uses the lariat to pull Harry close to her, and recognizes the smell of the mushroom. He says it's Amanita virosa, but since he presumably got it in Illinois, not Europe, it is more likely A. bisporigera, the eastern destroying angel amanita (A. virosa and A. bisporigera, along with A. ocreata and A. verna, are all routinely referred to as "destroying angel" and produce similar fatal poisonings). The symptom progression he describes is accurate for all of the destroying angels, though. Including the part about his innards falling apart - there are anecdotal reports of being able to pour the victim's liver out of their body on autopsy with these kinds of mushroom poisonings. He's also correct that there's no specific antidote, although I can't verify the effectiveness of fairy magic in the treatment of multiple organ failure. Lea, can, though, and after she's satisfied herself that he's not bluffing, and she seems to share his assessment that her magic can't fix it. She says he's gone mad, which, y'know, this plan was definitely formed by a man who's had four concussions in the past several days and hasn't gotten much sleep. Michael volunteers that he has what he refers to as St. Mary's thistle (Sylibum marianum, better known as milk thistle) which is frequently used in Europe for mushroom poisonings of this type. Lea, whom I can only assume has already started to experience the first corrupting effects of the dagger, demands that Michael give her the extract, forgetting, until Harry reminds her, that she probably doesn't want to be in open-ended debt to a Knight of the Cross. If she wants Harry to live, she's gonna have to make a deal. Michael offers that he'll give her the extract (technically, he'll give it to Harry, but on her behalf) if she lets Harry go and agrees to leave him alone for a year and a day. Lea asks why he'd do this, why he'd die rather than be hers, and he says people need him, and while he can't help them if he's dead, he also can't help them if he's with her. She says, again, that he's mad, and that he must get it from his mother, that she had a similar mindset "near the end". This lends context and credibility to what Chauncy said in Fool Moon about Maggie having been involved with dark forces, although it's not a whole lot of new information. 

Lea agrees, and Harry takes the milk thistle. He talks about needing to go to the hospital as well, but honestly the only things a hospital can do are provide intravenous silibinin (the active constituent in milk thistle) and keep an eye on whether he needs a new liver. Also like, intravenous fluids and other supportive care, but that's not really gonna make the difference in whether you die or not. You should, to be clear, you should go to a hospital if you ate, or think you might have eaten, a destroying angel mushroom, but Harry took milk thistle extract within minutes of eating it (you will not be able to do this because you did not make a whole plan to eat and then survive this mushroom) and premedicated with pepto-bismol, so the usefulness of a hospital is like, relatively lower in his case. He may also, in the long run, be able to recover more thoroughly from damage to his liver and other internal organs, but he won't enjoy the process. Thomas expresses surprise that Harry really did eat the mushroom, he'd assumed it was a bluff, because Harry's idea was, objectively, bonkers.

Unfortunately, as is so often the case, Harry forgot something when putting together a deal with one of the Sidhe. Lea agreed not to pursue him, but she didn't agree not to send anyone else after him, and many things in faerie are under her command or owe her favors she can call in. So now they've got everything but Lea coming down on their heads. Now, I'm not actually entirely sure this holds up - she agreed to let him go, and not to pursue him as long as he remained in the moral world, and this doesn't really feel consistent with "letting him go", but given that, again, she has presumably already been affected by the dagger, her agreements may not bind as tightly. It's about two miles to their exit, and Michael can't make that with broken ribs, it's just not happening. Thomas proposes they leave Michael behind, but Harry insists on leaving them both behind, to hold the bridge, while he runs for it on his own. There's merit to this plan, inasmuch as it maximizes the chances someone will get to Bianca's mansion, and Harry's the only one of them who can open a door back out of the Nevernever. On the other hand, while Harry's right that this is a stealth-dependent plan and extra people hit diminishing returns pretty fast, going in alone is never the best idea. The difference between having someone else with you and not is always significant. Michael also doesn't especially want Harry to be alone with Thomas, which is fair, since as far as he knows Thomas's only motive here is that he needs their help to get Justine back. 

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So Harry runs, and the pretty fairy-tale woodland quickly turns to dark, spooky forest. (Possible Red Riding Hood callback, given what's coming). Bob finds the spot, in the trunk of a hollow tree. Harry starts gathering his will, which still hurts on account of getting his magic eaten, and is further complicated by physical exhaustion and either the beginnings of amantin poisoning or anxiety about having eaten an extremely poisonous mushroom. The first symptom of amantin poisoning is "unease", so either is legitimately possible here. Bob tries to get his attention a couple of times while he's opening the portal, but he blows him off so he can focus. This, unsurprisingly, turns out to have been a mistake. The veil was weak here, because it's been opened in this spot recently - Bianca had people watching this entrance as well, and when Harry comes through, the Red Court have him surrounded. Yeah this is, this is it guys. The monsters get him. I hadn't actually remembered until I went through this chapter to take notes that in addition to the fairly transparent analog to sexual assault in all that touching and licking and helplessness, Bianca herself does also very literally rape him here. Like, that happened. He's physically attacked, restrained, forcibly stripped, drugged, and raped. A couple of things come out of this. First of all, no more little bits of homoeroticism after this. Harry remains, as he puts it in White Knight, secure in his heterosexuality, but he stops, y'know, having thoughts about how warm and calloused  Michael's hands are. Harry's got the normal amount of internalized homophobia for a man of his era and cultural background, but he was maybe getting close to being able to start exploring some things and that just...stops, never to be picked up again. This is also, obviously, just an immense trauma, and a major factor in his headspace during the very end of this book and the entirety of the next one, as well as the time between. Everyone thinks his fairly obvious breakdown is because of Susan turning into half-vampire and then leaving, and obviously that didn't help (neither did the repeated assassination attempts at the very beginning of the war), but I think this may be the bigger factor. Also harder to process. Men aren't given frameworks for understanding that they've been raped, let alone how to think about it, how to start healing from it. I don't think he ever tells anyone, except Ivy, sort of indirectly in Small Favor. A lot of the obsession with finding a way to turn Susan fully human again may honestly be as much about wanting to reverse what happened to him, just turn the clock back on the whole thing. In Small Favor he observes in narration that he "never really got over" this, specifically in connection with being tempted by Mab's offer, and I think there's a more general theme there. As I said when we talked about Chapter 26, Harry is much less afraid of his own power, his own capacity for destruction, after this, but he's also a lot more tempted by the offer of more power. This is going on our list of things to keep an eye on - seeing how the sexual trauma here plays out across the rest of the series, especially in terms of Harry's relationship to violence, sexuality, and his own power. 

That's what I got for now. The freelance project that's been eating my life since the spring is for realsies over, and I genuinely have reason to hope that posts will be more frequent, perhaps even more consistent, going forward. Until next time, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!

How to Take a Nap

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I'm fully aware that I may be about to alienate some readers, but I don't think you can do your best writing when you're sleep deprived. There is a kind of mental holding yourself together that is necessary to do any focused work when your brain and body would really prefer you to be unconscious, and that holding-together also holds shut some internal passages that are best kept open when we are trying to be evocative or creative. Sometimes, though, we want, or need to write when we didn't get enough sleep and circumstances are not conducive to getting a proper night's sleep first. So because I'm a chronic optimizer, I worked out what for me is the best, most efficient way to take a nap that will help me write better, and now I'm going to share it with all of you. There will probably be steps here that make you go "But I can't sleep like that!" you may be right, but I would encourage you to give it a shot, because some of the things that are like that are here on purpose. This is a recipe for a 20-30 minute nap after which you will be able to get some writing done - the normal rules of sleep are not all in play. The objective here is to fall asleep quickly, enter REM sleep quickly, and be able to return to coherence and productivity quickly upon awakening. The behaviors conducive to getting a restful 6-10 hours are not necessarily our allies here, especially if it's important that we not accidentally sleep longer than we meant to.

Environment

Lights on. I'm serious.This is part of setting the stage for the whole thing. Most of us, when we sleep, want it as dark as we can get it. Making it dark will prompt your brain in the direction that you are going to bed, when you're not, and likely start it demanding all the other things you usually do before going to bed, which we don't have time for. Keep the lights on. If you've been working in a dark room, turn the lights on. If it's the middle of the night and everyone else is asleep including a partner or sibling who shares your room, consider having your nap on the bathroom floor. Sound is important too, you want some. This works best if other people in the same space are awake and moving around, talking or watching tv or whatever. You want non-repetitive background noise that's not entirely under your control. My very best results have been with two other people in the room playing a video game with the sound on and occasionally talking to each other about it. If you don't have any source of real background noise available, maybe put on a tv show or something, but like, not something you would normally watch, and not something that's trying to engage you directly - cooking show with two hosts so they talk to each other as much as the audience, maybe. If you have enough control of your space, put it on at normal volume but not close to you. Try to minimize repetitive, mechanical sounds, like running dryers, steam engines, or white noise machines. Actually if you don't normally use a white noise machine when you're sleeping it's probably fine, but if you do, don't use it now. It's preferable not to have a fan or space heater for the same reasons, but deal with the realities of the temperature in the room. There's a version of this process where you freeze or cook yourself on purpose, but that's advanced. 

Bed and Bedding

Do not, under any circumstances, lie down on the bed or other furniture upon which you usually sleep. This will get your brain working against you, and in any case it's probably too soft. A couch or futon will do, a carpeted floor is best. I have done this successfully on a bathroom or kitchen floor with a rug. You could probably use a yoga mat. No pillow. If you're on the floor, you can put a folded shirt or a dish towel or something under your head. (If you need to keep your torso a bit elevated to breathe or not choke on your own stomach acid, do what you need to do - the basic objective here is to minimize coziness, so execute that to the best of your ability within your medical needs). You can have a blanket, but only one, and it should be light - a top sheet or a plush throw. Have some hydrating liquid ready to hand for when you wake up. (If you are an active alcoholic and you normally drink while you work, it might be better if your post-nap drink has some alcohol in it, but use your own best judgement). If you usually work on a couch, you'll need somewhere that's not that couch. If you usually work lying on the floor, find a piece of furniture or go to a different room.

You

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Take off your shoes, belt, hat, and coat, if you're wearing any of those things. If you use caffeine, get a little into your system now so it can kick in when you're asleep. (If you use alcohol, probably best to wait until after the nap - the version of this that uses alcohol on purpose is also advanced). If you wear a binder that doesn't have any fastenings, you'll need to take it off, but otherwise just unclasp, unlace, or unzip any upper-body undergarments - if you're wearing a sports bra that fits you can probably just leave it alone. Keep your other clothes on. Lie down on your back. If anything in your pockets is bothering you, take it out and put it somewhere that it won't bother you or get lost (maybe in your shoes). Set a timer (not an alarm) on your phone for 30 minutes. Put your feet flat on the floor like you're gonna do crunches. (You're not gonna do crunches). You'll probably end up straightening your legs out at some point, and that's fine. You can do whatever's comfortable with your arms, although I'd advise against putting your hands under your head - I like to put my hands on the middle of my chest with my fingers laced together. Close your eyes. Tell yourself, out loud or in your head "This is going to work. I'm going to get a little sleep, and when I wake up I'll be able to get some writing done." Take a couple of deep breaths. If you don't normally lie down on the floor, your back muscles are probably doing some weird things, and that's fine, but they'll settle down faster if you breathe. Now let your mind wander and do whatever it's gonna do, with as little resistance as possible. If you start going to the "Oh god how long has it been" or "Here's every stupid thing I did in the last decade" places, redirect your attention briefly to your Background Sounds. You will fall asleep at some point. 

Bee-bee-bee-beep! Bee-bee-bee-beep!

Sit up as soon as the timer goes off. This process has a greater than 50% chance of producing really weird, vivid dreams, and you will probably want a second to process them (and maybe to make sure you remember, if they present a possible way forward on your writing), but do it sitting up. Drink like, at least half your post-nap hydration drink, unless it's one of those really big water bottle, in which case, y'know, at least 6floz. As soon as possible, get up. Go to the bathroom if you need to, maybe splash water on your face. Then get back to work. 

Next post will be Dresden Files - I already started on it. I sincerely apologize for how long you've all been waiting, but I had like, the biggest freelance project and it's put everything else on hold for the past month or so. It's done now, and we're getting back to normal, at least until the next thing goes wrong. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 32

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Thomas interposes himself between Harry and the fireplace, getting himself a couple of broken ribs and very likely saving Harry's life. Obviously everyone's a bit distracted by the active fight going on, but it's nonetheless interesting that this goes essentially unremarked, given how thoroughly at odds this is with Thomas's characterization up to this point. Something like two chapters ago, he said "I like you, Dresden, but I like myself a whole lot more", and suited action to word by betraying them at a critical moment. This, more than anything Thomas has said since arriving at Harry's apartment, not only establishes his sincerity about helping them now, but lends credence to the idea that his apparent betrayal at the party really was a ruse, that he might really have intended to help them as soon as he got the chance.

Michael gets between Lydia and both of them, sword drawn, but the Nightmare points out, and Harry corroborates, that it's wearing Lydia's real body. She's an innocent in this, and hurting her with the sword risks unmaking it, and would, you know, be wrong. So Michael drops the sword and throws her into the couch, trying to keep her occupied while Harry gets set up to perform an exorcism. He puts down a salt circle and uses those trick birthday candles that can't be blown out to anchor the directions, which is honestly kind of brilliant. I don't know why those aren't more readily available in non-birthday shapes and sizes - fire risk, I guess. When he gets the spell going, the energy forms a small vortex, swirling down into the earth, where the dark spirits energy will be absorbed and grounded once it's removed from Lydia. So that's actually fascinating. I think this is the only time we actually see Harry perform an exorcism on the page, so this vortex doesn't come up again, but what we're seeing here, on a reread, is the basic structure of the Darkhallow. "Not a new spell, just a really, really skewed application of an old one." The Darkhallow is an exorcism, scaled up and turned inside out, so that instead of drawing one possessing spirit out of a person and into the ground, it draws many spirits out of the surrounding environment and into a person. That's very cool, both as an element of worldbuilding and as a reflection of the amount of thought Jim Butcher started putting in after the first few books. Once the circle is empowered, Harry just needs to put the Nightmare off balance so it can take effect. He uses what he thinks is its name, Azorthragal, but of course it doesn't work, because the Nightmare is not, in fact, the ghost of Azorthragal. Nightmare Lydia breaks Michael's hand, and in his efforts to fight her off, he inadvertently breaks the circle. 

Harry tries to hit her, which isn't a very good plan, but good plans are in pretty short supply here. She slams his head into the floor (he sees stars, so that's concussion number four), and...look, I need you to remember that I didn't write this, okay? I'm not responsible for what goes on here. She starts humping him. Looked at objectively, I suppose this is foreshadowing for the sexual trauma yet to come, but subjectively it's weird, uncomfortable, and more than a little jarring. Except also, as Harry's going to realize in a minute, we've been referring to Nightmare Lydia as "she" or "it", but that's the ghost of Leonid Kravos in there. I... don't know where Butcher was going with this. It feels transphobic, certainly. (Broadly transphobic, to be clear - while this can certainly be taken in a transmisogynistic "man disguised as a woman" way, we are nonetheless looking at a man in a phenotypically female body, and the stereotype of trans men as small, violent, hypersexual, criminal women has a persistent, if somewhat obscure, history in the genres that form this one's parentage. Butcher may have had either, both, or neither of these ideas consciously in mind, and I don't think it matters which). Sexual violence is, as they say, an extension of violence, not of sex, but I have no idea whether we're meant to take it that way here, or whether this is meant to queer code Kravos, to suggest that he's into Harry? Of course, a minute ago Nightmare Lydia was like, seductively running her hands over her breasts, so it's possible this is more about doing weird things to Lydia's body and Harry's just, y'know, there. It may be that the point of Kravos Nightmare Lydia grinding on Harry is to make things uncomfortable enough that the reader notices how inherently violatory this possession is. That's important, because there hasn't been time anywhere in here for Lydia to become someone we actually know. She was sketchy, at the beginning, an unknown quantity whose motives were suspect, and she's spent most of the book off-screen, unconscious, or both. This version of her is as real to us as whoever she actually is, if not more so, because we're given to suspect the non-possessed Lydia we've seen is at least partly a performance, so we may need a little extra help to catch that Kravos is using a whole other living person's body for his own twisted ends, and that's incredibly fucked up. That was pointed out explicitly, too, earlier in this chapter, but sometimes you have to both say something out loud and make it weird to make sure everyone's on the same page. 

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Nightmare Lydia then starts strangling Harry, which is honestly much less uncomfortable. I do want to
note here that given the strength she displayed earlier, Harry should not have functioning trachea after this. Your breathe-y bits aren't really...supposed to be compressed to a sufficient extent that you can't inhale, and it only takes about two additional pounds of pressure to go from completely occluding the trachea to doing them a potentially serious injury. She makes a remark about him dying without figuring it out, so of course it is at this point, while being strangled to death, that Harry starts to figure it out. He remembers how agitated everyone at SI was, including about Kravos's journal, and how Susan was excited about something but said she couldn't tell him what yet, and asked him to confirm Kravos's name. He works out, at long fucking last, that Kravos deliberately killed himself in the midst of all the turbulence in the border between worlds, creating an extraordinarily powerful ghost. The reader doesn't get this information quite yet, we're just told that he knows it, and that it's going to avail in precisely fuck all since he's about to die. 

Thomas, for the second time in about five minutes, saves Harry's life, although this time at less risk and detriment to himself. He begins to feed on...I'm not actually sure - Lydia, probably, since I don't think a ghost has whatever exactly it is the White Court eat, but Kravos is definitely along for the ride, trapped in Lydia's body as it succumbs to Thomas's inhuman powers of seduction. This is definitely foreshadowing for what happens to Dresden later - in the interests of not having to put content warnings on more than one post, I will discuss the specific quote that makes the parallel obvious when we get there, rather than doing it here. While Thomas keeps Nightmare Lydia busy, Harry gets the exorcism going again, and this time, with the right Name, he's able to banish Kravos's spirit. This doesn't necessarily mean he won't cause any more problems for anyone, but it gets him out of their faces for the moment, and Harry seems reasonably confident that it will keep him from possessing Lydia, specifically, ever again. Harry checks in with Michael, who's pretty sure he's got broken ribs, but then has to tell Thomas to stop making out with Lydia, who isn't fully conscious but is still responding to his feeding on her. Thomas does not make a great argument here - he could point out that he's got broken ribs too and given another few minutes to feed he could be fully back in fighting shape, but instead says something about how she's probably just grateful. Harry carries the point, and Thomas, looking less dented than he did after smashing into the fireplace, goes to find some clothes. 

Harry and Michael discuss the nature of the White Court, how they can feed on different emotions but always induce lust to get close to them. Harry notes that their powers appear to affect the body directly, given that it worked on Lydia's body even when she wasn't the one controlling it, which suggests either ambient magic or something chemical, like pheromones. I believe over time the weight of evidence favors the ambient magic theory, but I don't think anyone ever quite comes out and says. 

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Thomas comes back, wearing some of Harry's jogging clothes. On the scale of inconsistencies that matter, this one isn't, but I was fairly certain Harry didn't actually take up running as a hobby until either between this book and Summer Knight or Summer Knight and Death Masks, so I'm not really sure why he has jogging clothes at this point. Maybe one of the times he resolved to get in shape over the past couple of books, he got as far as getting appropriate clothes for it but then never actually got underway with doing it. That can happen. Harry fills Thomas and Michael in on what he's figured out about Kravos and his plan. He doesn't articulate a specific idea of how Bianca and Mavra fit in, but since Bianca has it out for Harry and Mavra has it out for Michael, and both of those things have already been established, that could account for it and doesn't really need to be said again. He's reasonably confident that he can take the Nightmare, now that he actually knows what he's dealing with. Thomas asks if Harry got hit in the head while he wasn't looking (he uh, he did, yeah) and reminds him that there are guards with machine guns. Michael makes the kind of unwarranted, but in this case accurate, assumption that Harry has a plan, and asks him to elaborate on it, largely disregarding Thomas's suggestion that they disguise themselves as caterers and sneak in. 

Rather than devoting page space to explaining something we're about to see anyway, the scene breaks, picking back up as Our Heroes step into the Nevernever. From the upper floor, the reflection of Harry's apartment looks nearly the same as it does in real life, albeit cleaner and brighter. Obviously, if they'd started from the basement, they would have had a very different experience. It's got a small infestation of little spirit beings that apparently hang out and feed on the energy that spills over from the mortal side. They've got Bob with them, to find them the shortest route to Bianca's place. As Bob explains, it's not exactly the "shortest" in the conventional sense since places in the Nevernever are linked by ideas rather than geography, but the principle stands, although there's some concern that they may not be able to open a gate back out until the sun goes down. Notably, I don't think that issue ever comes up again, but in fairness I don't think Harry makes any other plans that involving making transit through the Nevernever while severely magically drained. They go out onto a street that looks like a stage set of the real Chicago, down into a tunnel that I assume is a reflection of the undercity, and then back out onto a hill with a ring of dolmens, tombs made of two or more big rocks supporting a slab of flat stone. Harry immediately recognizes this as part of Faerie, which is a very bad problem, since both Lea and Mab are gonna be somewhere in there, putting Harry and Bob both in danger. Bob says there was no way to get anywhere through the Nevernever without passing through part of Faerie. The concepts of the Summer and Winter courts are very briefly and vaguely introduced here, with Bob describing them as the Disney version and the wicked witch version, and Harry identifying the former as Summer. Bob has just pointed them in the direction of a covered bridge that should take them out of Faerie when Thomas points out that this place is obviously maintained, or the grass would be over their knees, and everyone gets a bad feeling. They haven't even had a chance to start moving yet when they hear a hunting horn. Thomas and Michael both make it to the bridge before Harry does, and Harry notes that Michael beat him there with 20 years on him and a broken rib, and that he has to work out more, putting Michael's age at around 47, and establishing that Harry has not, in fact, starting regularly exercising yet. 

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Inches from the bridge, Lea gets a lariat around Harry's neck. Lariat, for those interested, is a strict synonym for the less fantasy-sounding "lasso", from the Spanish la reata. She pulls him off his feet, leaving him lying on the ground and being strangled (again), although he manages to get the rope off. Give the amount of damage he took from Nightmare Lydia, that had to have hurt like hell, and it's too his credit that he keeps it together as much as he does. Lea herself comes into view a moment later, on night-black steed (that's a direct quote - someone bother me if I don't follow up on it when we talk about the next chapter). She's surrounded by her hellhounds, and says that now they can finally conclude their bargain. 

I feel like every chapter in this book has contrived to end with some new, cliff-hanger-y peril. Hopefully, it won't take me quite so long to write about this next one. Remember that if you want more regular updates, the best thing you can do to make that happen is use the button at the top of the page to become a Patron. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!

2024-2025 Eeveeyear Goals

It wasn't until I directly compared the two spreadsheets that I realized I didn't, at least in relative terms, actually do worse this year than last. It hasn't felt like it was going well, and my wrap-up post from a year ago talked about being under 50%, without, apparently, mentioning that one goal actually came in under 25%. That goals was New Cards, which was set absurdly high, but still. The goal I did worst on this year still came in at 29.22%, so I suppose that's something. I'm also not sure I have a lot of useful insights this year, but we'll see what we can come up with. 

Core Goals

This is a blog about books and writing. I am, in some ways, a person about books and writing. I'm still hoping to eventually make, if not a living, at least, y'know, money as a novelist. So the goals that directly support that do feel more important than the ones that don't, that are here to give more strictly recreational activities a place in my life, or to shore up areas where I struggle with being a corporeal being. This also includes the goals that have been with us the longest, and that means we get to do graphs. 

I wrote fewer words of fiction this year than last year. I don't like that. I really wanted there to be continuous improvement on that one.  Apparently, I also wrote fewer words, by a substantially wider margin, last year than the year before that. Regression line indicates the trend is still basically upwards, which is something, I suppose. I wish I felt like I understood what happened here, why I haven't been able to keep up the 2021-2022 numbers. I thought last year was just the move, which took a lot out of me mentally, emotionally, and chronologically, but I didn't move this year. I don't know, maybe I'm still recovering, but I'm hoping to fiddle with the knobs some this year and see if we can't get back to a more respectable output level. I know part of the thing is some of my freelance work straight up getting harder, but I can't really do anything about that, so we'll have to see what else we can adjust. 

I read exactly as many books this year as I did the one before, 50, which is, y'know, that's almost a book a week, it's respectable, but it's not what I hoped for, nor is it really enough to sustain the level of creative output for which I'm aiming. I think part of the problem, for this and the writing, might just be that living with so many other people makes it harder to really put in the time on these essentially solitary activities. I don't like being unsociable when there's social to be had (I am perhaps the only extroverted writer in existence, and this has its downsides), and there is a lot more social to be had now than there was where I lived previously. I do think I've figured out how to stop game manuals from slowing me down, but I only figured it out part way through this year. Tracking pages of game reading, directly, rather than only counting them when I finish, means I can make some progress without bringing everything else to a halt, and that I'm not forced to choose between slogging through a game I'm no longer interested in and sacrificing the progress I've made so far.

We're dropping handwritten pages, as I said we might. One of my two most active fiction projects, I write exclusively on my phone, and the other primarily on the computer, so it's not doing much to facilitate progress in that area anymore, and needing to work on paper has at this point unambiguously become a deterrent to actually working on blog posts. On the subject of which, I wrote one (1) more blog post this year than last, 17 instead of 16. We're gonna get back to regular output, okay? We are. 

Most of these goals, and the ones that attend upon them, have at this point, of necessity, been pinned. That is to say, rather than setting them via the usual formula, which would result in unacceptably low targets from which it would likely take years to recover, I set them directly, based on what I hope to accomplish or, where fiction writing is concerned, what I think will set an appropriate scale for what I hope to accomplish. I put blog posts at 50+1d10 and got 57 again. This naturally puts the blog reading goal at 570+1d10, in this case, 576. Similarly, the goal for fiction writing remains 60,000 words, so the target for reading must be 60,000+1d100 pages, in this case 60033. Book reading goal is 111 this year - I did it as 100+2d6, so we'll see how that goes. I'm honestly sort of expecting the book target to naturally land where it needs to be now that I've got the goal for pages read set in a reasonable way that supports my goals. This was the worst year on record for rereading, which again I think might be related to spending more time actually talking to other people, an activity notoriously difficult to reconcile with listening to audiobooks. This, too, has been set manually, at 81 (75+1d10). I'll see where I can get with remembering to put on an audiobook any time I'm doing something compatible with it and not currently caught up on rereads (if I am, I should put on a podcast). The reading and writing time goals are not pinned, but they are intertwined. Rather than letting each one develop separately, and then aiming for 125% of prior year average, I calculate as though I were doing that and then average those, so the goals are the same every year even if I didn't accomplish the same amount. This year, it's 1007 hours each, which is a hair over 3 hours a day.

Fanfiction, nonfiction, and short fiction aren't really core, but they're the other reading and writing things, so here we are. I'm continuing to let nonfiction writing do what it's gonna do, for the most part - I do have a couple longer-form nonfiction projects where the additional pressure to get things done might be helpful, but it's as much to check whether, when I'm not writing a lot of fiction, it's because I'm writing a lot of nonfiction. And it supports good length on blog posts, especially in the absence of tracking handwritten pages. We've also added a nonfiction reading goal, currently set at an almost totally arbitrary 928 pages, which is in the same kind of "see how it goes" space from which the originally nonfiction target of 15,000 words arose. I'm hoping to discover if there's a relationship between how much nonfiction I read and how much nonfiction I can write, as there seems to be for fiction and blog posts. Of course, blog posts are part of nonfiction, so one of the things we'll learn this year is my level of patience for using the print function to check the page count on the blog posts I read. Separating fanfiction and short fiction reading largely accomplished what I wanted it to, even if I didn't do as much of either as I'd have liked. I have discovered something of an issue with longform fics-in-progress, because I don't like to count them until they're actually done and I've read the whole thing, but that means quite a lot of reading might not get counted in the year in which it occurs, and also what if they never get finished. Depending upon how this year goes, I may end up counting them as fic read when I get caught up, and potentially subsequently counting each chapter as an additional fic read (since a complete 100 word drabble also counts as a fic, this isn't unreasonable), and only counting it as a book read once either the whole thing is done or I have reason to believe it never will be, but we're gonna give it another year first. Fanfiction writing, measured by chapters posted, went pretty well, I think, and while I didn't hit the goal, the one of the coming year will be higher, which is...not the case for quite a few of my goals. I've gotten kind of into translating pop music from the aughties into the Old Tongue from Wheel of Time - if that becomes enough of a Thing, I may have to make it a separate goal, as the translations take less time, and use a different skill set, from most prose fiction writing.

Non-core goals

The overhead projector that I used for most of my video gaming and some of my tv watching broke this spring, which kinda put a cramp in my style in those areas. We're mostly up and running with using the living room tv instead, but we can't use that for the more difficult stuff in Hollow Knight because the switch controllers lag a little, and so does the connection between the switch and the tv. Nature of the physical space, and not a lot to be done about it except hope that increased efforts to make money will make it possible for us to repair the projector sometime this year. Time spent playing tabletop games (and, to a lesser extent sewing) was lower than it might have been because my GM's summer hiatus was both delayed and extended due to circumstances beyond either of our control. And that's as much as I think we need to say about how none of this is my fault, yeah?

I don't think we need to get into every single goal here. You can see the numbers for yourselves. Webcomics was one of only two goals I actually hit this year, and to be honest I have no real idea how that happened. Learning python is going very slowly, although I'm working on a dice calculator for my partner's ttrpg system, which at least gives me a project to learn on. I was also able to get in a lot of extra Skills at the last minute because one of my freelance projects required me to learn R. I was told that R is "statistics software" like SPSS (which I also don't know how to use, to be clear). It is not. It's an entire damn programming language, in which I am now marginally competent. There's even a chance this will help me with the statistical operations I need to learn to perform in Python. This year I will probably also install RPGmaker and start playing around with that, and maybe with some tools for Pokemon romhacks. I wish I'd managed to listen to more podcasts, but we're just gonna see if Trying Harder works for that. 

I think I've got the TCGOs targets about right now. They're gonna move some every year, of course, but what happened this year feels reasonable, manageable, and like it's keeping the place this thoroughly unproductive activity holds in my life both open and contained, which is what it was supposed to do. Music, on the other hand... Part of the issue with this one was the social thing, that it's hard to do something that benefits from headphones while interacting with other people, but also, listening to new music is harder when there's a bookkeeping element involved. I'm gonna keep it as a goal for this year, but after that we're going to evaluate whether it's doing more good than harm. Walking was straight up undercounted because I'm still using Pokemon Go to track distance, and it had an update that disconnected the function to count walking when the app wasn't open and it took me a while to notice, but I have also been walking less. Duolingo is the only non-core goal that got pinned - I made very little progress this year, and I don't want to risk letting the situation get worse. I am also looking for a different language learning app with a similar structure, as I'd really prefer not to support their AI nonsense, but most of the ones I tried are expensive, are bad, or don't have Russian as a language option. 

I got fewer little administrative tasks accomplished this year than I would have liked, but as a goal it is basically working how it's supposed to. The only difficulty is that it interacts a little oddly with Dracula Daily, and even in that area it's more of a blessing than a hindrance, if only because it prompts me to check my email more often than I otherwise might. 

New Goals

We already talked, back up in the discussion of core goals, about the addition of nonfiction reading. The only other thing I'm really adding this year is goals for cleaning and organizing my living space. Progress units for cleaning include: putting away a load of something (laundry, dishes), returning five objects that are not part of a load to their permanent homes, putting an object in its permanent home for the first time, retiring a temporary container (e.g. a cardboard box), and setting up a new permanent container. There's also a time goal to go with them. I have no idea whether either number was set in a good place, but there's no real way to find out except to give it a try and hope for the best. 

Potential goals that were considered and discarded for this year are TCGO wins, about which I didn't feel confident in setting even a tentative target, and which in any case are not really sufficiently under my control, and working with the dog, which I do want to do more but is a little fiddly and contingent, and about which again I had no real idea where to set such a goal, or even what a reasonable non-time unit might look like. Either of these might be considered for future years if I can get my head around them a little better. 

I don't feel like I really have any useful insights about my progress this year, anything you might be able to apply to your own work or even your understanding of mine, for whatever that may be worth to you. It didn't go well, but it did go. And I finished Ghani and started on its sequal, Kozatin, so there's that. Next post will be more Dresden Files, and it's gonna have to be soon if I want to stay on track. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The things!

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 31

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I am fascinated by the way this book is playing with addiction. There's no central throughline, at least not that I've been able to identify so far, but almost this collage of ideas and images about it, putting all these pieces out to see what they look like together. Harry's asleep for a long time. It's pain that wakes him up, the burns at first, then the cuts, the scrapes and bruises. As soon as he's conscious, he remembers what happened the night before, what he did, and realizes, as he wasn't in any state to do at the time, that he almost certainly killed some of the human teenagers the vampires were feeding upon in his conflagration. He drags himself out of bed, narrowly makes it to the bathroom in time to vomit, and starts guilt spiraling. By the time Michael comes in, he's progressed from crying on the bathroom floor to crying in the shower. I can't speak for anyone else who's had substance use issues, but I know I felt personally attacked by this scene. As I said, this moment doesn't feel directly connected to Justine's connection with Thomas, or Harry's reaction to vampire venom, or Lydia's present dependence on amphetamines to protect herself from the Nightmare, or Bianca's inability to accept responsibility for Paula's death (caused by desperate need, by a loss of control, by Paula's own addiction to the venom), or Mort's alcoholism, or the introduction of the only smoker in the series whose habit is not meant to code him as morally dissolute, but it sure is in the same book as all of them. He reflects on how you can't do anything with magic that you don't basically believe in, that you don't believe on some level is a good and okay thing to do - I feel like this came up in one of the first two books, but it might not have, and it's certainly the first time it's been mentioned in this one. I'm not actually sure it applies the way he's applying it here; you can't do anything with magic that you don't believe in, sure, but he straight up forgot those kids were there, and while that's, y'know, horrible (although see previous posts re: drugged, concussed, exhausted), I don't think magic's inability to do something you don't believe is right prevents unintended consequences that you wouldn't have wanted.

Michael physically picks Harry up, dries him off, and puts a bathrobe on him. He called the fire department after extracting Harry and Lydia, and they pulled out eleven bodies, at least some of them nonhuman, and twelve living humans. The rest are unaccounted for, and at least some of them may have been cremated by the heat of the fire, a prospect which Harry finds appropriately disturbing. He's talking somewhat incoherently about how he was so stupid, it wasn't worth it... Michael tries to reassure him by pointing out that they killed a lot of vampires too, but that doesn't do anything to break the cycle of self-recrimination. When Harry finally pulls himself together a little, Michael starts filling him in. He was asleep for over a day, but Michael didn't want to take him to a hospital when the vampires are almost certainly looking for him. Murphy is in the hospital now - she's still asleep, and the police have been pulled off the investigation entirely. Susan, Justine, and Amoracchius all remain unaccounted for. Charity's recovering, but the new baby is getting weaker and the doctors can't figure out what's wrong. Michael called, but hasn't been to see them - he's been staying with Harry and Lydia to make sure they're safe. 

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Lydia's on the couch, asleep. Apparently Michael only got her settled down about half an hour ago, which has the fascinating implication that, since he's been here since he brought Harry back, and that was over a day ago, he's just been kind of...hanging out with Lydia for the past almost 24 hours? Was it awkward? Did they talk at all? If so, about what? Honestly I feel like there's a short story to be written here, or at least a fanfic. Michael also finally reveals to the reader where he and Harry know her from, that she was one of the kids hanging around with Kravos. Harry, who has now progressed to the 'unsteadily getting a glass of water' stage, says there will be consequences for what he did. Michael asks whether he's talking about the Rule of Three, which Harry has previously expressed he doesn't believe in that. Harry says he doesn't, that it's too tidy, too much like the world being fair and just, but tha there are consequences for what you do with magic. He quotes Proverbs here, which surprises Michael a little. I still don't think I can make sense of what parts of the Bible Harry does and doesn't know. He knows Proverbs, and the Psalms (Old Testament), but not Noah's Arc (also Old Testament), or the Parable of the Talents, which is in the New Testament (Matthew 25:14-30 and Luke 19:11-37). We don't know one way or another if he understood the John 3:16 reference from a few chapters ago. As an aside, Harry initially goes for a can of coke, then puts it back in favor of the water, unsure whether his stomach is up to the soda. This is mildly interesting, inasmuch as coke is conventionally held to be good for an upset stomach. 

Michael says he has to go, that his family needs him, now that Harry's awake and presumably able to look after himself and Lydia. He feels bad about it, despite Harry's efforts to assure Michael that it's okay, that looking after his family is the right and reasonable thing to do. Part of it is, Michael isn't sure he'd be making the same choice if he hadn't lost the Sword, isn't sure what he'd want to do, isn't sure what he should want to do. Normal human instinct is gonna point him towards being with his family, trying to look after them, even though there isn't much concrete action he can take to help with the recovery from a difficult labor, or a medically unexplained failure to thrive. If nothing else, he can provide care and reassurance for his six other kids rather than leaving them with Father Forthill or their grandparents. His duty as a Knight says he should be here, with Harry, protecting Lydia, gearing up for the next round in the struggle against things that go bump in the night. He might feel less reflexively drawn to that, just at present, but in addition to its being a holy calling, he likes the work. The previous chapter was at some pains to emphasize that. He thinks losing the Sword might have been a sign that he's meant to give up being a Knight, and he both wants that to be the case and doesn't, so he's getting a double dose of guilt, because wishing to be released from a holy calling feels unworthy, weak, but what kind of person doesn't want a change of circumstances that will let them spend more time with, be better positioned to take care of, the people they love? Harry loses the thread of what Michael's saying because something occurs to him, or tries to. All he can articulate is that something about the situation feels off. Michael isn't sure what he means.

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Before Michael can leave, there's a knock and the door, forceful and uncoordinated. On the very reasonable assumption that this is the attack by the Red Court they've been expecting, Michael grabs a hot poker and takes up position near the fireplace, and Harry pulls the door open without actually putting himself in front of it, causing their visitor to stumble into the room. It's Thomas, dressed in street clothes and carrying a plastic rifle case. Harry smacks him around a little, and then Michael stands on him and puts the hot poker up close to his face. He's bleeding where Harry split his lip, giving us our first look at the pink, pearlescent blood of the White Court. Thomas wants them to listen to him, but only narrowly convinces them not to kill him on the spot, on the basis that they have a common interest. He claims that he was going to double cross Bianca as soon as he'd gotten Justine back and was out from under direct observation, only of course Bianca double crossed him first. More importantly, from the perspective of Our Heroes, Bianca still has both Susan and Justine. They're still alive the last time he checked, and he wants to work together to get them back, which is a nice, clean, self-interested motive we can all believe in. Michael says he can tell Thomas is a liar just by standing near him, which is honestly fascinating and not, so far as I can recall, ever followed up on. Thomas readily agrees, but swears by, among other things, his own "stunning good looks" that he's not lying in this instance. On the surface, this sounds kind of facetious and very, very Thomas, but let's remember that this is the book where the consequences, for a wizard, of swearing by their power and breaking their word were introduced. Thomas is a White Court Vampire. And we see, in Blood Rites, that he would not look like this without his vampiric nature. His stunning good looks are his power, part of it, and a crucial aspect of his ability to do things like feed upon humans. Swearing by that isn't a small thing, nor nearly as facetious as it sounds. Harry, however, doesn't consider any of this, and tells Michael to kill him. At which point Thomas straight up begs, offering to do or pay whatever's necessary to convince them. This gets Harry to take a proper look at Thomas, to finally notice that he's scared, exhausted, desperate. He tells Michael to let Thomas get up, and Thomas directs him to open the rifle case, saying it contains a "down payment" for their help. Harry does, exercising appropriate caution. Apparently, Thomas was able to retrieve Amoracchius. I feel like he could have lead with that? Michael legit cries a little, and, once he's made sure the Sword is undamaged, tells God, and then Harry, that he understands now that he isn't meant to retire yet, that there's still work to be done. 

Thomas gives them all the information he has. The manor house wasn't destroyed - most of it is still fine, after the fire. The unaccounted-for human kids are there, and Thomas thinks they're turning some of them into new vampires, to make up their losses. He saw Mavra leave with two of them - she's getting out of town. Susan and Justine are being kept somewhere in the house, but he doesn't know where. And Bianca has hired additional security: humans with machine guns. Since Thomas doesn't know the layout of the house, Harry plans to wake Lydia up and ask her if she knows anything about where Susan and Justine are, since she's been inside more of the house than they have, and may additionally have some insights to offer from her prophetic gifts. Michael says he doesn't think she's slept in days, which causes Harry to realize, about 15 seconds too late, what's suspicious about her presence and their escape. She's possessed by the Nightmare, and figuring that out does Harry absolutely no good as she physically picks him up and throws him at the fireplace. 

This will probably be the last Dresden Files post of the 2023-2024 Eeveeyear. In a few days, we'll talk about what I accomplished, and didn't this year, and what's coming in the next one. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 30

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This chapter opens with a description of how in history books and the like tend to present battles as these very orderly things with neat formations acting as cohesive units, and how that's an illusion and real battle is messy and chaotic, how no diagram can convey the noise, the terror, etc. There's some unpacking to do here. Battles are always loud and scary, obviously, and it's true that the blocks-and-arrows diagrams that you apparently see in history lectures (due to a series of hilarious mishaps, I have successfully avoided attending a conventional history class of any kind, and my classes on labor history, Pacific Northwest History, and the counterculture fashions of the 1960s and '70s did not spend a great deal of time on battles, nor, now that I think of it, did they have anything immediately recognizable as textbooks. I did take a world history class, but it was a survey course and didn't get into enough detail about any single conflict for this kind of analysis, and the assigned reading was all primary sources in translation.) do not really convey this. However, in the kind of battles in which formations are likely to feature in the first place, it is not actually natural or inevitable for them to fall apart into a confused melee - especially if you're winning, formations tend to hold together, and the usefulness of the people in them is often contingent on their doing so. Also though, absolutely none of that applies here. We've got five people, one and a half of them noncombatants, with wildly divergent cultural backgrounds, only two of whom have any prior experience fighting together, all of whom variously mistrust most of the others, with wildly mismatched weapons and fighting styles and absolutely no time to prepare. Formations are out of the question on almost every possible level. (They do all speak the same language). They're also in a really, really bad position. 

Thomas does a little show and tell about opening the blood reservoir in the Reds' bellies in order to take them down, which is great information for Harry but almost fatally distracts Michael. Kyle briefly appears with a gun, but Harry uses the sword cane as a channel for a magnetism spell and gets it away from him. I believe this is the first time we see Harry do the magnet thing. Michael creates an opening, which Susan and Justine reinforce by hitting one vampire who tries to advance out of the line with holy water, incapacitating it. Thomas says they need to take out Bianca, which is reasonable in premise, but if she's not actually between them and their objectives (get Lydia, get out) probably isn't worth the extra time and effort. This portion of the fight also makes a point to showcase Thomas's physical capabilities - lifting a vampire straight off the ground while it's biting his arm, swatting a thrown knife out of the air with his sword. I'm not actually sure there comes a point in this book where we need to know about that, but it's a reasonably smooth establishment. 

Up on the dais, Mavra was distracted enough by all the blood that she hasn't gotten around to killing Lydia yet, a stroke of luck that, under the circumstances, I think can very reasonably be attributed to divine intervention. Harry gets Michael's attention, and uses the magnet spell again, dragging Amoracchius, and Mavra, when she refuses to let go of it, into the courtyard below, breaking at least several of the vampire bones in the process, although this doesn't stop her from physically jumping straight back up onto it. (Like, from the side, she doesn't use the steps). Michael does the dagger cross thing again, directly opposing Mavra's weird shadow magic, giving Harry time to check for Bianca and, when he doesn't find her, grab Lydia. Michael is apparently having a great time, but the rest of the team is fairing less well down in the courtyard. Faith magic doesn't work as well on the Red Court as it does on the Black, so Susan isn't able to keep them at bay with a cross. She does managing to take one out by vaporizing a jar of holy water on a spotlight, and then shooting the newly skinless vampire several times in the blood reservoir. 

Photo by Vitaliy Shevchenko on Unsplash

And then Bianca grabs Justine, and licks her, down the side of her neck, incapacitating her with venom. Bianca calls checkmate, but Harry disagrees, pointing out, in essence, that he and his allies shouldn't have been able to accomplish what they already have, not against her entire assembled court, and so it probably isn't a great idea to count on a reasonable assessment of what else they're capable of. He throws in a bit about how vampires can live forever, and do they really want to risk that, and seems to get somewhere in demoralizing them. So Bianca turns her attention to Thomas, offering to let him leave, with Justine, uncontested, if he "gives" Harry, Michael, and Susan to her. Thomas, in what will be the first of many demonstrations that he does not always think very clearly where Justine is concerned, agrees, and pushes Susan into the crowd of vampires. Bianca barely takes another second to gloat before betraying Thomas, telling Kyle and Mavra to kill him. 

And Harry...snaps. He actually blacks out for a second while he's calling his magic up. I honestly don't know if that's related to how drained he is, and how much he's abruptly trying to do, or purely an emotional thing. And then he sets absolutely everything on fire. He also stops his own heart. I had to go back over this bit a couple times, because I initially didn't take "I felt my heart clench in my chest and stop beating." to indicate more than a momentary disruption, but no. I think this conflagration may actually constitute a death curse. Michael starts trying to drag Harry and Lydia out of there, but Harry's actively dying and the air is now full of smoke. Michael directly asks God to show them a way out, and it looks like his prayers are answered - the smoke parts, just for them. Harry collapses, and Michael finally realizes that he doesn't have a heartbeat and stops to do CPR. So we're gonna add "had a heart attack, basically" to the list of things Harry is dealing with for what remains of the book. By some metrics, he was dead for a little bit there. Michael gets his heart going again, and they follow the extremely obvious tube of clear air towards the exit. There's a figure at the other end who really looks like they might be an angel. Harry asks where Susan is, and Michael says he'll go back for her. At the far end of their escape route is Lea, not an angel, and this one's actually harder to easily class as divine intervention than Mavra's critical distraction. Harry and Michael naturally assume they're in for a fight that they absolutely do not have the wherewithal to win, but Lea basically shoos them out, explaining that she wants Harry whole and alive and useful, not drained and battered. Michael leaves Harry and Lydia in the truck and tries to go back for Susan. He returns, without her, but Harry is by this point far too out of it to say anything. Michael starts the car, and Harry falls unconscious. 

Sorry for the short post. This one is mostly action, which doesn't usually give me a lot to work with in terms of analysis. I'm gonna try to get another Dresden post, and maybe something else, up before the end of September, but like, no promises. As always, if you want to increase the ratio of time I spend making blog posts to time I spend doing other things, feel free to become a Patron. The button's up at the top. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!