2026-2027 Eeveeyear Goals

This year did not go very well. It's not like, the worst on record. I'm pretty sure that's 2023-2024, in which I came in under 30% on multiple targets, largely for those goals that I only work on when they're what I'm currently most behind on. (There being some goals like this is an intended part of the system, to be clear). This year, the worst I did on anything was rereading Wheel of Time, at 31.15%, so there's that. I was kinda hoping that last year was the beginning of a trend of actually getting shit done, and strictly speaking we still can't rule that out, but that's not currently where the evidence seems to point. Some of this is not my fault. At the beginning of June, I took my phone in to have a cracked screen repaired, leading to a three month saga during which it saw more specialists than some human people I know have had to see for cancer, and culminating in my having to get a new phone in the first week of September. The biggest losses here were on time - basically every time goal I have is undercounted because I didn't have any reasonable way of tracking time all month. There are a few other things I just can't do without my phone, and I repeatedly got kinda hung up on the logistics of working around that, and a few others I can do without my phone, but can't do in as many places or circumstances as I can with it. For example, I cannot easily read or write in the car while doordashing - physical books and notebooks are not backlit, and getting enough light on them without creating safety issues is tricky. If I'd known when I handed my phone over to the shop that I would be phoneless for three months, there are a couple of steps I could have taken to help maintain efficiency, including buying a damn book light, but the whole time it was like "probably another week, maybe two" until suddenly that was my whole summer. Couldn't really have picked a worse three months to happen either. I know this is risky to admit, as a creative type trying to make a living doing stuff on the internet, but I generally feel my best, physically, during the summer, and I have an easier time getting stuff done when my joints don't hurt as much. Also didn't help that this summer was wet where I live, and a big part of the normal productivity boost there is that I can take my laptop out to the back porch and work there, where I can be warm without messing up everyone else's air conditioning. Also also didn't help that I spent the past month not being able to eat my normal range of foods while I was waiting for a dental procedure which finally got done yesterday. On the more "my fault" end of things, I had two road trips this year, one of which was largely voluntary (going to visit my parents because I haven't seen them in years), the other of which really wasn't (my grandmother only turns 90 the once, you know?). But I don't know, I also feel like I've just been straight up worse at doing stuff this year in ways I can't readily account for. So I'm gonna be thinking about what's going on there and how to address it, and may have updates for you later in the coming year, but right now kinda all I've got is "try harder". I'm gonna try to avoid doing too much self-flagellating as we dive into the particulars of what I accomplished, and didn't, in 2025-2026, because that's not helpful for me and probably not much fun for you to read, but I'm not sure how much there will be to say on some of these. That said, the structure I started using last year is partly so that I can just kinda skip things where I don't have much to say. 

Core Goals

I was so bad at reading books this year that the trendline on the graph is actually pointing down now, despite 73 still being a substantial improvement over the two years in a row where I managed only 50. This was a lot the phone thing over the summer, although there were also a couple books where I got kinda stuck for a while and didn't get much reading done because I didn't feel super excited about finishing them. But being stuck with only physical paper books, and by extension with only the physical paper books I had on hand or could access, was definitely the biggest factor. Like, if you look at my Storygraph profile, the largest gap between finishing books before the first week in June was 11 days, and the average looks closer to maybe 3, although I haven't sat down and run the numbers. I might do that later, make it its own post. In any case, that goal's getting pinned again, this time at 114. 

Fiction writing kinda ended up in a similar situation - I do a lot of writing on my phone, normally, and some of my stories get done almost exclusively on the pocket screen. I was already having trouble with Kozatin, because the document started just...refusing to open on my phone. Also I was locked out of Amazon while phoneless because I got logged out, and while Amazon was willing to send a six digit code to my email instead, the email my account is tied to insists on doing 2FA through a phone number. Which meant that I couldn't rewatch bits of episodes. Other contributing factors include having actually done quite a lot of finishing out chapters for various fics that I've been stalled out on for a year or more now, which should make getting more work done on them easier going forward, but took a lot of time, and the absence of any fits of all-consuming inspiration, which I still wish I had a better handle on what caused that, so I could try to get it to happen on purpose, but I think that's something every fiction writer has wanted since the invention of the epic. About the one thing I can say wasn't a problem this year was reading enough - despite objectively not having read enough books, unless something has happened to make the "about one page of reading per word of fiction" thing not work anymore, my fiction writing word count came in noticeably under what my Pages Read would suggest it ought to have been. This is getting pinned again as well, and just for fun we're taking it up, just a skosh, from 60k last year to 61k this year. 

This is the new worst year on record for rereads, although the lack of phone plays a role there as well, since for three months I couldn't listen to audiobooks. So we're doubling that again this year, and maybe we won't have to do it next year. I'm still sort of feeling out the effectiveness of doubling as a check against letting goals fall off the map entirely after a couple of bad years. I'm doing it with a fair few things this year, so we should be in a position to know something by this time next year. I also think it might be a little undercounted, because before the phone thing, I did do a fair bit of rereading Tortall books on my phone, with my eyes, and I'm not entirely sure that all got recorded. 

19 obviously isn't where we want to be with blog posts, nor is it anywhere near the 26 we managed last year, but it sort of looks like steady progression over the 17 and 16, respectively, or the two years preceding that. Needless to say, this goal is getting "pinned" for another year, and blog post reading along with it. Neither of those goals is changing enough to be worth talking about. Apparently, this time last year, I brought up the possibility of creating a subgoal for posts that aren't part of the Reread Series, allowing as I wasn't sure it was a good idea, but I had a whole year to think about it. And then, for the whole year, I didn't think about it. Pretty sure I forgot the idea as soon as I hit "publish", actually. Anyway, I think we are going to give that a shot, put like, 11 of them on the agenda for this year. I'm not normally a big fan of goals that have "big pieces" like that, but the biggest issue there is that I have to do one straight away before my spreadsheet will work correctly, and that's kind of a non-issue with this, specifically, because I have to do one straight away anyway. You're reading it right now. But the idea is that this way maybe you actually get some more Wheel of Time posts, writing advice, that thing I said last year I might write about Bloodbourne. 

I did like, okay on reading fanfiction, but I didn't manage to get up to last year's standard, and the goal was looking to drop substantially as a result. And I did very badly on reading short fiction. Targets for both have been doubled for the coming year. 

The visible numbers for time spent on reading and writing are genuinely meaningless, because I didn't have any ability to track them for like, a quarter of this year. They've been allowed to factor into the goals for the coming year, but only because it honestly doesn't matter - they're never what I'm most behind on. 

 First Year Goals

These are sort of complicated to talk about, because almost every "new" goal this year was a restructuring of something from a year or two ago. Doing the Wheel of Time specific rereading as PoVs and Chapters, rather than trying to do it as fractions of books has, in fact, worked a lot better, and would have done even if I hadn't lost my notes about how much audiobook time constitutes 5% of each book with the old phone. (These should technically be retrievable - the old phone still works fine, and even charges now, except that it cannot communicate with its screen, but that's gonna be like, a Process). It's also allowed me to start my reread where I just read all the Rand PoVs, and then go back and just read all the Perrin PoVs, and so on in chronological order by when someone gets their first perspective section. This is gonna have the somewhat wild side effect that I'll get to The Wheel of Time According to Jaichim Carridin before I hear about it from like, Mat, because Carridin's first PoV is the prologue of TGH, but Mat doesn't get one until early in TDR. 

Breaking up Admin into multiple categories was definitely the right call, and I'm pretty happy with the categories I ended up with. It turns out there's more data entry than anything else, or at least there was this year, even when a lot of things that could be counted as data entry are instead constructed as Listing or Updating, but that's not a huge surprise, and there's an extent to which it's to be expected that the different goals here will get farther apart as they each find their own individual level. Correspondence is a bit weird because it's so dependent on there actually being emails I need to send, etc, but I was able to address this by counting replies to comments on my fic, replies to replies to my comments on other people's fic, and comments on someone's fic if I've made or implied some kind of commitment to reading it properly and giving good comments. It swung around a fair bit compared to the others, because sometimes, y'know, there's a Problem and you have to send roughly One Million emails or make like six phone calls in order to get something sorted out, and then other times you're actually all caught up, or it's two in the morning and what you need to do next involves dropping off a piece of paper in person or some shit. The Maryland state government is a pretty reliable producer of fucking Tasks, so I'm not that worried about running out of Stuff to Do, even though that is technically possible here. (To be clear, I have lived in six different states, and Maryland is by far the worst about this. I am not just whining about having to live in a society). Attentive readers may have noticed the difference the Updating goal made in actually keeping the sidebar trackers up to date. 

Adding Programming Tasks to my suite of programming goals was also definitely the right call, and indeed moreso than I could reasonably have anticipated, since due to an error in the sequence of applying certain expansions, I was forced to start over from the beginning. I have taken this opportunity to switch from Emerald to Fire Red as my base, because while this means sacrificing any kind of convenient access to Dive, it also means not having to personally directly add every move and Pokemon I want from later generations, and provides a few other similar conveniences. There's just a lot more support for it. I do think I might have set the initial goal a little low, and it's gonna be lower still this year, so this one is already in line for potentially getting doubled or pinned depending on how it goes. 

The two properly new goals, Science and Magazine, both went like, pretty well? Ran into an annoying issue with Science where, for at least the first couple of issues, articles in Transformative Works and Cultures don't interact correctly with the print function, making their page counts very difficult to check, but this isn't a huge deal because we're still just kind of letting the nonfiction pages read do its own thing. I had fewer magazine articles sitting around unread in tabs than I thought, but I also have access to magazines through the library, so it's fine. Targets for both goals dropped a fair bit for this year, so these may also be in line for early pinning or doubling. 

Non-Core Goals

So it turns out that when you start a TTRPG campaign, even, and perhaps especially, with the intention that it should demand relatively little preparation between sessions, you end up writing a lot of words, and creating a lot of elements. The first few sessions of the campaign have gone well, and I think I might actually have the beginnings of a publishable module here. I exceeded targets for Elements and Words both to a sufficient extent that both goals are going up for this year. So far that only really seems to happen if I do straight up exceed the goal, but the notion is sort of that it will go up, gradually, if I'm meeting the goal and that's often a very fine line, so maybe we don't have a problem. We came in kinda low on Time, but I'm not particularly worried about that. Like most time goals, it's primarily a derived statistic, and if I end up so behind on it that I have to actively work on it, it will presumably go back up due to my actively working on it. The like, three weeks I spent really focused on getting that campaign ready accounts for another substantial chunk of my failure to get as much done as I would have liked on other things this year. 

I may have overcorrected the balance in my RSS feed between youtube videos and blog posts a little. Especially towards the end there, I was often reading multiple blog posts in order to find one Youtube video. I'm not that worried about it, though - certainly this is a better problem to have than the reverse.  

Honestly, living somewhere that there's a tv in the same room has made a really substantial difference to how much tv I watch in a year. Oh, oh right, that was the other thing that messed up my productivity, is in December, right before we left for my parents' house, I was too sick to work for like, two weeks, during which time mostly I rewatched The West Wing. You can see the impact of that in the total Television Rewatch number for this year. Also showed my mom a nontrivial amount of Leverage while we were at my parents' house. It was kind of too cold to do anything, so a lot of the days we were there it was like, get up, read on my phone for a couple hours, hang out with my dad if he was up for it, watch Leverage with my mom, watch The West Wing with my partner. But even after that, like, I can just Watch stuff by sticking a cable in my computer, and that makes a big difference in the amount of Stuff I watch. 

Sewing was one of the big sticking points in terms of having trouble making progress without my phone, Trying to just work without the time trackers, I happened to hit Sewing Time as the thing I was most behind on pretty early on, and it took my a while to figure out how I wanted to proceed, because at this point I'm very used to having the thing I'm most behind on be a different color and just following that rather than comparing the numbers. Shorter repairs, like darning socks, also contributed to this one coming in a lot lower this year. It's not something I've ever had to deliberately stay on top of before, so far as I can recall. I'm not really expecting to need to double this, I think it will recover on its own, but doubling is on the table if it doesn't. Repairs seems to be finding its level, though, so that's something. 

Walking is up there with most of the time goals on the Probably Really Undercounted list, and unlike those, it's not a derived stat that can usually just be allowed to do its thing, so for the coming year it's getting doubled. I'm not upset about this, it was slipping to a kind of unacceptable degree anyway. I need to be walking more than I have been the past year or two, and setting goals is exactly how I'm meant to handle things like that. 

The full list of things getting doubled this year is as follows:

• Rereads
• Podcasts
• Language Learning
• Short Fiction
• Fanfiction
• Walking
• Cleaning 

I did end up just dropping Music relatively early in the year, because while going through the backlog of an artist I like is workable, and enjoyable, Music is meant to be a multitaskable goal, and manually managing working through someone's entire back catalogue of singles is not multitaskable. Also my list of artists with whom I intended to do this still needs to be extricated from the old phone. So this one might make a reappearance next year, or something, if I ever figure out a way to approach it that I'm happy with. 

I have figured out that I will reliably count TCGO matches if I am testing new decks in an organized way, so now I'm making rat decks in every color combination that will support them, and doing detailed testing to see which is best. This is one of my very few projects that I am highly confident isn't gonna be of much interests to anyone other than myself, but if I'm wrong, and you'd like to see some kind of writeup comparing different rat decks in Eternal, do let me know in the comments, and I will be happy to oblige. 

Cleaning still actually wasn't set high enough for me to get on top of the laundry or organizing any of the myriad things I need to organize, so that's getting doubled too, even though  I did like, relatively okay on it, despite its having gotten undercounted, and the associated time metric having been severely undercounted due to I'm still not great at starting the timer when I get up to do the dishes, and then also of course there was the Three Months of No Phone. Third time's the charm, I hope? Also I never actually got around to making a tracker bar for this, even with a 

Reading webcomics continues to just kind of Happen at a pace I find acceptable, but if I ever want to read any new ones I am probably gonna have to manually increase it at some point. We'll see though. If I were on top of the goals it's intertwined with, it would probably be going up on its own. 

New Goals

In a feat of like, unprecedented self-restraint or something, I am adding only three new goals this year, and all of them relate to this blog. The first, as discussed above, is posts that aren't the Dresden Files reread. We're gonna be shooting for 11 of those. 

The other two are words and pages edited for the exciting new project to which I have alluded in a couple of earlier posts, so I guess it's time for the big announcement: I am putting together a book based on the Dresden Files reread posts covering Storm Front, Fool Moon, and Grave Peril. A great deal of the work to be done here is mundane - cleaning up typos, turning hypertext links into proper citations, removing signoffs and other portions of each post that are really specific to their being blog posts - but I will be doing some revision and expansion of most posts, and intend to include some additional special features, which ought to make it worthwhile even for regular readers. My exact goals for how much of that to accomplish this year are still pending some testing of how long it takes to edit a full page, and how much the word count changes in that process, so that will be announced with the first Dresden Files post of the new year. 

I'll also be getting the sidebar trackers for this year set up over the next couple days, although probably not all at once. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!  

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 30

Photo by Julien Andrieux on Unsplash

Harry reflects on how, in the face of the miraculous, people often focus on mundane inconveniences. You get on an airplane, someone's gonna complain about the drinks. You get on a magical staircase made of moonlight leading up through empty air into another dimension, someone, in this case Harry, is gonna complain that it's not an escalator. We're told that it's "about a mile" of stairs, but since Harry was just complaining about it, I don't know if that's a sincere approximation or if Harry's exaggerating for effect. Chicago over Chicago, when they reach it, is complete, with real terrain, rather than featureless cloudscape, and a real battle. We're told that the storm below, in the physical sky of Chicago, is a "pale reflection" of the battle up above, but I don't know how literally to take that - obviously the storm is, meteorologically, the result of clashing warm and cold fronts brought in by the gathering of Winter and Summer power in this spot, but it's not entirely clear to me whether the state of the storm literally reflects the state of the battle, or if "pale reflection" here is just about relative severity. This is a proper battle, or perhaps more accurately several battles - almost everyone whose person-sized is in units, in formation, although some of the bigger things, like trolls, which I suppose are less vulnerable to being surrounded than human infantry, appear to effectively be formations unto themselves. However, different... legions, maybe? Probably small armies in some cases, appear to be spread out, fighting on different fronts simultaneously. Harry and co. are looking over the valley, which seems to be where the fighting is thickest. There's it's divided into two distinct, but not entirely separate, levels. Things that would probably be described in Pathfinder as small and medium humanoids, maybe also large, are having a pretty normal battle with each other, while in the same space, much bigger, and maybe less people-shaped things, are engaged in their own conflict, of which the regular-sized guys are occasional mass casualties when someone steps in the wrong place. We find out later that there's a third level to the battle, up in the sky, but that either isn't happening right over the valley, or is too far up for Harry to readily see it from where he's standing. Unfortunately, his tracking spell is pointing them straight down into all that. 

Meryl asks what their next move is, but before Harry can answer, they're approached by a Sidhe knight, presumably of Winter. This isn't necessarily relevant at the moment, but I don't think we ever learn any of these guys' names. Not here, not in Cold Days, not anywhere. This one certainly doesn't introduce himself, but he recognizes Harry as Winter's Emissary, and brings with him a bubble of quiet that makes conversation possible without having to shout over the din of battle. Harry explains that they need to see Mab, and the unnamed knight leads them to her. She's sitting on a white horse, which we aren't given any particular reason to assume is the one Tam Lin rode, but I mean, c'mon, and is presumably wearing armor under her dress, since she hasn't opted for the dress made of armor like Aurora did. Everyone takes a second to be startled by her beauty, but it hits the changelings especially hard. Fix and Meryl are both children of Winter, and on some level they're meant to belong to her. Mab asks Harry if he caught the thief, and seems to understand everything when he says it was Aurora. She asks if he can bring proof, and he says he can do it if he can get to the Stone Table before midnight. This is sort of simultaneously true and not true. He probably can bring proof, if he stops Aurora, but if he fails, the situation is likely to pretty well prove itself - I don't imagine Aurora's plan can be executed so stealthily that no one will know she was involved, although it might take Titania a while to calm down enough to realize that. But from Harry's perspective, stopping Aurora is sort of more important than proving her culpability. 

Photo by Mario Heller on Unsplash

Part of the battlefield suddenly lights up gold, and Mab cancels it out with a flash of her own power, which is the entirely separate level of the battle that she's fighting, just, y'know, while carrying on a conversation. She also recognizes Harry's fragment of the Stone Table as belonging to Rashid, and the faerie ointment as his recipe, which makes a lot of sense, given the context we get in Cold Days. Those two actually work pretty closely together, but on a first read this is just a tantalizing hint of an already mysterious character's background and connections. She asks what his interest in this is, but Harry doesn't give her a real answer, and she doesn't really seem to expect one. Mab confirms that following the tracking spell directly would be a really bad idea, and starts just kind of talking out loud about how else they might get there. I don't know if this is for Harry's benefit, to reassure him and his allies that she's not holding back a usable option, or if it's just a consequence of the number of different ways she's splitting her concentration right now. She can't fly him there, and Slate isn't available. (Harry confirms he's with Aurora, and Mab says this is the last time she lets Aurora hire the help, which may mean there isn't a strict pattern to who chooses each Knight, or may mean that Mab expects the situation with the Outer Gates to resolve one way or the other before it's Maeve's turn again, thereby stripping Winter of its purpose and presumably removing the necessity to have a Knight at all). Winter still holds the River, and Maeve and Lea are both focusing their efforts there, so Harry's best shot at getting to the Stone Table in one piece is to follow it. As long as they don't start shit, Winter forces, at least, will let them pass. 

They head downhill, although presumably not into the valley since the whole point was to avoid that. They're on ground held by Winter, far enough back from the front lines that they're mostly looking at those injured in the initial charge. A group of goblins feed their dead, and some of their non-ambulatory wounded, to a flock of predatory sylphs, which raises a couple of questions for me. First, while goblins are Wildfae, they also work pretty directly for the Erlking, and I wouldn't have expected them to be Called the way, say, a pixie would be. Maybe they're here as the result of a treaty or something? Also, I'd love to know how the corpse-eating sylphs fit into the...I don't even know if the word I want here is "tactics" or "ecology" of battles like this. What does anyone gain from feeding their dead to the sylphs? Why is having them here, eating, a better use of their time than having them fight? I'm pretty sure this could be explained, but like, it isn't. In any case it's pretty gross, and it's gonna be worse for the werewolves, so Harry tries to say encouraging things to them, and to keep himself between Fix and the worse of the carnage. As they get closer to the river, they're also getting closer to the fighting, and the mist turns from Winter blue to murky, undecided green. Harry suggests they make a run for it. 

That's what I've got for this chapter. It feels a little sparse, and I can't tell if there just wasn't a lot here to analyze, or if my brain didn't catch on things properly. Realistically, expect one, maybe two more posts before the end of the month. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!  

 

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 29

Photo by Yucel M on Unsplash

Harry makes some phone calls, showers, and gears up again, with the same stuff he took to see the Mothers, plus his gun, the stuff the Gatekeeper gave him, and a change of clothes. The lattermost includes a black ball cap, despite Harry's later assertion that he doesn't do hats. I guess it's different when you're going to war. You want what head protection you can get, even if it's just a baseball cap. A couple of minutes later, Billy pulls up with a minivan full of werewolves. And I do mean full - he's got like, 10 werewolves in the back, along with Meryl and Fix. (This number took some figuring - we're initially told that there are "ten or eleven" young people in the van, but later that there are half a dozen young men and half a dozen young women, plus Meryl and Fix. So the best I can work it out, we've got ten werewolves and two changelings in the back, and our initial number doesn't include Billy and Georgia up front). Harry is initially surprised by their numbers, and reminds Billy that he said "only volunteers". To be clear, I really like this trope - it's great when the protagonist is like "this is too dangerous to drag other people in with me, but if someone really super extra wants to come, they can" and then everyone shows up. However, there's a reason you usually see this trope with like, military and quasi-military organizations. The Alphas are already an entirely voluntary organization. They take orders from Billy and Georgia, and I expect if someone disobeyed in the field, Billy might nip them, but this isn't a situation where I would expect consequences for refusing an assignment, and it's not like there are advancement opportunities their access to which could be complicated by having turned down a mission they were asked, rather than ordered, to participate in. You do the "volunteers only" thing in situations where there are strong norms against saying "no" to a task even when it's presented as a request, rather than an order, and that's usually backed by an organizational context where it is illegal, forbidden, or at the very least strongly frowned upon to not do as you're told. If the Alphas have that going on, it hasn't been communicated to the reader like, at all. 

Harry reminds everyone that they have to do what he says, even (implicitly) if it's something like "wait here", "go back", or "don't touch that", and that he's not bringing anyone who can't agree to those terms. He also thinks a little bit about how young everyone here is, and how, while the Alphas have had a couple years of practice dealing with "low-intensity rifraff", they're in over their heads here. I think it's a pretty fair assumption that the Alphas are in over their heads, because Harry is in over his head here, and he does have more experience than they do, but I also wish we'd been given a clearer sense of how much he actually knows about what they've been getting up to. I think we talked about this some in the chapter after the Walmart fight, but Harry is in sort of an odd position relative to the supernatural world. He is, or considers himself to be, sufficiently "above" the Alphas, changelings, minor practitioners, etc to be unaware of a lot of what's going on in the sort of street level supernatural community - regular people whose lives sometimes, or even routinely, involve the supernatural but who have mundane day jobs, and don't have fully equipped magical laboratories or membership in widely recognized supernatural organizations. He doesn't, for example, have like, any friends who aren't connected to the supernatural in one way or another. He's had two entire romantic relationships, one with a fellow wizard-level practitioner and one with an investigative journalist who reported on the supernatural and eventually became a half-vampire. But he's also an outsider to the White Council, and blissfully unaware of the politics of the various courts (faerie, vampire, etc) except when they're actively trying to kill him, and at this point in the series he needs Bob to fill him in on some entire segment of the supernatural community basically every time he gets an important case. This is great from a storytelling perspective, because it means he can be plausibly unaware of basically anything at any level of the supernatural community, since he's sitting on his own little mezzanine between them and trying to focus on reading a paperback thriller, and need those things explained once they become his problem, but it does occasionally call his credibility into question when he makes assertions about what anyone else does or doesn't know, deal with, etc. 

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Harry asks Billy if he "has them", and Billy produces a plastic bag full of cheap orange box cutters, saying that he took so long to get here because the Walmart still had police tape and cops all over the place. This is a nice bit of continuity, what with Harry having kinda wrecked parts of the Walmart back in the middle chapters, but it's also by far the biggest failure to acknowledge the urban setting in this book, and maybe one of the biggest in the entire series. Somewhere like where I live now, this would be a very realistic outcome. Someone had a Wizard Fight in the Walmart, so now I have to either deal with the extra time that added to Walmart, or go farther out of my way (and likely pay more) to get the same box cutters from Target or Home Depot or something. However, in an urban environment, I mean first of all, it's like 40 minutes by car from Billy's neighborhood to Wrigleyville, where we're told that Walmart is, but also, you just go to another store. There are other stores. There was not, in 2002, another Walmart in any convenient way, but you could try the Jewel-Osco on Cottage Grove (I could not confirm that this existed in '02), or literally any drugstore, hardware store, department store (have not been able to confirm the availability of one of these), an auto parts store, or if necessary the University of Chicago bookstore, which if it's anything like the University bookstores I'm familiar with, will almost certainly have lab and art supplies down in a basement somewhere. Idk, the first three cities I lived, including the one where I grew up, didn't even have Walmart, but I would not drive 40 minutes in city traffic to get to a Walmart I knew was also a recent or active crime scene to buy box cutters there vs buying them literally anywhere else, and I don't know any city-dweller who would. Anyway, Harry puts the box cutters in the doctor's valise he brought for this exact purpose, and they get on the road, following a tracking spell on Harry's fragment of the Stone Table. 

Most of the drive is spent on an extended recap, clarifying the "who", "how", and "why" of the current situation for readers who might have gotten lost on some of the twistier bits of a fairly twisty plot, and addressing some pretty reasonable "why didn't they just"s, like "If Aurora is willing to do this by handing power to Winter, why not just approach Mab about it?" This is perhaps not the most elegantly it's ever been done, but the werewolves and changelings needed to be filled in, and I don't see a lot of other good opportunities to get some of this on the page more smoothly. This is also where Harry lays out the actual objective: get to the stone table before or at the same time as Aurora, and stop her from de-statueing Lily and sacrificing her. When they get where they're going, or as close thereto as they can get in the mortal world, Harry puts faerie ointment on everyone. There is just exactly enough in the jar, which strongly suggests that the Gatekeeper's involvement here was informed by Hindsight - he knew how many people Harry would have with him, if he got this far, and prepared his gifts accordingly. If Harry were paying close enough attention, the contents of the jar might even tell him that the Gatekeeper knew some of what was coming, that at least some of what he's walking into has been foreseen and planned for, but honestly without the ability to read and reread the book, they'd probably have to be on whatever shared wavelength Katniss Everdeen and Haymitch Abernathy have for Harry to figure that out. 

While Harry is getting his kit situated how he wants it, and Meryl is putting on a battle coat made by covering an old denim jacket with cutlery, and Fix collects a toolbox that probably weighs half as much as he does from the van, Billy, now in wolf form, hears something, or smell something, and he and the other Alphas spread out to investigate. So Harry proceeds with the changelings towards the lake. They find a gate, locked until recently, with the chain broken by something strong enough to twist it apart and hot enough that the rain still hisses where it touches the broken metal. Just about as soon as they're past that, the lights go out, and when Fix and Meryl pull out a flashlight and a glowstick respectively, someone shoots Meryl. In Turn Coat, when the lights go out, the first thing, the absolute very first thing Harry does before he has any real idea what's going on is yell "No lights!", and I think this moment is helping set that up. The second shot hits Fix's toolbox, and he drops his flashlight, which lands in such a way as to reveal the Tigress bearing down on them. Harry gets to just kind of watch this fight for a while, because the Alphas immediately close in on her and start doing their thing. It's a more refined iteration of the tactics we saw in Fool Moon, and which will be presented as familiar and practiced in...Turn Coat again, I think? Yeah, it must have been Turn Coat, because Madeline was there, and she didn't have any involvement in the events of Small Favor. The Alphas tear the Tigress apart pretty good, and they get Meryl behind some cover to have a loot at her injury, which isn't too bad. 

Then one of the Alphas (Harry can't tell them apart in their wolf forms at this point), leads him to where a few of their number are keeping Ace pinned down. Apparently he went to the Red Court for protecting after Reuel's death, and their price for that protection was that he kill Harry, so he hired to Tigress. I don't know where the hell he got the money to hire a high-profile assassin, but that's what he says happened. I think Summer Knight might have a little too much going on, because this wasn't, from where I'm standing, foreshadowed at all. He's in like, one scene before this, and yeah, he has a gun, and he's the most suspicious of Harry, but it's a longish step between there and working with vampires or hiring ghoul assassins. I'm not gonna summarize most of the interrogation, but he says towards the end of it that the Reds told him that Harry would be here, and I don't remember if it's ever explained how the hell they knew that? I mean, presumably they have some degree of sensitivity to what's going on in the Nevernever, since they're at least partly of that world themselves, but that feels really specific unless someone more highly placed in the Fairy courts than Ace is working with them, and if that's the case I don't remember learning about it. Meryl tells Ace to leave before she kills him, and Harry tells the Alphas to let him go. 

Now that they aren't dealing with any more immediate bad guys, Harry gets his special rock back out. It points him up, which isn't terribly helpful, but he applies just a little bit of magic and a staircase of solidified moonlight forms over the lake, leading them up into the clouds. 

So, that's what we've got for Chapter 29. The whole book is only 34 chapters, so I think there's an outside chance that if I really apply myself, we might finish before the end of the month. Also, stay tuned for the announcement of a new project. In the meantime, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!  

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 28

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Slate is all ready to kill Harry, but Elaine stops him at the last second, giving away Harry's plan to use his death curse. Aurora doesn't think a human can leverage a strong enough death curse to do her any real harm, which is honestly kind of stupid. I don't know if this is the arrogance we sometimes see Nemesis display in its other hosts, or if Aurora just hasn't been paying attention, but it should be common knowledge that a mortal wizard is not something to take chances with. Elaine says it nicer than that, and Harry calls her a treacherous bitch. The sentiment is understandable, but I don't think he needed to get gendered about it. She suggests that Aurora "arrange" Harry's death and then leave him. Aurora's concerned that he won't be contained by the circle after she leaves, so Elaine tells her to call water, to drown him in mud, while Elaine puts a physical binding on him that will persist when they're gone. We're summarizing each step in the conversation, rather than skipping to the eventual decision because I think it's interesting to look at how Elaine manipulates Aurora here, how she takes advantage of Aurora's ignorance of both mortal magic and Harry and Elaine's particular history, but also how this relied on a very solid knowledge of what Aurora is like as a person and where her head is at right now. "Arrange his death" makes it sound like something complicated, something that will need to be figured out, and plays to Aurora's relative lack of experience with violence, so that she will ask Elaine for a suggestion. The notion of letting the earth "drink him", especially with that phrasing, makes it sound gentle and natural, while Elaine promises to take care of the hard part - keeping Harry in place. All Aurora has to do is make a mud puddle. It's very well done, and shows that Elaine is good at this, which is good information for later and may also tell us something about what spending most of her adult life in Summer was like. To say nothing of the fact that she has to do this all in a way that will keep Harry thinking that she's on Aurora's side, at least until they're out of earshot, which is at once easier and harder than manipulating Aurora, because she knows him very well, knows where his buttons are, since she was, as they say, there when they were installed, knows how he's likely to think about her, but also he knows her, and can read her a hell of a lot better than Aurora can. 

Elaine puts the binding on, smooth and fast, reflecting the superior focus Harry said she had a couple of chapters ago. This is also when we find out that she uses Old Egyptian for her magic, which concerning thing we know about her, because that's also what DuMorne used, although it may simply be another reflection of her being a better student, in some ways a better wizard than Harry, that she was able to make her magic work with the language she was given, rather than having to come up with something else. At the same time, Aurora does her think, filling the ground under Harry's feet with water. This creates immediate bubbles and a sulfur smell, which may suggest that there were Methanosarcina bacteria in the soil already, despite this not really being their usual habitat, and none of their symbiotes being present. That would make a certain poetic sense, here in Faerie, and especially a part of faerie currently being manipulated by a Summer Queen, since these guys played a role in the development of complex life on earth, and may in fact have been one of the first cellular life forms. Of course, it's just as possible that it bubbles and smells like sulfur because most of the people present, and perhaps the land itself, expect marshy ground to smell like that. Everyone else starts to leave, but Elaine comes closer. Harry asks why she did it, and she calls him an idiot, presumably for not yet getting that she's arranged this all to give him a better way out than getting stabbed by Slate and hoping to take Aurora with him. She says she couldn't risk Harry using his death curse on her, too, which should also be a clue, since Harry Would Not Do That, and he should trust her to know him at least that well, but he doesn't get it right away, because he's not doing his best thinking right now. She turns away, then turns back and says "It's just like old times." which here is code for "I am once again not actually betraying you, you giant dumbass." 

Harry starts feeling out the binding, hoping he can find a way to break it after Aurora's circle breaks, but before he finishes drowning in the mud. Trying this with a decent-quality binding is likely to be dangerous and unpleasant, but it's better than not trying. Then he gets it. Finally. The big clue was that Elaine is way too calm. She might betray him, might kill him, but she wouldn't do it with apparent indifference. This is not something that's really been clearly established about her for the reader before this point, but it's also not hard to guess, given that we know she and Harry used to be involved romantically, and we have some idea of what Harry finds attractive in a woman. "Passion" is pretty close to the top of the list. Harry takes a deep breath and confirms his suspicions about the binding. It's the one he and Elaine developed when they were kids, when one of them would do the mundane homework while the other did the magic homework, and then they would copy each other's work so they could finish faster and have time to have sex. And it's not a very good binding, because all the threads of hardened air are gathered at the back, creating a weak spot where someone who knows how to look for it can break through. I'd love to know what exactly is meant by "hardened air" here, because it was described earlier as physically flattening Harry's clothes against his body, but it's apparently permeable to both air and mud. He's all the way under before Aurora's circle breaks and he can actually do anything about it. The word he uses for the spell is "tappitytaptap", which is very Harry, but also, is onomatopoeia allowed? Can you use like, 'kaboom' for a spell? This has fascinating possibilities. He gets the binding open on the third try, but is of course still fully immersed in mud, so he has to forzare himself out, blasting himself well into the air and getting stuck in a tree, because that's the kind of day he's having. 

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He's about twenty feet up, dangling by his belt where it's stuck on a branch, and really hoping no one sees him like this, but doesn't have time to start getting himself out of it before the Gatekeeper, of all people, shows up. The Gatekeeper tries very hard not to laugh at Harry, with limited success, then helps him get down. Harry asks what he's doing here, and he says he was looking for Harry, that he's been monitoring him. He also says that the situation in Chicago is getting worse. Harry's ready to go running off and try to fix it, but the Gatekeeper points out that this is not, strictly speaking, his problem anymore. He solved the mystery, and the murder. He knows where the Summer Knight's mantle is, and who took it, and that it wasn't Mab. Technically, his Trial is ended, the White Council should have clear access to Winter's paths through the Ways, and as far as they're concerned, Harry can go home. It's a tempting idea. Harry, understandably, would very much like to go take a shower, eat a thing, and get some proper sleep. Technically it says "hot shower", but we're gonna chalk that up to wishful thinking on Harry's part, since he doesn't have hot water at home. Maybe this reflects his awareness that he won't, and kind of can't, actually walk away at this point, no matter how much he might like to. He told Meryl he would help Lily, and Aurora still has the Unraveling, and even if he can't use it to help Susan, which he's still hoping to do, Aurora's still gonna mess up the balance in Faerie if he doesn't stop her. And he feels sort of responsible for that last thing because the Unraveling is his, was given to him. So he says "no". Rashid presses, saying that the Council doesn't expect him to singlehandedly stop a war between the Faerie Courts, and Harry says no again. Rashid asks if he's sure, and he affirms that he is. The third refusal was apparently what the Gatekeeper was looking for, because he says that in that case, he'll vote in Harry's favor. This is basically understandable, since one of the key questions of Harry's trial is whether he comports himself, and uses his power, as a wizard ought, but considering he and Rashid are both human, I'm not sure why Rashid needed him to say it three times. Magical significance, maybe. Harry asks if he would have voted against him otherwise, and Rashid clarifies that he would have killed Harry himself, since voting against him would be the same thing, and he'd rather take full responsibility for that choice. I'm intrigued by his confidence that he could have killed Harry without violating the First Law. 

He gives Harry a little velvet bag, containing fairie ointment and small piece of the Stone Table, suitable for finding or accessing the Table with magic. Adding to the list of things that could really use follow up, where did he get that? How did he get that? How did anyone get that? It doesn't seem terribly likely that you could just take a chisel and knock a piece off that thing, even if circumstances were such that it existed and could be accessed, which, y'know, isn't the case most of the time. Harry points out that this is interference in his trial, and would upset the Council, and Rashid says that he's never said this before, but in this case, what the Council doesn't know won't hurt it. I suspect he's never said this before because when he violates the rules or customs of the Council, he's usually doing it by himself, or with people who don't need an explanation. He makes a portal back to Chicago, and Harry steps through, turning the mud on his clothes into ectoplasm, which the summer rain starts washing away. He has phone calls to make and a war to get ready for. 

What did I even used to say at the end, before I got so bad at posting regularly that I used this space to apologize for how long it's been and try to give some sense of when the next one was coming? Idk, it'll be a few days, probably. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and Read All The Things!  

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 27

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Harry regains consciousness, stripped of all his magical gear except the pentacle, in a circle anchored to a ring of toadstools. He's able to stand, but makes no effort to physically escape. Outside the ring stand Aurora, Elaine, "Grum", the "unicorn", and Lloyd slate. Aurora is wearing an ankle-length, long-sleeved mail dress, which I would normally criticize as impractical, even if the fairy metal is light enough to make it wearable, but given that she's very literally a fairy princess, I suspect the look, the cool factor, actually contributes to this ridiculous garment's protective function, and may even make her better at killing stuff with a sword. Actually it occurs to me this might be part of why Emissaries are expected to participate in battles between the courts. You need a few humans around to perceive everyone's ridiculous Rule of Cool aesthetics, or they might not work right. 

Aurora starts making noises about how she regrets this, but Harry stood a real chance of stopping her, so now that he's served his purpose (getting the Unraveling, which was also taken while Harry was unconscious), she has to kill him. Harry asks why they haven't killed him already, and Slate says he agrees, that he would have preferred to just cut Harry's throat after Grum knocked him out. Harry asks why they're still calling him Grum, and prompts both Lord Marshal Talos and Korrick the centaur. They're both armed and armored similarly to Aurora, although Talos's armor is black, and I would really like a more detailed description of Korrick's kit since he's not on the standard human body plan. Aurora starts trying to question him, find out how much he knows, how long he's known it, and whether he told anyone, but he tells her to fuck off, and Elaine confirms that he's unlikely to comply when he knows Aurora's gonna kill him. Aurora says she's sorry that Harry "pushed her to this", which is just fucked, honestly, and then does a little mind control to make him start talking. He lays out the events to date, and her plan going forward, as he understands them, which I will not reiterate in its entirety, but there are a couple of things worth talking about in particular here. 

Elaine was the one to take Slate into Reuel's building, so that's our final confirmation that she's Mrs. Stapleton. The wet stuff on Reuel's sleeve was apparently water formed when Summer fire met Winter. This makes sense, based on things we see in like, Cold Days, but at this point it has not been established that the Knights can throw around ice and fire that way. I mean, Reuel might have been a wizard (it depends on which word Slate emphasized back in chapter 15), but Slate certainly isn't. This is an understandable oversight - this book has a lot of new information to introduce, and that information has to be structured so as not to give away anything too early, and that's hard, but even if we weren't gonna learn it ahead of time, it should have been explained here. Aurora wasn't the one who sent the Tigress against Harry, which is mildly interesting inasmuch as it's the only thing Harry's wrong about, and also that she claims she "doesn't hire killers", which given that she's working with Slate, I suppose depends a lot on your definition of "hire", and a little on your definition of "killer". As far as I know, she's not paying Slate in money, and he's not like, strictly an assassin. I mean he very much is an assassin, but the Winter Knight has other responsibilities too - the Tigress doesn't. Aurora did help Elaine fake her injuries, so I'm glad I remembered that right. But the attack at the Walmart doesn't add up for me. Harry asserts, and Aurora confirms, that she was waiting for him to come out of the Mothers' cottage, because she needs the Unraveling to de-statue Lily. Now, if this was the plan all along, it was already sort of shaky, because there were a lot of places where she had to guess just exactly right what Harry would do, and be confident he'd succeed in doing it, if she wanted him to get the Unraveling for her, and all she'd have had to go on is what Elaine can tell her, which is, y'know, ten years out of date. But there are two other problems here. First, I'm pretty sure she could have accomplished the same thing with a lot more certainty by saying "Oh, Harry, it's so terrible, someone has turned Lily to stone, won't you go and get an Unraveling for me?" and Elaine should have been able to tell her that. Second, if the idea was to get him to get the Unraveling, what did she stand to gain by the attack at the Walmart? I mean, given what comes next, it's possible Elaine knew the attack would fail, or helped arrange for us to fail, and felt this was a stronger position from which to suggest maneuvering Harry into getting the Unraveling for them before getting him out of the way. That's a guess, though, and I don't think it's ever really explained. 

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Harry ends his recounting of Aurora's plan by saying he doesn't know why she's doing it, so she explains about ending the conflict between the courts by giving the Summer Knight's mantle to Winter, permanently disrupting the balance. She seems very sure that this needs to happen, and is not at all receptive to reason. She asks if Harry told the White Council. Harry responds impolitely, but Elaine steps in and tells her that he hasn't, that he told her they didn't understand. To the highly observant reader, this is a solid clue that Elaine's loyalties may not entirely be with Aurora, because I just went back and checked their conversation in Chapter 25, and while this could be referring to Harry's conversation with Morgan, he didn't tell her about that. Elaine is straight up lying here. Which is a risky thing to do with a Faerie Queen who can compel answers out of you. Harry doesn't catch this at all, which I'll forgive on account of the imminent peril and recent head injury. Harry appeals to Slate, as the only other human present who hasn't actively betrayed him, asking whether Aurora actually made him any promises, whether he really thinks she'd share power with a mortal the way he thinks she will. Slate actually looks concerned, for a second, but Aurora settles him down, without promising anything. Then he tries Elaine, who explains that this was the price of Aurora's help. If she doesn't do this, her own life is forfeit, and she doesn't care, or claims not to care, how many other people get hurt, as long as she survives. That one of those people is Harry...she cares a little, but not enough to do anything differently. Harry reflects on exactly how doomed he is here, and we get an explanation of the death curse, as Harry starts readying his, and Slate draws his sword. 

I'm still in frantic "get as much done as I can before the end of the month" mode, so you should get at least a couple more of these in the next couple weeks. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!  

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 26

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As Harry runs the rest of the way to the Mothers' cottage, he fills the reader in on the nature of the Nevernever, how it's not quite a place in the conventional sense, despite being somewhere you can physically go, but a malleable, magical realm, containing every otherworld, spirit world, and afterlife ever thought of by humans. Faerie is part of the Nevernever that is in some sense "close" to the mortal world, closely connected to nature and its cycles, and so it tends to have things like consistent gravity and something we'd recognize as weather, but Harry emphasizes that it's not the mortal world, and letting the similarities lull you into a false sense of security can get you dead or worse. And he's pretty sure he's right in the heart of it. 

The cottage itself stands on a low hill, surrounded by several rings of menhirs, or standing stones, some of them fallen. I initially thought this might be a direct reflection of Stonehenge, but there aren't any lintel stones, and I can't find any other European stone circles with concentric rings. Rujm el-Hiri has concentric rings, but consists of smaller rocks, not menhirs. The cottage emits the smells of baking bread and mildew, which I suppose makes sense as a reflection of the mildest and (at least in a European context) most commonplace forms of creation and destruction specific to human-built structures. It's noteworthy, actually, the of all the Queens, the Mothers seem most closely tied to the domestic (in both senses, "at home" and "intranational"), while the Ladies may be the most closely connected to nature. The Queens are sort of structural and symbolic, and perhaps in some ways as...societal as the Mothers, but it's noteworthy that they are leaders in war, which if you're doing it right (in the sense of "winning", not the sense of "behaving ethically") does not happen in your own space. Of course the Mothers are, as we discover in Cold Days, also sort of cosmic, dealing most directly with things that affect like, the nature of reality in a way the Queens and Ladies don't as much. There's a snowflake symbol on the door, matching Lloyd Slate's brand, and no visible corresponding symbol for Summer, which is interesting. Notably, with Midsummer coming up, Summer is still technically ascendant for another like, 13 hours or something, suggesting that either ownership of the cottage belongs to whichever of the Mothers is currently weaker (balance) or there are actually two cottages, and they move between them as the seasons change, which at least sometimes puts them in the home of the Mother whose court is currently subordinate. If they move, it could be that they're in the Winter cottage until tonight and then moving, that they already moved because Midsummer is nearly upon them, or that they move on the equinoxes instead of the solstices (or maybe on Samhain and Beltane), which might match better with cycles of creation and destruction in both human activity and the natural world than doing it on the solstices, but halfway between the Vernal and Autumnal equinoxes, I'd still expect us to be firmly in Summer territory, so I think in any of these scenarios except the second one (they already moved because it's about to be Winter's turn), they're in the home of the Mother whose season it isn't. This makes a certain degree of practical sense, given that Winter isn't really up to like, standing right now, but I also enjoy it as symbolism. There's the balance thing, but it's also...it's like shabbat, kinda. When its not your season, you get to stay home, you get to rest. When Harry visits the Mothers in Cold Days, he gets teleported straight to the interior, so I don't think I can readily prove or disprove the "two cottages" option. It looks the same on the inside, so far as Harry recalls from his single previous visit. When they go outside, it's into a forest of deciduous trees the size of redwoods, and there's a footpath, not just spongy grass, which may mean it's a different house or simply that it's the same house in a different place. Or, I suppose, the same house in the same place but the landscape has radically changed for some Faerie reason. In any case, Harry initially figures this is just Mother Winter's place, which is a reasonable guess under the circumstances, especially because her energy is palpable even through the walls and door. 

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Inside, the cottage pretty much looks like a cottage. Probably the most notable features are a loom, which I wish was described in like, any detail, and Mother Winter's various sets of dentures on the mantle. Puzzling, the description says they're on the "hearth", but since they're also "above the fireplace", I think we're meant to understand that what's called a "fireplace" here is, in fact, a hearth? Mother Winter herself sits in her rocking chair. She makes a remark to Summer, who either wasn't previously here or wasn't previously visible, because there's really nowhere someone can hide while dusting the shelves in a one room cottage. Summer walks right up to Harry, physically takes hold of his head, pulls up his eyelids a little, and says that he has "scars here", by which I assume she means on his soul, famously accessible through the eyes in this setting, and not on his physical eyes or eyelids. Then she has him stick out his tongue, examines it and his throat, and says he has strength, and can be clever at times. Harry, who hasn't gotten a ton of sleep recently and has largely been cooperating out of startled confusion, gets his shit together enough to greet her properly, and she introduces herself and Winter, explaining that the latter isn't getting up because it's the "wrong season". Then she tells Harry to hand her the broom. Winter says the dust will just come back, and Summer says it's the principle of the thing, and asks Harry to back her up. Which is, y'know, it may not be the best possible metaphor for what Harry does, and why he does it, but it's not a bad metaphor. He should have kept this one in mind for when he gets asked about it in Death Masks. Harry says he has questions, and the Mothers say they'll each answer one of his questions for each of theirs that he answers. Harry says he didn't come there so they could ask him questions, which is honestly both a little rude and very stupid. He's on two concussions and one missed night of sleep at this point in the book, and I'm not at all sure it justifies his being this stupid. Maybe he...forgot that he's dealing with faeries? He can't possibly have forgotten that you normally need to trade with the fae to get anything from them, not after having remembered it when talking to Lea like, three hours ago. And these two overwhelmingly, incomprehensibly powerful fae, from whom he needs answers in order to get anywhere, just named their price, unprompted, and that price is fair, safe, and comprehensible, and he's fucking arguing with them about it? The Mothers are more polite about this than I would have been, and ask if he's sure he didn't come to answer questions. He agrees, and they ask which is more important, the body or the soul. Harry's answer is basically "it depends", although he needs two tries to get that detailed enough for the Mothers' liking. When asked to explain his answer, he says it's a stupid question, it's not as simple as one or the other, and Summer says "Precisely" in a very significant way, and tells Winter that he "sees what she does not". I assume "she" is Mab here, although Harry thinks it's Maeve. 

They make Harry wait to ask his question while Summer pours tea for herself and Winter, and when he asks who killed the summer Knight, and who stole his mantle, they refuse to answer and dismiss the question as irrelevant, which like, do they get to do that? They say the important thing isn't who, but how and why, which is fair, but not an answer. Summer asks him what the theft of the mantle accomplished, and Harry thinks about how mostly it has prompted war between the Courts, to which Winter says "exactly", because apparently she can hear him thinking. I'd love to know if Summer can also hear him thinking, or if this is related to his current connection to Winter as its Emissary. Winter prompts him to think about how the theft was accomplished, which brings my count of questions they've asked him up to three. Harry talks out loud about what you can do with something that's been stolen, which wasn't really what she asked, saying that it can be hidden away, destroyed, or sold to someone else. Winter says it can't be destroyed, on account of conservation of matter and energy, so Harry revises this to "rendered valueless". I'm getting the sense here that even having made a bargain to answer Harry's questions, the Mothers are very limited in what they can say outright, but they're trying their best to get him to the right answer anyway. And Harry does get to the answer, concluding that the mantle must have been passed to a new Knight, and that the Knight must have been changed in some way, to take the mantle out of the balance of power. So he finally asks a question they'll answer: how is the mantle passed to a new Knight? They tell him it goes to the nearest vessel of Summer, and she chooses the next Knight, which seems to indicate that "vessel of Summer" here means "existing Queen". Notably this is not what "vessel" means when the Lady's mantles are moving around in Cold Days. Not sure what the deal is there. It would make sense of the Knight's mantle works differently, but using "vessel" for both things seems needlessly confusing. However, this does pretty well narrow down our potential culprits to Aurora, since the mantle would have reverted to one of the Queens as soon as Reuel died, and if Titania had it she wouldn't be going to war about it, and if Mother Summer had it she presumably wouldn't be helping Harry figure this out.

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Harry initially figures that having identified the culprit, the situation is pretty well sorted, but the Mothers make it clear that it's too late for either them or Harry to intervene with Mab and Titania, so he'll have to find another way to solve things. He asks what they can do, and Summer says she can't do anything, but Winter gives him the Unraveling. When she describes what it does, he asks if it could fix Susan, and she confirms it. She also clarifies that it's not a gift, but a necessity, and Summer says that it's his now, to do with what he will. It seems tolerably obvious that they expect him to need it to fix the mantle situation, but Harry walks out of there thinking he's gonna be able to use it for Susan, after he solves the case, although he's aware enough to realize that he's still got a decent chance of getting killed in the process. By my count, Summer still owes him two answers, and Winter three, so when we get to Cold Days we're gonna be on the lookout for information they don't make him pay for. (Although with Winter this is complicated by his status as her Knight). Before leaving, he apologizes if he harmed their unicorn, and Winter asks "What unicorn?" He figures out what this implies just in time for Elaine to lift the veil from Grum and herself so Grum can hit Harry in the head, knocking him unconscious. Concussion count: 3

Does Harry get fewer than three concussions in any of these book? I really am going to make a graph when I do the retrospective for this book, and update it for each one going forward. Hopefully I will have the next chapter done in another couple of days. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things! 

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 25

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The Mothers' carriage pulls out smoothly into traffic, and then either passes through some kind of fog into deep Faerie, or calls up a fog before passing into deep Faerie to protect Harry and Elaine from whatever mindbreaking landscape you actually have to pass through to get from Northwest Chicago to the Mothers' cottage in five minutes. 

They're at the top of a low hill, in a misty landscape of other such hills, and there's a raven perched on the nearest tree, very obviously looking at them. Harry describes the scene as "very Baskerville", which I initially took to be about the bird, and was going to question on that basis, but I finally went and reread The Hound of the Baskervilles like I said I was going to do back in Chapter 11 (a year ago?!), which is raven-free but does feature dense fog surrounding rolling hills. Also now that it's been named specifically I think we can be very confident there's a deliberate Hound of the Baskervilles thing happening here. The important part, for our purposes, I think, is that the secret heir to a small but wealthy estate takes advantage of an old legend about a curse on the family to try to arrange the death of the current baronet (who dies) and his only known heir (who doesn't). It's not entirely clear how he meant to put himself forward after they'd been gotten out of the way, since he had been living under a false name in the nearby village, with his wife whom he was pretending was his sister, but that's really neither here nor there since he fails to kill Henry Baskerville and dies in a bog. The old baronet, whose names escapes me...Charles Baskerville? Yeah, Sir Charles, was literally frightened to death by a large, but entirely corporeal and non-cursed, dog painted up with phosphorus. This wasn't gonna work with Sir Henry, who wasn't old, and didn't have heart problems, so Stapleton (not his real name, but what he's called for most of the story) has to get a little cute trying to arrange for his dog to physically kill him. There's a whole subplot where the couple who take care of the Baskerville house are hiding the housekeeper's brother, who's an escaped mass murderer, out on the moor, but I don't think that matters here. Aurora is obviously positioned as Stapleton here, operating under a false name (if not for such a large portion of the story) and working behind the scenes to pull off a really complicated inheritance scheme involving property she is, legally, entitled to. Reuel is of course Sir Charles, the old man who was murdered (iirc in a way that wouldn't have worked if he weren't old and frail) to get the inheritance in question where she wanted it. Lily, then, parallels Sir Henry, the relative outsider (Lily is half-human and her fae parent was from Winter, Sir Henry has spent most of his life in North America) inheriting this not-actually-cursed but currently very dangerous thing, and going to get killed for it, although she also has commonalities with Laura Lyons, a somewhat naive woman whom Stapleton manipulated to get at Sir Charles, and who, in backstory, the entire community had to pull together to save from destitution and/or sex work (everyone's a bit delicate about the particulars) after she was abandoned by, or left, her husband, who was, perhaps significantly, an artist, and her father "refused to have anything to do with her", much as Reuel and the other changeling kids seem to have done with Lily, although Lily's difficulties seem to stem from an inherent difficulty in "taking care of herself" rather than a bad marriage and a shitty father. I don't think Aurora manipulated Lily to get at Reuel, although I could be wrong, but that is what the reader is positioned to expect, once they have enough information to draw inferences on this point, which at this stage we don't, really. More importantly, this positions Elaine as Mrs. Stapleton, Stapleton's wife and largely unwilling accomplice, and I think it is possible that we should be able to work that out at this stage. The reinforcement of the Hound of the Baskervilles reference, after setting it up with an explicit Sherlock Holmes reference in the same chapter that Harry goes to investigate the death of an old man who apparently died for Old Man reasons but also clearly there's more to it than that, should tell us that someone who has so far appeared to be friendly and helpful, whom Harry did not know before this book, is behind the murder and the ongoing shenanigans, and that they have an accomplice who doesn't like or support their plan but has been forced to help. Also that a lot of the apparently supernatural aspects of the case are just cobwebs, but we'll get to that in a second. Technically there are three people who meet our Stapleton criteria at this stage: Aurora, Meryl, and Listens to Wind. Meryl was the first person to approach Harry about Lily, even though she wasn't the first person to approach him about this case as a whole, which makes her a better fit, if we're going to keep matching up characters, for Dr. Mortimer. And Listens to Wind is not, as far as we know, closely associated with the faerie courts - he's not an insider the way Stapleton needs to be, nor is he much involved in the events of the book after Harry accepts the case. That makes Aurora the strongest candidate here, and Elaine is the only person we've met who could plausibly be her Mrs. Stapleton, although Summer Knight is not so very similar to The Hound of the Baskervilles as to make anything extrapolated about the former from the latter certain. Also, notably, Mrs. Stapleton does not, so far as I can recall, actually do or even appear to do anything to either Sir Henry or Watson during the story. She's maybe sort of trying to seduce Sir Henry, but that doesn't really go anywhere, and the thing where she pretends to be Stapleton's sister seems to be more about making sure he appears unattached so he can seduce Laura Lyons. 

Harry asks "where to now?" and the raven flies off, stopping almost out of sight but clearly waiting for them. Elaine tells Harry not to make any "never more" jokes, and I was gonna do a little bit of analysis on the potential relevance of this literary allusion, but honestly I'm not sure there's a lot there. Harry's upset about losing his girlfriend, which is also one of the things "The Raven" is about, but like, a quarter of all art ever is about that. Like the speaker in "The Raven" he's been keeping odd hours and spending a lot of time with his books about it, I guess. And the has in common with Baskervilles that it features an ordinary animal frightening the shit out of someone who ascribes supernatural powers to it, but nothing along those lines is really part of the plot of themes of this book. The lost love who's currently standing next to Harry never gets back together with him, but she's not dead, and she's never again fully out of reach after this book. The one he's been up in his feelings about since the end of Grave Peril does of course die eventually, but at the moment she's still alive, and in the next book, this soul with sorrows laden very much will clasp that rare and radiant maiden. Not even within the distant Aidenn, just like, in his apartment. I guess it's foreshadowing for his giving up the chance to use the unraveling, maybe, but that's sort of dubious since in "The Raven", Lenore is already dead and the speaker doesn't come to terms with that or give up a chance of seeing her again anyway for a greater good, he just kinda gives up on ever being happy again because a bird that only knows one, really depressing word, got into his house. They follow the bird for a while, until it leaves them just barely in sight of a light they assume, not unreasonably, is the Mothers' place. 

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Unfortunately, between them and it is a unicorn, or something along the general lines of a unicorn. It's got
two sort of goatlike horns next to its regular unicorn horn, and a mane like rotten cobwebs, and Elaine says it's not as "prancy" as the ones she saw in the Summer court. There's a pair of odd descriptive choices here that I'm not really sure what to make of. At the beginning of the first paragraph describing this thing, Harry tells us it looks like "a Budweiser horse", and then just after that paragraph says "that was where its resemblance to a Clydesdale ended". Similarly, we're told that its hooves are cloven and "stained with old blood" and then later that its horn has "rust-brown stains". There's nothing wrong with any of those descriptors individually, but I think it would have been more evocative to start by comparing it to a Clydesdale, and then say "that was where its resemblance to a Budweiser horse ended", because most people know that the Budweiser horses are Clydesdales, so when you say "Clydeasdale" you're prompting the reader to think "Oh, like the Budweiser horses" which puts you in a position to say "No, not like the Budweiser horses." And I know it's more artistically effective to start with the somewhat euphemistic "rust-brown stains" and then escalate to "blood" rather than the reverse. It's possible Butcher is trying to do something Clever here, but if so, I can't figure out what it is and I don't think it worked. Only his having done it twice in the same passage makes me think it might have been deliberate. Harry's first idea for getting past this thing is to blow it up. Elaine's is to use a veil. Certain amount of Ah, yes, the two genders. This is a tangent but I would at some point in this series like to see a man be specialized in veils and mental stuff - one who isn't so vastly much more experienced than Harry that his superior abilities in this area are clearly the result of practice and discipline rather than having a talent for it. Or a woman who's better than Harry at blowing things up. Blowing things up is, in this setting, clearly established to be a sign of not being very good at evocation, but that's fine - fantasy needs more women who are strong as hell but not all that refined in their control, and part of showing women as people in your writing is not having them all be hypercompetent. Anyway, what they eventually settle on, since unicorns can sense thoughts, is for Elaine to focus on a mental image to distract it and lure it away  while Harry sneaks past. This works, but only for a few seconds, and when it starts gearing up to attack Elaine, Harry, remembering how Grum shrugged off his magic, blows up the ground at its feet. Unicorns having somewhat better balance than horses, this doesn't knock it over, but it does get it focused on Harry, who follows up first by trying to get it to charge into a tree and get stuck, which doesn't work at all (it hits the tree but just tears through it), and then by hitting it in the ankle on a spot that's apparently vulnerable on horses, which doesn't really work either. There's pretty good paragraph of frantic staff vs. horn combat here - a staff is a good weapon for this situation, which buys Elaine time to pull together a spell to force a memory of hers onto it more aggressively, which pretty well incapacitates it. 

She tells Harry to go on ahead, that she can hold it, although not for long, and won't be sticking around to get skewered once he's out of danger. Harry mostly does this, but stops for just a second to admire Elaine. This is noteworthy mostly inasmuch as he describes her as " My slender and straight and beautiful Elaine." which reminds me a great deal of the description of Blaes of Matuchin in Wheel of Time, "strong as the ash she stands, as lithe as the willow's branch, and as beautiful as a rose." This matters because from birth, the Dark One marked Blaes as his own, although as far as we know (she's a legendary historical figure who's only present in the books twice and doesn't have much chance to exposit about her biography either time) she never went over to the Shadow. Something to keep an eye on, potentially, regarding Elaine. Harry succeeds, barely, in not getting distracted by memories of when he and Elaine were together, and runs for the Mothers' cottage. 

So that's what I have for this chapter. Took a week longer than I'd hoped, on account of I had to reread an entire other novel and also I finally got my phone situation sorted out, which is basically a good thing but it took, y'know, time. Still gonna be trying to keep up a pretty good pace at we close in on the end of the month, so hopefully I will get you another one of these in the next like, four days. Until then, be Gay, do Crime, and read All The Things!