Herbal Medicine for Fantasy Writers Part 1 - Making It Up (Kind Of)

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Sometimes, you're writing a pre-industrial or non-industrial setting, and you need a character to get, and
be treated for, a condition that can be diagnosed and treated in the here and now, but wasn't known, or wasn't treatable, in the technologically equivalent real-world time period. Maybe there's no magical healing in your world, maybe it's not accessible to the character right now (or their condition is chronic and it's just not available consistently), or maybe it doesn't work for this particular thing. In any case, you know what you need to do: treat it with Herbs. 

However, this can get kind of tricky, as the nature of conditions that were not treatable until the advent of modern medicine is that there probably isn't a well-established and effective herbal remedy. What's more, you don't always want to just invent a plant out of whole cloth, and if you repurpose a real plant, there's a solid chance that someone will Notice. So here's what you do. Please note that this is going to involve a lot of Wikipedia, and if you don't like having a bunch of tabs open, you may want to use a separate window. 

1. Look up current medications for the condition you're trying to treat - Wikipedia will probably have a good list, but feel free to look elsewhere as well. The first thing you're gonna do is look at the Wikipedia page for each medication, and do two things - first, note the mechanism of action. This will usually be expressed as Something Something Inhibitor, Something Something Agonist, or Something Something Antagonist, although the specifics will vary. 

2. Read their pages to see if they have any known natural sources. Let's say your character is a recovering alcoholic, and either support groups don't exist or you have Things To Say about medication assisted treatment. We're gonna skip issues of withdrawal for now, that's a different medication process. For the post-detox treatment of alcoholism, there are basically thee medications: acamprosate, naltrexone, and disulfiram. Disulfiram is an easy one here - its wikipedia page straight up lists the other substances that do what it does, and one of them is coprine, which naturally occurs in inky cap mushrooms. (To a sufficient extent that another name for the mushroom is Tippler's Bane). Unfortunately, what it does is make alcohol violently, rather than mildly, toxic. Unless there are no other options, or the healer providing treatment believe that addiction is a character flaw and wants to punish our alcoholic as much as he wants to help, this is probably not what we want to go with. (Although there are other situations where we might. For example, if the character is a known drunk, and will need at some point to prove that she was sober when some particular thing occurred, being able to say "I take stuff that makes me extremely and immediately ill if I drink, so since I wasn't obviously, debilitatingly sick, you can be sure I wasn't drunk." might be very helpful.) 

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3. With the mechanisms of action in hand, start finding out what else does what they do. You may be able to find a list of Something Something Antagonists, but more likely you'll need to follow the name of the Something Something Receptor, scroll down to Ligands, and then find Antagonists. Naltrexone is a competitive opioid receptor antagonist, or a weak partial opioid receptor agonist. Acamprosate is a Mystery, but currently believed to be an NMDA receptor antagonist and positive allosteric modulator of GABA-a receptors. It's okay if you don't know what those words mean - I'm not actually sure on the last one. There are a quite a few opioid receptor antagonists, but following all of them down, plus a google search for "naturally occurring opioid receptor antagonists" doesn't point us to any plants or fungi with this effect, even after we spell "occurring" correctly on the third try. It looks like naltrexone is off the table, although it and most drugs like it are derived from opioids, so if you have alchemists or something like them and a willingness to fake it beyond the scope of this post, you may have options. Let's try acamprosate. There are a lot of NMDA receptor antagonists, and they come in flavors, but we can immediately narrow our search a little by finding acamprosate on the list of "uncompetitive channel blockers". (I must stress, again, it's okay if you don't know what that means). PCP is apparently on this list. It's synthetic, but it's also an old drug with a complex history so we'll bookmark that for further investigation. Agmatine is apparently present in fermented foods, so we'll bookmark that as well. Argiotoxin is certainly naturally occuring - it comes from orb-weavers, an incredibly common class of spider found just about everywhere, many of which are not dangerous to humans. I have no idea if the amount of argiotoxin produced by a normal spider bite would do anything here, but if you already have giant spiders, again, options. Ethanol is on this list, and is of course naturally occurring, but rather defeats the purpose here. Magnesium?! Just...magnesium. If managing this with food feels like an option, maybe we can consider this in combination with agmatine. A search for "naturally occurring nmda receptor antagonists" (not in quotes) retrieves an article listing several herbs used in Chinese traditional medicine, and describes how they operate. Unfortunately, they use more descriptive terms than "competitive agonist" and "uncompetitive channel blocker", so now we are going to need to know what those words mean. Wikipedia says that "uncompetitive antagonists block binding to a site within the ion channel" an includes a helpful little diagram, so let's see how that lines up. It sounds like that could be the same thing as "block NMDA-induced current", and one of the things listed as doing that (and nothing else) is an antitussive, a cough supressant, of which there are several (mostly DXM and its relatives) on our list of uncompetitive channel blockers. This sounds very plausible. Folium ginko is the dried leaf of Ginko biloba - finally, a plant! So for our NMDA receptor antagonist, we can use foods rich in agmatine and magnesium, a great deal of orb weaver venom, or ginko leaf tea. Or some combination thereof. 

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4. Technically this should be part of step 3, but that's gotten unconscionably long, so we'll have a separate step for finding our positive allosteric modulator of GABA-a receptors. If we go to the wikipedia page for the GABA-a receptor, and scroll down past a lot of words I don't know, we'll find a description of its ligands, with examples for each type, and there's a decent number of positive allosteric modulators. Just skimming this list, you might actually see some words you do recognize, including ethanol, niacin, theanine, and menthol, as well as some drugs you might know, like barbiturates, benzodiazepines, and zolpidem. Because we appear to have a lot of good options, we're going to start by just checking the ones we can't immediately identify as synthetic drugs. We have options here. Honkiolol and magnolol both come from magnolia bark and seed cones, biacalin comes from skullcap, kavalactones come from kava and shell ginger, niacin is a B vitamin (it's in food), theanine comes from green tea, valerenic acid comes from valerian, and menthol comes from mint. 

5. Make your choices. This is where you have to turn your writer brain back on. Unless you're just describing how something would, theoretically, be treated, for atmosphere, the exact regimen you settle on is going to be informed by the individual you're treating, and her circumstances, and may not represent the entire space of what's available. This particular example is a lot easier if your story is set in Asia or somewhere with a similar biome, because the best confirmed food source of agmatine is doenjang, a traditional Korean fermented soybean paste, and ginko, magnolia, green tea, shell ginger, and one kind of skullcap are all also from Asia. In a European setting, or Europe with the serial numbers filed off, we will have a harder time finding good sources of agmatine (although most fish, meat, and cheese has some), and the word "ginko" may be immersion breaking (although see below), although valerian or concentrated mint are perfectly reasonable sources for our GABA-a modulator, and we can source magnesium from peas, beans, greens, or flaxseed. Obviously, if trade exists, we may be able to work around this, but that's a decision dependent on other factors. So let's say our alcoholic is in a Vaguely European setting. She's getting some dietary intervention. Peas, meat, and fish are all good sources of niacin, peas will add magnesium and the animal products some amount of agmatine. This is great, because she hates peas - conflict! We'll also give her the ink cap mushrooms, less because they're really going to help her than because it makes her partner feel better. We'll use a powder that can go in her tea, rather than making her eat them, though. We can give her valerian for the GABA, maybe with corn mint (we'll make an extract using vinegar). But it's very hard to do without that ginko, especially when we don't have a really good agmatine source. Dextromethorphan, a (hopefully) similar NMDA receptor antagonist, has a half-life of four hours, so that's how often she'll need to drink the tea.

6. Fix the names. Look, there's no particular reason ginko couldn't grow in Europe, it just doesn't, without humans bringing it there. Corn mint, on the other hand, does grow in Europe, but people get distracted by the word "corn". Since you've likely been to the wikipedia pages for both plants at least three times by this point in the process, you probably got this already, but look at alternate names. No one knows what a "maidenhair tree" is, so if you say that's in the tea, it won't be distracting to the casual reader, and the reader who looks things up will be able to follow your reasoning. Corn mint is also called "field mint" or "wild mint", and you can take your pick depending on which has the feel you want. 

7. Explaining and describing. This tea. Is going to taste. Terrible. It's gonna smell like a minty mouse cage. It's gonna be bitter, sour, unsettlingly sweet, and disturbingly thick (because of the mushroom powder), taste subtly but unmistakably like dirt, and burn a little going down. Obviously whether our alcoholic resents this, tolerates it with grim resignation, or thinks it's what she deserves is gonna be down to her characterization. If we don't want tea here, we could make a vinegar based tincture with the herbs (still awful, but you can get it over with faster), and mix the mushroom powder in with the peas she's going to be eating with every meal. Chances are no one in your setting knows what an NMDA receptor is, so we could describe her treatment as being meant to balance her humors, or keep her mind level, or as sort of doing a little of what alcohol does, depending on what a setting-appropriate understanding of medicine looks like here, and what kind of tone you're going for. Since food as part of medical care is more normal than not most times and most places, you probably won't run into any trouble there. 

To be absolutely clear, I can't say for sure if this would work. Medication assisted treatment for alcoholism is a newish thing, newer even than for opiates, and there's a reason we use real drugs instead of herbs. But this isn't really about medical accuracy. Taking this approach will produce results that don't sound wrong, and that will show weirdos like me who google every named medicinal herb in a fantasy series that you did your research.

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 28

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Harry is pretty reasonably pissed off, but as Michael points out, this is not a great place to stand around swearing. Susan still doesn't want to leave until she manages to interview a vampire. She also insists on being addressed as Miss Rodriguez, and when Harry impulsively reaches out to touch her, she pulls a knife on him. 

They're able to ascertain that Lea took only memories that directly involve Harry or Michael, leaving some weird gaps. Susan remembers making a copy of the invitation, but not here she got it. She remembers going to the police station, but not why she was there. Drawing her attention to these gaps does at least convince her that something's up, even if she's not necessarily prepared to trust Harry all that much. She agrees to leave the party, and to let Harry and Michael walk her to her car, although she won't let them take her home. Michael briefly suggests that he should stay behind and see if he can get the sword from Lea, or discover where she's keeping it, but as this is an objectively terrible idea, he doesn't press the issue when Harry objects. 

They get as far as the stairs, but Harry senses bad vibes and stops to bring his Sight up for a second. Doing so makes Mavra visible to him and his companions, which suggests that she actually perceived him using it, and dropped her invisibility spell. This makes a certain amount of sense. When Harry's a ghost, he can see Molly's Sight as a light emanating from the middle of her forehead. Having no physical body, and being invisible to most people (and thus permeable to light), his ability to see anything at all obviously didn't operate along normal lines, since he had no retinas for light to hit, so his ability to see someone else's Sight in action is about as expected as anything else. Black court vampires are, even on the scale of vampires, pretty dead. Like, they look like corpses. They sound like corpses, when they move or speak. Mavra's eyes are described as cloudy, as though she has cataracts. However she sees, it's clearly not with her cloudy, desiccated corpse eyes. So it stands to reason that she, too, can perceive things not visible to conventional eyeballs. 

She's the one in the Hamlet outfit, and she brought a real, upsettingly fresh human skull as a prop. She insists on her right to exchange names and pleasantries, in a way that suggests to me that "hour for socialization" is a concept covered explicitly in the Accords. Apparently if Harry refuses to cooperate, she can take insult and demand satisfaction. Her angle here seems to be that if Harry insults her and then lets Michael fight her as his champion, she gets to fight Michael. (Also I may just spend too much time on Tumblr, but the whole notion of Michael fighting as Harry's champion is reading a little gay to me, especially given the whole warm, calloused hands thing from a few chapters ago). Harry asks Michael if he knows her, and Michael makes what on the surface appear to be very proper introductions. Except, he introduces Mavra to Harry, not the other way around. Now, Mavra is a little ambiguous in her gender presentation, and Michael makes a point a little later of saying that she's not a "lady" and referring to her as "it", but gender notwithstanding she's at least a hundred years older than Harry, and by any conventional standards has the right to have him introduced to her, rather than the reverse. Either Jim Butcher was not trained on the same kind of stuffy etiquette I was as a child, which honestly strikes me as unlikely given that we essentially never see Harry make this kind of mistake (excepting in chapter 26 of this book, which is accounted for by the head trauma, drugs, exhaustion, etc), or this is a deliberate, calculated insult, either calculated to stay below the level at which Mavra could respond or in hopes that she would take insult against him directly rather than trying to force Harry to do something for which she could demand answer. Susan turns on her tape recorder, because if she can't interview a vampire, she can at least observe a conversation with one. 

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Harry asks again if they know each other, and Mavra confirms that "some little time ago" Michael killed a bunch of her "children and grandchildren". Since Michael clarifies that it was 20 years ago, these were presumably vampires she turned, and the vampires they turned, not her biological offspring, since Mavra is way to old to have living human children, although I suppose they could have been both. This also brings me back to the question of exactly how old Michael is. The ages and dates are deliberately a bit fuzzy here, but we know Harry was 13 years old sometime between 1982 and 1986, as Knight Rider was on the air during his first year living with Justin. Word of Jim is that he's around 25 at start of series, which fits with that timeframe. Storm Front is set in early November I think, which means he'd probably either just turned 25 or just turned 26, although I suppose 24 isn't out of the question. That means he's at the oldest almost 28 here. So 20 years ago he was probably around 7 years old. And Michael was not only already in the monster hunting business, but able to take on a nest of Black Court vampires and emerge more or less intact. Harry tries the same thing three books from now, and loses most of a hand in the process. Maybe Michael had better backup, but still. He must have already been fairly experiences, and since it's apparently The Rules in this setting that you can't start fighting evil until you're at least 16, he was probably already in his 20s at that point, and seriously how old is he? How long have he and Harry known each other? How did they meet?

Her distinctly nonhuman sense of what constitutes a short time notwithstanding, Mavra can count, and she knows Susan and Michael can't both be covered by guest right. If Harry claims that safety for Susan, she'll try to take vengeance on Michael. If he claims it for Michael, she'll eat Susan because Harry's association with Michael offends her and eating Harry's girlfriend is apparently an appropriate response to that. Harry asks Michael if he can handle Mavra, and Michael says he'll manage, but Susan isn't terribly interested in being rescued. Rather than argue with her, Harry starts rummaging in her picnic basket, and unearths a clove of garlic, which he tosses experimentally at Mavra. She jumps back, confirming the vulnerability. Harry observes aloud that Dracula is basically a how-to manual for killing Black Court vampires, and that this was probably a significant factor in the Black Court's decline. I believe this is out first introduction to book publishing as a weapon against the supernatural, which comes up a few other times in the series. 

Mavra calls shadows into her hands. It's not entirely clear what he means to do with them, but it's probably not anything Our Heroes will enjoy. In doing so, however, she also gives herself way. The feel of her magic matches the barbed wire sell, so now they've got the information they came for and there's absolutely no reason to stick around. Susan asks if vampires can do that, and Harry says that wizards can. It is Best Practices to make sure we know not to expect this from and random Blampire we encounter, and that we might see it from practitioners, vampire or not, but so far as I can recall we don't ever see anyone,v do this particular spell again. Mavra says if they try the garlic thing again, she'll take it as an attack on her person, which, honestly, y'know, that's fair, it would be. Deliberately exposing someone to a substance that's poisonous, or to which they're allergic, is assault under human laws too.

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She invites Harry to try and have a wizard fight with her, but he uses his damn brain for once in this stupid book and realizes she can't make the first move, at least not against him, without violating guest right and insulting Bianca. She could, I suppose, attack whichever of Michael or Susan isn't covered by Harry's invitation, but her insistence that he choose strongly implies that she doesn't know which one of them arrived with him, and she can't afford to guess wrong. Harry threatens to turn her into a greasy spot on the floor if she tries anything, and she comes at him in that blurry-fast vampire way, but Michael and Susan were apparently ready for this, and brandish crosses in her face. (Technically, Michael's is his knife, held upside down, but it's the shape, and the faith, that matter here). 

Michael...says something rather odd. I mean, most of it is a fairly articulate "you have no power here" abjuration, but the first bit of it is "Blood of the Dragon, that old Serpent." Without any fucking context (and we never get any context on this), this epithet is a skosh confusing, because we just met a dragon two chapters ago, but this doesn't, I don't think, have anything to do with that. One would assume it has something to do with either Vlad Dracul or Vlad Dracula, but neither possibility makes as much sense as I would like. Vlad Dracula was, or is, a Black Court vampire. Per Blood Rites, he became involved with the Black Court as kind of "teenage rebellion" which would confirm that his father wasn't part of the Black Court, even if the same book did not also explicitly state that he was something else - a scion, offspring of a human and a demon. And it was Vlad Dracul, not Vlad Dracula, who was called Vlad the Dragon. So connecting Mavra with Dracula would make a lot of sense, but calling her "Blood of the Dragon" appears to connect her to the other Vlad, the one who isn't a vampire. Notably, he was called "the Dragon" because he was a member of the Order of the Dragon (not to be confused with the Dragon Society (secret society at Dartmouth) or the Order of the Dragon King (highest decoration of the Kingdom of Bhutan)), a chivalric order fashioned after the military orders of the crusades, including, y'know, the Knights Templar, meaning that Michael himself ought to have more in common with Vlad the Dragon than Mavra does, notwithstanding VtD's apparently being half demon and referred to later in the series as The Creature. Of course, Elizabeth Bathory, who is almost certainly a vampire in this setting, had her coat of arms inspired by the Order of the Dragon, so it's possible Michael was suggesting Mavra has a connection to her, although I'd rather figured her for the Red Court. It's also possible that if Mavra was turned by Baby Vlad, who was Vlad the Dragon's son, there's sort of a line of descent there, and depending on what the Black Court turning process entails, it might even involve blood. It's also possible that I'm overthinking this, and Jim Butcher, who had neither Google nor Wikipedia when Grave Peril was written, simply noticed that "Dracula" means "(son) of the Dragon" and ran with it for a minute. 

It's tense for a second there. Harry and Michael are both Done, and pretty ready for a fight, even if they wouldn't necessarily have chosen this one. Mavra would very much like to have this fight, specifically, but isn't willing to start it. Susan doesn't know what's going on. Fortunately, the hour for socialization ends at just that moment, so they don't have to talk to Mavra anymore. 

Thomas, sporting a lip shaped burn on his neck from Lea, asks if he and Justine can stand with Harry. The burn, presumably a result of Lea having recently absorbed all Susan's memories of her relationship with Harry, would be great reinforcement that however weird and repressed and anxious they might both be about it, the love they have for each other is strong and real, and has tangible power that could get them out of a tight spot later (as, in fact, it does), if only the whole "White Court vampires are burned by love" thing had been established earlier in this book, rather than not even mentioned until Blood Rites. As they stand there in the dramatic, spooky darkness, Thomas tells Harry that Bianca is about to start Court, and distribute gifts. The chapter closes with Bianca making her entrance, smeared with blood and ready vto cause problems as yet undreamt of by Our Heroes.

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 27

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Lea is dressed as a waterfall, in a flowy blue dress with white lace at the hem, and a gauzy opalescent shawl. I'm not entirely sure what the symbolism is meant to be on this one, not lest because waterfalls are such an inherently variable proposition, which I suspect may be part of the point. My strongest immediate reference point is the role waterfalls play in children's fiction and family movies, in which they are something for going over, a sudden massive disruption and shift in the narrative that leaves Our Heroes disoriented, stripped of resources, and possibly scattered, but essentially unscathed, which isn't the first way it would occur to me to characterize Lea's presence in this book. Upon reflection...yeah, no. Of she hadn't given Bianca the sword, Harry still might not have made it out of there in one piece, but he would have had substantially more options. My actual personal experience of waterfalls is mostly of the little ones you see hiking in the Cascades and Olympics, about which there's not a whole lot to say other than that they're nice to look at, and mildly exciting if you happen to be a city kid who doesn't necessarily see a whole lot of Nature. Waterfalls may also be associated with change and impermanence, balance, evolution, and unharnessed potential or energy, but none of that immediately makes me go "Oh, yeah, that tracks with Lea's role here." It could, I suppose, be an oblique reference to to the hint she gave Harry back in the graveyard. This unclarity about the costume is made more frustrating by Lea's explicitly identifying herself as a metaphor. A metaphor for what, Lea? I know you're usually about artistic madness and lust for power, but what are you doing here, and how is it supported or subverted by your being dressed as a waterfall? We also get a description of glamour, including a firm confirmation that Lea's beauty is partly magical in origin. 

Harry meets her Little Red Riding Hood reference with one of his own, and then returns his attention to trying to persuade Susan to leave. She's not having it, insisting (wrongly) that she can protect herself and (validly) that if it's that dangerous, shes not gonna leave Harry alone here. Like, she's sufficiently competent, and has demonstrated herself to be adequately well-prepared that were circumstances even slightly altered, she'd be substantially more of an asset than a liability. The difficulties here are that she's not protected by hospitality, that Harry cannot accept with equanimity the possibility of her getting hurt, and he's not really in any condition to take care of himself, much less anyone else. Only one of those things would need to not be true. 

Unfortunately, Harry's obvious desire to protect Susan draws Lea's attention to her. She tries to make eye contact with Susan, and Harry narrowly intervenes, getting caught in her glamour in the process. She floods his mind with visions of what it will be like when he stops resisting and gives himself to her. The phrase "the tips of her breasts" makes an appearance, but the emphasis is on peace, rest, the absence of pain, and conflict, and responsibility. Harry, as I mentioned a few chapters back, and back in Fool Moon I think, is in a pretty much constant state of physical and emotional discomfort, and desperately needs a break. Not a great idea at this exact moment though. It physically hurts, but he pushes the glamour away and tells her "no". Very impressive, especially under the circumstances, but sadly this also makes the third time he's refused to honor their bargain. Threes, as Harry knows perfectly well when he's not drugged, concussed, exhausted, and trying to get his girlfriend to leave the monster party before something eats her, have particular significance in faerie, and this third refusal causes his magic to turn against him. 

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Harry goes all wibbly, and Susan demands an explanation so that Lea can exposit a more thorough version of the above for the reader's benefit. She seems genuinely regretful, and I don't think it's just, as Harry suggests, because his weakening himself this way will leave her with less to "eat". I'm still not entirely sure what pre-sidhesicle Lea wants with Harry, but her feelings and motives where he's concerned have always been complex. I suspect the basic shape of the idea was to amuse herself with hm while keeping him safe and pliant for future use by Winter, but she does, in some sense, care about him, at least a little. 

Susan tells Lea to stop it, and Lea invites her to make a deal, not for Harry's debt, which she certainly couldn't afford, but for relief from the immediate impact of the broken oath. Susan is so startled by a request for her eyes that Lea withdraws the offer, and firmly refuses to give her Name. She doesn't really understand what Lea is asking for when she asks for Susan's love (which I suspect is an inappropriately high price in any case), and Lea retracts that as well, before asking for a year of Susan's memories. Given the disproportionate cost of Lea's first three offers, and how quickly she withdrew the two that Susan didn't immediately refuse, I suspect this was her real aim, and that she meant to create anchoring bias, making what would otherwise be a rather startling request sound reasonable by comparison. I don't really know what she wanted with Susan's memories of Harry, though a benevolent read suitable to her later characterization might be that she knew Harry would be able to restore Susan's memory, and was getting as close as the rules would allow to doing it for free, which might be supported by the stress given later to the sidhe's inability to give or accept anything without a fair trade. Only, in that case, why go bother them in the first place. I suppose it's possible that she, unlike Bianca, really was trying to get Harry to leave, and figure getting his newly amnesiac girlfriend to safety might be sufficient to make him do that, but since Susan isn't protected by hospitality, I feel like there would have been easier ways to do that, like, I don't know, sticking a glamour on Susan that made her do whatever anyone told her, rendering her both exceptionally vulnerable and more, rather than less, amenable to extraction. Then again, she may have been trying something like that when she attempted to force eye contact with Susan a minute ago, only someone intervened, so this is her plan B. That said, I'm not sure the benevolent reading holds up at all, since this is the book in which she tries to break Amoracchius. Susan agrees to it, and Lea seals the deal with a kiss on the forehead (also "the tips of her breasts" harden - please, Jim, just say "nipples), and then slaps Harry across the face. Now, this symbolism I get. The rejection conveyed by the slap basically cancels out one of the times he refused her, setting the balance back to two, and thus below the critical threshold. 

Harry starts to feel better right away, some of the effects of the red court venom apparently effect of the broken oath. Michael is still pretty upset, and tries to threaten Lea, but she interrupts him and offers to bargain with him, this time for the sword. Michael offers himself, but apparently such a bargain wouldn't hold once he had the sword back, and in any case he's too rigid, and righteous, for her tastes. She would, however, happily take Molly in exchange for Amoracchius. 

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I feel like there's some AU potential there. At this point, neither Lea nor Maeve has been infected, so  there's no reason to think Maeve will need to be replaced, but at the end of Cold Days Mab claims she had a different role in mind for Molly. She also says, earlier in the same conversation, that she "would have considered her a better candidate for Summer", and it's not clear whether she's talking about the same thing in those two places, so it's possible that Aurora was already infected, and Mab meant to replace her, presumably going behind Titania's back, which tracks since Titania is a bit too sentimental to approach this reasonably. It's almost Halloween, so they'd need to wait at least a year, to prepare her suitably, but since Ronal Reuel hasn't been murdered yet, there's no reason to think they don't have time. Heck, given that Molly is like, 11 in this book, they might be planning to go the full Tam Lin and give her seven years, wait until she's 18. It's also possible Winter wanted her for something else entirely, some role that either hasn't been explicitly named or with which Molly has never been associated. In any case, if Michael were taken by some temporary madness and did trade Molly for the sword, here's what I think happens: Michael gets the sword back. Lea, lacking an appropriate gift for Bianca, trades Susan to her instead. so Susan is still half-turned, and Harry still starts the war with the Red Court. Lea receives the dagger, becomes infected, and infects both Maeve and Molly. In Summer Knight, Harry almost gets into serious trouble trying to rescue Molly when after encountering her somewhere in Winter, probably as part of Maeve's entourage, but there's no substantial alteration to the plot until Proven Guilty, in which some other impetus will have to set up the raid on Arctis Tor. (Someone else will also have to make the suggestion that Harry tie Susan up while they have sex in Death Masks, assuming we want to ensure Maggie's conception). They find Lea and Molly in the ice garden. Molly's younger, more flexible mind was easier to disinfect, so she's been clean and just chilling for a little while now, perhaps working some mind magic to bring Lloyd Slate what comfort he can while he hangs from the tree. (Or making it worse - this would strictly come down to what she's been told about him, and by whom). Rosie and Nelson are never hurt, and the Council's suspicion of Molly (to say nothing of her very real sketchiness and instability) is prompted by her having spent almost a third of her young life in Winter, rather than by her history as a warlock. It's hard to know what happens from here, as we've got a very different Molly, and the plot is gonna diverge ever further as her role in the narrative becomes more substantial. 

Anyway, not only does Michael not agree, he physically picks Lea up buy the front of her dress and threatens to destroy her "for all time" if she doesn't stay away from his family. She laughs, apparently teleports out of his grip, informs him that rage weakens his power (which is good to know, and may help explain how things went for Murphy with Fidelacchius), and vanishes into the shadows. 

After Michael makes sure Harry is okay, and Harry makes a mental note to check in with Bob about the whole "self-inflicted spell" thing, they return their attention to trying to get Susan out of there. Of course, now they have a new problem - she doesn't remember who Harry is. 

See? I told you it would be faster. I don't know if the next one is gonna be quite this fast, but I've hit a lowish point in my annual workload, so there shouldn't be any more massive delays. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 26

This post contains extensive discussion of the biblical story of Samson, and the geographic area in which those events are said to have taken place - the ancient states of Philistia and Judah. Lest there be any suspicion that I'm trying to sneakily work in my own opinions on the current situation on Israel and Palestine, I do so openly and explicitly here at the outset. Israel is very actively committing genocide against Palestine right now. That's bad, and they should stop doing it. The modern state of Israel isn't, realistically, going anywhere without someone committing even more atrocities, so any reasonable long term solution should probably include its continued existence. I'm not any kind of expert on geopolitics, and I don't have any specific idea what a successful resolution to this mess might look like, but it would be a good start for the Israeli government to stop blowing up hospitals and residential neighborhoods, and for the US government to stop subsidizing them in doing so. Most of the people affected by this conflict are just regular folks trying to get through their fucking day, and I bear them no ill will whatsoever. That's it, that's what I got. I'm Jewish, sort of...that's, that's part of why I'm against genocide, you know? That and I'm like, a person, I guess. If some part of that bothers you, absolutely no one is gonna make you keep reading my blog. I don't want to host a debate in the comments. This was an accident of timing, and figuring out how to navigate that is one of the reasons this post took so long to write. Okay? Cool, now we can talk about the fun little fantasy book. 

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Harry is naturally somewhat alarmed to learn that he's been poisoned, and wonders if his sudden abdominal discomfort is cause by the poison, or just anxiety because he knows about it. Michael asks what the poison is, so that's officially a pattern. Harry thinks all the time about what a good person Michael is, how he's kind and reliable and solid (and warm, and calloused, hang on I'm gonna come back to that in a minute), but what has stood out to me so far in this book is how intelligent he is, how he usually asks the most useful question in any given situation, and seems constantly to be turning around every piece of information he has, looking for how it fits together. Thomas doesn't know, but Harry, looking at he partygoers collapsing in a drugged stupor, works out that it's vampire venom, and explains that since it's a recreational drug, and they're serving the poisoned wine to everyone, it doesn't count as an attack on him, or any of the other representatives of the various supernatural factions. So Bianca is legally in the clear. Harry makes himself throw up in a potted plant, but since Red Court venom is topical and absorbs very fast, it only sort of works. I could have sworn that he also used the antidote to vampire venom that he made back in chapter...oh, never mind, I just looked it up and apparently he didn't do that until Death Masks. Suppose I can't hold it against him that he didn't violate the laws of magic by time traveling two books into the future to get it. Anyway, Michael thinks they should leave, but Harry refuses. He figures Bianca didn't expect him to show up at all, and that poisoning the wine is an attempt to scare him off. I know Harry doesn't have a lot of experience hosting social events, but there is a roughly zero percent chance that Bianca had all her wine poisoned between his arrival and his reaching the refreshments table, and it's not much more likely that she had it done ahead of time just in case he showed up. She may, however, have considered wizard deterrence a fringe benefit of what was mostly and effort to give her guests a good time, so I'll give this one a 4/10 on the contrivance scale. 

Harry says something about figuring out "who it is", but tells Thomas it's none of his business (actually, he says "beeswax") when he inquires. Thomas takes the hint and fucks off, and Harry tells Michael they need to check out the other two non-vampire guests. I guess the invitees from the Summer Court, the Wildfae, the Svartalves, the Denarians, the Fomor, and the LeChaise clan didn't show up. (I'm not actually sure the wildfae are signatories).

Before they go bother the guy dressed as a centurion, Michael reiterates his dislike for the human teenagers' being served as food. His language, "abomination before the Lord" and "consorting with these things" makes it sound like he's judging the humans as much as the vampires, which seems unlike him, but I suppose he's likely just disgusted with the whole situation. Harry reminds him that they're here for information, not to bring the house down on a bunch of nasties, so, y'know, foreshadowing. Michael responds "Samson did", and Harry says "Yeah and look at what happened to him." This is  nearly a non-sequitor, but there is so. much. going on here on a symbolism, foreshadowing, and worldbuilding level. 

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So let's start with Samson himself. He was born fated to deliver Israel from the Philistines and, for that purpose, a Nazirite from birth meaning he wasn't supposed to cut his hair, consume (or even touch) grapes or grape products, or interact with grapes or corpses. Harry isn't subject to any fancy religious restrictions, but he was certainly born into some complex obligations, and as a Starborn, he certainly seems to be destined to save a whole lotta people, so there's that. Samson was also, as the Dresden Files recons these things, very probably a lycanthrope. He was periodically possessed by the Spirit of the Lord, which gave him super strength. That's a natural channel for a spirit of something if ever I did see one. I think I brought up back in my Fool Moon reread that there ought to be natural channels for spirits of things other than bestial rage/ Bu there's also a bi of uncertainty concerning whether what came and talked to Samson's parents was an angel, God, or a god, which causes me some uncertainty about what exactly was possessing Samson, and his behavior certainly seems consistent with the lycanthropes from Fool Moon. Also the Abrahamic God is a spirit of everything, bestial rage presumably included. 

Arguably, any reference to Samson foreshadows both needless fucking complication and wildly misplaced vengeance. Before he married Delilah, Samson was very briefly married to a Philistine woman. At the beginning of the week-long wedding reception, Samson poses his 30 Philistine groomsmen (dude had no friends of his own, I guess? idk) a "what have I got in my pockets" level unfair riddle, betting them 30 full sets of clothes (a huge deal in any pre-industrial setting) that they can't answer. To be clear, I have no idea why he did that, although the strongest working theory is "to start shit with the Philistines. Well, they can't answer, but they bully his wife into getting the answer from him (by threatening to burn her father's house down while she and her father are inside) and reporting back. Unfortunately, since she was the only other person who knew what it had in its pocketses precious, it's pretty obvious who told them. So he yells at them about it and then makes good on the wager by killing 30 other Philistine men and giving their clothes to his groomsmen. Then he storms off and his wife is given to his best man. He comes back and asks to see his...wife? Her father, with whom she apparently still lives, refuses to let him in, so he... gathers 300 foxes, or jackals, and ties them together in pairs by their tails, attaches a lit torch to each pair, and set them loose in the fields. The Philistines respond to this drastic escalation by burning down this house of his, again, most translations say "wife", but it said earlier that she was "given" to someone else, so I'm not sure what the situation is there, burning her and her father alive in the process. Very few of these details line up precisely with anything in this book, but it's got a lot of the same energy. A lot of fire, a lot of getting at people through their female partners, a lot of wanton destruction and disproportionate escalation. Also possibly an opening of hostilities? The beginning of Judges 13 says that the Israelites were "handed over" to the Philistines (New English Translation - other versions sometimes say "delivered"), but Judges 15:9 says that the Philistines invade Judea, so I'm not sure what the status quo was before the wedding, but bringing Samson into the conversation could very reasonably be understood as a clue that starting a war is on the table here. Certainly, things between Philistia and Judea get a lot more intense over the course of the story. 

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Most casual retellings of Samson's story focus on his time with his second wife, Delilah, and how she betrayed him but cutting his hair. They often don't mention that she was paid by the Philistines to discover and, if possible, remove, the source of his supernatural strength. See, when I was first making notes on this, I felt like Samson was an odd reference to make here. Plenty of other biblical figures faced off against armies of bad guys, or supernatural threats, and most of them aren't best known for having been betrayed by a lover. There are a lot of women in Grave Peril, a lot of them with active roles where they exercise substantial personal and narrative agency, but no one in Grave Peril is deliberately betrayed by a wife or girlfriend. Except, except, except this is the book in which Justine is introduced. I just checked Battle Ground, and she wasn't possessed by He Who Walks Beside this far back, although that doesn't actually rule out the possibility that she was infected by Nemesis, but still. I mean, I think it's as likely that Jim Butcher hit upon the idea for the thing with Justine while rereading in the course of writing Peace Talks/Battle Ground as that he really planned it this early, but in either case it's there. There is also Martin's long-game betrayal of Susan, and the Fellowship of St. Giles, several crucial prerequisites of which are also in this book, but that feels like a bit more of a stretch. 

So about bringing the house down on a bunch of nasties. Notably, Samson did not actually lose his powers, he just had to ask politely to have them restored, but this apparently did not occur to him until after he was taken captive, had his eyes put out, and and was forced to spend an unspecified amount of time grinding grain. Or he was just waiting for his moment. Either way, the Philistines throw a party about his capture, including a major sacrifice to Dagon, or Dagan, a stressfully complicated ancient Syrian god, referred to in the Tanakh as the head god of the Philistines. Samson is called in to entertain them, asks for permission to lean against the two load bearing pillars, prays for God to restore his super strength, and then...yeah, brings the house down is as good a way as any to describe it. He collapses the temple, killing himself and about 3000 Philistines, many of them civilians, in the process. Thing is, the Philistines weren't vampires, or demons. They didn't even consort with creatures of the night like the human guests at Bianca's party. Constructing Dagon as a demon here would be wildly ahistorical - the notion that the gods of other people are demons is, as far as I know, as strictly Christian notion, and not invoked in either the text of, nor, so far as cursory research suggests, Christian exegesis on, this passage. Philistia was a real confederation of cities in what is now the Gaza strip and a chunk of southwestern Israel, plus I think a little bit of northeastern Egypt. The Philistines were, and I cannot stress this enough, just people. This suggests three possibilities, and I don't like any of them. 

1. In the Dresden Files universe, the Philistines were, or worked with, demons, and either that information is recorded in their version of the Bible, or Michael knows about it someway else. That would reflect really, really badly on Jim Butcher. Like, I thought it was kinda cool on a first research pass, until I caught that we're talking about an event that's supposed to have happened in Gaza. (The words Philistine and Philistia do not always seem to refer to Palestine in the Bible, but in this instance it seems unambiguous). Yeah, no, bad things. 

2. Michael considers the Philistines, as the bad guys in this story, to be basically equivalent to vampires and similar, which reflects badly on Michael and seems rather out of character. 

3. Neither Michael nor Jim Butcher thought about this anything like as hard as I did, which would reflect badly on both of them but not as badly as options 1 or 2. 

Either way, not a good look for anyone involved. 

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Anyway! They approach the man dressed as a centurion. Harry remarks very quietly that his armor looks real, but apparently "Mr. Ferro" has supernatually good hearing, because he confirms that is is real. (He's also described as a man of "indefinite" years, and I'm honestly not sure if Jim Butcher was being clever there or if he meant "indeterminate".) Harry says it must have cost a fortune to put together, to which Ferro responds only with a smirk. I know this is probably meant to convey that he's so old he just kinda had a centurion outfit lying around, but the sheer rudeness of basically opening a conversation with a stranger by talking about how much his clothes cost makes his silence read more as a polite failure to notice a serious faux pas, and it's distracting as hell because Harry knows better. He isn't always polite, obviously, but when he isn't it's generally either a deliberate choice or a response to heightened emotion. This is neither.  I will forgive this on the basis that he's drugged and had three concussions in the past like, 48, maybe 60 hours, during which time the only sleep he got was the other time he got dosed with Red Court venom, and in the course of which he got a chunk of his life force eaten. Harry introduces himself, and when Mr. Ferro repeats his name, it hits Harry like a slap in the face, physically staggering him. We get a quick refresher on the nature of true names, which I thought were already discussed when Harry first got ahold of Kravos's journal, bu with a stress on how unusual it is to be able to hit someone that hard, or at all, with only part of their Name. This is an Elder Scrolls reference. While the physical force dragons can exert by speaking gets the most attention in Skyrim, the concept was introduced all the way back in Elder Scrolls: Redguard, which came out in 1998. I don't know if it originated somewhere external to the games. I'm not sure what Ferro did to Harry even operates on the same mechanism as the sympathetic magic with which Harry is familiar, much less that it plays by all the same rules. So when Harry asks how he did it, I don't think Ferro is just being a dick in saying Harry wouldn't understand. 

Michael points out that Ferro, who still hasn't introduced himself, is a dragon - his cigarette isn't lit, yet smoke issues from his mouth. While this is a fun and well-structured reveal for the reader, I don't know what it's supposed to be doing on a worldbuilding or characterization level. From whom, precisely, is the cigarette meant to conceal Ferro's draconic nature? Certainly Bianca knows, as would most of the other nonhuman guests, no one was expecting Harry to show up, and even if he did, he's bound by the same rules of conduct as everyone else here, to say nothing of the fact that if he gets uppity Ferro can just squish him. Ferro does introduce himself, as Mr. Ferro, and Michael says "Why don't I just call you Ferrovax", which seems to both impress and annoy the dragon. Harry objects that dragons are supposed to be big, with scales and wings. Ferro says, "We are what we wish to be," and I'm not sure if that's a general statement of philosophy, or information about how dragons, specifically, work. Or rather, it's certainly the latter, but I don't know if it's also the former. He also addresses Harry as "Mr. Drafton", to which Harry objects, apparently overlooking that this is probably an act of (pointed) consideration, given what just happened when Ferro used Harry's name. Actually, this may put some context on the cigarette thing. Dragons are big, aggressive apex predators, and if Ferro is anything to go by, deeply concerned with power. (In other words, a magnification of the species-level character flaws to which humans are inclined, but we don't need to get into all that). While this is never explicitly established to be the case in The Dresden Files, conventionally their biggest conflicts are with humans or with other dragons, and unlike humans, they're typically solitary, meaning that survival-level fear of conflict probably only kicks in when they might lose, rather than as soon as there's a risk of rejection by the group. Openly existing as a dragon in a space full of non-dragons, most of whom are also predators, but smaller ones who are unlikely to be a threat except as a group, may, as draconic etiquette recons these things, simply be too big a flex to be appropriate in polite company. Establishing that he can bat Dresden around like a cat toy just by addressing him directly makes the balance of power between them clear enough that it should prevent Harry from trying anything that could get messy, and pointedly failing to do so a second time signals that he's doesn't actually, y'know, want to fight, only Harry's a fucking primate (rather than, say, a cat) and gets upset because us social monkeys don't like it when someone opens a conversation by announcing, apropos of nothing, that they could beat us up if they felt like it. 

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Ferro reveals that he's the oldest of his kind, and the strongest. Just how big a deal is this party? Or what kind of situation are the dragons in? Lord Raith sent Thomas, probably as an insult - he doesn't like the Red Court and he can afford to offend them a little to make the point. Mavra's here for the opposite reason - she's the strongest, and very likely the oldest Black Court vampire in the series, probably in the Americas, possibly in the world. The Black Court is weak and needs to curry favor, so sending the most impressive person they have makes sense, and because they're weak, it's reasonably obvious that her attendance is a compliment, not a show of force. Harry's here because he's local, because they need him, specifically, to start the war, and because he's probably among the most powerful wizards of the White Council who would actually show up - being refused might represent a loss of face for the Red Court, or for Bianca specifically. Even Lea makes a fair amount of sense, she's a lot more important in Winter's hierarchy than Harry is in the White Council's, but not actually much higher than Bianca is about to be in within the Red Court, and if the invitation was directed to her, or one of the Queens, she was a very reasonable person to send - Winter doesn't seem to like the Red Court, but erring on the side of politeness isn't gonna hurt them any, they're secure in their power, and Lea is such a menace that no one could reasonably take her presence as a gesture of placation. But why is Ferro, the oldest and most powerful dragon alive, apparently, personally attending this thing? One certainly gets the impression that there are not a lot of dragons left, but they don't seem to be in such a spot that they'd need to cultivate an alliance with one of the most numerous and least pleasant bad guy factions currently signed to the Accords. The Red Court are...common. He's an independent signatory, but he could have sent a representative, or just...not shown up. (Word of Jim is that there are only two dragons left in the world, which would account for Ferro attending in person, but that's extracanonical and in any case makes his claim to be the oldest of his kind considerably less impressive.) 

Harry takes this villain monologue in the spirit in which it was intended, and informs Ferro that he's not all that impressed. So Ferro, who is clearly not into people being unimpressed with him, squishes Harry, apparently using his pure, directed will, although there may be some magic in it, as Harry is able to deflect it with a shield spell once Michael distracts Ferro. I don't remember if we see anyone do this between here and Changes, but either way it's interesting that this is our first look at this trick, and Harry's ability to respond to it. First of all, it situates Ferro as potentially in the same league as Mother Winter and Odin, if not necessarily as truly on their level. Which in turn causes one to wonder if his anger at not being taken seriously might reflect a similar vulnerability to disbelief.  Gods and faeries need people to believe in them, not just in their existence but in their power, or they can dwindle, fade, something - the books aren't terribly specific, but it's not good for them. And under those rules, the 1990s were not a great time to be a dragon. The Hobbit hadn't had a screen adaptation for 20 years. Pern was still going strong, but places a heavy emphasis on draconic interdependence with humans. Recent (if they were out at all yet, the exact year in which this book is set being somewhat uncertain) animated films like Mulan and Quest for Camelot situated their dragons as somewhat ridiculous. Eragon and Temeraire, both dragon-human partnership stories, were still a few years off, as was Reign of Fire, which might have been more to Ferro's liking, although its use to a belief-powered would be somewhat limited by not that many people having seen it. Pagemaster, Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher, and the first two Spiro games may have been some help, but the consensus of the time, at least at my elementary school, was that dragons were extinct. 

Second, there's a bit of a throughline of character development here. Harry obviously has no idea what's happening in this moment, and he needs both Michael's assistance and a spell to get out from under it. Nine books later, when Vadderung does the same thing, he gets it almost immediately, and recognizes that he can't do anything about it as he is, not against something with that kind of power. Two books, and a disproportionate amount of character development after that, he not only understand what Mother Winter is doing, he responds quickly and effectively. It's not actually clear whether gods and similar can do the pure-will-squish because their will, or the force it exerts, is in some meaningful sense stronger than that of mortals, of it it's simply that, as their will is the means through which they exert power in the world ("let there be light", etc) they have a great deal more practice focusing and applying it. But it shows meaningful growth in Harry's understanding of himself, his abilities, and the world in which he lives. Harry, in the early books, clearly likes to think of himself as anti-authoritarian, but he still views the power and authority wielded against him by other as inevitable. He's just determined to make doing so as unpleasant for its wielders as possible. And when that's all you can do, you should do that. Add friction. Make them work for it. There's power to be had there. But it is nothing on the power of realizing you can just straight up say no, just refuse, and then doing that. In Peace Talks, Harry tells Ebenezer "no" in a pretty serious way, and I don't know that he could have done that if he hadn't already told Mother Winter "no" two books earlier. Come to think of it, given the Mothers' established history of leading Harry into importation realizations, it wouldn't surprise me if that's why she stuck him to the floor in the first place. 

Once Harry's no longer being squished, we find out that Michael's the one who killed Siriothrax, and then Ferro vanishes. Poof. Michael chides Harry for being provocative, and they agree that Michael will take the lead on any subsequent dragon encounters. So far as I can recall, this gun remains unfired. People are starting to thin out as the vampires grab their human meals and withdraw to less public areas of the house. Michael doesn't like it, of course, and this time Harry doesn't bother asking him not to start a fight, just that they wait to do so until they can check the Hamlet guy and Bianca herself. There's some (more) good setup in this chapter with how Michael, hitherto the more cautious and even-tempered of the pair, is getting more and more upset as the evening wears on, even though nothing as happened, at least as far as the behavior of the vampires is concerned, that he didn't already know about. Presenting through his perspective, established to be reasonable (except where his own family is concerned), what an outrage this is, and, crucially, letting Harry be the voice of moderation, situates us to understand, when Harry "cuts loose" later in the book, that while his actions may have been unwise, they were not excessive, immoral, or unjustified. Hell, in another nine books, he's going to effectively commit genocide against the Red Court, and this helps situate that as acceptable too. Which, to be clear, it is. The reds are monsters, at minimum a 2.5 on the Mind Flayer Scale. That justifies genocide. But oh wow does it ever make me even less comfortable with the comparison of Red Court vampires to Philistines. Like, this is good setup, very strong series writing, but did you have to bring real world religious conflict into it? 

Michael asks if it might not be one of the other vampires, but Harry doesn't think it's likely. A vampire powerful enough to pull this off would have overthrown Bianca by now, unless they were part of her inner circle. But that apparently consists solely of Kyle and Kelly, who have both been ruled out, Kyle directly and Kelly for not having the necessary "presence of mind". I would very much like to know how Harry is so sure that there's no one else in Bianca's inner circle, but maybe Red Court vamps always only have two trusted lieutenants, so even though Harry didn't know Kelly and Kyle existed until...night before last, now that he's aware of them he can fill out the organizational flowchart from there. Presumably he assumes that Bianca's "shadows" are other vampires. And I suppose his failure to consider that as Bianca's elevation must have had the signoff, if not the active support of someone who standards above her in the Court, there may well be a higher ranking vampire currently in Chicago, if not in attendance at this shindig, to the head trauma. 

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They're looking around for "Hamlet" when Harry catches sight of a red-cloaked figure approaching quickly and stealthily from behind the ferns. Michael pulls a knife, and Harry grabs them, but when the hood falls back, it's Susan, dressed as Little Red Riding Hood. The picnic basket full of weapons may be a reference to the 1999 Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Fear Itself", in which Buffy did the same thing, but the idea is straightforward enough for two people to have had it independently. But we need to talk about symbolism and foreshadowing again. Fortunately, Little Red Riding Hood's story is much shorter and simpler than Samson's, and I feel comfortably assuming that my readers are familiar with the basic details. I will note here only that in the oldest written versions clearly identifiable as Little Red Riding Hood or Little Red Cap, there is no woodsman, no rescue, but that rescues do feature in many of the older stories which (may) comprise its precursors. 

Conventional interpretations of Little Red Riding Hood often focus on maturity and sexuality, noting elements like the disobedience, or going astray, in stopping to pick flowers, the symbolism of the red hood or hat, the fear of being consumed, and the symbolic rebirth of emergence from the wold's belly. Some modern analysis envisions the wold specifically as a rapist, and revisionist retellings often feature either Little Red Cap and/or her grandmother defending themselves from the wolf, or the girl embracing her own wildness (typically but not exclusively sexual) and engaging with the wolf on her own terms. This set of interpretations is probably out most useful in reading the immediate foreshadowing presented by Susan's costume. Harry and Susan will both experience violent, sexualized, traumatic shifts in the trajectory of their characters in this book. Susan, of course, ends up as a half-vampire, and while both her entry into that state and its ramifications are clearly rough on her (and end in her death, eventually), the Susan we see two books from now is more mature, perhaps more comfortable in her own skin and certainly better contained by it (in the sense that she has firmer boundaries and internalizes more of what she feels, although the tattoos serves as something of a literalization), and stronger in most conventionally accepted senses of the word. Harry, on the other hand...kind of breaks. We'll get into that more when we get there, not least because this post already needs a lengthy disclaimer and I'd rather it didn't need a lengthy content warning as well. I will, however, note briefly that it radically alters his relationship with his own sexuality. It also prompts him to embrace, if not unreservedly, his own power, his own wildness, his own destructive capability, and seems to shake him, a little, out of the deny-ignore mentality he's displayed towards how own raw strength. He also, y'know, starts a war, a thing the participation in which has been regarded as a mark of or prerequisite for adult masculinity by a lot of humans for at least the past several thousand years. To be clear, as with a lot of the foreshadowing in this book, someone reading it for the first time could not reasonably predict what's coming, but it helps make things feel earned, effective, and natural when we do realize it. 

There is also the fairly central image of the wolf wearing the grandmother's clothing. Lea is gonna be explicitly associated with that in a few pages, so let's take that and run with it. Lea is a mentor to Harry, however messed up their relationship might be, and quite possible to Maeve as well, given her closeness to Mab. And by the end of this book, Nemesis will be using her as a disguise to infiltrate Winter and infect Maeve. None of the other Nemesis carriers we know about are notable mentor figures, much less female mentor figures to Harry specifically, but notably three of them do have white hair, which is a grandmother sort of thing to have. Four if you count Tessa's "silvery gray", and if she's infected, which if I remember correctly has not been confirmed at the time of this writing. So there's that. 

Anyway, Harry asks Susan what she even got in, and she explains, rather complacently, that she had a copy of Harry's invitation made. He starts trying (badly, but like, concussions, sleep deprivation, drugs, panic) to explain how much danger she's really in, but she tells him, essentially, that she's going to be fine because she knows the rules for vampire safety. (She does, in fact, know them). Harry tells her she doesn't understand, she demands to know what she doesn't understand, and Lea cuts in to explain that without a legitimate invitation, she has no protection from the laws of hospitality. 

Holy shit, okay, I think we're setting a new record here for Late Post, Long Post. Of you want the next post that unexpectedly rivals some shorter Master's theses to not take like three months, please consider becoming a Patron so I can spend more time on this and less on the work that pays the bills. Next chapter won't take this long, I swear. It will also, I sincerely hope, be considerably shorter. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!

Chicken and Rice for People Who Can't Be Trusted With Perishable Ingredients

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 Hi, yeah, hi. I know it's been approximately forever since I got a post up, and it may be a while yet. My
post on Grave Peril Chapter 26 is well underway, but it's been research intensive and is shaping up to be very long, as I had to summarize an entire story from the Bible and discuss the foreshadowing implied by each of its elements. So, while I'm finishing that up, here is the recipe for the meal I make more often than any other by an actual order of magnitude. This is writing related inasmuch as it is excellent for people who are distractible in the short term, scattered in the long term, and perpetually broke. The only two absolutely essential ingredients have been common offerings at every food pantry I've ever visited, and cost $3.50 for two batches at my local Walmart, even under current greedflation prices. It requires perhaps five minutes of concerted effort, two of which you can spend sitting on the kitchen floor, and dirties a maximum of three dishes and three utensils, counting those used to eat, none of which are pots or pans. Once it's going, it will be ready in 20-30 minutes, but you can forget about it for up to three hours before it suffers any observable ill effects, and eight before any portion of it is likely to be rendered inedible or hard to clean. I use a 2 cup Pyrex measuring cup and a tiny, pink, two cup capacity rice cooker for this. Alterations and substitutions are discussed below, but I would recommend doing your measuring in a microwave safe container.

Ingredients

1 cup white rice (dry)

1 4.5 oz can of chicken (same size as normal tuna can)

1 cube chicken bullion

1 cup water

Poultry seasoning

Directions

1. Measure out the rice and put it in the rice cooker.
2. Measure out 1 cup of water and drop in the bullion cube. 
3. Put the water in the microwave and start it for 2:30 minutes on high. 
4. Open the can of chicken. You can drain it or not, I usually don't. 
5. Put the chicken in the rice cooker. 
6. Add 2 generous pinches of poultry seasoning to the chicken and rice, or sprinkle until the entire surface looks lightly coated. 
7. Using the rice tool that came with the rice cooker, or another nonmetal implement, mix until combined thoroughly, and break up some of the bigger chunks of chicken, especially if you're planning to share.
8. When the microwave finishes, remove water. 
9. Stir until bullion is completely dissolved. If it proves stubborn, crush it against the side of the cup. 
10. Pour the chicken broth into the rice cooker. 
11. Start the rice cooker. 

My rice cooker has two settings - cook, and warm. If yours is more complicated, use whatever settings you would ordinarily use with the same quantity of plain white rice. If you have a 10 cup capacity rice cooker, I would advise doubling the recipe, as the larger heating element can cause it to dry out rather quickly otherwise. This recipe can comfortably be doubled or more by maintaining the ratio of 1 cup of water - 1 bullion cube - 1 cup of rice - 1 can of chicken. You can also use one big can of chicken for every two cups of rice. Brown rice may be substituted for white, but use 1.5 cups of water instead. (It's up to you whether you want to use 1 bullion cube, use two, or split one in half so you can use 1.5). If you have liquid chicken broth, by all means use that - it's better. It's also actually fine with plain water if you don't have bullion cubes or broth. The poultry seasoning is optional - that's my most recent addition, and you'll be fine without it. If you have leftover cooked chicken lying around, you can use about 4-5 oz of that instead of canned chicken. If you have canned (or leftover) beef, you can use that, with beef or chicken broth (liquid or started from bullion), but I haven't settled on a seasoning I like for this version. This should work fine with tuna, with dashi or chicken broth, but I haven't tried it and I would tentatively suggest lemon pepper in place of poultry seasoning. You could probably use tofu or mushrooms, and vegetable or mushroom broth, maybe with a little soy sauce, but I haven't tried that either. For microwavable rice, skip the addition of the chicken until you've zapped it for the prescribed time and it inevitably comes out undercooked, then stir it in before returning the mixture to the microwave. Feel free to play around with the seasonings if you want. 

Yes, this can be done on a stovetop. I wouldn't recommend it, because the "fire and forget" nature of the recipe is mostly lost when it risks burning if left to cook too long, but it's still an inexpensive meal with a little bit of protein and a lot of flexibility, so sure. If you already have a way of cooking stovetop rice that consistently produces good results, I have no desire whatsoever to challenge that, and you'd know better than I would when to add the chicken in that process. If not, read on.

 You must respect the rice. The process for reliably creating steamed rice is not complex, but it demands a little bit of precision and a lot of not fucking around. I'm assuming short or medium grain rice here - I can't help you with long grain.

1. Measure out 1 cup of rice and 2 cups of water or chicken broth. (Rice to water ratio should remain 1:2 if you increase recipe volume).
2. Combine in a saucepan. 
3. Open the chicken and drain it. 
4. Cook on high until the rice and liquid have just started to boil. 
5. Reduce temperature to low and quickly stir in the chicken. 
6. Cover, and allow to cook on low for 20 minutes.  Do not lift the lid. Do. Not. Lift. The. Lid. DO NOT LIFT THE LID. The rice is being steamed and for that to go as intended the steam must remain in the pot. Do you understand?
   
7. Remove from heat promptly. You may now lift the lid. 

Whether you use the rice cooker or the stove, you can serve the chicken and rice however you usually eat white rice, or really however you want. I usually use like, 3 tablespoons of butter and 4 tablespoons of lemon juice for half the rice. My partner uses salt, pepper, and a normal amount of butter. I keep meaning to try it with sriracha mayo but then forgetting. It's pretty good with just butter. Like, one of the major functions of this for me is it's almost no effort over plain white rice, but there's some cheap animal protein in there. 

Yeah, that's my recipe, the thing I eat All The Time. Honestly it feels a bit obvious spelling it out, but the transition from "Yeah, we'll have plain buttered rice again" to this took months of fussing around and having new thoughts about it, so perhaps I might spare someone else the same experimentation. I'm working on the Chapter 26 reread post, I really am. Until I finish it (and transcribe it, eeg), be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 25

Photo by DANNY G on Unsplash

It's very tense for a minute there, and Harry and Michael get ready for a fight, until Thomas laughs, and delicately implies that it reflects badly on Bianca's hospitality for everyone to get so upset. Harry takes the cue and follows up with a remark about how "this was a masquerade ball, wasn't it?". Bianca is described here, and I had not previously noticed how much she looks like Anita Blake, titular protagonist of one of the oldest series that fits tidily into the tradition of urban fantasy that The Dresden Files helped popularize. Anita, however, probably would not wear a dress made of fire, although she's scarcely to be seen without heels that do "interesting" things to the shape of her legs. She's objectively attractive, especially with the way she's smiling, but Harry isn't interested - he's seen her true, creepy, bat face. We also get the cameo by Cowl and Kumori here, dressed as the shadows to her flame. While there's no real way to catch it on a first read, this is one of the first real pieces of the Nemesis puzzle, and it makes some of the others easier to put together if you're watching for it. It's confirmed in Dead Beat that these two were Cowl and Kumori. In Proven Guilty, we find out that Lea's obvious madness and present ice cube status were the result of the knife she was given at this very party. In White Night, we see that Madrigal and Vittorio are working with Cowl, and then Vittorio calls on an Outsider. Technically, this makes it possible to work out the origin of much of the "world is getting darker" stuff several books ahead of schedule. There are obvious similarities between what's wrong with Kumori and what's wrong with Aurora, and we know they're in the "handing out cursed magic objects" business because of the athame, making it at least plausible that they were also involved with the wolf belts in Fool Moon. Based on the evidence as of the end of White Night, these two can be linked to enough of events of the first 10 books to make their involvement with the rest plausible as a matter of consistency, and their connection with the Outsiders, while less thoroughly reinforced, has sufficient support to situate them as a link between the Outside and those events, making it possible, just barely, to extrapolate that the Outsiders are systematically stirring up trouble and making people lose their baskets. 

In any event, Bianca implies that she's going to eat Harry, and he responds, more directly, that she oughtn't try it. She gives her people tacit permission to go after him, if they can manage it without being too overt, or at least that's how Harry interprets it. This prompts Harry to remember how nice the venom to which he was exposed to yesterday was. File under: Harry is in pretty much constant emotional and physical pain, and has a corresponding vulnerability to things that make him feel better; nothing that can reasonably be described as "narcotic" tends to hold much appeal for people who aren't someways hurting. They descend into the main courtyard, where Thomas reconnects with them, and tells Harry his entrance was "marvelous". He says he couldn't let it descend into a general brawl, though, because it would reduce the opportunities for intrigue. This is probably mostly a cover for helping Harry, but it's also a very White Court way of looking at it, and places an emphasis on their not only preferring to avoid direct confrontation, but actively seeking out opportunities to engage in social and political machinations, which is certainly present in their later appearances but gets less attention. Unfortunately, their conversation is interrupted when he has to go retrieve Justine from a Red Court guy who's hitting on her. 

Photo by Tetiana Padurets on Unsplash

No sooner has he left them, then Michael notes that they're being surrounded. The majority of the attendees are humans, dressed largely in black, with red ribbons around an arm of neck marking out those who are fair game for feeding. This is very reasonable and well organized, honestly, except for the part where Red Court venom is supernaturally addictive and our human feeder fish therefore can't reasonably be said to have given meaningful consent. But it's a good system. The actual Red Court vampires, in very literal contrast, are all dressed in red, and a few moments observation of the crowd confirms that they're forming a ring around Harry and Michael, making it impossible for them to leave without coming in reach of at least one of them. This is a relatively subtle instance of another one of our running patterns in this series: Jim Butcher plays tabletop roleplaying games, and he pays attention to spacing. They head for the refreshments table, hoping to make themselves harder to trap, and partially succeed - most of their pursuers can't maintain formation without being obvious, but Kyle and Kelly intercept them at table. Kelly has everything except the lower part of her face covered, to hide the burns she got fighting Harry earlier, and Harry makes a remark about her hitting the tanning bed a little too long. He was apparently hoping to provoke her into attacking him, presumably, although it's not explicated quite yet, because if she, and through her the Red Court, breaks the rules first, he can fight back, and move the inherent conflict of this event into a sphere with which he's more comfortable, but she smiles and hands him a glass of wine instead. Kyle expresses his regret that Susan couldn't be here, which is...interesting. I may need to take back my earlier assertion that Harry might have done better to bring Susan along in the first place. Kyle isn't terribly smooth or subtle, as vampires go, and in light of what happens later, it's hard not to read this at an indication that Susan's attendance at this party was both planned for and arranged. Which, uh...guys? I think we might have been too hard on Susan here. Bianca isn't Nicodemus. It's not her established style to go for a small win (making Harry have a really stressful, unproductive evening, or getting him into trouble with the Council for skipping the party entirely) while rolling the dice on a bigger one (starting a war between the Council and the Red Court). We know, with the benefit of the 12 or 13 books that follow this one, the power she serves, and it doesn't operate like that either. Nemesis is careful and systematic, and not given especially to opportunism. Bianca's plan doesn't work if Susan isn't here. I'm sure there was a contingency in place for if she arrived as an invited guest (they managed to kidnap Justine, although I don't remember how they made that work), but she had to be here. And some amount of hypnotism and mind control are within the established Red Court power set - they can't all do it, but if memory serves Paulo Ortega is in Chicago right now, and if Arianna can call upon the Eebs then so can he. There's also a known mind-invader running around, against whom Susan hasn't been warned and has no particular defenses. I don't think it's her fault, or even Harry's, that she made the incredibly bad decision to come to this party. I think someone made her do it. 

Kelly makes a remark about Harry being into men, which is the second time Harry's sexuality has been brought up in as many chapters, and at least the third time in this book. He takes it in stride, so she escalates, and despite Harry's warning her against it, tries to touch Michael. Naturally, she burns the shit out of her hand. Harry basically says "I told you so", and Kyle is so angry he nearly drops his flesh mask. Harry tells him to go ahead and break the peace first, if he wants, the White Council will squish this entire place, which is of course what this whole exchange was mostly here to do - remind the reader of the rules of hospitality that govern this entire event, and the consequences for breaking them. As I said last chapter, Jim Butcher is getting better at using foreshadowing effectively and giving out information at the pace he wants. The twins stalk off, but now people are staring at them, so Harry proposes a toast "to hospitality", and drains his entire glass. So of course a moment later, when he's barely had time to tell Michael that he ruled out Kyle and Kelly, as far as who's controlling the Nightmare, Thomas reappears to inform them that the wine is poisoned. 

I don't remember off the top of my head whether every chapter at this party ends with something this dire, but twice in a row certainly looks like the beginning of a pattern. I'll try not to keep you in suspense too long. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!