Recorded Neutral Territory - A Dresden Files Podcast

Brian (00:00)
So Adam, obviously it's incredible to record a Dresden episode to drop on Harry's birthday, Halloween. It's just awesome. I love it.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (00:08)
If only it was deadbeat,

Brian (00:09)
I know, right. We'll have to just line that up in the future. But it's extra special for me because my wife and I got married in a church last year, but our wedding anniversary was actually this past weekend because we got married by the mayor of Sleepy in a graveyard, the old church graveyard.

the week of So yeah, for me, it's it's Dresden's birthday. It's kind of my anniversary. Like, gotta bring the fastball tonight.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (00:35)
Yeah, I hear

Brian (00:36)
I also proposed during a confluence, during the total solar eclipse year, I've learned a lot from Dresden. Confluences are special.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (00:40)
⁓

Welcome one, welcome all, welcome to recorded neutral territory where the spoilers go all the way through battleground. I'm Adam Ruzzo, and with me, as always, is a corn maze worker who's definitely not right behind you. It's Brian O'Reilly. Welcome, Brian.

Brian (01:11)
Pay no attention to the chainsaw. It's prescription. Yeah.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (01:15)
Yeah, I'm sure you have a permit for that.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (01:18)
One quick note before we get started, I wanted to quickly acknowledge our brand new episode artwork provided by the very talented Nick Strom. There's a link in the description of the podcast here or in the description on YouTube if that's where you're watching to the Displate site for Nick's artwork. You can get that to hang on your wall if you'd like. The episode artwork so far that he's put together for us uses the images that are found on that site. The Stormfront one shows Harry Dresden's office door. The Full Moon one shows the

print in and then the grave peril one shows Harry's tombstone where he died doing the right thing. So check those out, highly recommend it. Nick does awesome work, and we thank him for working with us on this and future episodes.

If you can't see that artwork on the older shows, by the way, you might have to go into your podcast player and set it to refresh the episode artwork. I had to do that inside of Pocket Casts under the appearance settings, But after that it should work properly.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (02:14)
Okay, Brian, chapter two of Grave Peril, Harry and Michael are gonna battle against Agatha Hagglethorn. The first chapter was just them getting to the hospital just in time. They arrive, they make their way to the nursery, the maternity ward, they rush up the stairs, and we get

a moment of how did you describe it? Quiet, too quiet.

Brian (02:37)
Yeah, exactly. This is a really nice transition from a scene, really a series of scenes in that first chapter that are very busy. They're in the car, they're driving, it's loud. They're running into the hospital, they're panting, people are staring at them, they're interacting. There's a lot of people around the whole time and then they get upstairs and you could hear a pin.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (03:02)
Yep, no technology, no intercoms, no fans, no people. That's creepy in hospital. You really do expect it to be at least the sounds of fans or something. But of course, magic interfering with technology makes that not the case here. Now, an interesting thing is Harry uses a ghost candle to basically detect that there is a ghost here and its relative power

but I don't think we ever see him use this again.

Brian (03:28)
Yeah, I don't think we ever see Harry use any ghost busting tech after Grave Peril really. I will say it's very probable that during Ghost Story other characters are using things like this. I think actually assisting Butters in that whole rig is a callback to a lot of stuff that happens in this book, but it's not really explained as being a reference because Harry is not the one setting it

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (03:49)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so Harry discovers several nurses are slumped over at their desk, apparently sleeping. And when they finally arrive in the nursery, they find the spirit Agatha Haggothorn singing over the cribs and lullaby to the babies. And then one of the babies stops breathing. Harry has been sort of creeping forward this whole time. And then he explains to the reader how one busts ghosts in the Dresden files. You don't get to use a proton pack.

or a nuclear reaction or anything like that. Instead, like, hey, ghosts don't have to play by the rules of reality. They can completely ignore you, and if they do, you can't do anything to them.

Brian (04:38)
I like that a lot. It's very different from the normal ghost tropes we get in, you know, just the typical Halloween story media. I like it a lot because I think it he does a nice job of, okay, if ghosts are this popular thing from those ghost hunting TV shows where they're basically just an energy that goes on the loop and repeats a series of activities that are tied to some psychic trauma. Well,

you shouldn't be able to interact with them really. They're not really there. They're there the same way that like a fossil is the dinosaur.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (05:15)
the other result of this is that you have to go in prepared. If he had just shown up here and said, hey, there's a ghost, he would not have been as effective at dealing with it as he was when he knew her name and the cause of her death, because he was able to use her name to get her attention. And he explains that once he does that, he can then use the ghost dust

which I believe is explained that it's like a new toy that he's bringing out for this particular ghost busting mission. I get the impression that Michael's along because the Sword of Amorachius doesn't care if the ghost doesn't acknowledge you. It's like one of the only tools that won't care. So.

Brian (05:55)
Yeah, no,

the swords of the cross don't care about a lot of things, one of which is if you're there in a physical sense. I also think it's pretty cool that Harry is kind of halfway between our Dan Aykroyd Ghostbuster and a true sort of Mystic Warrior kind of setup where he needs tech to deal with a ghost. And maybe proton packs would work in the Dresden Files. We don't know. Harry's not

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (06:15)
Mm.

Brian (06:19)
quite that good at his nuclear engineering, right? But we also know that somebody like Mort doesn't need this gear because if you're good enough at ectomancy, you can do things that people like Harry can't. And maybe Harry could learn to do those things, but at this point, he doesn't know how to do them. He's got to use all of these tools the same way he needs to use a blasting rod to throw fire accurately to deal with ghosts.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (06:22)
No.

Hmm. ⁓

Yeah, in the same way that you could probably teach Mort to like light a candle with fire magic, you could probably teach Harry to like talk to ghosts or see them more effectively, but there's no way that Harry does what Mort does with ectomancy and there's no way that Mort does what Harry does with fire magic, I think you're right because Harry does do a little bit here. He says you can't talk to a ghost unless you use magic. He has to put some magic into his voice to make it work.

Brian (06:49)
Mm-hmm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (07:10)
So that I think is a very interesting set. He sort of walks us through this and then he decides not to get her attention and then just throw the dust at her. Instead, he tries to use her name and her story to get her to realize that she's a ghost so she just dissipates and disappears. That doesn't work and she goes full poltergeist on him and Michael has to bust in to try to help because she almost chops Harry's face off.

Brian (07:39)
Yeah, it's a good fight scene in that it's not really a fight scene until it immediately becomes one. So Jim doesn't need to sort of pace out a physical confrontation. It's a confrontation of wills.

know, it's the very Klaus Fitts, war is the extension of politics by other means.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (08:00)
the other thing that we get here is a little Buffy the Vampire Slayer reference because when Harry reads the tag on one of the babies that is potentially being suffocated to death by Agatha, it says Allison Anne Summers and Buffy's name was Buffy Anne Summers in the TV show. So I'm pretty sure that is Jim winking at the Buffy fans out there. So that's clearly who the baby is.

Brian (08:21)
And as we

know, Buffy is a chosen one, so this baby is Kimori. Mystery solved, thank you guys.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (08:30)
Listen, I've heard crazier theories. So the babies are basically stop breathing because of Agatha's magical lullaby that's putting them to sleep. And Harry has to do something about this. The fight begins when Agatha, like I said, remembers her death, goes into a rage, slams Harry against the wall, and causes the air to start spinning. So he can't use the dust anymore.

That's a nice touch that, okay, the dust is gonna take care of this no problem. And then the wind kicks up and it's like, well, dust isn't gonna work anymore. And Agatha starts to choke the baby with her stump and Harry has to like try to just hold her in place with the bag. And then Michael comes in and saves him from the hatchet. I think it's pretty well set up as like a jump off, here's a fight right at the beginning. And it is very well written. Like I could always follow everything that was going on here. So as far as this set piece is concerned,

I thought it was very cool. We had a set up. We had where it went wrong. We had Michael coming in to save the day. What else could you ask for?

Brian (09:30)
Yeah, it's great. And I think it's really cool that Jim does this with a lot of things, but I think this is something that he executes better with ghosts in Grave Peril than he did with werewolves in Fool Moon, where the wind kicking up and rendering the dust useless. That's a great confluence of there's a special thing in my book series that has this effect, but what combats it? Well, this thing that's very tropally associated with ghosts, the spooky wind. Yeah.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (09:42)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Brian (10:00)
totally beats the ghost dust. Absolutely, makes sense. You don't have to explain it to me. I get it immediately. Ghosts kick up spooky wind.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (10:07)
now the other thing that is sort of revealed here, but not if you're not paying close attention, is Amarokius catches this ghostly blade. do you think if that was just a regular old piece of iron sword or whatever, does that catch the she's trying to hit Harry with?

Brian (10:25)
I mean, definitely not, right? It's so great because as rereaders, we know what Amarokius is. But when you're reading this for the first time, ⁓ this is the Sword Can Stop Ghost stuff. And this is just after Harry reflects on the nail with the flecks of the dark, dried red thing, you know, in the hilt of the blade.

If you're an astute reader, you might already think this sword is a relic, and that's why this guy's a Knight of the Cross.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (11:01)
This is what he says about the sword. I glance at the sword and at the long slender spike of metal set into the cross guard. Perhaps it was only imagination, but I could still see flecks of red still upon it. Probably rust, I reasoned. Sure, rust,

It's just, it's introducing a mystery. Like Harry knows something about this. He's telling you there's something special, but you're not gonna find out about it yet. You've gotta turn the page. You gotta get to the next thing. And it's why these books are just things that get devoured. Like when I read through them for the first time, like they're just such page turners. just have, because Butcher does such a fantastic job of introducing little mysteries and then, and then answering them pretty close. Like he tells us,

really what the deal is with Amorachius later in this same book. We don't have to wait several books for it, but he's introducing it to you slowly. There's something special about this sword. That's all you need to know right now. No more exposition required.

Brian (11:55)
And it's a great trick because when you're doing a fantasy series that's set in our world, that has a lot of disadvantages, puts a lot of constraints on what you're allowed to do, the ways your magic is allowed to work. But one thing that you can do is you can build in these mysteries using the symbolic shorthand that all of your readers are going to pick up on because it's a part of their real life. But some of your readers are going to pick on immediately.

I'm fairly certain that I had an inkling that it was a nail from the crucifixion in the blade. Like at that point, because okay, this guy is a knight. He's got the cross thing on the cape on, you know, it's catching the ghost axe. I think I was already at that point like, and I...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (12:32)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's definitely

possible to speculate by that point, I think.

Brian (12:47)
Right,

but that's great because that's something that I get because, I mean, Adam, did you play Crusader Kings? You know, that's got exactly all the artifacts that they say have this in it and that in it and this guy's finger bone. And, you know, I was raised Catholic and I learned church history. So I knew about the existence of stuff like this about I read the song of Roland when I was in high school. You know, I knew about that stuff. You can see where he's drawing from.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (12:54)
Yeah, plenty of relics in there.

Brian (13:16)
If like me and you're really steeped in that part of real world lore, then it's cool. It's you're so pleased that this author is referencing these niche things that were never going to come up in any piece of media you'll ever engage with. But if you don't know any of that, it's still something that you pick up on and notice. And when he does the reveal later, you're not caught completely flat footed.

It really just strikes this wonderful balance, starting in this book, that I think for the rest of the series is going to hold true, almost with that exception.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (13:52)
Yeah,

Now, Agatha tears off her arm that's stuck in the ghost dust that Harry just puts the whole bag in there and then disappears. And they're like, well, problem solved. And then the babies all stop breathing again. Like she's now doing the spell from the other side, from the Never Never. And so, I guess we're gonna have to go after her. Michael's like, you will not let these babies perish. I know you are a good man. You will not let them perish, even though you're terrified to go into the Never Never. Now at this point,

I don't think it's explained why he's terrified of the never never, but he says, fine, we'll do it. And of course, ⁓ Michael says, you have a good heart, Harry Dresden. God will smile on this choice. And he knew that this was what Dresden was gonna do the whole time, right? He was just poking him to get him there. But we end with this line, quote, then I reached out, caught hold of reality in my fingertips and with an effort of will and a whispered, apaturum.

Brian (14:21)
You

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (14:48)
tore a hole between this world and the next." Now, that's not quite as good as I walk into the storm, my bridge is burning behind me, but it's a pretty good cliffhanger because we are not going to go straight into the next part of that story. Instead, we're about to flash back to what happened that morning. So you have to stop right before they go into the Never Never for the first time and he's just revealed he's going to a new plane of existence. but let's flash back to what happened.

I guess you're wondering how I got here. is infuriating as a reader, but it works so well.

Brian (15:19)
Yeah.

It's a great cliffhanger and I think that we also have to note the great layering that's happening here because we know from Stormfront, theoretically, you can hide from magic in the Never Never. I think we know that from Stormfront and certainly it's the something that will come up later in the series. So it's weird that Agatha Hagglethorn can affect the babies in the hospital from the Never Never. And that's partially because

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (15:50)
Mm-hmm.

Brian (15:53)
as a ghost, has a special relationship with this place, but it's partially because of plot things that are going on that we're going to find out about much later in the book, but Jim is already laying the groundwork for those things. He's making it so that if you're astute at working out how that side of the world works, you've got a little breadcrumb right here to follow.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (16:15)
So that's the end of this second chapter. One thing I wanted to talk about before we move on. I noticed four different instances where Jim is mentioning that Harry, Harry's got his rod, his staff, and this bag of ghost dust. And when he gets out of the car in the previous chapter, he mentions, quote, I had to juggle the staff blasting rod and sack for a moment and then wound up with the staff in this hand and the rod there and the bag in my teeth.

And then he talks about how when he asks the orderly where the nursery is, he's saying it through the leather sack that's clutched in his teeth. And then twice more in this chapter, he mentions he's still clutching the leather sack in his teeth and he had to set the rod and staff aside to light the candle. And then another time he mentions it again, Brian, this guy needs some pockets.

And later on, he does get like an upgrade, but it's not a magical upgrade. He just has a leather thong hiding inside of his no, not that kind listener. I hear you going there, don't laugh. He has a piece of leather cord in his jacket and he hangs his blasting rod from it and it solves a lot of these problems. So he's gonna get more powerful, but he's also just gonna be smarter about how he carries his equipment with him.

Brian (17:31)
I didn't really notice this when we were ⁓ even rereading for the pod and when you brought it up to me, it just made me so happy because Jim is sort of writing progression fantasy. But one thing that I don't always love about that genre is I feel like it's kind of linear. You know, you're Dragon Ball Z, the bad guy shows up, so your power level needs to be higher, period. That's the whole thing.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (17:52)
Hmm.

Brian (17:58)
But Harry doesn't just develop in terms of he becomes a magically stronger, able to do, you know, the ninjitsu equivalent better. He actually gains subtle strategies, tactics, gear, organizational skills that just show him maturing as a person. And it's cool that Jim is able to layer all those things together to show how this character is improving.

rather than just talking about, and then he learned this spell.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (18:28)
Right. And I mean, we know here at this moment, Grave Peril, he can open a way to the Never Never. Presumably he could have also done it in Full Moon. And I think it was you that brought up, you know, what does a later version of Dresden do when the Luguru is charging you in the precinct? He does exactly what it in Zude, and he just does Arpatorum, and he opens the way at the last second, and the Luguru is gone. Like, that is fighting smarter, not harder. And Harry could have done that.

but he's not smart enough or wise enough to figure out that course of action at that moment. Now, there's one other thing, Brian. Grave Peril is supposedly the story where Mirror Mirror Harry, the alternate universe Harry,

had a different choice than our version of Harry and that splits the timelines and creates whatever the mirror mirror verse is. We don't know, we'll figure that out in two years or whenever. But we're gonna have some fun rereading this book and speculating what if this was the choice that made it happen? Now, I don't think this is it, but one of the ways to think about was this the choice is when Harry is about to do something and

pauses and then does something else and then the first thing becomes unavailable to him. In this case, the ghost dust. He had the ghost's attention. He was ready to just toss the dust at the ghost. But he didn't. He stopped and decided to try to talk it down instead because it was a kinder way to put the ghost down. So is it possible that in the alternate version, Harry

just uses the ghost dust and says, Michael, just slay it. I locked it in place, just kill it. And then just goes about his day. Because if that's the case, He doesn't go to the Never Never. He doesn't have to deal with his godmother. She then doesn't have a specific reason to come see him in Chicago and maybe doesn't have the ability to mess with him in Chicago because he hasn't broken his word for like the second or third time or whatever.

and so he doesn't lose Amarachius to her. there's another little big, I think there's a big chain of events that could be a result of this. I know I'm reaching a little bit, but maybe.

Brian (20:46)
No, I think that's actually really cogent and frankly, you could have a lot of knock on effects. I agree with you. I don't think that this is it, but we should pay attention to subtle moments like this. There's a couple of big set pieces, right? That I think everybody who's listening to this show already knows about at towards the end of the book that are good candidates for the point of departure, but it could even be something subtle like this. Let's just take one example of that fork there.

So Leia can no longer mess with slash help Harry as freely as she does in the rest of the book because he's no longer as obligated to her. Well, besides all the other knock-ons that would cause, one interesting thing is maybe Molly never becomes the Winter Why? Well, because when Leia does get her hands on Amarachius in the graveyard, what does she offer to trade it for?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (21:22)
Hmm.

Yeah, exactly.

Brian (21:43)
Michael's firstborn child.

So it might be that obviously Michael doesn't agree to that promise, but it might be that that groundwork is laid in a magical sense because we know becoming the lady.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (21:58)
It gives her the idea

in the first place to like check up on this guy's daughter. Like it brings him to her attention.

Brian (22:06)
Yes, and it when you turn down a bargain from the Fae or when you cross the Fae, that same thing can become a point of issue, right? Every story about the princess in the tower and the wicked fairy, Rumpelstiltskin, Sleeping Beauty, it's you cross a and they put the curse on the child and then, whatever happens in the future happens. I'm not saying that Leia cursed Molly or anything, but certainly

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (22:29)
Hmm.

Brian (22:33)
the process of becoming a receptacle for the lady's power we know is a gradual one, and Molly starts really early coming into Winter's orbit.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (22:44)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, absolutely. So as we said, the next chapter, chapter three, we flash back to that morning before the crazed drive to the hospital to fight Agatha Haggothorn. Now, before we go into the details of what happens in chapter three, I wanna talk about what else is happening in parallel at this point in time in the story, because we find out a lot of stuff later that has been happening right now. So at the very beginning of the book,

Harry is about to meet Lydia for the first time. What else is going on?

Brian (23:16)
Right,

so it's important to lay out, this is actually the beginning of Grave Peril. Harry meeting Lydia. In every other book, when we started the book, it's been the morning of day one. This book does not start in the morning of day one. Chapter three starts in the morning of day one. So what's happening in the morning of day one already? Well, Kravos is actually preparing his ritual execution. In fact,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (23:25)
Right.

Brian (23:43)
We had a discussion about this in our preparation for the show, Adam, and you actually proved to me that Kravos is alive in Chapter 3.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (23:53)
Right, because Harry gets a creepy call right before Lydia shows up. And that is what reveals to you like, this is Kravos. no, I'm sorry, right after Lydia leaves, it's chapter four. during the day, the first day of the book, Kravos is still alive. And during the evening of the first Day the nightmare, Kravos' ghost, is attacking the church where Lydia is hiding.

with Father Fordhill. Therefore, Kravos dies that evening.

Brian (24:26)
Right, and what else is going on that evening? Well, presumably someone, namely Mavre we think, is whipping up the ghosts by using that barbed wire spell to ⁓ torture them effectively. The spell we'll see later on Mickey Malone. Now I say Mavre, maybe, probably, because we know Mavre's got a hand in it, but it could also be Bianca. She is learning. Right.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (24:53)
Yeah, she's teaching Bianca, so

this could be Bianca practicing this magic that Mavra's teaching her, but in both cases, it seems like Mavra's pulling the strings to specifically cause the border between the spirit world and the mortal world to weaken. And the result of that is that Kravos is able to cast his spell that kills himself and creates...

what is essentially a super poltergeist more or less. gonna debate that when we get to it, but the question of whether Mavra's directly working with Kravos, using Kravos, like misleading him, like how does she involve, how does she and Kravos cross paths? That's a question we're gonna leave to a different episode, but that's one you can start thinking about here.

Brian (25:42)
Yeah, and we just want to kind of seed in, we know that Mavre really wants to learn the big secrets of necromancy for some reason. It's been a constant theme every time she shows up. And this is very similar to something we see necromancers doing in Deadbeat. So put that under your hat. We'll talk about it later, but think about it because we're going to have a conversation. Okay, so in chapter three itself,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (25:52)
Mm-hmm.

Brian (26:10)
Harry begins the chapter by ⁓ talking to Susan isn't that nice.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (26:16)
Yes, and actually right before he does that, he describes his office, Brian. And I don't know if you remember this, but he's got pamphlets in his office, some of which he has personally written. And he gives the names of those pamphlets in Stormfront. And in Stormfront, one of them was, don't float so good. And the one he describes here is, why witches don't sink any faster than anyone else, a wizard's perspective.

So he's rewritten that pamphlet I think and made it sound more professional. He's learning.

Brian (26:50)
Yeah, it's very funny because again, who is actually walking into his office with that question? It's just so absurd to think that somebody who's going to see him, who would read the pamphlet, right? Who's not like a member of the Milifis Milificarum, like whatever the, if you've read Good Omens, the witch hunters in that book, somebody who's not like a witch hunter coming in with the thought in mind, well, you know.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (27:00)
Yeah.

Right.

Brian (27:18)
I mean, we can always test if they're a wizard to see if they, you know, are they heavier than a duck? Dresden's worried about being able to prove and explain this to people, but I mean, no one's gonna care.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (27:29)
But the other thing is, when it comes to those pamphlets, whether you're in like a dentist office or a doctor's or a therapist office, they have pamphlets to like, you know, give you some information about some thing, right? But it's not like people walk into his office, see the pamphlet and go, oh, this answers my question, grab it and leave, right? They're gonna talk to Dresden first.

And what's gonna happen is Dresden's gonna be like, hey, I've got a pamphlet that answers your specific question. Take this home with you so that you can read these answers. So who's coming in that made him write this pamphlet? I don't know.

Brian (28:05)
Well,

you know, you just made me think of something. Why do they have those trade mags in the doctor's office? It's partially to like put you at ease that they really know what they're talking about, right? They're up on the literature. So that's a very funny way to read it too. Harry feels like he's supposed to have these pamphlets so you know he's a serious wizard. Yes, exactly, exactly.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (28:20)
Yes.

Yeah, so he tries to make them that sound professional. That's, yeah. So,

and he realized that his other one, why witches don't float so good, sounded like it was written by a seven year old. ⁓ So he decided to add a wizard's perspective. So it sounds more, more erudite. All right. So anyway, then he gets the call from Susan, as you alluded to, and she chastises him for her up the previous night.

Brian (28:32)
Hahaha!

Mm-hmm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (28:51)
And that's where we learn a lot of the exposition about he's been hunting ghosts for a while, the last couple of weeks, which means that Mavre and or Bianca have been stirring up the ghosts for the last couple of weeks. It obviously took time to wear down the barrier that Kravos takes advantage of. It's not just something they can do in one night. So as he gives this exposition and uses it as a backstory and tells Susan what's been happening and the reader, of course,

and she kind of forgives him because he had a good reason to stand her up, before they hang up, Ryan, she says, and then stops, and he says, yes, and she says, I just want to make sure you're okay, or something to that effect, right? It's fairly obvious to me that Jim is trying to heavily imply here that she was about to say, I love you. And we know from the first chapter that Harry loves her, but he's not willing to say it either. So these two kids just can't figure out how to communicate with each other.

Brian (29:48)
it works certainly because they're both intense weirdos who have jobs make them seem odd to regular folks. So they're not sure how to do the normal relational interactions, even what I mean, this is like a year into them dating essentially. But I also think this is a hint that the age that is assigned to Susan by the official timeline

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (30:03)
Yeah.

Brian (30:12)
might be off, not in the sense that Jim actually picked a number and they were wrong about what the number is, but Susan's behaving like a fairly young person in this scene, where saying I love you to the person you've been seeing for over a year is such a big deal. It's not. If you've been dating for over a year and you're not saying I love you, I mean, why? That's Michael's point. So Susan, I wonder if

she's actually not older than Harry, but his age, or even possibly, she could be up to two years younger than him, I think we worked out. And that would kind of make sense to me as to why they're both sort of so bad at this. They really are new at it.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (30:55)
Yeah, if you know,

if you know if there's a specific reference to Susan's age relative to Harry somewhere that we're missing, go ahead and send it to us, macatrnt.fm, because we went looking and we spent a long time trying to figure out, and the best we could come up with is that it's referred to her getting her job at the arcane about four years before Stormfront takes place, give or take, and that would mean that if she's like,

Harry's age, like 25 during Stormfront, then maybe she got her first job there when she was 21 or 22. Maybe she had just graduated college or something to that effect and got the job there. So that would put her age about at Harry's, maybe a year older at most.

Brian (31:35)
That being said, we just wanted to notice this because

Obviously both Harry and Susan are going to be in different ways immature during the events of Grave Peril. And we're just highlighting, it's something that starts on page one. Harry is not saying, love you to this woman. He's dated for over a year. And it's continued in the beginning of the story temporally with Susan being unable to say it over the phone to him. So there's definitely a consistent theme.

that they're very new at this and that highlights some of the reasons that they're actually communicating very ineffectively later in the story.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (32:18)
Yeah, so after he hangs up with Susan,

Harry's about to leave the office, but who shows up? Well, it's Lydia. And that's not even a real name, right? She refuses to give a real name. says, what do I call you? We just refer to her as Lydia for the rest of the book. And I believe she never ever comes back after this book. So she's still out there probably. And she says, again, just a great cliffhanger at the end of this line. If you couldn't stop at the end of the last chapter, you can't stop here either because she says, if I don't have your protection, I'm not sure I'll live through the night.

Brian (32:50)
Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It's a great cliffhanger and it leads us directly into chapter four. first, it's just cool to notice how PI, how case file Grave Peril is. I mean, he literally is getting a case in the office. He's talking about, you know, the word on the street with his associate.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (32:50)
And man, you gotta figure out what

Mm-hmm.

Brian (33:14)
They're doing a simple mission to try to make a few people's lives better at the very top of the book. And it's cool that we got to see something like that in the law after not seeing it since, I don't know, turncoat. Yeah. White Knight.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (33:28)
Yeah, more or less. Even turncoat is hard to, mean, yeah.

White Knight's probably a better case. And the other thing, of course, right after that, a femme fatale shows up and tries to use her feminine wiles to manipulate the hard-nosed PI, which again, is very noir, very detective book. Of course, Harry throws a loop, unlike Sam Spade, who probably would have been like, sure doll, and taken her right to bed. Harry's like, no, I'm not interested in that. I just want.

Brian (33:38)
Mm-hmm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (33:57)
answers to my questions, what are you crazy? So let's get right to that. So Harry reluctantly lets Lydia back in when she pronounces that she's going to die without his help. And Harry says, and don't try lying to me, it won't do you any good. And what this made me think of, Brian, is the hard-nosed, hard-bitten PI that acts on his hunch and he can tell whether you're lying or not, because he's been around the block a couple of times.

But what Harry goes on to explain is not that he's good at telling when people are lying. He is bluffing because he's relying on the reputation of the wizards, of the White Council, that they just know when you're lying. They know things. And so he says, even in that paragraph, he says, this only works on people who are A, clued in enough to know who the wizards are and their reputation, and

believe in that reputation, right? It doesn't work on normies. It doesn't work on the heebie jeebie guy in the law. Instead, it has to work on people that are on the fringes of the paranormal society and Lydia definitely qualifies. So he says, don't lie to me. And she doesn't, at least not as far as we can tell.

Brian (35:06)
that is a lesson from Stormfront. We can see Harry growing. Wow, you know, he's actually demanding a little bit more firmly that he gets the whole story. And that...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (35:11)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, we speculated

what happens in Stormfront if he got the whole story from Monica in Chapter 1. And here, that's exactly what he's doing. I'm not gonna help you until you tell me the whole story.

Brian (35:28)
Now that's one way to read this, but there's another way to look at it. In the next book, he's just gonna believe Elaine because she's a girl he thinks is pretty and he has a soft spot for, and that's not gonna go away. So why with this femme fatale does Harry immediately think, and don't try lying, you liar?

who doesn't tell the truth to people who I can't trust, is it maybe because he is... He's already, and ⁓ my God, this is so well done, I think, already being affected by Cassandra's tears. I think this is my favorite subtle thing the way that this is just constantly layered on.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (36:00)
What? Why Brian is it, is it because she's cursed?

Brian (36:23)
So if you don't get the reference, Cassandra is a Trojan priestess. I think she is actually a daughter of the king Priam, dedicated to the god Apollo, who is the oracular god. There are other oracular gods, he, or there's other oracular god it says, I think, but he is the oracular god of the.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (36:43)
Hang on, that's a $10

word. What does oracular mean?

Brian (36:47)
So the patron of an oracle, like the oracle at Delphi, is an oracular god.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (36:53)
oracular like

Brian (36:55)
And the really fun history thing about this is there's a theory that Apollo is actually not originally a Greek god. Apollo is actually originally a Trojan, the people who were the Trojans, god. And that's why Cassandra is a priestess of Apollo.

And one thing, just to give you guys a picture, if you don't know, an idea of the original Cassandra and what happens to her and how her prophecies are seen in one version of the Trojan War.

when the Trojan horse is brought to the gates. She essentially says, don't bring that in, there are Greeks inside.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (37:33)
Nobody believes her.

Brian (37:35)
So that's, yeah, that's the level

that Cassandra's tears have affected history in the Dresden Files world

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (37:42)
So in the mythology, as far as I know, this is a specific curse on this one priestess named Cassandra, right? It's in the Dresden Files, it's a condition that Dresden is aware of through his education. Like this is a thing that happens to somebody, like a syndrome, like a disease.

Brian (37:48)
Yes.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (38:00)
or like a curse and maybe it goes through bloodlines and maybe, I'm just completely speculating here, there's no support for this, but maybe the people who suffer from Cassandra's tears are like descendants of the Cassandra of myth and it jumps multiple generations or something like that, similar to the Lugaru curse.

Brian (38:16)
You say there's no support for this. There's not no support for this. There's like a scintilla. There's a little kernel of support for this because we do get Lydia's real first name at the end of the book and it's Barbara, which I mean, okay, Barbara, very American name. That's how we think of it now, but it's actually a Greek name and it's specifically a Greek name with the same root as Barbara, Barbarian.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (38:37)
Ha

Brian (38:43)
of which Cassandra was one. She was not Greek, so she was a barbarian.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (38:48)
Okay, that's possible.

Brian (38:51)
I mean,

honestly, given how Jim writes stuff like this, I really don't think that's even particularly wild bit of speculation. But whether it is a curse that has laid on her, a condition that just happens to a certain number of mortals, or she's a descendant of the original, Lydia definitely has this, even though that's one of the things that as we go through the book, people will doubt whether she really has it or not.

I mean, it's just great. The layers of people doubting Lydia are back to conversation they're actually having. Dresden says to Lydia that before I'm going to protect you, I need a few things. And she takes that as demand for sexual favors.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (39:20)
Yes.

Yeah, that does more to sort of describe her history and her character than almost anything else about her. That misunderstanding, that assumption that jumps right out at the beginning. And it implies that she's had to do this a lot. And if you think about her condition, it does make sense that if the Cassandra's Tears actively prevents people from believing you, then in order to get

something done, you cannot use convincing, right? You cannot ever reason someone into following your advice. Everything has to be a transaction, right? If you know that so-and-so is gonna get hit by a car tomorrow, you can't convince them not to go to work. Instead, the only way you could do it is bribe them in some way or give them a reason that's not, you're gonna get hit by a car.

Right? That's kind of what it sounds like to me is she's using this to get around the curse in a way, to make it out into a transaction instead of a convincing argument because the curse will shut those down. That's what it does.

Brian (40:48)
Yes, and we have to, think, before we get to discussing a little bit later the sort of implications of this scene for Lydia,

So we have to kind of view this moment from Lydia's perspective because in Harry's world, this scene is very similar to the Monica Sells scene, except it's a little sillier. It's a little funnier. There's an awkward misunderstanding faux pas, comedy of manners thing where

She thinks she has to throw herself at him and he's literally turning her down. Ha ha, how funny. From Lydia's perspective, this is the moment where the person being pursued by Freddy Krueger runs into the police station and goes, know, Jason Voorhees is right outside. He's coming to kill me. You have to stop him. And the cops like, well,

if you do x y and z for me then maybe I'll think about right exactly exactly

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (41:47)
Maybe I'll protect you from what is probably just a big dog or something like that. Exactly.

So yeah, she's terrified for her life because she knows that this monster's coming for her. She's had three visions about it. She knows there's one person who might be able to help her. And from her perspective, this person has just said, ⁓ maybe I'll help you if you do something for me first, baby, right? That's what she's thinking is going on before Dresden corrects her.

And that is horrifying. That is, yeah, I didn't think of until you mentioned that to sit around and see it from her perspective. That is a horror movie for sure. But we're in Dresden's head.

Brian (42:24)
And

it gets not worse, but it continues to be that part of the horror because as the conversation goes on, okay, it turns out that Dresden's not a bad guy who's gonna take advantage of her fear, but he also doesn't believe Now he's not the slimy cop who's trying to get something out of her. Now he's saying, little lady.

I know there's a big scary man outside. Why don't you sit down and have a nice sandwich and a cup of tea and I'll go open the door and just take a look. And she's like, just bring your gun. Just make sure you have your gun out. And he's like, exactly.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (43:05)
Right, and then he becomes the next victim. Which actually,

you know, Harry becomes the next victim after Mickey Malone.

Brian (43:12)
It... No, literally.

I mean, from her perspective, it is that horror movie. And I just want to kind of feed that to you guys because there's two things that are driving how Lydia behaves throughout this entire book where she seems to be either a rational or kind of a weak character if you don't think of this. One, she actually knows before anyone else really how horrifying things are. No one will believe her when she tells them.

Like she's really the horror movie protagonist who the horror movie protagonist usually can't convince anyone because they're stupid. Lydia, it doesn't matter. She's cursed. She can't ever convince anyone that they're in the horror And all of the consequences of the actions end in people being violently assaulted by the killer. So her book is different from the slower buildup of Dresden's.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (43:46)
Mmm.

Brian (44:05)
She is in the slasher movie from moment one.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (44:09)
the only other visions that she references in terms of like trying to get across to Harry how clearly this is going to happen. She said, I got one vision when the president was, when there was an attempt to assassinate the president. I got two visions when there was that big earthquake and now I got for this nightmare coming to kill me. Now, all of those are horribly violent tragedies and.

To me, that suggests that like, is that all of her visions? Do you have any visions of like, good things gonna happen? Probably not if it's this curse. Yeah. So that brings up an important question here, Brian. She is predicting, and it turns out to be very correct, that the nightmare, as we will learn to call it, is coming for her. And it's going to come for her that night. Why?

Brian (44:43)
Mm-hmm. No, I don't think so. Yeah.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (45:03)
Why is the nightmare who we know is the ghost of Kravos, why is he coming for Lydia?

Brian (45:09)
So the, I think, answer that a lot of people might understand is that Lydia was a member of Kravos' cult as he, you know, had one before his downfall. She was there the night he was taken and brought into police custody. Yes. But I think it's more than that because there are other people who were in

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (45:28)
Right, Michael recognizes her later in the book.

Brian (45:38)
What's the other thing we know about Lydia? She has some talent. So we're going to discuss this in ⁓ more detail in the future, but if the nightmare is a little bit like something that a necromancer would make, maybe the reason he's seeking out Lydia to possess is because the access to her talent will be important

for him because I don't get the sense that Kravos' plan is just to remain a ghost for all eternity.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (46:13)
No, it's probably something like become what Corpse Taker is. And so if he possesses Lydia or just get revenge, right? Obviously revenge is the one that he's doing in this book, revenge first, and Lydia gets him to that goal, but possessing Lydia.

Brian (46:23)
Yeah, revenge first. Yeah.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (46:30)
might also lead him to the ability to cast magic in the physical world the same way that Dresden does when he's possessing Mort. And so if he can do that, maybe he can do a corpse taker type thing and, and become the ability to be in the real world for real again. So that's kind of the most common answer.

So at this point, Harry contemplates how easy it would be to pretend to have Cassandra's tears and to dupe somebody into giving up a valuable magical artifact like the talisman that he ultimately ends up giving to her. And the thing about this, the twisted crazy thing about this line of reasoning is it's 100 % correct.

Right? Everything that Harry uses to convince himself that she's probably a charlatan and he's probably a mark is correct. It has been done before. He specifically says people have pretended to have Cassandra's tears to get people to do what they want. And all of that is a hundred percent correct. And yet we can be fairly certain that those ideas are being brought to the surface and given extra weight in his mind.

the curse itself. It's making him think of the most reasonable reasons to disbelieve her.

Brian (47:52)
Yes, and they're all reasonable, but they also don't hold up super well to a deeper examination because why would this be the thing that she tries to get out of him for having Cassandra's tears? And how many people know about Cassandra's tears in the first place? So it's a little weird that she's walking in with this very specific request and this claim to, I don't know, basically have

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (48:07)
That's the only big hole that I could think of,

Brian (48:23)
the rarest illness in the world or something to a wizard's office where he could presumably check. It's almost like if you think that you might be believing someone and they're saying that they have Cassandra's tears, that's when you should actually not believe them.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (48:39)
⁓

how can you tell? That is a twisted magic. All right, so happens. Harry tells her, listen, come back in a few days. If you still feel this way, maybe we'll figure something out. He's basically affected by the curse, disbelieves her and sends her on her way. But just before she leaves, he has a change of heart and he decides to believe her. And she is so happy, Brian.

Brian (48:41)
Right.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (49:07)
I gotta ask you this, how rare is it for someone to believe her in like the way that, like obviously she's super happy because she did not expect it to go this way.

Brian (49:19)
As an LSAT tutor, I have to talk about the word unique a lot. the way we use the word unique nowadays is generally to mean rare. they're so unique, which means they're special. have ⁓ gifts that are very rare and they have a combination of But literally unique means the only one in the world.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (49:24)
Ha

Yeah, nothing can be very unique.

Brian (49:43)
Right, this is, I think, for Lydia, a unique experience.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (49:48)
So I have to disagree because if she had never been able to convince anyone before, I think she stops trying at some point, right? She has to get beaten down to the point where she would stop trying to convince And that's why I think maybe it's extremely rare, but maybe there are people that are strong enough out there to get past the curse. And maybe it's happened once or twice out of

hundreds of times where she's tried to do this, but that's kind of where I land on.

Brian (50:20)
So I think that it's not implausible that you're completely correct and this is still a unique event because I imagine when people do believe her, usually it's because they already believe that sort of she's acting as a confirmation for something they believe. So the person who, you know, would think, man, maybe the Trojan horse is bad is going to be somebody who already thinks that, you know, like their

they're not really affected by the curse, you know, against Cassandra because they believe it But I wonder if because Lydia is fairly young, she just hasn't been beaten down yet.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (51:04)
All right, the next question is, what allowed Harry to break through the power of the curse and believe her anyway? I think there's two different answers to this.

Brian (51:15)
You wanna... Do

you wanna try to say the first one at the same time? We'll

three, two, one, starboard. ⁓ yeah, well, okay.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (51:24)
He's a sap. Starborn, yeah, obviously.

that was obviously the first thing that came to mind. What's unique and special about Harry? Well, he's a star, well, not unique, we just came over that. There are other Starborn out there. But what is special about Harry? He's a Starborn that lets him resist influence from outsiders. That's kind of really all that we know about Starborn so far. We have a lot of other speculations, but like, is there a reason to imagine that his Starborn nature would apply?

in this particular case, I'm not so certain.

Brian (51:52)
I think so,

I think so because he, the starborn man, I'm not gonna get into the whole thing guys, but I think starborn is sort of a channel for humanity's rebellious and chaotic instincts. The same way the archive is a repository of knowledge, it's our fighting spirit. So starborn resists mental compulsion because you just can't keep him down. And it's particularly effective against the outsiders.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (52:12)
Ha

Brian (52:20)
But Harry's a very stubborn and strong-willed person. A lot of the starborn we meet appear to be very willful, kind of out on their own maverick individuals. I think that that might just be a part of it. That the pressures of society or prophecy or anything else just don't lay on them quite as heavily. And it's a little bit easier for them to just do what they think they should do, regardless of...

whatever pressures are acting.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (52:50)
So yeah, that's definitely possible. And I think it might be a combination of factors. So I'll bring up the other factor that I said is we know he has a complex for damsels in distress, right? He's mentioned it multiple times. We see it happen multiple times, maybe almost certainly due to his being unable to save Elaine and maybe something to do with his mother dying, but he's got this complex where he has to save and protect women. And that gets less

Brian (52:54)
Yeah.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (53:19)
cringey over the course of the books, but at this point he still has it. And he like immediately wanted to help her as soon as she came in. Like he wanted to leave, he just wanted to leave. His day was over and she's like, you gotta help me. He's like, fine. He opens his door anyway because he's just that ⁓ kind of a sap, right? He's gotta help this damsel in distress. Now, the last thing that occurred to me that kind of twines in with that is when he tells her no.

The way it's described that she just deflates, but with an acceptance of like, yeah, this is the expected outcome is something that you wouldn't expect necessarily from a charlatan. It's just another little point of evidence to her telling the truth. Like it just seemed so genuine the way that it was described here.

Brian (53:55)
Mm-hmm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (54:12)
And so that's why to me, think those three things, like maybe his innate resistance to compulsion, his sort of predisposition to really wanting to help women in danger, and his sort of gut instincts that we see send him in the right direction a lot of the time, seeing the genuine despondence in her response. I think those three things combined convince him

Just help her, just help her. Give her this thing, send her to Father Fort Hill. It's the least you can do.

Brian (54:46)
Yeah, and I mean, I think that's definitely true that those things are working in combination because it's not like Harry rejects every societal norm and, reinvents every wheel, reevaluates all values. That's not Harry Dresden, but he just does it a lot more than the average person towards the things that he thinks are important. And for very emotional and basal reasons, protecting women in danger is something that's really important to him. But I love you bringing up her reaction.

She only stared at me, her mouth open, tears formed in her eyes. You believe me, she said. You believe me. And of course, Cassandra's tears, I shrugged uncomfortable, maybe, maybe not. He literally can't, he literally cannot just believe her. But the fact that he's not completely doubting her is for Lydia, and we're gonna talk about this in the question for Bob, an experience that she essentially never has happened.

with the things that are the most important.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (55:48)
You're right that he doesn't necessarily believe her, right? When she says, believe me or not, he's maybe, maybe not. At this point, he's like hedging his bets. He's like, okay, if I don't help and something bad happens, that is going to haunt me. But if I do help her suckered, that's clearly not as bad. So he's doing like a Pascal's wager sort of situation here.

Brian (55:56)
Mm-hmm.

Ha!

That's so right.

You're so correct. That's actually what it is. He's not... Yes.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (56:12)
But that's how he gets around the curse in his mind,

in the reasoning. Like I don't have to believe you to help you because on the two scales here, I would rather be a sucker than not help you.

Brian (56:24)
Right, and Pascal's wager is of course that even if you don't believe in God, you should probably be a good person. Because being a good person doesn't really cost you very much. To be a good person does not actually require that many sacrifices. And if you're wrong and there is a God, well, you the reward punishment schema is pretty black and white, so you really wanna make sure you're on the good side of that ledger And that's exactly what he's doing. He actually doesn't believe her, but he's able to say,

Well, I would feel so bad about this that I should hedge my bets. You're completely correct. That's exactly what's going on. ⁓ That's so clever. my God. No, it's yeah, yeah.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (56:58)
Yeah, and Pascal's Wager has a lot of problems. We're not saying it's the right way of

reasoning, but in this specific case, it does seem to apply and it works well. And of course, after he gives her the talisman, he gives her advice, which turns out to be very good advice. Faith magic works best against ghosts. Head over to Saint Mary of the Angels, Father Fort Hill, Michael's friend sent you, and she says, thank you, Mr. Dresden. She kisses his hand.

Brian (57:08)
Yes.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (57:24)
and she leaves and he then chastises himself for giving away his one decent talisman that would protect him against ghosts. Now imagine, what if he had that talisman at the fight with Agatha Hagglethorn? Does she just not able to smash him back against the wall? Like she hits him and like nothing happens because the talisman protects him or something like that? Is it like a shield against her physical attacks?

Brian (57:46)
Yeah, I mean, that's another, it's the same point of departure effectively, but it's for the same reason. If he doesn't give away the talisman, maybe they never need to go into the never never because he's able to just ghost dust her the second that she turns off.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (57:56)
Hmm.

Yeah, and it definitely would have helped him avoid Kravos getting into his brain, right, in through his dreams. I'm almost certain of that. That if he had his talisman, Kravos would not have been able to eat him the first time. That's my interpretation.

Brian (58:10)
Though

that's really interesting because by the end of the book, is it a bad thing that Kravos took a bite out of him? We'll get to that later.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (58:20)
No, because

At the end of this, the last couple of things we wanna talk about here, Michael shows up at the door right as Harry is about to go call him, and Michael tries to make a joke, like when Harry says, how did you get here? Michael says, when there is a need, he sees to it that I am there.

And Harry's like, wow, really? He's like, no, of course. You've gotten in touch with me every night for the past two weeks. Tonight, I just thought I'd save him the trouble of arranging coincidence. So he's having a joke here, but Jim is setting up the fact that the white god arranges things so that his knights will be in the right place at the right time and have Father Forthill showing up for babysitting duty because his car broke down again.

and then Sonya getting stuck in the airport for like six days straight or something. So those things exist in this world. But ostensibly, Michael says that's not what's happening here. I thought I would use my free will to do something about this. But Brian, I don't think that's the case. I think what Michael thinks is free will is somebody nudging the dice in favor of Michael's goodness.

Brian (59:06)
In the airport. Yeah.

Yes, I think you're completely right, but I also think it is free will. And I think Jim has an intuitive understanding of something that, I mean, I don't know, maybe he's spent hours and hours and hours grappling with it, but he seems to just have it from the very beginning of the series. And I love it so much. It's one of my favorite things about the series. Jim's idea of free will and determinism appears to be not that these are opposing forces and you have to pick one, but that they're both true. And the thing is that,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (59:39)
Sure.

Brian (1:00:03)
the things that arrange destiny are very smart and they can sort of make wagers to make things go the way they want but ultimately you do still have to decide or it won't happen that way and I think this is really a situation where yeah Michael would have started doing this at some point Michael would have just started showing up because he's a good guy he's smart he recognizes patterns but if he didn't recognize it tonight

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:00:13)
Mm-hmm.

Brian (1:00:30)
there would be dead babies in that hospital.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:00:32)
Yeah, because they get there just in time to save them. And the only way that happens is that Michael is here right after Harry got that radio announcement from Bob and immediately leaves for the hospital. And then of course we're back to what happened in chapter one. So this quote unquote coincidence of Michael deciding tonight to preempt Harry's phone call.

saves all those babies lives because otherwise Harry would have had to go pick up Michael or meet him somewhere and then race to the hospital and that would be far too late because another 30-40 seconds later they wouldn't have made it.

Brian (1:01:07)
And really, what does that mean? How did God intervene? Well, Michael's probably thought of it before. He said it's been every night for two weeks, but why does he keep waiting for the call? Well, Charity gets real annoyed at him when he takes the excuse to run out of the house at the first possible moment. So what's probably really different tonight? Charity's in a really good mood because something nice happened today and he feels like he can get an early start. And it's just something small like that that's just letting Michael's nature actually express itself.

without any of the things that would restrain it. That's the way in which the white God influences things, by letting somebody else have a good day so that you can act the way you want.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:01:46)
Yeah,

exactly.

So I did jump ahead here. Before Michael shows up, we have two important things that happen. Harry gets a creepy phone call from someone, we are fairly certain that that is Leonid Kravos, who calls him and says, soon Dresden, we'll see one another again soon. And then the line goes dead. Presumably shortly thereafter, like minutes, maybe 20, 30, 40 minutes from now, he goes back to his cell and commits the ritual suicide when the sun goes down in order to become the nightmare.

So that's happening here. And then we have Bob calling on the radio, giving Harry all the information about Agatha Hagglethorn, and then Michael shows up and then they're off to the races. Now we have finally caught back up to the present because the very next chapter we jump back to the present and they're in the never never having just jumped through from the hospital. So let me ask you this, Brian. We had...

two chapters in the present, then we flashed back to two chapters here, now we're back to the present again, the rest of the book is gonna move chronologically. How do you feel this sort of start, this beginning of the book works? It's hard for me to get into the headspace of when I first read it, and I really wanna ask our new readers that and the reaction, but as a reread, how do you think it works?

Brian (1:03:03)
So think it works really, really well. This is something that can be done simply or in a complicated fashion, flashback scenes. There's a much more elaborate version of this in skin game, right? The reveal that Goodman Grey is the agent that Odin has, you know, that whole thing.

So Jim will do this in the future in a more complicated way, but this is a very simple flashback. We begin in the middle of things, and then we jump back to the beginning at a convenient point at a little cliffhanger, and then jump forward. I actually just read a different fantasy series where there's an entire, like, climax and five chapters between a seemingly innocuous event.

and the flashback to let you know that the hero has altered reality. And that was really jarring and I wasn't honestly sure if I liked it. This slots in seamlessly. It's very clear what's going on. It gets right back to where we started and it is full of interesting tidbits that would have been a little bit more boring to start with than a race in a fight.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:04:10)
It builds in the exposition really well without slowing down the tempo of the book, the pacing of the book, until such a time that you're hooked and you need to keep reading, right? You've read those first two chapters and you're like, they're going into the never never, what does that mean? The ghost has a domain, what's going on? And then you're like, yeah, let's slow down for a little bit and listen to Harry talk with his girlfriend and then this lady's gonna show up and she's...

She's gonna be attacked by something, what's going on there? And throughout those chapters, seeded into that is important plot information for that main thing that's going on in the other thing. We learn about Agatha Hagglethorn and how Harry learned about her. And we learn about the ghost thing that's been happening as he talks to Susan about it. So like layering into that flashback, you not only explain things that happened earlier today, but you're explaining things that happened in the last two weeks

So I think it works really well in this instance, and I'm really excited to hear what our first time readers say about it, because I think they're gonna say that it worked well too. It does so much with so little.

Brian (1:05:13)
Yeah, so that's going to lead us to the end of this chapter. We'll be doing, hopefully, at the minimum, five and six next week. But before that, we've got our question for Bob.

So Bob, are a spirit of intellect, you are a knower of things. We call upon your judgment to answer. Of all the characters in the Dresden files, who has been the most negatively impacted by their own magic? And could you do it like in order of pain and negative consequences, sort of like ascending?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:05:51)
Yeah, well, he didn't make it this week, obviously, but he has a pretty good excuse. He's currently animating the Halloween decorations for the castle. So those are not animatronics if you're driving through Chicago. That's Bob animating them in the same way that he animated the lion statue in Skin Game. So.

Brian (1:06:12)
You know,

as a big fan of Halloween, I'm really into like living gargoyles, so can't fault them for that either.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:06:19)
No, no. So we're gonna try our best as we usually do. Considered Dissent starts us off with the real victim, the one, yes, it's Larry Fowler. He is truly gifted and just wants to share it with the world, but suffers so much due to his incompetent staff, not to mention those pesky guests and their somehow wrecking his equipment.

Brian (1:06:26)
Really wise, truly a wise man.

Mm-hmm.

And you might say,

know, Larry Fowler doesn't have any magic, but he does. He's got the magic of television.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:06:51)
⁓ Sure, okay. So starting us with some sort of runners up, because they don't really apply to the question we are trying to ask. And maybe I didn't ask it perfectly and put the restrictions that I was looking for. But these ones, they're not really negatively impacted by their own magic so much as their own choices. So we're gonna start with somebody

obviously has gotten the short end of the stick, the shortest end, and that's Rasmussen. We know from the soul gaze that he has with Dresden in Death Masks that he has essentially been tortured inside his own brain slash soul for like 150 years, since like 1849. So that is awful. But again,

Brian (1:07:20)
Oof.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:07:42)
It's not really his magic that led him to that. It was his choice to take up the coin. So he doesn't really fit into what we're talking about here, but if he did, he'd be a very strong contender.

and Mr. Coyote was the one that gave us that, was one of the ones that gave us Rasmussen as a name. Now, Brian, the next one here also doesn't quite fit, but I thought it was really cool, so I wanted to include it anyway.

Brian (1:08:03)
It is.

Yeah, hospitable fox brought us the curveball, Lash. I think you can make a reasonable argument for Lash, born for a single purpose that she realizes is increasingly less and less likely, shunned by her only companion for nearly her entire existence, until the very end when she dies for him? At least most other characters know some form of happiness at some point in their existence.

the lash.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:08:34)
Yeah, and Lash is a tough case. It's not really her own magic. It's more like Lashiel's magic that's causing this second copy of, it's difficult to parse, but, I would argue that it's a good answer, but we're gonna discount it because it's not quite what we were looking for.

And the other one that definitely fits, but again, it's more like Lloyd Slate's own choices led to him being tortured by Mab for almost a decade, basically. brings up that one and says, mean, sure, he gets some cool powers, but he also has to deal with the supernaturally intense urges to do horrible things and has to put up with Maeve's constant abuse.

But now let's get to the answers that we think did fit kind of the profile we were looking into. Someone with their own magic that has negative consequences as a result of having that innate magic.

Brian (1:09:27)
leads us Thomas. Doc Derry argues, everyone else gets a ton of balance with their power versus the pain it causes. Thomas simply doesn't.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:09:37)
I just feel like Thomas.

is always described as, he's got a very powerful demon and he's very strong and skilled, but then he's never able to tackle a lot by himself. I know that's not always the case. Sometimes he definitely carries his weight and helps Harry and fight stuff, but a lot of the time it does feel like he gets knocked out pretty easily.

Brian (1:10:00)
Yeah, I mean, we get to see Thomas operating at peak on a couple of occasions, White Knight changes, usually when he's very well fed, which for lots of reasons, exactly. Yeah, for lots of reasons, he's usually not that well fed. ⁓ And, you know, I think that Thomas, Thomas and Harry are very similar in this regard, where they do take a lot of punishment.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:10:10)
Exactly. But that's part of what's torturing him, isn't it?

Mm-hmm.

Brian (1:10:28)
because they try to use their power the right way. But also until the last book, which is really why I think Thomas catapults ahead of Harry and ends up on this list, he has mostly put up with horrible things in order to actually be able to say at the end of the day, I behaved the way that I should have behaved. And he's always been able to say that and his magic hasn't cost him that self-respect.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:10:52)
Mm-hmm.

Brian (1:10:58)
landed him in self-inflicted torment until literally now when that's exactly what it's doing to

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:11:05)
Now the next one on this list, Brian, is not a mortal, but someone who was once a mortal.

Brian (1:11:12)
I made Adam put Mab here. I made him do it because he thought about it, but I said, no, we have to do it. And guys, I know you're gonna tell me when you hear this, Mab, Mab is not a victim of her own power. First of all, her power comes from the Winter Court. And second of all, she's the bad guy. She's the evil guys. Just wait. Just I'm calling my shot.

Mab is not somebody who is capable of inflicting horrible torment on someone because she is purely sadistic. Mab is someone who is capable of inflicting horrible torment on someone because she has been destroyed by the consequences of trying to defend her home reality over and over.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:11:57)
Yeah, and there's somebody else who agreed with you.

Jetty Cadd says, I don't think she qualifies now, but I'd be curious to revisit this once the series is We know she was mortal once. We don't know how she came into the mantle. We have started to see glimpses of her, I'll call it mortal self for lack of a better phrase, especially in peace talks and battleground. I feel this is a combination of the attack itself and also Harry bringing it out of her.

One thing I'm looking forward to as we delve further is how that progresses and how much more we get to learn about Mab, who she was and what, if any, humanity remains inside her. And depending on how that plays out, she very much has the potential to be at the top of this list or at least near it." Unquote. So yeah, Jetty Cat also had exactly the same kind of thought as you. It's it's implied that she was maybe thrust into that position the same way that Molly was thrust into her position as the Winter Lady.

didn't want it, never asked for it, but now has been bearing that burden for her whole life. And obviously, if we've seen what the winter mantle does to Harry in terms of molding him into the winter knight, I have to imagine

mother's mantle has to be doing things to her in the same way. So that I think is a strong contender as well. here, Brian?

Brian (1:13:15)
and just to add

a coda to that, if Mab did not become the monarch of winter by choice, it has already cost her her daughter. So next on the list, fittingly, is another member of the winter court, the winter lady, Molly. Kyler Stern says she came into her power as a teenager.

and her power is to be an uber empath. I remember having a lot of feelings as a teenager. Good, bad, just a lot. Crank that up to 20 and that has to be hard. Kyler Stern also points out the tension that develops between Charity and Molly. Even though it's eventually fixed, that's some awful drama to live through for a year and that's a result of Molly being born with a power that Charity has turned away from. And he goes on to say that she then

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:14:05)
Mm-hmm.

Brian (1:14:08)
accidentally enters the world of magic as a villain and is forced to confront some pretty horrible truths of her actions that were made in total ignorance or at least under a rationalization that 90 % of us, this is me putting words in his mouth, that 90 % of us would have, you know, done absolutely. Yes, I'm a little annoyed at these people, but I'm doing what's good for them. You know, most people would try to do, I think, what Molly did and it makes her,

A horror movie character

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:14:38)
Yeah. that revelation could have broken her, right? When she realizes, ⁓ I accidentally drove my boyfriend insane, like unrecoverably is what Harry seems to imply.

Brian (1:14:43)
Mm-hmm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:14:53)
And then of course, she becomes the Winter Lady without asking for it and all of the negative connotations that are implied in that. But I didn't put her super high on this list because she seems to be a, she still has her loving family and that has a solid foundation that's allowed her to get through all of these toughest times. The times when she was on the outs with Charity, the times when she was the rag lady, and now dealing with the Winter Mantle.

And she's really stepped up to the plate by all accounts, as far as we can tell, and decided that like Mab, she has a job to do, and it's been a long time since it's done properly, and it's important, right? She knows that Winter's goal, Winter's purpose is super important to the rest of humanity. And she's taken it on, a will. So yes, she's had a bad time of it, but

In the end, she kind of winds up in an okay place, at least so far. Obviously, that remains to be seen how that goes. So.

Brian (1:15:54)
Right,

mean Molly should be below Thomas on this list, going by where she seems to be right now. Even though stuff like her time as the Rag Lady, I mean that is, she was a warlock just by the virtue of having the power and not knowing how to use it. The only person who could stop her from dying was Harry. When he dies, she has to go on the lam. It's all very, very tragic.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:16:17)
she blames herself for his suicide and that was part of her power, right? He would not have asked her to do that if she didn't have the power. So that whole self-torturing about Harry's death until he comes back, that's like six months of her torturing herself about that.

Brian (1:16:34)
Right, so it's all really bad and we think in the future it's gonna cost her even more, but it's hard to place her because based on where she is right now, mean, contrast where Thomas is and where Molly is, Molly is certainly less afflicted by her own gifts at this moment. So she's just a hard one to place. Listens to Wind also makes our list because we know from Ebenezer that

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:16:54)
So.

Brian (1:17:01)
He had to literally watch his people, his tribe specifically, and Native Americans more generally, be slaughtered, be effectively genocided, without really intervening to stop it, because the consequences of him using his power in that way would have been disastrous. So his long lifespan and his power let him see and experience all of this loss, and he was unable to do anything about it.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:17:31)
No, it's worse than that. He was able to do anything, do something about it. And he had to restrain himself from interfering in the genocide of his own people and then live with that choice. That does feel like, wow.

Brian (1:17:45)
for

Yeah, when you put it, that is a perfect way to put it. That is a, that's a more awful consequence than merely having to observe it. Absolutely.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:17:59)
So the next one on our list is a little controversial. I don't know if she belongs here, but we put Elaine here. And you know what, hang

Brian (1:18:05)
I do. She belongs here.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:18:08)
All right, I know that you put her higher up and I'll respect that. Sir Elda also agrees with you and Sir Elda says because of her power, she gets chosen by Justin as a child and basically trained to become a weapon, but she lacks the willpower to resist Justin's domination and has to witness herself betraying the boy she loves and her only friend and confidant. After that, she probably lives the years until she runs at the summer court.

in hiding, in fear of the wardens and the White Council, while also having to live with both the betrayal, her betrayal of Harry and his betrayal of her. He left her basically for dead, but mainly because believed she died. Elaine doesn't necessarily know that. So what she might actually have thought of that as a betrayal and not realizing his perspective. Then,

When she is in debt to the summer, she has to actively work against her former love Harry and is forced to betray him again. Later in White Night, she gets preyed upon by Madrigal and is almost forced to kill herself. So to conclude, she may not experience constant torture or the horror of her own existence, but due to her power, she is forced to betray her loved ones multiple times and has to live a life constantly on the run." End quote.

Brian (1:19:21)
Look guys, I'm gonna say this now, you're gonna find out that I'm right later. Harry is Batman. Elaine is Catwoman. And they're not gonna have, they're not gonna get back together, they already did the romance arc, that's over. But Bruce Wayne, yes, yes, he's an orphan. Yes, yes, yes. Has a butler, billions of dollars, all the gear. Selena Kyle has to become a thief so she doesn't have to prostitute herself.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:19:29)
okay.

Brian (1:19:48)
Right? That's the Harry-Elaine difference. They have the same functional, in my opinion, they have the same functional role in the series. Their power gives them the same burden, makes them a target in the same ways. But while Harry is able to do the right thing, just barely able to survive without compromising his ideals, Elaine's choices are either compromise your ideals or die.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:19:49)
Right.

All right, so the next one on their list, and I think one of the real contenders for this is Ivy. And we had quite a few people say Ivy as well. Happy Goth Pirate starts us off by saying, no childhood at all, and not even a name, only a moniker.

Brian (1:20:17)
Gold star.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:20:31)
At least Molly got to enjoy 15 years of a loving family.

Brian (1:20:35)
Right, and cryptid Grimnoir points out, especially since Ivy herself never had a choice. Everyone else at least had a choice at some point. We can quibble about that, but that's essentially true. Ivy was bound to this precise path by birth.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:20:52)
Gizmo Chile brings us the final ultimate torture. Worse than that, every archive has an unbroken link to the archives that came before, their memories, et cetera. Ivy knows intimately why and how her mom resented her and what choices.

that she made that led to Ivy becoming the archive. That is, yeah, she knows and remembers the pain that her mother was in and the resentment that she had for her child. That has got to sting, Brian, but there is one upside to Ivy's existence. And that's thousands of years of dealing with this, right?

Brian (1:21:14)
Ugh.

Yes, Ivy is the childlike Buddha, right? She is gifted with all of the wisdom necessary to make the right choices and grow in the right way. She just has to bear the pain of the world as she does it. So her existence is truly incomprehensibly hard, but she also has incomprehensible mental resources to navigate it.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:22:01)
Yes, fortitude built up over millennia at this point. So I think she's a strong contender, but because she has that sort of reservoir of wisdom, knowledge, fortitude to build off of, I put her a little bit lower on the list than these other two. The next one is one that you were gung-ho about, and Rob X4 also agrees with you.

Brian (1:22:26)
Yeah, it's Deirdre. We don't know her full past, says Rabax IV, but getting the coin at such a young age alongside her parents, there probably wasn't much she could do to avoid becoming what she was by the time we met her. In the end, she is now in a personal, eternal punishment when she was likely one of the more innocent to start Denarians. And I won't say more innocent to start,

most innocent possible. She essentially got the coin as a baby and we're not going to get into it. We're not going to get into it. But if you view Deirdre's life story not as one of happily joining the supervillain family but of essentially being coerced by a

older and more powerful entity that has intimate access to all her thoughts and memories into becoming exactly what they wanted her to be. And then you layer that on top of the first few things we see Deirdre doing in the books. It is truly a horror story, the kind of which usually leads redditors to get out the pitchforks and machetes.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:23:44)
Here's the thing. And this is why I put her one rung below the highest that we're getting to here. And it's because I agree with you from the outside, looking at her life, it is a horrific tragedy the way that she has been twisted into the thing that she is in the books. But from all that we've seen, she seems to be at

She's been groomed and indoctrinated so thoroughly that she doesn't see it as a negative consequence. She thinks she's on the right side of history in the same way that Enduriel has convinced Nicodemus that he's on the right side of history. So from her own perspective, she's not suffering the way that Ivy is in dealing with these horrible memories. She's not suffering the way that Elaine or Molly are suffering with their choices and with what they're forced to do.

She's doing these things because she thinks they're right. And that means that she doesn't see a lot of what happens as negative consequences. They're just part of the fight that she's fighting the good fight in.

Brian (1:24:54)
Yeah, I mean, she's literally a child soldier, right? So the trauma that she could be experiencing might not be essentially able to manifest because she never gets perspective on the war. So

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:24:57)
Mm-hmm.

Exactly. If she

Brian (1:25:12)
because what do we know about the coins? They're not gonna stay in Hades. So now she is without the fallen angel in her own personal hell. But there's one person who I put even higher than Deirdre. And I really want you guys to think about how awful this is. Because for me, it really is just...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:25:17)
Yeah.

Brian (1:25:38)
I can't even comprehend how crazy this would make me feel. It's Lydia. When this book ends, we stop paying attention to Lydia. Lydia, it turns out, was right all along and basically everything she said was a dire warning that people better heed or things will happen horribly and she's almost useless to human sacrifice and she sort of seems to be

you know, consistently kind of tortured by a bunch of vampires, but she gets out of it and, you know, the book moves on and, ooh, she goes into the church's witness protection program and for the rest of her life, she will still have visions like this and no one will ever...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:26:25)
Yeah, if you're a person with any amount of empathy, you would wanna stop those bad things from happening, and knowing that they're coming and being unable to do anything about them does seem like a specific circle of hell that you would have to be put into at some point. ⁓ Now, I 100 % agree with you that Lydia probably belongs at the top of this list, but there's somebody else, Brian, that nobody chose, and it's really surprising to me, because this person is one that everybody

in the community likes to joke that Jim loves to torture. And it's Harry Dresden. Think of all of the horrifying things that Harry has had to deal with through these books. It's all as a result of him having power and choosing to use it to do the right thing. He has that spate where he goes into a deep depression after Susan, of course the whole thing with Justin before that, and then obviously losing Murphy.

and losing Susan later at Chichen Itza. it's just torture after torture. And he just keeps dealing with it over and over and over again. And his brother's captured by the Negloshi and then his brother's locked on the island and he can't do anything to save him. Like he's dealt with more, I think, by like the numbers, like negative consequences that probably anybody else on this list. And a lot of them were pretty extreme.

Brian (1:27:50)
Yeah, I mean, I was surprised that Harry wasn't just the universal number one choice myself. And I do think that honestly, he is probably below Thomas where he is right now, At the same time, Harry's lowest points are after Elaine, well, after his dad.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:28:11)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Brian (1:28:13)
after

Elaine, after Susan, take your pick which time, and after Murphy. And those points are really, really, really bad. But the reason why they're so bad is because Harry has been truly loved by all of those people. And that overwhelming love that Harry has experienced in his life from ⁓ all kinds of friends and family is the thing that I think as readers makes us feel like

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:28:17)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Brian (1:28:42)
Yeah man, it's real hard for you, but you know exactly why it's worth it. You have the motivation and the encouragement to deal with it.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:28:49)
Yes.

And of course, having Michael as a best friend doesn't hurt. So are already going pretty long here, guys. Sorry, this one was longer. In retrospect, we should not have bitten off more than we could chew. We're gonna have to do two chapters for a while in Grave Peril. I don't think we're gonna be able to jump back to three or four for a while like we did in Fool Moon. There's just so much good stuff to talk about in these. But that having been said.

Brian (1:28:55)
Doesn't hurt. No. No.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:29:17)
Next week's question for Bob. what is required for a being to have a domain? We see Agatha's, we see Agatha Hagglethorn's domain in the next set of chapters. We have a fight in there and then it burns to the ground, but we know there are other domains. We've been to some of them. Arctis Taur is clearly a domain. We've been to the Goblin King's domain.

Does Theravax have a domain? Probably. We don't really know too much about it, but speculate. Who else has a domain? Who else that we have seen and who else that we haven't seen? And what is required to have one?

Brian (1:29:56)
And we want you guys to take this as an opportunity to be a little creative, because could you argue that everything in fairy isn't a domain, it's something more complicated than that? Sure. But if you want to argue all of fairy is the domain of the mothers, we'll take that. this is one where we want you to kind of be a little creative with it, because we don't know the taxonomy of the never never. So we're using this word to mean more than it might in Jim's head.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:30:22)
All right. And with that, I think we're done. It's been a long one, Brian,

Brian (1:30:25)
Huh.

Adam, think we just are gonna have to just start skipping just parts of Great Peril and hoping nobody notices.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:30:33)
I'm sure it'll all turn out fine in the end. We'll see you next week.