Recorded Neutral Territory - A Dresden Files Podcast

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (00:00)
he starts coming into his office and he has some pamphlets laid out that he describes as having written some of them himself. And I love the titles that Jim comes up with for these. I feel like he describes them maybe two or three times in the whole series. But the titles in this one are Real Witches Don't Float So Good and

Magic in the 21st century, those absolutely sound like titles, like little infomercial things.

Baloreilly (00:22)
And they crack me up so much because Harry is clearly not that great at sort of addressing people's pertinent questions about magic. know, his first thing is like, you know that scene in Monty Python, not true to life. Like, yeah, that's definitely, definitely what I was thinking of. Thanks for stating that, wizard.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (00:36)
Yeah ⁓

one, welcome all, welcome to Recorded Neutral Territory, a chapter by chapter Dresden Files reread podcast.

Today we're examining chapters 22, 23, and 24 of Stormfront. It's our penultimate episode, but remember, the spoilers go all the way through the current book, Battleground.

I am Adam Ruzzo and with me as always is a confused EMT. It's Brian O'Reilly. Welcome, Brian.

Baloreilly (01:14)
What even happened here? How is there a scorpion in Chicago?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (01:19)
Don't ask too many questions.

Where we last left Harry was at the middle of chapter 21. He had decided not to call in the cavalry and instead to take care of this himself.

So he tries to call Murphy, instead he gets Carmichael on a bad connection. Carmichael tells him Murphy is over at Harry's office serving a warrant, searching the place, and he panics because he realizes, ⁓ no, that talisman could be dangerous. Hey, be careful. I don't think he expects it to jump out and attack her necessarily.

but he definitely twinges to the fact, maybe it's his instincts, a little bit of precognition coming in, going, this is a dangerous situation. He calls her, tries to warn her, and it's too late. She gets attacked while he's on the phone with her, and then he jumps in the car, throws all the rest of Murphy's money at him, and says, get me to this address yesterday. And that brings us to chapter 22. Now this is sometime in the afternoon.

of Sunday, because by the time we get to chapter 24, he describes how dusk was arriving over the city. So this is probably somewhere around 3, 3.30, 4 o'clock, somewhere in that range.

Baloreilly (02:23)
Yeah, it's pretty funny,

even says that the building was locked because it was a Sunday, because it's only been four days since the investigation started. immediately dashes up the stairs, saying it takes him less than a minute to get there. And that's when we get to his floor, which no longer seems welcoming and ⁓ like his house.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (02:46)
No, and it's written a little bit like a horror scene here. And one of the things I noticed while rereading it is all of the descriptions, the physical descriptions of what's going on in those rooms. The halls were quiet, empty, dim. I could hear my ceiling fan squeaking, the wheezing of my own breath,

My hands were shaking. I heard a labored breath, a dry scuttling sound. I could smell gunpowder on the air. He's layering on all of these sensatory feelings in descriptions here.

Baloreilly (03:17)
Yeah, I really like the mention of smelling the gunpowder because on the one hand, that's so distinct. You know, if you've ever set off a firework or something, the smell of burnt gunpowder really is unique and it's so clearly telling us Murphy, who is not answering his calls, has been shooting at something.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (03:20)
Hmm.

I think it's mentioned that he heard a gunshot when he's on the phone when he hears her open the desk drawer.

Yes. It says, quote, the receiver clattered to the floor. I heard gunshots, shockingly loud, whining ricochets, and then a scream, unquote. So that was in the previous chapter when he was on the phone with Murphy.

She's just expecting to find something in the desk that like...

implicates Harry or something. He's hiding something in here that he shouldn't have. Maybe there's a firearm he shouldn't have. Instead, it's a scorpion jumping at her and she has the reflexes and wherewithal to just grab her gun and start shooting.

Baloreilly (04:11)
Yeah, and I think that means that the scorpion doesn't immediately get her with the stinger. We later find out that she has been poisoned, the scorpion has stung her. It seems like she opens the desk drawer, the thing jumps out. She probably backs up, pulls out her gun, tries to shoot it. Now, that's a little bit of an extreme reaction to, you know, insect jumping out of the drawer, but she probably has the sense Dresden just

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (04:34)
Yeah.

Baloreilly (04:38)
told her don't open that it's dangerous, this is some kind of magical booby trap. Now, I think it's clear that in this chapter, she doesn't make the connection that it's a magical booby trap set by someone else, but she does seem to recognize immediately that this isn't just random scary bug that Harry's keeping in his desk. It's something a little bit more significant than that.

And that's why she immediately starts blasting away at it in this office building.

So as Harry,

scouts out the scene, he sees Murphy, he sees her feet, before he sees anything else,

Comes to check on her, and immediately after reviving Murphy, she handcuffs herself to him. Now, I think this is obviously pretty stupid. First of all, if Harry is some kind dangerous criminal, handcuffing yourself to him when you're too groggy and messed up to him on in any meaningful sense isn't gonna do

much. moreover, Murphy has now put herself in a situation where the only way she can effectively stop Harry from going anywhere is to wrestle him down. She doesn't handcuff Harry to the desk. She handcuffs Harry to her. I think this speaks to, a larger character flaw that both Harry and Murphy share at this point in the series.

they're both prone to two different things that psychologists would describe as sort of psychological mistakes or as neurotic defenses, which doesn't mean that you're neurotic. Everyone, when they're faced with a high stress situation, has to deal with that stress in some One thing that Murphy very clearly does is she splits.

splitting is when you view people as sort of good or bad in an intrinsic way and you treat them and all of the actions that flow from them as coming from this fundamental place of goodness or badness. Harry and Murphy both split people, especially early in the series, and don't approach them with a lot of nuance. You can just view some of the ways that Harry deals with Marcon early on as an extension of this.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (06:57)
and we talked about how

he does it with Hendrix in one of the previous episodes.

Baloreilly (07:01)
That's a great example of it. Yeah, exactly. So Murphy has moved Harry from the civilian friend ally column to the suspicious character column, which means that even though at this point he's tried to warn her and is standing over her trying to help her, he's still one of the bad guys and she has to treat him that way. Murphy can't view his actions in a nuanced way because as soon as you move into the suspect

column on Murphy's list, she treats you as if your actions are essentially predicated on thwarting her. In addition, the reason why both of them do this, I think often comes down to a phenomenon known as fundamental attribution error.

Fundamental attribution error is the thing that almost everybody does a lot. When somebody cuts you off in traffic, the natural reaction is, what a jerk. This person's a bad driver and what they do is they don't respect other people on the road. And in reality, maybe that person is running late for a job interview that is the only way

that their kids are gonna be able to stay in the house they grew up in for the rest of the year. maybe they're late for the biggest exam of their life and they're cutting you off because they have to get there as close to on time as they can possibly manage. Most people, when they see people take an action, treat that action as emblematic of their character

So Harry's been real suspicious, he's been real cagey. We know it's because he's trying to protect people, but Murphy has filed him under suspect. So when Harry says there's something dangerous in my office, it's because he's a bad guy who put it here. He's booby-trapped it. When Harry comes to check on her, it's not because he's trying to help his friend.

It's because he's returning to the scene of the crime to do whatever nefarious thing.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (09:00)
Yeah, and I think what you're saying has a lot of merit here, but I also think from Murphy's perspective, without the information that Harry has, I think it's reasonable for her to assume that this was a booby trap that Harry put here and it's irresponsible because anybody could come through your desk and they would get attacked by this thing and now I'm like in trouble and like that's a bad thing to do. She has no way of knowing that doesn't belong to him. Why would it be there if it doesn't belong to him, right? So.

to me, it seems her conclusions are semi-reasonable, and she's also clearly a little delirious in this moment, because if you were just attacked by a scorpion and you can feel yourself losing consciousness, you don't make your priority handcuffing yourself to the other guy, she appears to sort of wake up to reality at some point later when she says, Harry,

Harry, can't see, what's going on? It seems like she comes out of the delirium at that moment, but then she slips back into it. So the fact that she seems to have no real short-term memory of like, there's a dangerous insect crawling around in here, we need to do something about this, she has no clear understanding that that's what's happening. So I can easily file that all away into there. The other thing to add to what you were saying, there's a quote when

they're at Linda's apartment and she decides to confront him. She calls Carmichael in and says, mark this and log it. And then it says, Carmichael looked down at the bag and saw my card. His beady eyes widened. He looked up at me and I saw the shift in gears in his head, reclassifying me from annoying ally to suspect, unquote. And that's exactly what you're talking about.

He's shifting Harry over to the suspect camp. I'm gonna treat you now as if you're in that camp. And you're gonna need a lot of evidence to get yourself back into the annoying ally camp.

Baloreilly (10:55)
Right, and I think what you're saying about Murphy's reasoning is exactly what I'm getting at. If she approached this from, okay, Harry's a genuinely good guy, I've worked with him before, we've done some cases together, maybe he's messed up in something here, but I know he's not trying to kill anybody. You would say, ⁓ maybe somebody's after him. Maybe this was put here to get Harry. But because she's classified him as suspect,

and she's erased all of this previous information as being relevant to his she's not considering those outcomes. And that's why I'm saying this is a character flaw that both Harry and Murphy will get to Harry doing it, especially in the next book.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (11:38)
Right, and the other thing to understand about the fundamental attribution error, is it's not exclusively based on behavior either. The one thing that sort of crystallized it for me was an example, say you're sitting on a park bench and you watch somebody walk by and they trip and fall. The fundamental attribution error is to assign clumsy as the adjective to describe that person. Whereas if you're the one walking,

and you trip over a rock that's blending in with the ground, you're gonna cut yourself a ton of slack. man, that rock is like the same color as the grass. There's no way I could have seen it. Or I was distracted Any number of excuses you're going to give to yourself, you're gonna cut yourself slack. But if you see somebody else's behavior, you instead assign them that adjective, clumsy.

so that's another layer here that is not 100 % relevant to this, but it did help me understand what the fundamental attribution error was.

Baloreilly (12:36)
Yeah, and that's really important because fundamentally the error is about a lack of empathy. And I think that's something that a lot of the characters in the series, Harry included, grow in as time goes on. Empathy literally meaning the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes and understand why they're making the decisions they are. Both Harry and Murphy get better at this. And right now, both of them are...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (12:43)
Yes.

Baloreilly (13:02)
so locked into their role as detectives that especially when they put somebody in the potential suspect column, they stop empathizing with them and they start thinking about them as being fundamentally Machiavellian.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (13:18)
Yeah, and so does make sense to me that she's suspicious of him, she's in his room, and then what appears to be a booby trap springs when she's going into the desk, and as she's getting injected with this poison, what's going through her head is, man, he set me up to do this, he told me not to go into the desk, and he knew that would make me go into the desk, he wanted this to happen. And I think, giving Murphy credit, if she had had time to think clearly,

for the next 10 minutes or so, then maybe she would have poked holes in that theory and that initial assessment. But because she immediately gets injected with this venom and then becomes semi-conscious for a while, that's still the same cognizant thought that's going around in her mind. And so it makes sense that when he shows up, she says, quote, can't believe it, you bastard, you set me up, unquote. So she's still in the same head space she was in.

Baloreilly (13:52)
Peace out.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (14:13)
20 minutes ago or whatever it was because she's being affected mentally by this venom.

Baloreilly (14:18)
And we're spending so much time discussing this because this is going to be extremely relevant in about a month when we start discussing Harry and Murphy's relationship in full moon, which I think a lot of people misunderstand. So you pulled up a great note here for what happens next, which is as Murphy puts the cuffs on, they go clicker clack. And I love that you pointed this out.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (14:26)
Exactly.

So that click or clack could just be onomatopoeia, but when you put it together with the fact that in the scene, Morgan's sword goes snicker-snack, that suggests that those are purposefully set up, snicker-snack being the sound that the Vorpal sword makes in the poem Lewis Carroll called Jabberwock.

I'm not the one who figured this out. I found it on a TV reference list for the Dresden Files, but it did make me appreciate that a little bit more. So the Vorpahl blade goes snicker Morgan's blade goes snicker snack, and Murphy's handcuffs go clicker clack. That is very cool.

Baloreilly (15:18)
And

I love that Jim's depth of reference isn't just the ubiquitous pop culture references that are, kind of a little bit, you know, funny, right? And it's not just ancient mythology. It's also, classic fairy tales and classic detective stories. He really has such a breadth of knowledge when it comes to the things he pulls ideas to the Dresden Files from.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (15:27)
Yeah, Star Wars.

Mm-hmm.

Baloreilly (15:45)
And even in little moments like that, it can give you a little bit of a chuckle.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (15:49)
Yep, absolutely. So after he to Murphy, and she says, you're under arrest, you son of a bitch. He goes, ⁓ Murphy, what have you done? And he tries to grab his weapons because at this moment, the scorpion rushes out from under the desk at him. It stretches credulity for me that he could miss.

a terrier-sized scorpion hiding under the desk when he went around behind the desk to get to Murphy in the first place? Whatever. It is what it is. So the terrier-sized scorpion comes and jumps out at him, and he has put down his weapons, and he makes a mention later, that it was, quote, too fast, too damn smart. It had ambushed me, waiting until I had set my weapons aside to come after me, unquote.

That is demonstrated here. So what is controlling this scorpion? If it was just a simple golem given the command, kill anything that is near you, it would not have set an ambush. That's at least my reading.

Baloreilly (16:53)
So it's a dead scorpion, which is the reason why I think that the model for its behavior are the zombies in Deadbeat. It's something that's been reanimated and we know that when, you know, Gravain six zombies on someone or when the Corpse Taker sends the ghosts out after people, they're operating sort of like a programmed, software.

where they have certain things they're capable of doing and they have an objective and they're just trying different things to get to that objective. They're not reasoning in the sense of trying to figure out, huh, what's like the best strategy I could use to achieve my goals? But they are capable of, the same sort of animal instinct that allows, prey to evade a predator or a predator to hunt prey. So,

I think that we should look at this as a zombie. And I think that the energy absorption thing it's doing that makes it get bigger and bigger and bigger over time is effectively some kind of spell that's taking the place of a drummer rather than the zombies reanimation being contingent on a continual input from the summoner. Victor has somehow set a trigger.

for this thing to keep going by drawing an ambient energy.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (18:17)
Yeah, other examples we've had of something like this is the idea of a hunter spirit possessing the husk of the scorpion. I do kind of feel like, okay, it's a zombie scorpion, it's operating under the scorpion instincts it had when it was alive is a good explanation of what's happening here.

Baloreilly (18:37)
Yeah, and those instincts being augmented by the commands given to it by its master. I think if it was a spirit, I perhaps expect it to be even a little because all it needs to do is sting Dresden once, and presumably that's the end of the fight. So why jump out at him? Why not walk around behind his back leg and poke So I don't think it's brilliant,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (18:42)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Baloreilly (19:02)
Spirits of rage as we'll see in the next book are not always the most well reasoning, creations either So it definitely could be a spirit from the never never either way I think that the size increase is the energy is being absorbed it's using ectoplasm to grow and It's sort of being powered off of this continual draw energy from the air, that has been set up and

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (19:28)
See, I've

always been of the opinion that it had to be getting fed energy from something. Maybe it had energy fed into the talisman earlier, and when Harry got it, it was a charged battery, and it was just slowly draining as it got bigger and bigger. And maybe if Harry was fighting it for another five minutes, it would have just fallen apart because it would have run out of juice. But the other option I had in my mind is maybe Victor's feeding it power from a distance.

But we don't necessarily see evidence of that in the later scene. So I think it might be more like it was charged like a battery during a previous ritual and it now had potential energy that it could then use.

Anyway, it's not something we can really know for sure, I don't think,

The next thing that I wanna talk about is the actual elevator scene. So Harry gets out of there, he gets in the elevator, the elevator door is closed just in time, a very classic trope of stories like this that take place in the modern day, and he's going down and then the elevator turns off because he can't control his power, and the scorpion, quote, the size of some French cars, unquote, tries to tear its way into the elevator and rip him apart. That is a great description and

It's better than just saying the size of a refrigerator. Like, don't know. It just tickles me every time I read it.

Baloreilly (20:45)
Yeah, it's got that little joke at the expense of, tiny European automobiles, which is very funny since Harry drives a Volkswagen Beetle. But the other interesting thing is that Harry drawing in a ton of power in this scene, but he says that he can't kill the scorpion with fire magic because he's left his blasting rod and his staff behind.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (20:53)
Yeah!

Baloreilly (21:11)
and he can't focus the energy tightly enough to laser strike the scorpion or to just directly blow a hole through the top and know, frag the scorpion, he would destroy the entire roof of the elevator or something.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (21:26)
and cook

them in the elevator shaft, essentially, yeah.

Baloreilly (21:28)
Right, and

Here, Harry is not confident that without his tools, he can even hit this thing without basically killing him and Murphy in the process.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (21:39)
Yeah, so do you get the impression, say he's in like an open field and the scorpion's in front of so he could direct all the fire away from him. Could he cast a fuego without a tool and fry it without hurting himself? I think the big problem here is the scorpion is directly above him and I think he specifically says like the elevator will melt and molten metal will rain down on him and Murphy and there's like, can't stop that. We know he has a problem with heat.

with his current shield bracelet, which we will learn about in Death Masks. So, I think in an open field, if he could just aim it correctly, I think he could definitely take care of this. The problem is he's in an enclosed space in a building, and even if he tried to attack it in his office and Murphy wasn't in the line of fire, he might catch the entire room on fire immediately and still put himself in danger.

Baloreilly (22:29)
Right, the problem is that When you're in an enclosed space, the blowback is very dangerous.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (22:34)
And what's more is this book has a very conspicuous absence of force magic. I don't know if that's something that Jim decided to give him later or it's something that he decided that Harry shouldn't have in the first book, but a later version of Harry, even if he wasn't confident using his fire magic, would have just like blasted this thing away from them with force

Baloreilly (22:56)
Yeah, and then the first time we see force magic is actually in the next book, but it's not a blast. So Harry takes a long time to be able to use telekinetic force as a directed weapon, but later in the series he's able to sculpt it in really unique and interesting ways. actually describes that telekinetic force is one of the more advanced tools in the wizard toolbox.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (23:14)
Yes,

Baloreilly (23:24)
That's a really good clue as to why he's 25. He's not really capable of pulling that out.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (23:31)
All right, so

that's the rest of this chapter, as Harry does deal with the scorpion by using air instead of fire to blast the elevator up into the ceiling, and I love the line that he uses to describe what happens, hammered into the roof of the shaft like the bell on a strong man's sledgehammer game at the amusement park. You could...

absolutely see the elevator shooting up the shaft and just slamming into the roof in that specific way. And then another great evocative line, because when he's hanging up there, stuck to the roof by the ectoplasm is the way that my brain thinks of it, it then says, quote, but I just couldn't shake the nagging impression that I was forgetting something, unquote. And of course, what he's forgetting is there's a groan in the elevator and it starts falling down. That evoked to me,

a wild E. Coyote scene where he like runs off the cliff but doesn't realize that he's gonna fall and once he realizes gravity should be pulling him, that's the moment that he falls down. for whatever reason, these lines are just so evocative of amazing scenes that my brain can just build perfectly.

Baloreilly (24:37)
And I wouldn't be surprised if the writer who will eventually refer to Dresden as Wile E. Coyote, super genius, was thinking of exactly that in this moment. one thing I also really like about this is Dresden's worried that when they crash into the ceiling, it's going to kill them from the force of the elevator smashing up so hard. But you can think of the scorpion acting as like the crumple zone in a car.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (24:44)
Super genius. Yes.

Baloreilly (25:05)
because it's hard exoskeleton, soft gooey interior, hard exoskeleton, so it really does a nice job breaking it for them. Now,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (25:11)
yeah.

Baloreilly (25:13)
funny thing about this is, in real life, basically every elevator you will ever ride in has an incredibly designed braking system that prevents anything like this from being that dangerous. The amount of mangling you would have to do to this elevator shaft to keep those brakes from functioning is incredible. I'm not even.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (25:37)
And they're fail

safe too, like even though Harry is there and he disrupts technology, these things are designed so that if power fails, the brakes kick in. that's the safe part of fail safe.

Baloreilly (25:47)
Right, so this is a little bit of, creative license, we're treating this as a death-defying feat when he uses the shield to slow the descent, but you can feel free, if you're a fan of the Otis Elevator Company, to just believe that the brakes work instead. After they land, Harry and Murphy come stumbling out of the elevator to the greeting of a pair of very confused EMTs.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (25:50)
Mm-hmm.

Sure.

Baloreilly (26:13)
Harry is absolutely losing it with his victory. He's yelling, take that Victor Shadow Man, ha, ha, give me your best shot, you murderous bastard. I'm gonna take my staff and shove it down your throat. And he's laughing like a crazy person as the EMTs.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (26:29)
Yeah, high on

adrenaline, because he survived two or three things that he was probably sure would kill him, but he managed to find his way out. That would make anybody that elated.

Baloreilly (26:39)
And then elation abruptly takes a chill pill. As Harry realizes, there's lightning dancing directly overhead and the storm and his death has come to Chicago.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (26:55)
Yeah, that's a very ominous line to end the chapter on, the storm had arrived.

Baloreilly (27:01)
And we should just mention, the storm is in Chicago now, but Jim is pretty consistent about why Harry lives through this moment. For Victor to draw power from the storm, the storm has to be where Victor is too. So during the Toad Demon attack, it seems like the demon attacks when the storm is over Harry's apartment, but presumably it's just a really big storm that is actually over both places.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (27:28)
Yeah, he wakes up to the sound of thunder and then Susan arrives 20ish minutes later and you could easily argue that the storm had been going for the last 10, 15, 20 minutes before that. So that still gives the storm plenty of time to have reached Victor by the time the Toad Demon arrives. So I agree, it's very consistent there.

Baloreilly (27:47)
So we start chapter 23 with Harry coming to grips with the fact that he's gotta get a move on or he's a dead And he feels really guilty about what he does next. Because Murphy is poisoned and dying right next to him.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (28:04)
And he says, it was my fault that Murphy was there. It had been my decision to hold information away from her that had compelled her to take direct action to search my office, unquote. So he's blaming himself again for another woman that's almost dying in this case. And he also now has to leave her. He says, quote, I didn't want to walk away from her. I didn't want to turn my back on her again and leave her behind me alone.

That is weighing on him. And it's very important to understand all of the things that are weighing on for the next paragraph where he says, most of all, I hated the one responsible for all of it, Victor Sells. He hates Victor Sells and that informs what's going to happen in the following chapter, chapter where he is tempted to just murder him with magic when he arrives at the place.

and it's colored by all of the things that have happened to him in the last couple of days,

So anyway, I do want to point out one thing here, because as we were talking about, his interaction with Murphy here is going to inform his relationship with Murphy in the next book, him walking away from her while she lays dying means that she's going to wake up, maybe in the ambulance, maybe at the hospital, having, a skinned...

wrist from where he handcuffs off and wondering where the heck he is. And that's just gonna make her more suspicious of him.

Baloreilly (29:36)
Yeah, and something that, again, we'll talk about in the future, but that's important to just mention now is, canonically, Harry and Murphy don't talk about what happens here for months. So take that forward.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (29:49)
I wanna come back to him saying most of all, I hated the one responsible It's very clear later in Proven Harry explains your emotions can color what happens with your magic even if when you were shaping the spell you had no intention. And Molly kind of do horrible things to Nelson by accident

Because deep down, she resented the fact that he was cheating on her. And that went into the magic, and it made the resulting spell against him much, much worse than it had been against Rosie.

Baloreilly (30:25)
Yeah, and it's clear that Harry's anger is coloring how he thinks he's going to use magic, as we'll see

in the next chapter.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (30:35)
Yeah,

Harry walks away from Murphy to

and he sees the whole place is full. People just get the bad vibe. They know that somebody's been being killed with magic in the last couple of nights, right? They've read the news about the grisly murders. The rumor mill has been going and the place is packed with people that are trying to just kind of shelter together for community, like, you just feel safer when you're in groups of people that know that something really weird is going on. here, go ahead.

Baloreilly (31:04)
And it's hinted

that they also that the council, some of them at least, know that the council might be coming on Monday to lay down the law. that has everybody pretty anxious and even more anxious when Harry actually walks in.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (31:21)
Yeah, and the way that Harry says it is, trouble was brewing between two wizards, white and black, and they had all come the shelter offered by McAnally's winding spaces and disruptive configurations of tables and columns, unquote. So they realize that something's going on with the local wizard, he's confronting the bad guy that's doing all this stuff, and they're just gonna

shelter the storm here. Now, one thing I do notice is he says, could not get away what Victor would do for me unless I wanted to flee to the Never Never. I think it's very interesting how long a game Jim is playing here. The Never Never has nothing to do with this book. He's mentioned it like twice now and here he's just bringing it back and saying, yeah, I could escape into the Never Never, but that's actually more dangerous for a couple of, you know, potentially, although.

I would argue based on what we see in book three when he actually does flee to the Never Never to chase the ghost, it doesn't seem as dangerous as definitely getting 100 % killed by staying here. So I feel like he would have probably at the last minute tried that if it all, if all else failed.

Baloreilly (32:23)
which suggests that Jim might have thought of the idea that Harry has sort of a fate worse than death waiting for him. That is, his fairy godmother, the Lananchi, awaiting to turn him into a dog, one of her hounds. So,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (32:33)
⁓ that's a good point.

Baloreilly (32:42)
the way that we can speculate that that's something Jim has already thought of is that Jim has already told us that Harry has a godmother who is inevitably a fairy. So he's already thought that Harry has a fairy godmother and this might mean he's already thought of what his fairy godmother is trying to do.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (33:01)
Absolutely possible. So now, as he's going into Mac's, he asks Mac for the keys. I find it very interesting that Mac trusts him enough to just be like, okay, and immediately throws the keys at him after he asks to borrow Mac's car. what does Mac know at this point? Really hard to speculate, but he obviously has a good enough opinion.

of Harry by this point. Maybe he's seen him doing enough good work around the town, has heard people talk about how, ⁓ he saved that girl Faith, and insert every other case between a restoration of Faith and the current time where he's helped people out, and he's decided that Harry's one of the good ones, and if Harry's gonna take on this wizard, I'll help him. The least I can do is give him my car.

Baloreilly (33:43)
Right, and we're not gonna get into the whole who is Mac thing now, we'll save that. But we will say that we know Mac is a watcher, so he's probably been paying very close attention to Harry. And we also know that Mac used to be somebody who was in contact with some very powerful forces. So he probably has an idea as to Harry's significance.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (33:47)
No, there's plenty of episodes left for that one.

So after Mac offers his keys, he kind of nods up at the door and we get this great description that again, such evocative visuals written down here, quote, lightning flashed outside. Morgan stood silhouetted in the doorway at the top of the little flight of stairs, his broad frame black against the gray sky, unquote. Just reading that, you can visualize that trope of like,

the door with a silhouette and lightning flashes behind them punctuate the drama of the moment. It's a little corny, it's a little bit out there, it still fits the moment so perfectly and it's very noir. And so I just completely let it slide, I just love it.

Baloreilly (34:48)
on the nose.

Yeah, I mean, listen, the point of tropes is not that you should be aware of them so that you don't use them. It's that you should be aware of them so that you deploy them in a way that's meaningful. And Jim does a great job through the climax of this book at making it feel like the climax by pulling out all the stops. So yeah, the wizard cop gets the entrance framed by a lightning strike because this is the big moment.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (35:07)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

And of course, Harry tries to tell Morgan what's going on. Morgan completely doesn't believe him, saying, we're gonna sit here until the council gets here so you can't kill anybody else. tries to explain, and he says, quote, he spoke in two sharp explosions of single syllables. Sit down.

Baloreilly (35:43)
Now, I is Morgan just trying to get him to sit down until the council comes so that they can put him on trial? Because what Morgan might realize is that if it's somebody else, they're gonna use this storm to kill somebody. So if he's sitting there watching Harry the whole time and somebody else gets murdered by the storm,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (35:44)
unquote.

Baloreilly (36:07)
Well then Harry is in the It's not him. The thing that Morgan doesn't know is that Harry is the next target.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (36:08)
Mm-hmm.

And Harry tries to explain that to him. In Harry's credit, there's a version of this scene in a lesser story where the hero just doesn't even bother trying to explain to the magic cop what's going on because there's no way he'll believe me. But at least here, Harry tries. Morgan, I know who the killer is, he's after me next. If I don't get to him and stop him, I'm as good as dead. But, like we were talking about before, Morgan has put Harry...

in a very specific box in his mind, and at this point, he's not willing to let him out of that box, not even if there's a chance that he might not belong there.

Baloreilly (36:51)
Yeah, and Harry does say that, but he also doesn't explain the key factor for a wizard like Morgan to know, which is he's got a thaumaturgical link to me.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (37:03)
Right, that's true. That may have made a difference, but based on the rest of this interaction, I think Morgan still says, no, we're staying here. I don't want to risk it. There's a version of this scene where maybe as Harry reveals more information, like you said, and maybe he can convince Morgan, like, put me in the equivalent of Thorn Manacles, like whatever you can do to disarm me, put a gag on my mouth, tie my arms behind my back.

but just let's go there, and you can see the guy for yourself kind of a thing. Trust me up and throw me in the corner, throw me in the, well don't throw me in the never never, but there's some way, some way that you could write this scene where maybe he does convince Morgan to do something, but that version almost certainly takes too long to save Harry's life.

Baloreilly (37:48)
Well, I wonder actually if Morgan's whole, deal as he's walking in and bossing Harry around and telling him what to do is he registers what Harry says and he doesn't immediately think that it is a life or death situation at this minute because Harry hasn't told him the way that the Shadow Man is going to be able to get to him. And if Harry did tell him that, he'd go, all right, we're going to duck into the Never Never for three hours and then we're going to come out and, you know, we'll have the trial on Monday.

I can keep you safe from the storm. isn't afraid of going into the never never. That's not a problem for him. So from Morgan's perspective, he certainly is suspicious of Harry at this point. He certainly thinks that it is likely that Harry's the killer. I don't think he has any idea how anyone else could be doing this, but I don't think he's necessarily completely disbelieving Harry. I think he's just like, that's not relevant. Like even if you were in danger, I could get you out of danger, you know.

If you're in custody, you're both safe and you can't kill anyone. There's no reason for you to resist this unless you're trying to do something.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (38:55)
And for the second time in this book, he takes Morgan by surprise with a sucker punch. In this case, he grabs a chair and spins it around and slams it into his gut or his ribs, and then he smashes him on the head, knocking him unconscious. We were talking earlier, there's a line in here, quote, in real life, the chair doesn't break when you slug somebody with it the way it does in the movies. The person you hit is the one who breaks, unquote. So Jim calls out the trope here.

of they use breakable chairs in the movies because when the chair breaks, the person doesn't get nearly as hurt, so the stuntman doesn't get really damaged, and it can look real without him taking any damage. The trope that he then goes on to use is the movie version of unconsciousness, which you just knock somebody out and they get up a couple minutes to an hour later and they're fine, which is not how real unconsciousness works.

Baloreilly (39:47)
Yes, if somebody actually knocks you out cold, that usually means brain damage, and know, Morgan's a wizard, so maybe he just recovers, but there's a lot of people getting whacked into the head with, big blunt objects in the Dresden files and not being in a coma afterwards. So...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (40:03)
Yeah, and I'm

sure Jim knows this. He seems like a very smart guy. He calls out this trope in particular right before it. the knocking people unconscious is such a flexible and valuable writing tool that to dismiss it because it's unrealistic really forces your hand and kind of paints you into a corner for a lot of situations. You either have to make...

the character's willing to kill people to stop them instead of just knocking them unconscious to stop them, or you have to have ⁓ an uncomfortably annoying scene where you're like, and then I trust him up and left him for whatever, and then what if he called for help? And you have to call all the contingencies. If they're knocked out, it solves so many questions for you that you would otherwise have to solve in a scene like this that I can forgive him using it.

Baloreilly (40:50)
So we're mentioning that here because it's gonna happen in the future and we're not gonna make a big deal over it. That's what everybody does in fiction. One interesting thing though is that I think part of why Harry is able to get the jump on people is, of course people don't expect a wizard to throw a punch. But also at this point in the series, he's a pretty skinny dude. But what you don't realize about people who are this skinny but this long is when they swing something, whether it's their fist,

or a chair, or just anything. The centrifugal force they're applying is much, much greater because outer edge of a circle that's rotating travels faster than the inner edge with respect to the distance between the two. So when Harry whacks you with something that he's holding with his arms fully outstretched, it hits a lot harder than somebody who's a foot shorter than him, which is most people.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (41:33)
Mm-hmm.

Yep.

It's all about that fulcrum leverage. Thanks Archimedes. You made Dresden strong enough to knock out Morgan. So, go ahead.

Baloreilly (41:54)
Exactly. So Harry puts

down Morgan and it's pretty funny that Mac doesn't say anything except alive. And lets Harry just drive off with the keys to his car. You know Harry hems and haws

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (42:07)
Clarification,

does say one other thing. Council will be pissed. ⁓

Baloreilly (42:11)
Right, even

kind of lampshading the fact that Harry is constantly, in these books, protecting people from getting caught up in his supernatural shenanigans. And here, he's just kind of willing to let Mac aid and abet a fugitive without really thinking about the consequences for him. One thing that I want to call out, because it's gonna be important in the next book especially, is that Mac's a dude.

and Harry really tends to have this hangup about supernatural forces killing someone when it's a woman. So we'll put that aside for now, but it's a big part of his character and it's something that's gonna take him several books.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (42:51)
He does recognize

it

on.

Baloreilly (42:52)
And that's the

reason why here he hasn't clued Murphy in about anything related to the council, but he's not worried about Mack. It's important to just mention it because he describes the fact that he does that differential treatment, but it's hard to catch him in practice. This is a moment where it actually happens.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (43:10)
Yep, that's All right, so moving on to the end of this chapter, chapter 23, we've talked a bit about how Butcher makes these really killer first lines to books and to chapters, but he's also got some great ending lines, and this is one of took the keys and walked up out of the light and shelter of Machinales and into the storm, my bridge is burning behind me, unquote.

I get chills reading that. That is such a killer ending line. My bridge is burning behind me. I don't have anything else to say. It's just fantastic.

Baloreilly (43:44)
Yeah, really good twist on that metaphor. The next chapter starts with something a little bit more straightforward. Quote, I drove for my life, end quote.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (43:54)
Yeah, setting the stakes right off the bat.

Baloreilly (43:56)
Now, Harry discusses how fast he's driving this car over 130 miles an hour.

So you can imagine Harry literally the entire drive to Victor's basically courting death because he's going at an unbelievable speed.

And then in the rain, that is really pushing.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (44:18)
And this is where it does mention that they are approaching dusk. People have their headlights on and the street lights were clicking a light as he barrels down the highway. So it's really setting the scene, night is falling and he's heading towards the final confrontation with the villain. And so as we get there, the car dies, just gets him to the house right in the right moment and then it shudders and dies.

Baloreilly (44:42)
And the nice thing is it works as a story device because we know that Dresden can't control his magic when his emotions are high. And of course, his emotions change when he finally gets to the house because he knows he's going to have a chance to confront Victor.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (44:56)
Hmm.

And this is the chapter I wanted to spend a bunch of time on, but we're already an hour into the recording. So it's gonna be a little bit of a long one, but this chapter has some of the best writing in the whole this is where he opens his third eye. And the reason he does so, so he says, is to check for magical traps or alarms. He's treating Victor as at least an equal here. It turns out there's no traps and no alarms. Victor isn't that.

practiced or he's too overconfident and arrogant, but what we see when he opens his third eye is still amazing. Why don't you take the first passage?

Baloreilly (45:38)
The only thing I can say is that I felt as though a veil of thick cloth had been lifted away from me as I opened my eyes again. And not only from my eyes, but from all of my senses. I could abruptly smell the mud and fish odor of the lake, the trees around the house, the fresh scent of the coming rain preceding the storm on the smoke-stained wind. I looked at the trees.

saw them not just in the first green coat of spring, but in the full bloom of summer, the splendor of the fall, and the barren desolation of winter, all at the same time. I saw the house, and each separate part of it as its own component, the timbers as parts of spectral trees, the windows as pieces of distant sandy shores.

I could feel the heat of summer and the cold of winter in the wind coming off of the I saw the house wreathed in ghostly flames and knew of its possible future. That fire lay down several of the many paths of possibility that lay ahead in the next hour.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (46:46)
some direct foreshadowing there to the fire that will be taking place very shortly, but one of the, just a very cool description. I don't think we get a better description of what the site does. Harry opens his site a couple more times in the series as it goes on. This may be my favorite description of it, especially the part about the, the trees in all the different seasons, the,

First green coat of spring, the full bloom of summer, the splendor of the fall, the barren desolation of winter. those are just great descriptions. And the other thing to note about this scene is when he says, I saw the house, the S is capitalized. He didn't just see the house, he saw the house in its full everything, right? It's very

Baloreilly (47:33)
Yeah, so first of all, really think that capital S saw is meaningful. He repeats it, in fact. I also feel like this is confirmation, as we've speculated at times in the that the sight can be, to a certain extent, certain ways, precognitive. He sees a potential outcome of the confrontation, and actually one that's close to the truth.

in his vision with the site. I will say my favorite description of the site is the Queens in Summer Night, but this is probably a close second. It's pretty awesome.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (48:07)
Okay, yeah,

I had forgotten about that one. think I'll have to, when we get there, I'll have to decide which one I like more. So we move on from that paragraph. We're gonna jump right back into the next paragraph. We're leaving very little out here. There's just so much good stuff to talk about. Quote, the house itself was a place of power, dark emotions, greed, lust, hatred, all hung over it as visible things.

molds and slimes that were strewn over it like Spanish moss with malevolent eyes. Ghostly things, restless spirits moving about the place, drawn to the sense of fear, despair, and anger that hung over it, mindless shades that were always to be found in such places like rats in granaries. The other thing that I saw over the house was a grinning empty skull. Skulls were everywhere, wherever I looked.

Just at the edge of my vision, silent and still and bleach white, as solid and real as though a fetishist had scattered them around in anticipation of some bizarre holiday. Death. Death lay in the house's future. Tangible, solid, unavoidable. Maybe mine. shoved the feeling away. No matter how strong the vision, no matter how powerful the image gained with the sight, the future

was always mutable, always something that could be changed. No one had to die tonight. It didn't have to come to that. Not for them and not for me." man, the ride in the middle of this passage where he's feeling what the site is telling him, the site is telling him that death lay in the house's future. It's unavoidable. That's the feeling he's getting.

and he has to bring his own voice in to remind himself that no, no, no, the site's visions are not perfect. They can be changed and I can change them. And that little struggle there makes this just another great moment.

Baloreilly (50:09)
And of course, we know that the vision that he's getting is true in this instance. But I don't think that that means that when he shudders and shoves the feeling away, he's incorrect. What the site is showing him seems to be more like probabilities than certainties. And it does seem like it's gonna be hard to avoid death in this confrontation.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (50:28)
Mm-hmm.

Baloreilly (50:36)
But that doesn't mean that Harry's wrong. It is perhaps possible, even at this late stage, that something could result in both him and cells at least walking away with their lives.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (50:48)
And forgive me for invoking the secret, but the idea that you can sort of a vision of the world you want to be by just willing it into existence is obviously, you know, magical thinking, so to speak, in the real life. But there's something to the idea of acknowledging, hey, doing this thing

the outcome is very likely going to be X. But it could be Y. And if I pursue and behave as if it's going to be Y, the chance of Y outcome increases. So if you approach with confidence that you can make Y happen, then you are much more likely to actually see Y. So for example, Cancer patients that approach

with confidence that they can get through this are more likely to actually get through it than the ones that sort of give up emotionally. And that can be seen through all walks of life. What's the line? ⁓ Dress for the job that you want.

Here, Harry can go into this and say, nobody has to die. I can make that outcome happen while still not ignoring the fact that it's an unlikely outcome. You can hold those two pieces in your mind at the same time.

Baloreilly (52:11)
Yeah, I've never found that to be really irrational at all. Of course you're gonna be more likely to take actions to secure a future if you're on the lookout for those actions. I've never thought that that's at all incompatible with a rational worldview. And I think that Jim is actually using this book to make an argument for that. And I think it's something he uses the series for as a whole. The idea that having a clear idea in your brain

about how you think the world should be. And actively trying to bring that about, even if you don't always succeed, really does have a positive impact in the world. It's an important thing to think of if you're gonna try to be someone who has a positive impact. What do you actually want? You're not gonna be very good at making it happen if you don't even think of what it is.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (53:01)
here.

Baloreilly (53:02)
And now Harry almost loses that hope that things can go well here, and doesn't lose it in the sense of, stops believing that it's possible, but in the sense of, he's not really sure if he wants it. and something about it, intangible, something I couldn't name, called to me, beckoned, here was.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (53:06)
Hmm.

Baloreilly (53:28)
Power I had thrust aside once before in the past. had thrown away the only family I had ever known to turn away power exactly like this.

This was the sort of strength that could reach out and change the world to my will, bend it and shape it to my desiring, could cut through all the petty trivialities of law and civilization and impose order where there was none, guarantee my security, my position, my And what had been my reward?

for turning that power aside thus far? Suspicion and contempt from the very wizards I had acted to support and protect. Condemnation from the White Council whose law I had clung to when all the world had been laid at my feet.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (54:26)
So you might ask yourself, like, why is this tempting Harry? Why is the strength to bend the world to his will something that he desires so much in this moment that he's almost willing to throw everything away for it? And when you remember his past as an orphan in the orphanage where he had no control over his life, and then he thought he finally found a home,

And then he had Justin betray him. And more control was taken away from him then because the White Council came and said, we're gonna murder you for defending yourself. In every instance of his childhood, he has no control over his life at all. And that desire for agency is something that really drives a lot of people.

And I think that's very clearly something that's, it's still part of the trauma from his childhood, that he desires more agency over his own life.

Baloreilly (55:28)
Yeah, that's definitely true. uses a word here I love to describe the house a little earlier. He calls it this darkling house. that word doesn't just mean It's of course referring to something that's of the dark.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (55:39)
Hmm.

Baloreilly (55:48)
Harry's almost saying, I can walk through this door of darkness, metaphorically, because what he's contemplating is burning the house down with Victor in it. And when I've become Darkling, I have this ability to control my life in a way that I don't right now. Now, this is partially irrational. If Harry does this,

The White Council might look the other way again, but they probably won't. Morgan's already called them here to put him down. That doesn't seem like a lightly outcome. The seduction of this power almost seems like it's coming from an external force.

that's making him think irrationally about what he psychologically wants rather than logically about what the outcomes of his actions will be.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (56:50)
Yeah,

and it might, mean, some people say, that might be Nemesis attacking him with a psychic attack. And it's possible. That's not my interpretation of this. I think it's the effect of the house, He's got his sight wide open for a long time here. I think longer than we ever see him with his sight open any other time in the series.

I think he's absorbing all of the negative energy, the corruption of this place I think that those emotions are being supercharged by

the dark emotions that are seeped into this house as a result of all of the rituals and things that have gone on here.

Baloreilly (57:32)
And I think that's definitely a part of it. Though, I will suggest that there's something more subtle than even nemesis at work here, which is this anger Harry is feeling that is driving him to this darkness is fueled by righteous rage at what Victor Sells has done.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (57:56)
Yes. Nothing more tempting than righteous anger. Whether right or not, if righteous means you think you're right.

Baloreilly (57:57)
That's.

And it

And in we hear about in the series how black magic is addictive. Harry has broken the laws before. And if he has done that, and he certainly thinks he did, it's because he believed once upon a time that righteous fury...

was a good enough reason to kill someone with magic. Harry is confronting the exact same temptation he's already succumbed to, and it is much harder to fight off when you've already gotten a taste of it. He's able to do it here. He's older. He's wiser. He's more mature. He is not that year old boy anymore. But damn is he tempted.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (58:51)
He needs help.

He needs help though. And that brings us to the next passage. spends the next couple paragraphs arguing with himself. I could kill him right now. I could just absorb all the power that he's gathered here and use it to burn the house down. Why shouldn't I do that? He tries to figure it out. And then we get the following passage.

after it says the energy was all there, he was ready to do it. And then, quote,

The hand was slim, the fingers long and delicate, The hand gently covered mine and lifted it like a small child's until I held my mother's pentacle in my grasp. I held it in my hand, felt its cool strength, its ordered and rational geometry. The five-pointed star within the circle was an ancient sign of white wizardry, the only remembrance of my mother. The cold strength of the pentacle gave me a chance, a moment to think again, to clear my head.

unquote.

He came so close to giving in.

Baloreilly (1:00:15)
And what saves him a small hand moving his to his mother's So you asked the qu- Yeah.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:00:23)
to remind him

of what magic was for.

Baloreilly (1:00:27)
So you asked the question in the pre-show, what's going on here?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:00:32)
know that there was already a spell on this pentacle that ties him and Thomas together that is revealed in Blood Rites. And my best guess was that there was some kind of other safety measure in also triggered at this moment to help him.

Baloreilly (1:00:49)
I wonder though if it's something else I think the hand Harry feels is the Lananchi.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:00:59)
⁓ of course, yes, because she is obligated to help him as his godmother. And this is a moment where he needs help.

Baloreilly (1:01:10)
And of course, Leia's definition of what helps Harry can But clearly, if Harry does this, there's no way he's getting through Monday Alive. So I think Leia touches his hand to this emblem of white wizardry because as much as she's a bloodthirsty psychotic fairy,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:01:17)
You

Mm-hmm.

Baloreilly (1:01:36)
She also, as we find out, has been genuinely protecting Harry his entire life. So it's not that Maggie's ghost is standing here. It's that Maggie's planned for this is there.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:01:50)
Not this specifically,

but yes, planned for Harry being in trouble and provided a countermeasure in the form of Leia. Yeah.

Baloreilly (1:01:54)
there's someone there in her stead. Because

that's what a godmother's literally supposed to do.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:02:00)
Exactly. Exactly right.

Baloreilly (1:02:02)
The next thing that comes up is Harry's resolution after he's decided not to touch this temptation.

wasn't what magic did. Magic came from life from the interaction of nature and the elements, from the energy of all living beings and especially people. A man's magic demonstrates what sort of person he is, what is held most deeply inside him. There is no truer gauge of a man's character.

than the way in which he employs his strengths, his power. Now, there's a lot going on here, but one thing we'll later find out, as you noted, is that this is clearly and ironically, Harry internalizing the teachings of the Black Staff.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:03:12)
Mm-hmm. reflects later about how Ebenezer was the one who taught him what the Pentacle stood for, about how you've got all this power in a controlled hand, and that magic is to be used to preserve and prosper life, not to end it, et cetera, et cetera. Everything that he espouses throughout the first several books about why he does what he does,

it seems like he adopted the teachings that Ebenezer gave him and really internalized them. And that's why Ebenezer's quote unquote betrayal when Harry finds out that he's the black staff, that he breaks the that feels like a betrayal to him because

Now Ebenezer appears to have betrayed those values, does that mean they still have truth? Harry's doubting his own value system in that moment. And here he's describing it in the first way, but it's very consistent the way he describes it here to the way he describes it later.

Baloreilly (1:04:14)
Yeah, and I think because this is part of what...

saves Harry here. It's actually a pretty clear signal that Ebenezer is a complicated figure, but is ultimately, I think, going to end up a tragic hero more than a hidden villain, because the ethos that he instills in Harry is one that sees magic as not just fundamentally a positive force, but that anything flowing from magic

as an utter perversion of it. He doesn't just think magic is mostly good. He thinks that magic is inherently good. He has faith in it. That's why he uses his faith in magic to drive back Bianca. And that's why Harry is able to come to the decision that Jim's telling us is the right thing to do in the next paragraph.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:05:10)
the last sentence of this you just read is, I think, the thesis statement of this book. There is no truer gauge of a man's character than the way in which he employs his strength, his power. And he set up Victor as a direct counterexample to the way that Harry lives his life. We know that Harry hates bullies.

He hates injustice and he tries to live his life using his power to right wrongs. And Victor is using his power for selfish reasons. And those are direct diametrically opposite. And this is the statement that says Harry is in the right here. That's what this book is about. It's the struggle between these two ideologies. Use power for your own gain or use power to help others

this statement is saying Harry is the right one here.

Baloreilly (1:06:07)
And one thing I think is very kind of Jim to believe, and something that draws me to these books, is that Harry doesn't think that the measure of a man is what his weaknesses are, or his flaws. He thinks that it's what he does with the things that he's good at, or what a woman does with the things that she's good at. ⁓

person is defined by the things that they're good at and what they use them for and not the things that they're bad at and that they do make mistakes with. That's a very forgiving attitude to have and it's part of the reason why ultimately the heroes in this story spend a lot of effort attempting to redeem people.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:06:52)
Yeah, and Harry kind of comes back to himself almost like a mantra. He reminds himself who he is in the next passage here, which comes right after the one that you read. Quote, I was not a murderer. I was not like Victor Sells. I was Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. I was a wizard. Wizards control their power. They don't let it control them. And wizards...

don't use magic to kill people. They use it to discover, to protect, to mend, help, not to destroy. The anger abruptly The burning hate subsided, leaving my head clear enough to think again. The pain in my leg settled into a dull ache, and I shivered in the wind and the first droplets of rain. I didn't have my staff. I didn't have my rod.

The trinkets I did have with me were either expended or burned to uselessness. All I had was what was inside me. I looked up, suddenly feeling smaller and very alone. There was no one near me, no hand touching mine, no one stood close by. For just a moment, I thought I smelled a whiff of perfume, familiar and haunting. Then it was gone. And the only one I had to help me was myself. I blew out a breath. Well, Harry.

told myself, that's just gonna have to be enough, unquote.

Baloreilly (1:08:18)
Man, talk about casting a spell on yourself. It is really impressive and interesting how Harry is so thoroughly able to banish those dark feelings. And I will say that does lend some credence to people who believe it is some kind of psychic assault.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:08:22)
Yeah!

It does, it's very reminiscent of the psychic assaults that we kind of witness in White Night, where, and I think in a couple other books too, Cold Days, where he basically has to push off these invasive thoughts that seem like they're coming from inside. And in Harry's case, it's entirely plausible, as we were talking about just a moment before, that these are his own thoughts and desires.

Baloreilly (1:08:54)
cold days.

Mm-hmm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:09:12)
but

they're the raw emotions that he hasn't, he has thought about and dismissed several times in the past. And if he has control over his emotions, he does not let those thoughts and emotions take over what his actions are.

Baloreilly (1:09:28)
And one thing that might be another possibility here is that this is actually what he who walks behind was trying to do when he marked Harry, trying to give him a little push at a critical moment. So it's a pale shadow of later psychic assaults. It's only the echo of one,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:09:45)
Hmm.

I like

that interpretation, when some people have drug flashbacks where they had some vision when they were on psychedelics or something, and then even later when it's completely out of their system, their brain will just make that connection again and they kind of have a flashback to that moment. That could be what's going on here where

the influence that he who walks behind marked him with is hitting him at this moment of vulnerability when he's already got his temper really close to the surface and it's just that extra little push that makes it feel like it's a little bit not him, it's just a little bit more than is normally going on inside of his head.

Baloreilly (1:10:26)
And we're not gonna see this kind of premeditated desire to murder for a while in Harry. we will see it again when the shadow of Lashiel is inside of So there's some reason to believe that it could have something to do with, you know, a psychic mark, implant, imprint on him. Especially since he does use his name to throw it off.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:10:38)
yeah.

Baloreilly (1:10:51)
We'll see, especially in the first two books, the power of using your name to beat back temptation is actually starkly outlined. So it could be an outside force, it could be an internal force, but by naming himself, by saying what he is about, he banishes it. It's not ex-

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:11:13)
Yeah, I hadn't put

that together before, but yeah, they talk about how somebody else gets your name, they have power over you. Well, you have your own name. It gives you power over yourself. Other people can't influence you if you use your own name to assert control. That's a really cool interpretation.

Baloreilly (1:11:31)
So, whether this resolution is Harry resisting an outside force or overcoming his inner demons, the chapter ends with Harry walking towards this vision of death and sardonically remarking, do I have a great job or what?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:11:53)
Yeah. All right. We went a little long today. Sorry about that, guys. We do try to keep these a little bit shorter than this, but this was a really big set of chapters that we wanted to get through. And one thing I will point out before we end, he still has his site open into the next chapter. He doesn't close it for like seven or eight paragraphs into the next chapter. he doesn't use his site an awful lot. And I wonder if that's because

every time he thinks about using it, he remembers these two chapters where he had it open in this horrible place and he has those memories forever.

Baloreilly (1:12:31)
Yeah, that's a really good point. So that's going to take us to this week's question for Bob.

Bob, of course, as an air spirit, is the perfect person to ask about the mechanics of air magic. So Adam, did he deign to show this time?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:12:53)
No, gonna keep asking him, but it'll at least be interesting to see what his excuse is. this time he said he's planning a Father's Day party for Harry, which at least is chronologically correct. It's coming up.

Baloreilly (1:13:04)
And

if that's true, I can't be too mad at him. But I mean, when does Bob ever, you know, plan a party? So.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:13:11)
Now,

12 months comes out and there's a scene where Harry gets a Father's Day party, I want credit. 12 months, yes.

Baloreilly (1:13:17)
If Bob is the wedding planner in 12 months, I'm gonna have a lot of questions

about how Mab is running her operations.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:13:25)
All right, so the question for this week, how does Air Magic interact with the laws of physics? I wanted to get a little bit more information about Air Magic in the Dresden Files, and so I turned to the RPG books because my understanding is that those are at least partially blessed by Jim in terms of their accuracy and things like that. So here's what the RPG book says about Air Magic in particular. Air is the element of motion and freedom.

and most of its key effects are motion-based, powerful gales to knock over foes or throw objects around, the movement of objects on a wizard's hand, or shields of swirling air currents to push harm away. On the nastier end, it's possible to make pockets of vacuum to suffocate or implode targets. It can also affect the quality of air around the wizard, keeping smoke clouds localized, purifying the air in a room, or even calling up fog to conceal an escape. So those are some examples of

Air Magic as used in the Dresden Files RPG, which of course is fairly similar to what we find in the books. Now, I always pictured Air Magic working within physics in the sense that Harry is manipulating pressures and moving air and creating wind in the way that air is naturally created. That's kind of just how I always had it in my head. I never thought about it too much, but I went on Reddit and we asked this question.

And it occurred to me while I was reading the responses that my interpretation didn't make a lot of sense. Okay, so he's levitating an object like a staff to come to him. He's gonna have to create some kind of a wind or a vacuum above it that exactly matches gravity's 9.8 meters per second per And that doesn't sound like something that Harry can actually do. But some of the answers on Reddit sound just kind of right to me. So.

Many people suggested that way that air magic works depend on your own understanding, and that having a better understanding of how reality and physics works can improve your efficiency in evocation. Oakleaves described it thus,

about how they visualize the spell functioning combined with their understanding of physics and the actual physics of the situation. I imagine a wizard that just visualizes fire appearing could make fire whole cloth, as you say, but at a greater cost and with less control than a practitioner that does it by pouring energy into matter until it combusts, as I expect Dresden does.

which would then not be as efficient or controlled as a practitioner that is combining magical theory, like summoning fire or energy from another plane with actual physics, like creating a lens to pour said energy for focusing and direction, which I suspect hardcore veterans like certain wardens might manage." That was a very interesting idea that the more and better ways that you understand physics in the real world, the more and better ways you can use magic to interact.

Baloreilly (1:16:30)
Yeah, I think that's definitely true. That's why certain wizards specialize in certain elements. In the world of darkness, which we've referred to before, different mages have different paradigms, the way they think magic works. And they're good at different things that, you know, sort of work better within their understanding of reality, within the reality that they're imposing on the world around them. I've always thought,

that Dresden's air magic, much like his fire magic, did have to do with a more physics equation-driven manipulation of the world around him. Part of the reason why I think this is because Molly's first air magic spell is the hairdryer. And one of the ways in which you can create a greater air pressure

to cause a gust is to increase air temperature. Harry is a natural fire evoker, so he might be using that pressure heat dynamic to push air. He might have taught Molly to use it that way. And sometimes when he calls up a wind, it might be cooling something, pulling energy out of one area, putting it in another area to cause a high to low pressure flow of air. I think that's totally reasonable.

Do I think that's how the Merlin uses air magic? No. I think his understanding of it probably has to do with like aether and quintessence and, ways of understanding the world that are no longer in create their own internally consistent system that, using access to the Never Never or just the force of his own will, the Merlin is able to create.

significant workings out of that Dresden couldn't dream of.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:18:26)
Yeah, and I mentioned, you some people kind of were saying it's like force magic in disguise because some people described it as like, Harry is always exhausted after using air magic. So they were thinking he's just grabbing the air molecules and forcing them all in the same direction to create wind. Rather than doing anything with pressure or temperature, he's just physically grabbing the atoms and throwing them all in the same direction. And because each individual atom of air is fairly light and it's a fluid, it's possible to do...

very similar to like, okay, I'm just gonna lift this rock with plane of force or what have you. So that's another interpretation. people saying that, you know, he's moving existing air around, which is getting to this point. Missy Witch 67 says, quote, I imagine Harry's wind spells being similar to how an airbender works, using energy to get air moving rather than creating wind, unquote. And that might be playing to his strength, right? He has raw power and not a lot of control.

So instead of doing some kind of fine tuning, like creating pressure differentials or even worrying about temperature differentials, he might just be like, physically grab all the air molecules, give them energy in that direction. And that's just his using a hammer to treat everything else as a nail solution.

Baloreilly (1:19:42)
Yeah, and I think that's correct, and I want to make two points about it because I think that part of the reason why Jim uses Force magic later in the series is that he doesn't like using air for every potential application. But I also think that there's a subtle difference. All of the magic Harry uses has some kind of force shaping it in some way.

Fire doesn't naturally shoot in beams. To make that happen you have to contain it with presumably raw telekinetic energy to get it to behave in a way that fire normally doesn't. So I imagine that all of these things are simultaneously true. How is Harry putting energy into the air molecules to move them? Well sometimes he's conceptualizing it as just an invisible hand.

slapping the air and creating the wave and the fluid. And sometimes he's transferring that energy through heat. All of these are just systems of delivering energy to the air, and all of them need to be a combination of shaping force and some initial inciting energy, which could come in any number of forms.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:20:58)
So that's probably where we're gonna stop. We are quite over time here, but thanks to everybody for participating in that discussion. It was very we're ending the book Next week is the last set of chapters. And then we'll have a wrap up show after that where we do a big overview of our thoughts on Stormfront, see if we missed anything. But for next week,

What could Harry have done to avoid the negative consequences from Stormfront? And I mean specifically in the direct aftermath of Stormfront. I'm not talking about six books down the, even two books down the line. Ignore the whole Bianca starting the war thing. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the fact that Linda dies in this book. Did she have to die? relationship with Murphy is ruined for like a year. Did that have to be the only outcome? Victor dies.

kind of at Harry's hand again, did that have to be the outcome? Is he right in this chapter when he says there didn't have to be somebody dying. So that's what we're talking about next week. Can you think of some way that it could have gone differently with the existing version of Harry? Not a later one that's better at telling people the truth, but this version that-

wants to restrain himself from giving information. Because if he just told people stuff, it would make this book a lot easier.

Baloreilly (1:22:17)
Yeah, Harry telling Murphy everything in book one is not on the But consistent with how he behaves, is there any decisions he could have made, strategic choices he could have made to avoid some of the worst things that happen that lead into the situations he finds himself in in full moon?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:22:38)
Yep, that's what we're gonna be talking about next time as we finish the book. I'm very excited, Brian. We are finally almost done with our first book. I've got a lot of great ideas of what to talk about on the wrap-up show, and I'm really excited to get into Full Moon. I know you've been re-listening to it, so I know you're excited too.

Baloreilly (1:22:54)
Raring to go, really excited to do episode 11 and talk about the end of Stormfront.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:23:01)
Yes, there was so much meat on the bone in this episode, specifically in chapter 24, have a feeling that that a precursor. That is what we're going to see more and more of as we get into the later books. It's one of the reasons that people like the books that come after Grave Peril so much is they have a lot more of these chapter 24s in them.

Baloreilly (1:23:25)
Absolutely, and part of the reason why we wanted to get through all of it today is because we're so excited to talk about the last three chapters.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:23:32)
All right. With that, we are out for the night. See you next time.