I wonder if Dresden will still be a shade. I understand his body is still alive, and that he can go back into it.

My main question is, what about the fact that Dadens body has already been separated for his soul.

 

No, Dresden won't be a shade. He's back in his body, and for all intents and purposes alive again. His body is incredibly weak due to the prolonged lack of movement and soul, and he will have to train himself to be able to move again. That's why the first words of Cold Days is "Mab has interesting ideas on physical therapy".

As best I can tell this early, the book is likely to be about how Dresden integrates into the Winter Court and to what degree Mab controls him. The plot of the book will likely be Mab sending him out on a mission or two, getting back in the saddle and whatnot, with sub-plots about how the Fae treat him and how he adapts to living in the Nevernever.

 

Previous threads indicate that attempting to converse with Whoop is pointless.

If we ignore him he might go away. It's worth a try I reckon.

 

I refer you to this:

 

As everyone else has said - nothing "hypothetical" to discuss. Harry's soul returned to his body in the last chapter. He's back, though very weak.

Anyway,

Hmm, yeah, have to agree with your second opinion. I really doubt Butcher would do a major time skip - I could see a smaller one, perhaps a year or so, but nothing bigger. Setting the apocalypse aside for a moment, imo an extended time skip would just be bad storytelling. No matter how much Murphy, Molly, etc are grieving for Harry, after 10 years they would have accepted it and moved on, especially since as far as they know he's dead and gone for sure now. Having him appear a decade later would just be weird, though I suppose you could argue that it would make Harry/Molly less awkward lol.

 

Him being correct or not is not the crux of the matter to me. DLP has always been a place where standards are enforced, we like to have our discussions involve intelligence and thought. Whoop displays neither characteristic. While a few of his ideas definitely could be interesting in some respects, they are motivated more by what seems epic to him, as opposed to what we actually know. See examples of where he tries to argue that Dresden is on the same level of power as Mab. Or that Intellectus is a godlike power.

Also, quite a few people have brought up his apparent inability to spell or use proper punctuation, yet in all instances he has responded with insults and petty defensiveness.

This is what I am referring to. Points 1 and 6 seem the most relevant here.

Both encouraging and not responding to this we lower the quality of discussion here. It's already bad enough in The Santi's BWL thread, and I'd rather not see it spread to the rest of the forum.

 

I remember now. I forgot most of the shades realized he had a different aura about him. The reason I asked was because I wondered if Harry would be able to leave his body in the future as long as Demonreach was keeping his body alive.

Ellisande I am still willing to argue about Mab Vs. Dresden, but I have noticed that people are offended by the argument so I let it be.

P.S. If every time I post without errors, are you going to insult me?

 

It took more than just Demonreach to keep his body alive. It took Demonreach feeding him, Mab breathing air into his lungs and the Parasite (Lash) keeping his heart going. Somehow I can't see them doing that again just so Harry could take a wander about in ghost form. Especially since Mab looked really strung out and nasty after a year of keeping his body alive.

 

Less - like six or seven months.

It would be like astral projection - the closest Harry ever came was walking around Little Chicago and looking up at himself - and we remember how stressful that was for only a few minutes.

And please don't open the Harry vs. Mab debate again - simple WoJ states that she would wipe the floor with him. Of course, since she's Sidhe, she can't technically kill him.

So she'd probably send a fucking troll with a club or army of trolls or trolls with clubs or armies of clubs with trolls that have clubs to crush him into tiny little pieces... and then she'd still have to figure out what to do with the other 23: 54 in the day.

Also: see sig.

 

Harry's part of her court, she can do what she wants to him. Hell, she could do what she wanted to him when he signed that first bargain with Lea, it's only unaffiliated mortals that are free from direct attacks.

 

Oh, i'm not disagreeing - she could cause him suffering the likes of which no human being could even imagine.

But she can't directly end his life - just make him wish she could.

EDIT: No, wait, It would appear I have failed. just leafed through SK, and there it is on pg 83/4: "The Queens can't gun down anyone who isn't in their Court."

So, while the White Council might be safe against Mab personally, Harry is now fucked. My bad.

 

Yeah, and 'in their court' can mean anything from directly serving (as Harry is) to being contracted to feed the feasts (literally in some cases).

But still, if the Queens were unable to gun down others... Why would they be as feared as they are? A bomb with no warhead is about as deadly as the stand it's placed on, after all.

 

Doesn't really make a lot of sense when put that way...

The Queens can't directly kill any human being, except their Knight, or... (leafs through SK again) any mortal who "does something stupid like make an open-ended bargain..."

Huh.

Mental note, don't accept anything from anyone, ever.

But at the same time, it means Mab would not be able to destroy anyone who came after her, even if it was the entire WC, because that would mean ending human lives that weren't bound to her. kind of takes the teeth out of the tiger.

 

I'd think that fighting directly against her would circumvent that ruling, and since she is basically the personification of Winter, every time you fight against a Winter Faerie, you risk Mab's wrath.

 

This is my interpretation. She can do whatever the fuck she wants to you if you attack her first, but she can't kill you out of the blue.

And that doesn't even take into accounts the various deals and allies she has that she can send after your ass at any point.

 

Plus, the matter of self-defense aside, it's easily within Mab's power to just do something like disable her opponent, and then get one of her personal bodyguard trolls or some other Winter Fae to do the head-smashing. Or just reduce her enemy to a state where they start begging her to kill them.

Or just try what Aurora did in SK. A Queen might not be able to directly kill, but there are plenty of ways to kill indirectly.

 

Coulda sworn I posited the same type of thing a while back. Oh wait - here it is:

So yeah, I wonder as well about the time-skip to Cold Days and beyond.

Don't be sorry. Not that you really are, but don't even say it. Getting off-topic is, quite literally and somewhat sadly, the only reason I still visit DLP.

That same thing has crossed my mind - making Molly older and wiser has already worked in GS, and whenever she brought up her unrequited love for Dresden, there was nowhere near the same level of "oh hell no" from him that there had been in earlier books.

The one wrench in the works is Molly's bum leg. I hate to think of it in these terms, but Butcher has always written his potential love interests (okay, let's be honest - every female in the whole series, aside from one changeling, has been a straight-up hottie) as statuesque babes, and I don't mean the Rubenesque kind of statuesqe either.

Gard and Charity are qualified to be bikini-and-muscle-mag models when they can spare the time from their day jobs of babysitting Marcone and children, respectively. Susan was this pheromone-oozing Latin sex kitten, and Luccio was an older lady dropped into the body of a hot co-ed. Elaine was the very definition of "man, when she grows into those legs..." And Murphy was Mary Lou Retton with a gun and a bad attitude. Hell, even Tera West was of course no dog when in human form, not to mention Mab, Lea, Aurora and of course Maeve. Yes, those are immortal and not even human, but you see the trend. Am I leaving anyone out? Oh yeah, Lash...

I can't imagine that, as things stand right now, Harry/Molly is on the table, because Butcher is going to pair Dresden with a super-babe, for the fanboys and for his own self-insert fantasies. Which is another reason I think there might be a time-skip, because something might happen to make Murphy even older (she's already older than Dresden, right?) and thus more easily sidelined from any debates on pairings, as well as allow time for something to happen to reverse the damage to Molly's leg.

I used to be all for the Harry/Murphy 'ship, but her constant bitchiness (whether warranted or not) had just about killed that for me. Then I re-read Fool Moon a couple weeks back, and she was such a fucking cunt in that book that I found myself hoping she'll be eaten by the Fomor before the start of Cold Days. Not likely, but that's what I was hoping.

Disclaimer: Despite the Murphy-hate induced, Fool Moon remains one of my very top Dresden books. I know it isn't a fave of most DLPers, but I really enjoyed the story, the imagery and the mythology that unfolded in it.

I actually like better the idea of those stones Harry used to have a side-by-side out-of-body conversation with Eb in, I think, Changes.

This. You need look no further than Summer Knight, where a myriad of Summer Fae do their damnedest to kill Dresden and Murphy. Hell, that bad-ass Grandpa Billy-goat was sent by Titania, IIRC. Just 'cause the Queens and Ladies and Mothers can't pull the trigger doesn't mean they can't aim the gun.

Ninja'd, before I even posted!

 

To be fair, a good half of those are using either Faerie glamours or Dresden's own idea of a 'perfect woman' to appear beautiful. The rest we can both attribute to Harry's misplaced chivalry (he very rarely describes a woman as outright ugly - Corpsetaker in GS is the only one I can think of off the top of my head), and Butcher's fantasies.

Also, you forgot Lara (though again she's got something extra working for her - remember how Thomas looked during his and Harry's soulgaze).

 

Fixing Molly's bum leg shouldn't be a big deal. Considering the fact that Mab fixed a broken spine in Changes and Lea took care of Harry's brain damage in Grave Peril,Molly could probably get her leg fixed in an instant if she was willing to make a bargain with one of them. Even if she doesn't want to get tangled up with Winter, her perfect wizard healing will take care of it after a few years, like happened with Harry's hand.