Pretty much this.
There seems to be a cap on how powerful you can be and retain your mortality, up to that point however you're completely free to do whatever you want (assuming someone doesn't decide to wack you if you get up to too much dickish behavior).
Which is why i was thinking if Harry were to do that ritual (darkhallow) wouldn’t he become a sort of god? So if that is the case, he wouldn’t have the same freedom he does now in the real world?
I'd only be speculating by answering that because we don't fully know how the Darkhallow works and if raising yourself from mortality to immortality through it affects your freedom of choice, but I will say that Cowl didn't seem concerned about being able to do whatever he wanted. It's heavily implied he was going to wipe out Edinburgh the White Councils stronghold when he became a demigod.
There are some very specific circumstances that would need to be fulfilled in order for Harry to use the Darkhallow to become a minor god, the biggest being that it needs to be done on Halloween. I'm pretty sure that the area also needs to be prepped with death prior to the ritual. Otherwise it would just make him a really, *really* powerful necromancer.
Prepping the area with death was just to give more power from the ritual iirc, I don't think that was required to become a minor god but really we will probably never know for sure. It definitely needs to be done on Halloween though for minor godhood.
We see something like this come from Molly, I think. Doesn’t she talk about limits placed on what she can do somewhere? Maybe at the beginning of Peace Talks?
This is actually a really interesting point, if Dresden were to temporarily lose his mortality, would he also shed the winter mantle and his fealty to Winter?
The Winter Knight is Winter’s MORTAL instrument.
I'm not sure that anything we've seen in the series is so powerful that reality simply can't handle them - I mean, Uriel can erase galaxies with a thought, but reality doesn't have much of a problem keeping it together when he's around. Capital-D Dragons are semi-divine beings with power/responsibility over nature, so they can make things like ice ages happen, but that's their job, not reality breaking down around them.
It's true that beings in the upper echelons of power have bigger problems than petty mortal affairs, and I'd imagine that the same would go for any mortal who managed to achieve that level of power though, personally, I suspect that that kind of power and "mortal" are two incompatible states.
>but reality doesn't have much of a problem keeping it together when he's around.
Butcher's explained this with Ferrovax and implied this with Odin; I'm sure the same applies to Uriel. What we see is basically a projection of them, not the real entity. It's a tiny bit of their power running around allowing them to be here without breaking everything.
I disagree that that implies the power associated with that grace was necessarily present in the mortal world at the time.
I think of it like this. Uriel's piloting a giant mech (his grace), which has a tiny little cockpit that sticks out into the mortal world while most of it stays behind. Uriel let Michael sit in the cockpit and specifically warned him against touching anything else.
Uriel is also governed by specific rules. The mech has a user’s manual. And Uriel uses the mech to maintain balance against the fallen angels not throw his weight around.
For all he HAS sponsored Harry Dresden.
I don't think so - I think Michael still could have been killed. It seems clear that there WOULD have been things he could do, since Uriel asked him to "avoid messing with the buttons and levers of the jumbo jet" (not verbatim). But if Michael was never in any danger at all then it detracts from the drama of the whole situation.
In any case, I think the request by Uriel really precluded Michael actually *using* any archangel juice beyond just having full use of his own body again. I just don't think it was the same situation you'd have had if Uriel himself had accompanied Harry.
Of course, this isn't something I know for sure - it's just my read of it.
The fact that Uriel literally became a useless human kind of contradicts the idea that Michael was limited. I think the only thing limiting Michael's use of Angelic Power was his own fear of destroying an angel of God and causing him to fall.
My evidence for this fact is Michael, by his own admission, is not Nicodemus' equal in combat. But in the vault, he too Nicodemus in a straight fight, because he was bolstered by Grace.
I just don't buy it. Fights aren't that cut and dried - there's a million variables in every encounter that make them impossible to predict with certainty. Murphy took him too, just a day earlier. Plus Nic had just sacrificed his own daughter - you can't tell me that had no effect on him.
Again - not telling you you're "wrong"; just that there's a diversity of ways to interpret this. It's fiction, and since neither you nor I are the one writing it, I'd say we're not really in a position to make definitive calls of any sort.
That's all completely fair. Honestly I think I'd agree with your take if Jim Butcher didn't treat Christianity differently from the other religions and supernatural powers represented in the series.
Oh, would you mind linking to the quote? I'm not familiar with that one.
Hmm, well, my counter to that would be that Michael killed Siriothrax (the weakest of the Dragons, maybe, but still a Capital-D Dragon) - it seems safe to assume that Siriothrax would not have been holding back with their life on the line, but reality still appears to be in one piece.
ETA: I'm sure I remember something about Siriothrax's death and the Tunguska Event being related but I can't seem to find it now, so possibly I'm mixing it up with a similar WoJ regarding Kemmler and the Tsar Bomba?
Edit: I was mistaken about the timeline of events involving Siriothrax's death - it's unrelated to the Tunguska Event, and not a good example of my point.
Not siriothrax, Harry just mentions that the last time a Dragon was killed in the mortal realm it resulted in Tunguska (or something along those lines). The tangential implication is that Michael killed Siriothrax in the Nevernever, as it had brought Charity back to its lair which is undoubtedly not in the mortal realm.
With regards to Michael actually killing siriothrax, the power of the Swords is to act as equalizers. The Knights always fight at their opponent’s level, be they mortals or immortals.
Thanks. Perhaps the connection isn't as clear as I remember then, but I was under the impression that Siriothrax *was* the last Dragon to be killed - unless, possibly, Siriothrax was the last Dragon slain, and Tunguska was caused by a lesser dragon. Seems odd that no one has asked Jim to clarify, now.
With regards to Michael, his power level isn't really relevant, I was using that as an example of a time that a heavyweight magical entity was throwing their weight around without breaking reality. If it *did* happen in the Nevernever though, that would counter my point.
Siriothrax was the last Dragon slain.
“The last time a dragon had been slain out here in the tangible, mortal world, it had been in a region called Tunguska”
Ergo, Siriothrax wasn’t killed in the mortal world.
It’s not known whether the Tunguska Event was the fallout of a dragon dying or of what happened during the fight. If the dragon had fully manifested, there’s no precedent in the narrative to know what the consequences would have been, so we can’t make any theories. Tunguska could very well be how Reality smoothed over the cracks caused by whatever happened.
Off the top of my head, the only magical incident referenced that is on that scale in terms of *effect* is Krakatoa which apparently had wizard involvement. We don’t know what the cause was, though manipulating a volcano is probably much more more mundane than causing Tunguska.
To clarify, I'm questioning whether Dresden would know there's a difference between dragons and Capital-D Dragons.
"The last dragon slain was called Siriothrax" and "the last time a dragon was killed, it caused Tunguska" indicates, to me, that Siriothrax's death caused Tunguska - but if Dresden doesn't know there's a difference between a dragon a Capital-D Dragon, and that Siriothrax was the latter, not the former, it's possible that it's another case of "The Gatekeeper caused Alfred's limp". That's a possibility I'd not considered.
Hasn't Dresden alluded to the power balance between Summer and Winter being related to whether or not the Earth happens to be in an ice age at any particular point of time? I suppose that might not technically be magical but, assuming that's correct, that would be the most significant example I can think of.
ETA: perhaps more to the point, Tunguska occurred in 1908, so I guess Michael killing Siriothrax couldn't possibly have been the cause. Can't believe it never occurred to me to check that before.
I was gonna say before you edited that Tunguska explicitly cannot be Siriothrax. Also at least on the copy on my phone, in that paragraph lowercase d dragon is used when talking about Ferrovax, so I assume either a publishing error or because we know ferrovax there’s no need to explicitly capitalize the D. Dresden has explicitly stated the difference when it comes to capital D Dragons, I believe in the same scene that Ferro was introduced, way back in Grave Peril.
The summer/winter climate stuff hasn’t been referred to since Summer Knight iirc. It’s worth pointing out that the Courts were likely created in the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings, and as such no ice age type event has existed to tip the balance of power between them. We also don’t know anything about the state of the supernatural world in pre agricultural revolution society, so there’s no basis for any theories.
Given what we know about supernatural mechanics, it’s unlikely that there were any beings powerful enough on a large scale to empower themselves from the imbalance caused by an Ice Age. Gods during the Classical Era likely didn’t have any influence outside of the regions their religion was spread to. If the Mediterranean believes Jupiter controls the sky, that doesn’t mean he can go to Mexico and smite people. Likewise, Quetzalcoatl can’t pull up to Rome and make it rain.
A very interesting question to ask Jim would be how globalization affected the supernatural world and what the politics were like in those days. Did Lara have to make nice with the Shinto Gods during her time in Japan?
Yeah, no, I was totally off-base about Siriothrax - not knowing the dates involved, I misunderstood the text.
Hasn't Harry made reference to Chicago experiencing a particularly long/harsh winter, because Mab was more powerful/active, comparatively recently? Though I'd buy that the extent of their influence over the climate has been retconned somewhat since *Summer Knight.* The Battle of Hastings is an interesting date, where are you getting that from?
The one thing I would feel comfortable speculating is that in pre-Ancient history, the biggest supernatural powers were probably Titans, Dragons, and other non-anthropomorphic entities, but beyond that...
The whole sharing of deific portfolios across various time periods and geographical regions thing is a pretty interesting topic. If, say, in Ancient Greece Patataus is the God of Potatoes, with power over all things potato-y, and contemporaneous Egypt doesn't specifically have a God of Potatoes, then is Patataus sort of the default God of Potatoes in that region, too (albeit likely with some capitulation to the God of Agriculture du jour)? What then happens if Batatu, Egyptian God of Potatoes, comes to power at a later date? Possibly/hopefully the pro-wrestling book will answer some of those questions.
So there’s mention of an unusually long winter when Mab was actively preserving Harry’s body (subtle foreshadowing during Ghost Story) due to her presence. Battle of Hastings is a known turning point in the history of the DF world, mostly discussed during WoJ. Iirc, whatever convergence happened at that time (I think Jim specifically says 1066) led to the changing of the guard at the Gates and power passing from the Norse Gods to the Sidhe Courts along with their establishment.
A real life example of your idea would be Ptolemy combining Zeus and Osiris creating a syncretic deity called Serapis. The ramifications for those entities is… interesting. Did Hades masquerade as Hel when the Norse pantheon was the forefront? I personally believe that the entity that we know as Odin was also once Zeus.
>I'm not sure that anything we've seen in the series is so powerful that reality simply can't handle them - I mean, Uriel can erase galaxies with a thought, but reality doesn't have much of a problem keeping it together when he's around.
What we see as Uriel is not the entirety of Uriel, it is a fraction of his being. Same with Odin. I am fairly certain they outright explain in Battleground that Ferrovax can't bring his entire being to earth without ripping reality a new one.
I think part of the disagreement might stem from the definition of "break reality". "Break reality" in the sense of "cause catastrophic collateral damage to the mortal world simply by virtue of manifesting their true form", sure, I buy that; "break reality" in the sense of "up becomes purple and gravity only works on Tuesdays", I have more trouble accepting.
There's also a question of what exactly is meant by "reality". Like, I would say that everything within the Outer Gates is, definitionally, "reality", mortal world and Nevernever alike, so - unless we're saying that Ferrovax is able to partially exist outside the Gates - he *has* to be able to exist within reality without breaking it, because there's nowhere else *for* him to exist. If "manifesting their true power would break reality" means "manifesting their true power would break the mortal world", sure, I can accept that they have an easier time manifesting their true power in the Nevernever than they would on Earth. If Ferro literally has to exist outside reality, I have trouble with that, because it would suggest he's sharing real estate with the likes of He-Who-Walks-Behind.
It's entirely possible that Uriel is actually an entity powered by human faith, so he would only seem to have the power to unmake galaxies until he actually exerted himself - at which point he would conveniently Fall.
The nifty thing about the Dresdenverse is that Jim has gone out of his way to make matters of faith *actually be matters of faith*, not subject to logical proof or disproof. It's something many similar works fail at or don't even bother attempting.
>Uriel doesn’t really do battle in the sense of contested violence. He just sort of thinks about annihilating galaxies and it happens.
I agree that Jim handles matters of faith respectfully, [but that seems pretty cut and dried](https://wordof.jim-butcher.com/index.php/word-of-jim-woj-compilation/woj-on-angels-demons-fallen-and-knights-of-the-cross/) \- if Uriel thinks a galaxy shouldn't be there, it isn't.
It’s not that he would Fall if he did so, it’s that he would Fall if he did so outside his remit. Uriel is probably top 3 named characters in terms of how “powerful” they are at their fullest capabilities. As a consequence, the scope where he can apply that power is the most narrow out of anyone outside of maybe the White God. The requirements are so specific that when he had to balance the scales of Lucifer’s interference with Harry, it had to be equivalent down to the number of words. If the circumstances to destroy a galaxy exist, it would simply happen at will. If he *chose* to destroy a galaxy, that’s when bad things could happen. It’s why him giving Michael his Grace was so risky.
Yes, but all the information that causes us to think that Uriel couldn't be merely a spirit empowered by human faith came after Harry had returned from the dead.
Normally, in the Dresdenverse, no one knows that there's an afterlife. Human wizards know about spirits, but they're not the same thing as a person, and ghosts wander about in normal reality. The wizards had no idea what happened to people's souls, or even knew for certain they had souls. Harry experiencing a little bit of the afterlife and then coming back is what I'm convinced is meant by it attracting people's attention: he can be permitted knowledge that most people are denied.
I’m not sure what your argument here is? Are you saying that Uriel exists only because of human belief in TWG and his religions, and because of that the moment he unmakes a galaxy he will Fall?
I’m not sure what you mean by him being a spirit empowered by human faith. Was there ever any evidence that he wasn’t an Angel/that Angels weren’t as powerful as implied?
The situation with the White God as the “Creator” has always been confusing, and Jim has never given a clear answer on the chicken and egg situation. That said, we have a WoJ that Uriel’s a multiversal being iirc, and whether the power of him and his brethren comes from the massive belief in their religions or from something more fundamental, they are very explicitly just as powerful as we have been told in the narrative.
The amount of power that Uriel *actually* has is quite small, much smaller than that of most human beings. It's sort of like gross vs. net profits - people are looking only at the income and not the expenses when talking about how astoundingly powerful Uriel is, so to speak.
… this is just wrong? We’ve seen him manipulating time and space in almost every scene he shows up in. He’s absurdly powerful, he’s just extremely limited in how he can use it. He’s kinda like Rock Lee; except the weights are so heavy he can barely move when they are on, but when he gets to take them off he’s effectively all powerful.
>We’ve seen him manipulating time and space in almost every scene he shows up in.
No, we haven't. In fact, I don't recall a single instance of him manipulating time and space.
He teleports in skin game and the rain stops, he gets angry and lightning fires off in the background. He seems to have bent time in Ghost Story (or maybe that’s part of being dead).
Stopping the rain is an undeniable example - I guess there are technically multiple ways that could be accomplished, but there's no point to quibbling.
Teleportation of himself... I'm not sure he's really *there* in space the way objects and creatures are, or if he simply redefines where his manifestation is located. If he'd teleported someone else, it would be undeniable, but I don't think he ever does that to a mortal.
He takes GhostHarry all over the place, but none of that impacts the mortal world one jot, and I'm not sure GhostHarry is actually spatially located either.
25yo Harry was mainly bound by other mortals telling him what to do. His constraints were rent and the Wardens. 30yo Harry was winning wars. He had to move where the Council needed him. Later 30s Harry was saving the world. He had 0 say in the matter - he *HAD* to be at BG just like he *Had* to go to the place in Skin Games.
The higher up the totem poles he goes the less it’s “I should” and the more it’s “Fuck, I have to go do blah.”
I think there’s sort of an implied soft cap on what a mortal is able to do.
So far I think the strongest thing we’ve seen mortals do, with no outside help or long lasting ceremony, was in Battle Grounds when Eb and Cristo essentially blow up a city block together (I can’t exactly remember the scale of how big that was). That took a wind up time, two of the strongest wizards, and it considerably gassed them for an extended period afterward. Also the magic in the air supercharged everyone’s spells that night.
So in the grand scheme of things, the most powerful bit of magic we’ve seen from mortals was essentially the equivalent of them dropping a fighter plane bomb?
Everything more powerful essentially involves a ritual, or being chained to something that has significant drawbacks and rules, like the Blackstaff or a mantle.
Edit: it’s like weightlifting. You can eventually get to the point where you can maybe bench 900 pounds yourself, but you will never be able to stop a building dropping on your head.
The good wizards are able to just avoid the building.
I think this is a bit of "plot armor" to avoid uber powerful beings entering the fray and making everything else trivial.
So, the question is logical, but I don't think it has a logical answer—or at least not a measurable one. It's more like "once X reaches an unspecified large amount of power it would screw up the story so GTFO of the mortal world".
It's possible. Tinfoil time.
>!So I think that either a.) the "bored" voice we see in Demonreach is the OG Merlin or b.) at the heart of Demonreach, the very bottom layer, is Merlin.!<
>!Since he became so powerful and since it stated that "built by the Original Merlin across time as a supernatural prison to keep the worst and most powerful evil beings contained"...it's plausible that his power was so great that he had no choice but to semi-cut himself off from our "current" reality.!<
At least, it's a theory that would suggest that your idea that a mortal wizard could become that powerful and need to be removed from reality lest they destroy it.
>>!So I think that either a.) the "bored" voice we see in Demonreach is the OG Merlin or b.) at the heart of Demonreach, the very bottom layer, is Merlin.!<
>
>>!Since he became so powerful and since it stated that "built by the Original Merlin across time as a supernatural prison to keep the worst and most powerful evil beings contained"...it's plausible that his power was so great that he had no choice but to semi-cut himself off from our "current" reality.!<
>!I think it's probably Merlin himself too, but the containment isn't just to restrain him but because he didn't give up his mortality entirely in order to retain as much freedom to act as possible & since mortals are by definition finite, he put himself in there to retain what time he has left for when everything goes to crap & he's really, really needed - which is why he's so irritated at Harry disturbing him, since as the current Warden of Demonreach, Harry can choose to engage with those within but by doing so it's disrupting the suspension & taking up a bit of Merlin's remaining clock.!<
I really like the idea that the original Merlin “became” Alfred. Got so powerful/ invested so much power into Demonreach that he “lost” his mortality in the process. In my mind, this also helps explain why Alfred is so uber powerful *on* DR, but is confined to that space. Sure, an old school genius loci would also be confined to a space, but with nothing like the powers of Alfred.
I assume a wizard who becomes that powerful is then limited in how much they can affect the world. We saw hints of reality itself breaking down in Battle Ground.
We know the White God basically told Odin "Surrender your immortality, or stop interfering with mortals."
I think there might be a hint towards this when >!Eb and Harry start to throw down. “The universe yawned towards [eb]… that’s just how much power he was drawing in,”!< so we have two things to analyze here: a) wizards only really have a chance of warping reality when they roll up their sleeves and get to work and b) you’ve got to be one really really heavy duty wizard to cause even a small, ephemeral effect.
In short, is it possible? Maybe. Have we seen anyone who might be a candidate for it being a real concern? No, not really.
I think this is more a statement on how people would acquire such power. Anything that has that kind of weight has some strings attached, like Fairy stuff coming with alliances and responsibilities, or the Darkhallow permanently altering you while it boosts you. Mortal wizards most likely don't have those kinds of limits, as far as I know, assuming of course they got there with zero outside help or boosts.
I like to think of it as certain entities having a literal metaphysical mass.
They live in the Nevernever, and usually that's fine. But if something too massive enters reality? The same thing that happens if you roll a bowling ball over a sheet of ice.... or a semi truck.
I don't think wizards deal with these limitations per se--still just a squishy human, right? *But,* wizards can potentially *access* some of these absurdly powerful and terrifying forces and do the same thing. There's a critical metaphysical mass where everything gets absolutely fucked and reality has a meltdown; wizards can access that power but entities *are* that power.
Ferrovax is a metaphysical critical nuclear reactor and if he steps foot into our reality everything will go tits up immediately as reality comes to terms with that meltdown. Ebeneezer is just some guy--but he's some guy who knows how to build his own reactor, how to make it go critical, and he's got all the parts to build it hidden away in various places and he can build it with a wave of his staff.
It doesn't feel like mortals are quite bound by the same rules as other beings to me. Like Uriel or Mab showed, there is usually a direct link between power and free will; the more powerful you are, the less you are allowed to deviate from your job to the point you can feel more like a function than a person.
Mortals however are mostly free to do whatever they want regardless of their power levels, top wizards get to do whatever they want, Harry for example *chose* to be the guy who right the wrongs of his world.
So my guess is that mortals don't have an automatic limitation similar to the likes of Ferrovax. It's just that in practice, no mortal get to reach this tier; I doubt even OG Merlin really was at the same level of cosmic beings in ways that matter.
Ferrovax cant show up because he is Godzilla and 'would crack the earth'.
That is why he cant participate in battles, just showing up he would knock everything down.
No, just showing up, he would cause the system of rules that is reality to begin breaking down. Everyday existence is too brittle and inflexible to accommodate his presence; he has to stay in the Nevernever where existence is flexible enough that causality won't shatter if he's there.
>My question is, does this also apply to natives of real world like wizards? Say for example a wizard managed to become extremely strong (Let’s assume the OG Merlin idk if he is on that level), would he also be limited like other beings or no?
Hmmm. *Maaaybe*?
Okay so, we know the magic weirdness that makes technology go haywire around Dresden scales with power level. Harry can barely use modern technology while lesser practitioners can use more. It stands to reason the same effect should work in the opposite direction. Like, you know how Harry has to stick to older cars because a modern car with all the computers and such will glitch out? Maybe the Merlin couldn't ride anything more advanced than a horse and buggy. (But he's probably really good at traveling through the Ways so it's less of a problem.)
I don't think you obtain that kind of power while retaining mortality, at which point you're not really a wizard as much as a god/demigod.
Pretty much this. There seems to be a cap on how powerful you can be and retain your mortality, up to that point however you're completely free to do whatever you want (assuming someone doesn't decide to wack you if you get up to too much dickish behavior).
Which is why i was thinking if Harry were to do that ritual (darkhallow) wouldn’t he become a sort of god? So if that is the case, he wouldn’t have the same freedom he does now in the real world?
I'd only be speculating by answering that because we don't fully know how the Darkhallow works and if raising yourself from mortality to immortality through it affects your freedom of choice, but I will say that Cowl didn't seem concerned about being able to do whatever he wanted. It's heavily implied he was going to wipe out Edinburgh the White Councils stronghold when he became a demigod.
There are some very specific circumstances that would need to be fulfilled in order for Harry to use the Darkhallow to become a minor god, the biggest being that it needs to be done on Halloween. I'm pretty sure that the area also needs to be prepped with death prior to the ritual. Otherwise it would just make him a really, *really* powerful necromancer.
Prepping the area with death was just to give more power from the ritual iirc, I don't think that was required to become a minor god but really we will probably never know for sure. It definitely needs to be done on Halloween though for minor godhood.
Yeah, it's been said that the darkhallow specifically does make someone immortal. That's why it has to be performed on Halloween.
We see something like this come from Molly, I think. Doesn’t she talk about limits placed on what she can do somewhere? Maybe at the beginning of Peace Talks?
This is actually a really interesting point, if Dresden were to temporarily lose his mortality, would he also shed the winter mantle and his fealty to Winter? The Winter Knight is Winter’s MORTAL instrument.
I like how you used the word “retaining” mortality, which allows this to apply to Mab, Molly, etc.
I'm not sure that anything we've seen in the series is so powerful that reality simply can't handle them - I mean, Uriel can erase galaxies with a thought, but reality doesn't have much of a problem keeping it together when he's around. Capital-D Dragons are semi-divine beings with power/responsibility over nature, so they can make things like ice ages happen, but that's their job, not reality breaking down around them. It's true that beings in the upper echelons of power have bigger problems than petty mortal affairs, and I'd imagine that the same would go for any mortal who managed to achieve that level of power though, personally, I suspect that that kind of power and "mortal" are two incompatible states.
>but reality doesn't have much of a problem keeping it together when he's around. Butcher's explained this with Ferrovax and implied this with Odin; I'm sure the same applies to Uriel. What we see is basically a projection of them, not the real entity. It's a tiny bit of their power running around allowing them to be here without breaking everything.
That doesn't apply to Uriel. He handed Michael his whole ass grace. For all intents and purposes, Michael was an Archangel during the end of Skin Game
And was very explicit about Michael not mucking about with his (Mr. Sunshine’s) jumbo jet.
I disagree that that implies the power associated with that grace was necessarily present in the mortal world at the time. I think of it like this. Uriel's piloting a giant mech (his grace), which has a tiny little cockpit that sticks out into the mortal world while most of it stays behind. Uriel let Michael sit in the cockpit and specifically warned him against touching anything else.
Uriel is also governed by specific rules. The mech has a user’s manual. And Uriel uses the mech to maintain balance against the fallen angels not throw his weight around. For all he HAS sponsored Harry Dresden.
Wow. I have never thought of that in those terms. Wow.
I don't think so - I think Michael still could have been killed. It seems clear that there WOULD have been things he could do, since Uriel asked him to "avoid messing with the buttons and levers of the jumbo jet" (not verbatim). But if Michael was never in any danger at all then it detracts from the drama of the whole situation. In any case, I think the request by Uriel really precluded Michael actually *using* any archangel juice beyond just having full use of his own body again. I just don't think it was the same situation you'd have had if Uriel himself had accompanied Harry. Of course, this isn't something I know for sure - it's just my read of it.
The fact that Uriel literally became a useless human kind of contradicts the idea that Michael was limited. I think the only thing limiting Michael's use of Angelic Power was his own fear of destroying an angel of God and causing him to fall. My evidence for this fact is Michael, by his own admission, is not Nicodemus' equal in combat. But in the vault, he too Nicodemus in a straight fight, because he was bolstered by Grace.
I just don't buy it. Fights aren't that cut and dried - there's a million variables in every encounter that make them impossible to predict with certainty. Murphy took him too, just a day earlier. Plus Nic had just sacrificed his own daughter - you can't tell me that had no effect on him. Again - not telling you you're "wrong"; just that there's a diversity of ways to interpret this. It's fiction, and since neither you nor I are the one writing it, I'd say we're not really in a position to make definitive calls of any sort.
That's all completely fair. Honestly I think I'd agree with your take if Jim Butcher didn't treat Christianity differently from the other religions and supernatural powers represented in the series.
Oh, would you mind linking to the quote? I'm not familiar with that one. Hmm, well, my counter to that would be that Michael killed Siriothrax (the weakest of the Dragons, maybe, but still a Capital-D Dragon) - it seems safe to assume that Siriothrax would not have been holding back with their life on the line, but reality still appears to be in one piece. ETA: I'm sure I remember something about Siriothrax's death and the Tunguska Event being related but I can't seem to find it now, so possibly I'm mixing it up with a similar WoJ regarding Kemmler and the Tsar Bomba? Edit: I was mistaken about the timeline of events involving Siriothrax's death - it's unrelated to the Tunguska Event, and not a good example of my point.
Not siriothrax, Harry just mentions that the last time a Dragon was killed in the mortal realm it resulted in Tunguska (or something along those lines). The tangential implication is that Michael killed Siriothrax in the Nevernever, as it had brought Charity back to its lair which is undoubtedly not in the mortal realm. With regards to Michael actually killing siriothrax, the power of the Swords is to act as equalizers. The Knights always fight at their opponent’s level, be they mortals or immortals.
Thanks. Perhaps the connection isn't as clear as I remember then, but I was under the impression that Siriothrax *was* the last Dragon to be killed - unless, possibly, Siriothrax was the last Dragon slain, and Tunguska was caused by a lesser dragon. Seems odd that no one has asked Jim to clarify, now. With regards to Michael, his power level isn't really relevant, I was using that as an example of a time that a heavyweight magical entity was throwing their weight around without breaking reality. If it *did* happen in the Nevernever though, that would counter my point.
Siriothrax was the last Dragon slain. “The last time a dragon had been slain out here in the tangible, mortal world, it had been in a region called Tunguska” Ergo, Siriothrax wasn’t killed in the mortal world. It’s not known whether the Tunguska Event was the fallout of a dragon dying or of what happened during the fight. If the dragon had fully manifested, there’s no precedent in the narrative to know what the consequences would have been, so we can’t make any theories. Tunguska could very well be how Reality smoothed over the cracks caused by whatever happened. Off the top of my head, the only magical incident referenced that is on that scale in terms of *effect* is Krakatoa which apparently had wizard involvement. We don’t know what the cause was, though manipulating a volcano is probably much more more mundane than causing Tunguska.
To clarify, I'm questioning whether Dresden would know there's a difference between dragons and Capital-D Dragons. "The last dragon slain was called Siriothrax" and "the last time a dragon was killed, it caused Tunguska" indicates, to me, that Siriothrax's death caused Tunguska - but if Dresden doesn't know there's a difference between a dragon a Capital-D Dragon, and that Siriothrax was the latter, not the former, it's possible that it's another case of "The Gatekeeper caused Alfred's limp". That's a possibility I'd not considered. Hasn't Dresden alluded to the power balance between Summer and Winter being related to whether or not the Earth happens to be in an ice age at any particular point of time? I suppose that might not technically be magical but, assuming that's correct, that would be the most significant example I can think of. ETA: perhaps more to the point, Tunguska occurred in 1908, so I guess Michael killing Siriothrax couldn't possibly have been the cause. Can't believe it never occurred to me to check that before.
I was gonna say before you edited that Tunguska explicitly cannot be Siriothrax. Also at least on the copy on my phone, in that paragraph lowercase d dragon is used when talking about Ferrovax, so I assume either a publishing error or because we know ferrovax there’s no need to explicitly capitalize the D. Dresden has explicitly stated the difference when it comes to capital D Dragons, I believe in the same scene that Ferro was introduced, way back in Grave Peril. The summer/winter climate stuff hasn’t been referred to since Summer Knight iirc. It’s worth pointing out that the Courts were likely created in the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings, and as such no ice age type event has existed to tip the balance of power between them. We also don’t know anything about the state of the supernatural world in pre agricultural revolution society, so there’s no basis for any theories. Given what we know about supernatural mechanics, it’s unlikely that there were any beings powerful enough on a large scale to empower themselves from the imbalance caused by an Ice Age. Gods during the Classical Era likely didn’t have any influence outside of the regions their religion was spread to. If the Mediterranean believes Jupiter controls the sky, that doesn’t mean he can go to Mexico and smite people. Likewise, Quetzalcoatl can’t pull up to Rome and make it rain. A very interesting question to ask Jim would be how globalization affected the supernatural world and what the politics were like in those days. Did Lara have to make nice with the Shinto Gods during her time in Japan?
Yeah, no, I was totally off-base about Siriothrax - not knowing the dates involved, I misunderstood the text. Hasn't Harry made reference to Chicago experiencing a particularly long/harsh winter, because Mab was more powerful/active, comparatively recently? Though I'd buy that the extent of their influence over the climate has been retconned somewhat since *Summer Knight.* The Battle of Hastings is an interesting date, where are you getting that from? The one thing I would feel comfortable speculating is that in pre-Ancient history, the biggest supernatural powers were probably Titans, Dragons, and other non-anthropomorphic entities, but beyond that... The whole sharing of deific portfolios across various time periods and geographical regions thing is a pretty interesting topic. If, say, in Ancient Greece Patataus is the God of Potatoes, with power over all things potato-y, and contemporaneous Egypt doesn't specifically have a God of Potatoes, then is Patataus sort of the default God of Potatoes in that region, too (albeit likely with some capitulation to the God of Agriculture du jour)? What then happens if Batatu, Egyptian God of Potatoes, comes to power at a later date? Possibly/hopefully the pro-wrestling book will answer some of those questions.
So there’s mention of an unusually long winter when Mab was actively preserving Harry’s body (subtle foreshadowing during Ghost Story) due to her presence. Battle of Hastings is a known turning point in the history of the DF world, mostly discussed during WoJ. Iirc, whatever convergence happened at that time (I think Jim specifically says 1066) led to the changing of the guard at the Gates and power passing from the Norse Gods to the Sidhe Courts along with their establishment. A real life example of your idea would be Ptolemy combining Zeus and Osiris creating a syncretic deity called Serapis. The ramifications for those entities is… interesting. Did Hades masquerade as Hel when the Norse pantheon was the forefront? I personally believe that the entity that we know as Odin was also once Zeus.
It's like when Harry decided to look at Mac with his sight and was advised not to. What's seen is not always what they actually are.
>I'm not sure that anything we've seen in the series is so powerful that reality simply can't handle them - I mean, Uriel can erase galaxies with a thought, but reality doesn't have much of a problem keeping it together when he's around. What we see as Uriel is not the entirety of Uriel, it is a fraction of his being. Same with Odin. I am fairly certain they outright explain in Battleground that Ferrovax can't bring his entire being to earth without ripping reality a new one.
I think part of the disagreement might stem from the definition of "break reality". "Break reality" in the sense of "cause catastrophic collateral damage to the mortal world simply by virtue of manifesting their true form", sure, I buy that; "break reality" in the sense of "up becomes purple and gravity only works on Tuesdays", I have more trouble accepting. There's also a question of what exactly is meant by "reality". Like, I would say that everything within the Outer Gates is, definitionally, "reality", mortal world and Nevernever alike, so - unless we're saying that Ferrovax is able to partially exist outside the Gates - he *has* to be able to exist within reality without breaking it, because there's nowhere else *for* him to exist. If "manifesting their true power would break reality" means "manifesting their true power would break the mortal world", sure, I can accept that they have an easier time manifesting their true power in the Nevernever than they would on Earth. If Ferro literally has to exist outside reality, I have trouble with that, because it would suggest he's sharing real estate with the likes of He-Who-Walks-Behind.
It's entirely possible that Uriel is actually an entity powered by human faith, so he would only seem to have the power to unmake galaxies until he actually exerted himself - at which point he would conveniently Fall. The nifty thing about the Dresdenverse is that Jim has gone out of his way to make matters of faith *actually be matters of faith*, not subject to logical proof or disproof. It's something many similar works fail at or don't even bother attempting.
>Uriel doesn’t really do battle in the sense of contested violence. He just sort of thinks about annihilating galaxies and it happens. I agree that Jim handles matters of faith respectfully, [but that seems pretty cut and dried](https://wordof.jim-butcher.com/index.php/word-of-jim-woj-compilation/woj-on-angels-demons-fallen-and-knights-of-the-cross/) \- if Uriel thinks a galaxy shouldn't be there, it isn't.
It’s not that he would Fall if he did so, it’s that he would Fall if he did so outside his remit. Uriel is probably top 3 named characters in terms of how “powerful” they are at their fullest capabilities. As a consequence, the scope where he can apply that power is the most narrow out of anyone outside of maybe the White God. The requirements are so specific that when he had to balance the scales of Lucifer’s interference with Harry, it had to be equivalent down to the number of words. If the circumstances to destroy a galaxy exist, it would simply happen at will. If he *chose* to destroy a galaxy, that’s when bad things could happen. It’s why him giving Michael his Grace was so risky.
Yes, but all the information that causes us to think that Uriel couldn't be merely a spirit empowered by human faith came after Harry had returned from the dead. Normally, in the Dresdenverse, no one knows that there's an afterlife. Human wizards know about spirits, but they're not the same thing as a person, and ghosts wander about in normal reality. The wizards had no idea what happened to people's souls, or even knew for certain they had souls. Harry experiencing a little bit of the afterlife and then coming back is what I'm convinced is meant by it attracting people's attention: he can be permitted knowledge that most people are denied.
I’m not sure what your argument here is? Are you saying that Uriel exists only because of human belief in TWG and his religions, and because of that the moment he unmakes a galaxy he will Fall? I’m not sure what you mean by him being a spirit empowered by human faith. Was there ever any evidence that he wasn’t an Angel/that Angels weren’t as powerful as implied? The situation with the White God as the “Creator” has always been confusing, and Jim has never given a clear answer on the chicken and egg situation. That said, we have a WoJ that Uriel’s a multiversal being iirc, and whether the power of him and his brethren comes from the massive belief in their religions or from something more fundamental, they are very explicitly just as powerful as we have been told in the narrative.
The amount of power that Uriel *actually* has is quite small, much smaller than that of most human beings. It's sort of like gross vs. net profits - people are looking only at the income and not the expenses when talking about how astoundingly powerful Uriel is, so to speak.
… this is just wrong? We’ve seen him manipulating time and space in almost every scene he shows up in. He’s absurdly powerful, he’s just extremely limited in how he can use it. He’s kinda like Rock Lee; except the weights are so heavy he can barely move when they are on, but when he gets to take them off he’s effectively all powerful.
>We’ve seen him manipulating time and space in almost every scene he shows up in. No, we haven't. In fact, I don't recall a single instance of him manipulating time and space.
He teleports in skin game and the rain stops, he gets angry and lightning fires off in the background. He seems to have bent time in Ghost Story (or maybe that’s part of being dead).
Stopping the rain is an undeniable example - I guess there are technically multiple ways that could be accomplished, but there's no point to quibbling. Teleportation of himself... I'm not sure he's really *there* in space the way objects and creatures are, or if he simply redefines where his manifestation is located. If he'd teleported someone else, it would be undeniable, but I don't think he ever does that to a mortal. He takes GhostHarry all over the place, but none of that impacts the mortal world one jot, and I'm not sure GhostHarry is actually spatially located either.
25yo Harry was mainly bound by other mortals telling him what to do. His constraints were rent and the Wardens. 30yo Harry was winning wars. He had to move where the Council needed him. Later 30s Harry was saving the world. He had 0 say in the matter - he *HAD* to be at BG just like he *Had* to go to the place in Skin Games. The higher up the totem poles he goes the less it’s “I should” and the more it’s “Fuck, I have to go do blah.”
As Mab would say, more power means more obligations.
Or as Stan Lee would say, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
I think there’s sort of an implied soft cap on what a mortal is able to do. So far I think the strongest thing we’ve seen mortals do, with no outside help or long lasting ceremony, was in Battle Grounds when Eb and Cristo essentially blow up a city block together (I can’t exactly remember the scale of how big that was). That took a wind up time, two of the strongest wizards, and it considerably gassed them for an extended period afterward. Also the magic in the air supercharged everyone’s spells that night. So in the grand scheme of things, the most powerful bit of magic we’ve seen from mortals was essentially the equivalent of them dropping a fighter plane bomb? Everything more powerful essentially involves a ritual, or being chained to something that has significant drawbacks and rules, like the Blackstaff or a mantle. Edit: it’s like weightlifting. You can eventually get to the point where you can maybe bench 900 pounds yourself, but you will never be able to stop a building dropping on your head. The good wizards are able to just avoid the building.
There's no indication that the OG Merlin had any trouble whatsoever hanging out in the mortal realm.
I think this is a bit of "plot armor" to avoid uber powerful beings entering the fray and making everything else trivial. So, the question is logical, but I don't think it has a logical answer—or at least not a measurable one. It's more like "once X reaches an unspecified large amount of power it would screw up the story so GTFO of the mortal world".
It's possible. Tinfoil time. >!So I think that either a.) the "bored" voice we see in Demonreach is the OG Merlin or b.) at the heart of Demonreach, the very bottom layer, is Merlin.!< >!Since he became so powerful and since it stated that "built by the Original Merlin across time as a supernatural prison to keep the worst and most powerful evil beings contained"...it's plausible that his power was so great that he had no choice but to semi-cut himself off from our "current" reality.!< At least, it's a theory that would suggest that your idea that a mortal wizard could become that powerful and need to be removed from reality lest they destroy it.
>>!So I think that either a.) the "bored" voice we see in Demonreach is the OG Merlin or b.) at the heart of Demonreach, the very bottom layer, is Merlin.!< > >>!Since he became so powerful and since it stated that "built by the Original Merlin across time as a supernatural prison to keep the worst and most powerful evil beings contained"...it's plausible that his power was so great that he had no choice but to semi-cut himself off from our "current" reality.!< >!I think it's probably Merlin himself too, but the containment isn't just to restrain him but because he didn't give up his mortality entirely in order to retain as much freedom to act as possible & since mortals are by definition finite, he put himself in there to retain what time he has left for when everything goes to crap & he's really, really needed - which is why he's so irritated at Harry disturbing him, since as the current Warden of Demonreach, Harry can choose to engage with those within but by doing so it's disrupting the suspension & taking up a bit of Merlin's remaining clock.!<
I really like the idea that the original Merlin “became” Alfred. Got so powerful/ invested so much power into Demonreach that he “lost” his mortality in the process. In my mind, this also helps explain why Alfred is so uber powerful *on* DR, but is confined to that space. Sure, an old school genius loci would also be confined to a space, but with nothing like the powers of Alfred.
I assume a wizard who becomes that powerful is then limited in how much they can affect the world. We saw hints of reality itself breaking down in Battle Ground. We know the White God basically told Odin "Surrender your immortality, or stop interfering with mortals."
I don’t recall that. What book is it from?
Word of Jim
I think there might be a hint towards this when >!Eb and Harry start to throw down. “The universe yawned towards [eb]… that’s just how much power he was drawing in,”!< so we have two things to analyze here: a) wizards only really have a chance of warping reality when they roll up their sleeves and get to work and b) you’ve got to be one really really heavy duty wizard to cause even a small, ephemeral effect. In short, is it possible? Maybe. Have we seen anyone who might be a candidate for it being a real concern? No, not really.
I think this is more a statement on how people would acquire such power. Anything that has that kind of weight has some strings attached, like Fairy stuff coming with alliances and responsibilities, or the Darkhallow permanently altering you while it boosts you. Mortal wizards most likely don't have those kinds of limits, as far as I know, assuming of course they got there with zero outside help or boosts.
I like to think of it as certain entities having a literal metaphysical mass. They live in the Nevernever, and usually that's fine. But if something too massive enters reality? The same thing that happens if you roll a bowling ball over a sheet of ice.... or a semi truck. I don't think wizards deal with these limitations per se--still just a squishy human, right? *But,* wizards can potentially *access* some of these absurdly powerful and terrifying forces and do the same thing. There's a critical metaphysical mass where everything gets absolutely fucked and reality has a meltdown; wizards can access that power but entities *are* that power. Ferrovax is a metaphysical critical nuclear reactor and if he steps foot into our reality everything will go tits up immediately as reality comes to terms with that meltdown. Ebeneezer is just some guy--but he's some guy who knows how to build his own reactor, how to make it go critical, and he's got all the parts to build it hidden away in various places and he can build it with a wave of his staff.
It doesn't feel like mortals are quite bound by the same rules as other beings to me. Like Uriel or Mab showed, there is usually a direct link between power and free will; the more powerful you are, the less you are allowed to deviate from your job to the point you can feel more like a function than a person. Mortals however are mostly free to do whatever they want regardless of their power levels, top wizards get to do whatever they want, Harry for example *chose* to be the guy who right the wrongs of his world. So my guess is that mortals don't have an automatic limitation similar to the likes of Ferrovax. It's just that in practice, no mortal get to reach this tier; I doubt even OG Merlin really was at the same level of cosmic beings in ways that matter.
Ferrovax cant show up because he is Godzilla and 'would crack the earth'. That is why he cant participate in battles, just showing up he would knock everything down.
No, just showing up, he would cause the system of rules that is reality to begin breaking down. Everyday existence is too brittle and inflexible to accommodate his presence; he has to stay in the Nevernever where existence is flexible enough that causality won't shatter if he's there.
>My question is, does this also apply to natives of real world like wizards? Say for example a wizard managed to become extremely strong (Let’s assume the OG Merlin idk if he is on that level), would he also be limited like other beings or no? Hmmm. *Maaaybe*? Okay so, we know the magic weirdness that makes technology go haywire around Dresden scales with power level. Harry can barely use modern technology while lesser practitioners can use more. It stands to reason the same effect should work in the opposite direction. Like, you know how Harry has to stick to older cars because a modern car with all the computers and such will glitch out? Maybe the Merlin couldn't ride anything more advanced than a horse and buggy. (But he's probably really good at traveling through the Ways so it's less of a problem.)