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I don't think we'll see him in the Mirror'verse. I think we'll see him get snatched, and cliffhang on "what thing just reached out of the mirror and grabbed Harry?!!?"
Is MM confirmed 100% as the next book, BTW?
"Rumours of your death et cetera" I shurgged "I'm sure it isn't an uncommon play among wizards" I said/ Something in his eye flashed, an amused thought that went by almost before I could see it. "Fewer try it then you might think"
If you’re (a powerful immortal being) in the real world, well, the problem is that you’re in the world, and you’re kind of mortal, and something could come along and try and whack you, if they’re fast enough, or good enough, or lucky enough. Which makes Odin a kind of special guy, because he doesn’t mind it, he thinks it’s awesome.
"This became the tale with which you are familiar only in fairly recent times. There are wizards enough alive today who knew of no such person when they were children awaiting the winter holiday"
I nodded thoughtfully. "You became something else"
He gave me a wink of his eye.
"He knew certain names. He was not wholly stupid in choosing them or wholly wrong in using them"
'Did he...?
"No croaked Mother Winter. "Not that one. But he has seen the adversary and learned one of its names"
Calculation and thought flickered through those green eyes, faster than I could follow. Ah yes. I see Mother Summer said. "So many new futures unwinding"
"Too many bright ones" Mother Winter said sullenly
"Even you must think better that than empty night"
"What my counterpart knows I know"
"Who are you really?"Our name most people assume is Gaia. Mother of Earth
Mother Summer stopped in her tracks and turned to look at me. Her eyebrows slowly lifted "That is a very significant question"
....
"It's just got me thinking: masks. I know of one figure from ancient tales who is alive and well and incognito. Why shouldn't there be more?"
Mother Summer inclined her head, more a gesture of acknowledgement or admission than agreement. "Things change" she said. "Immortals deal poorly with change. But it comes to everyone"
"I called Mother Winter by the names Athropos and Skuld because they seemed to fit her" I said.
...
Mothers Summer's smile appeared for a moment, dazzling me and then was gone again. "It was not an imbecilic guess" She said. "And Yes she has been known by such names before. But you've only guessed the name of one of her masks- not our most powerful name"
We’ll have to as we go on, in terms of, to a certain degree, some of them have always been there. If we're talking about mantles in There’s all kinds of them. It’s not just Faerie, they’re all over the place. There are still mantles hanging around from Greek times. Greco-Roman mythology, **unintelligible** mythology. The gods are also around, in one form or another, most of them are around. Some of them got themselves killed. Because lets face it, some of those guys were idiots.
And I mean, you go back there and read, and it’s like, how could you possibly have survived that? The answer in the Dresden Files is that they didn't. They *unintelligible* up til they died. Sorry, Hercules, you can only go slamming your head into walls for so long. And if your mantle passed on to The Hulk, it sort of exists in people’s minds and imaginations now.
.
They kinda /do/ win. It’s one reason the White Council thinks of itself as something so ohmygodmighty important. But bear in mind a few things:
1) The White Council /exists/ in order to limit the power of wizards. These days, it’s mostly about keeping wizards out of the black magic–but in the past, it was also to keep wizards out of politics. They would show up as advisers, rarely (most “court wizards” were charlatans or underpowered schmucks), but the Council itself was very much against getting involved in things.
That’s mainly because if the Council threw its weight in anywhere, it was all but guaranteeing a civil war among its own members. (Remember, it’s very Euro-centric.)
The original Merlin learned a lesson about wizards involving themselves in politics. They already have too much power to use wisely, from his point of view.
2) Wizards were a hell of a lot more rare in centuries past. Their numbers have increased along with the world population, but back then a given country was lucky if it had produced a single wizard-level talent more than about one generation in three.
3) Travel in general was a lot harder. Disease, in general, was a lot more rampant and likely to kill you. Yeah, wizards have the capacity to recover from things, but they don’t have any particular increased resistance to contracting a disease. They just come back from it in better shape than regular folks. For example, if you get a good case of pneumonia (like I did), you’ve got a reduced capacity to resist subsequent similar infections. And that’s it. In fact, having gotten pneumonia once gives you a pretty darn big mathematical probability that you’re going to die of pneumonia in the future. (Pneumonia being one of the main things that actually does the killing when you’ve got cancer or other serious medical issues.) Wizards don’t face that same danger. If they beat it, they beat it, and it isn’t of any more consequence than getting over a cold.
But even so, before antibiotics, wizards were as worried about disease as everyone else was. And a great way to not get diseases was to STAY HOME. Which most of them did. That kinda limited how much conflict they would actually get involved in.
4) The Inquisition. Fact of the matter is that the Inquisition, for better or worse, made everyone REALLY aware of practitioners. If a wizard started slinging his power around willy nilly, it would attract attention. Probably /hostile/ attention, at that. Which leads us to…
5) Wizards have to sleep. Yes, an enraged wizard could probably kill just about anyone he wanted to, flatten towns, all the mighty wizard stuff. But… there are about a million humans to every full-blown wizard talent. A strong wizard can kill a mortal with about as much effort as it would take you to pick up a piece of gravel and toss it twenty feet. Now, go out to a gravel pile and do that a MILLION times.
Of course, that leaves many, many other things they could do to influence events. The most powerful such was the gathering of information and rapid communications. Their ability to travel rapidly, to gather information and send it elsewhere was something that didn’t really get beat until a Mr. Ford, Mr. Marconi, and some guys named Orville and Wilbur came along. And they were basically in the information business, which is an excellent way to guarantee security.
They were also largely responsible for the Renaissance, in the Dresden universe. Not directly, but by going out and finding the best and brightest minds and seeing to it that they got the education and the chances they needed to succeed in life. Some wizards even did direct mentoring of various brilliant figures of European history (DaVinci and Gallileo were two prime examples).
But they stayed out of direct involvement in wars and politics, instead focusing on becoming involved in the intellectual progress of society. Wizards from France and Germany, for example, would treat each other much the same way as opposing lawyers in a big case. Even when their clients were tearing each other to bits, that didn’t meant that the two wizards were foes. They were, in fact, professional colleagues, who were likely to go off and get a beer and roll their eyes at their clients’ foolishness.
(All of this is mostly focused on the White Council, which was centered in Europe. Wizards in other areas of the world, such as the Americas, eastern Asia, and Australia have far different histories.)
But that factor–the sheer weight of numbers of mortals–dictated the role they had to assume to survive and prosper. They hoped that a more advanced, less warlike culture would provide a better place for wizards to live. In fact, it did. But it also robbed them of the extreme power they’d possessed until that time, relative to vanilla mortals.
6) PEOPLE BELIEVED IN MAGIC AND IT SCARED THEM. I mean, there was none of this “but there’s no such thing as magic” nonsense involved. And not all the witch hunters were in it for the money. There was a class of men who knew all about the various forces of the supernatural, out there in the darkness, and who made themselves as able to contend with them as any mortal could be. If a wizard went all kaboomy on mortals, he knew that there was someone who was going to hunt him, striking in a moment of vulnerability.
(I’ll leave it to you to deduce who they grew up into, eventually. It isn’t complicated or hard to see.)
End of the day, even wizards bleed. And as the wise Governor of California says, if it bleeds, you can kill it.