I never thought of Cowl as having a German accent or really any kind of accent.  The only clue Cowl might be German is he knew the difference between Shubert's music Erlkönig and Goethe's poem, which provide the words used in the song.  However, you don't have to be Austrian or German to know who those two people were.  Harry has any affinity for classical music so he's heard of Franz Shubert and probably went to concerts where his music was played.  Whether he's read much poetry or anything by Goethe is something we have no way of knowing, but I wouldn't be surprised if Harry is much better read than the average college graduate because he doesn't have a TV, radio or the internet.

I'm pretty sure Cowl's reference to Goethe was a quip jumping from Erlkonig to his even more famous work, the play Faust - as in, Cowl was alluding to having made a Faustian bargain himself, but it went over Harry's head at the time.

I doubt he has to be German to be familiar with those works though. Pretty much any wizard of European origin and sufficient age would presumably have been exposed to the range of classical music and literature. Most of the elderly, conventional Council types seem to make a point of flaunting that they're upper class - it probably would have been considered terribly vulgar not to educate their apprentices on culture as well as magic.

Cowl doesn't like "the bad man Kemmler".

That, again, falls under saying one thing in front of Kumori and another later when she's not listening. At Murphy's house, when she's inside searching for Bob and Cowl is talking to Harry outside, he makes it pretty clear that he has plenty of history with Kemmler and the other apprentices. He says knocking the power out while Grevane and Corpsetaker fought each other was par for the course - him doing the serious technical magic while they bickered - and that it was also normal that they'd present one face of smiling and getting along for the greater glory of Kemmler while planning to eliminate each other when the chance came.

He might not have been exactly an apprentice like the others. He might even have serious misgivings about Kemmler himself. But when he doesn't have to worry about shaking Kumori's delusion that he's in it for some greater good, he's quite free about admitting an association with Kemmler and company that goes beyond "nothing but disdain".

There is one big advantage to the Coin, though: Harry could have set it aside afterward. Michael would have saved him, I'm certain of it. It's going to be much harder to get out of being the Winter Knight, at least until next Halloween.

Except if Michael was right that setting down the coin means forfeiting his magic too, the whole 'wizard PI' concept for the series is going to be down one wizard.

Out of curiosity, does anyone know if there's a WOJ on what would happen if Ivy died without a descendant ready to take on the Archive?
I mean, when the current Archive dies, it's "mantle" (for lack of a better term) goes somewhere . If there's no ready recepticle, does it die out?
Does it pick a new recepticle?

There's no WOJ I'm aware of to settle that. Personally, I suspect it jumps to the next nearest cousin in the founding Archive's bloodline, but that's just a guess.

On the bizarre side, she could end up like that Twitter bot Microsoft put out that became a Nazi

I was just thinking of that one! RIP Tay, you had a good 24 hours.

Not exactly.  There is a smaller more covert organization within the Venatori Umbrorum that is fighting the Oblivion War.  Most members within the larger organization don't even know it exists, let alone its true purpose.  Thomas and Lara Raith are members of that smaller group, though I can't remember it's name.

They called themselves Venators. Their pun was that the Venatori Umbrorum think their name means something like Shadow Hunters, it's actually Shadows of the Hunters - the rest of them are basically just elaborate camoflage for the inhuman Venators to do the real work.

As for the Thule, they might have some overlap with the Circle, but it seemed that the Thule membership were human, while many of the known Circle members were vampires. If anything, it seems more likely that the Thule were created by the Circle to act as proxies / generally increase chaos.

I'm not sure whether Kemmler would have been down with the whole pro-Outsider agenda, either. He didn't really reveal enough in the short story to judge whether his crazy ran in the direction of wanting to let the Outsiders in in the hopes of being rewarded for it. But if the Darkhallow was the culmination of his life's work, it would seem becoming a lower-level god is somewhat devalued at an objective if you're also going to be letting a whole pantheon of much more powerful dark gods back onto the scene.

Oh? an now we have proof when Luccio was compromised do we?

At some point after getting bodyswapped. The part that proves it is where the text of TC outright says it was the bodyswap that made her vulnerable to influence, where an older wizard's mind would normally have been too set in its ways to be forcibly altered like that. Morgan is full of self-recrimination over not predicting that could be an issue.

Cowl didn't need a copy for himself.  He was trying to remove copies that the others could use.  They'd been gathering the copies for weeks, if I recall.

There's a considerable distance between what he says about his motivations in front of Kumori in that scene, and what he actually does later. Early on he claims to be trying to foil the others by removing the books, but in the end he actually preferred to see someone else risk the Erlking's wrath by doing the actual summoning, and swoop in himself at the last moment of the Darkhallow. If you reread him talking to Harry after knocking him on the head in Murphy's back yard - when Kumori wasn't around to have her impression that he's trying to use dark power to do good ruined by him talking honestly - he's quite open that he can work with one of the other two doing the summoning step, but he had to stop Harry foiling that.

Now, maybe he's just insane due to nemfection, and his actions are all over the map. But personally, I think his efforts to get other copies out of circulation were primarily for the sake of maintaining Kumori's illusions about his real motives so she would stay obedient, rather than a significant interest in denying the summoning incantation to other players.

*btw when Luccio has been compromised as well as Peabody being a TC, them having high level WC reports isn't really a big mystery.

Luccio wasn't compromised until after that conversation. And while Peabody was a Circle traitor, I think he must have been operating in a different cell of the organization than Cowl. It simply doesn't make sense that finding Die Lied Der Erlking was important to Cowl if he was already getting regular document dumps from the guy who wrote it.

(which honestly, what's the evidence for Simon is Cowl anyway? )

- Beastly strong human practitioner
- Had access to high-level internal White Council reports (just before fighting Harry outside Bock's he said he was "curious what had the Wardens so nervous about him") - this rules out future Harry time travel theories because he would have known exactly how strong his younger self was
- Connections with the Reds to synchronize their assault with his Darkhallow plans
- Has a female apprentice

That circumstantial evidence defines one hell of a narrow candidate pool.