I don't think Eb will survive the BAT... I also believe that, at some point, Harry will be sent to get Mother Winter's cane back.

I agree with the first. I actually think/hope that he goes out fighting Cowl. This shows how strong Cowl really is, and drives home just how strong he has become when Dresden kills him... while wielding the Black Staff. I do hope Mother Winter is going to comment on the cane after he gets it.

I'm unconvinced that they're inherently any more vulnerable to iron/steel than before the Mantles. My read on it was more that the iron blocked the Fae power from doing anything for them, thus dropping them back to where they'd be without the Mantle, which is a sudden shock to the system, especially the longer and more dependent/used the Mantle has been.
I suspect that the situation is more akin to that of Odin/Kringle - While actively wearing the Fae-origin Mantle, they've got Fae weaknesses and limits, but if they were to somehow learn how to not be actively wearing the Mantle while still possessing it, they would not have those weaknesses and limits.

Odin/Kringle is treated as Fae (for most purposes) while he has the Kringle Mantle active, but when he shuts it down to switch over to Odin, he is no longer treated as Fae, but he is always treated as Aesir.

I think an analogy would be ... psychoactive skins (from D&D3.xe, psionics) - you can have more than one on your skin, but only one is active/primary at a time. With mantles, you can have more than one, but only one is active/primary at a time, though with mantles you probably get some passive benefits for mantles that aren't currently active/primary.


As for Harry's longevity ... I doubt we'll ever see it, although Fix's predecessor (?Raoul?) was pretty old but apparently sufficiently fit that he could probably have beaten Slate had he not been bushwhacked. The Fae Knighthood Mantles may well increase longevity, but Harry's already a wizard - and a powerful one - so his natural lifespan was already substantially greater than his probable life expectancy (let's face it, he's never gonna be able to afford life insurance). I suspect that the Knighthood Mantles help keep their bearers physically fit and able longer, even if they don't actively extend lifespan, plus the whole gaining Fae magic may also have an effect similar to that of humans having magic, although that is purely speculative.
Most Knights are generally interchangeable/readily replaced, however, so I'm uncertain as to whether or not the Fae would care to invest the power to actively boost the Knights' lifespans beyond the passive effects inherent in enhanced physical fitness and health plus the magic channeling aspects. Besides, Knights aren't likely to die of old age anyways, and are probably fairly likely to die fairly young while in combat with someone or something.

Well, yes. I don't think Iron/Steel is going to do to Harry/Fix what it would do to someone like Toot or a Gruff (Harry & fixs' wounds didn't burning at the touch of said metal).

Isn't that cutting the hair a bit fine though? For all intents and purposes, Harry does have Fae weaknesses now - when iron pierces his skin he is put into extreme pain, any pain he had is now magnified because Mab's "pain threshold" settings get temporarily set aside, and he finds it hard to even think. Yes he now knows that he can set aside the Mantle/Mask somehow like Kringle does, but until he does, it's part of him.

Therefore since he has Fae weaknesses, and he HAS to obey Mab's laws or the Mantle powers get withdrawn. He's part Fae, even if it wasn't something with which he was born. It's... like an infection I suppose.

This is interesting. On further reading on the Morrigan, it seems that she was the consort to the Dagda, and she indeed translates quite perfectly into the Winter Queen thing. Depending on the source, it also seems that Morgan Le Fay might have been her human aspect. Considering the relationship between the Dagda/Morrigan and Merlin/Morgan, there might be some credence to the "Odin is Merlin" theory. In the same book we find Vaderung is Odin is Kringle who has Time Powers, and we also see that Merlin is very powerful and has Time Powers AND the mental acuity to work in multiple dimensions- I'd say there's a correlation.

I think it's more likely that Morgan Le Fay was the Winter Knight, not the aspect of one of the Queens. (She did have the Le Fay name like Maggie did centuries later, after all.)

I don't buy Merlin=Odin, it's too much of a circle jerk. It's also been stated in the DF that Merlin was a human wizard who did legendary things & was merely taught by Odin.

I personally like the idea that the original Merlin was just a crafty bad-ass wizard. I feel that Odin is Santa is Merlin is taking it one step too far, but I of course trust Jim could make it work and be believable and interesting.
I guess it really depends on which stories Jim draws from. It looks like Morgan Le Fey was originally a supernatural being, and later was reported to be Arthur's half sister. Merlin was supposed to have a demon as his father, I like the idea that Odin is Merlin's Sire better than the two being the same person.

The more I'm looking into it the more things seem to mesh up. Jim specifically mentions Celtic legend and the Dagda story jibs with Arthurian legend and Dresdenology. The thing is that we don't have to go 100% on the real world lore because it all goes through the Jim filter. Lore is a bunch of half-truths anyway.
I am totally open to hearing your thoughts on the matter if you have another line of thought for me to investigate.
I'm just not mentally tying the Blackstaff too tightly to the 1065 AD time frame. That might have been when a change of hands occurred or something.

I immediately could only find a few historically important things of note (thing that I can relate directly to DF) that happened in 1060s Europe:
1063: The River Thames is frozen for 14 weeks. (Obviously something Wintery happened)
1066:
King of England dies, and New King (Harold) gets chosen by a council of old men.
Battle of Hastings, King Harold and all his brothers are killed and England gets taken over.
Dark Ages ends, Middle Ages begin.
End of the Viking Age in England.

We have a little bit to work with there in terms of guessing at the powers and meaning behind those events, but as far as lore and mythology goes I'm at a total lose as to were else I should be looking.

That's a LOT of incredibly historic stuff taking place over a relatively short period of time. Wow, yeah I can sense that I'm going to be doing some major research about those things soon. Thanks!

It's entirely possible that Mother Winter wants it back, but can't take it back because of the balance with Summer.  Perhaps Summer had such an instrument (or something equally powerful but wonderfully different) and it was destroyed. 

That being said, when Eb bites the big one (and he will before this is all over...I'm guessing), Harry will want to grab that blackstaff so he can serve up a rather potent bargaining chip for whatever purpose.

Maybe she wants it back but not enough to set pawns in motion to make it happen? Or she knows it's needed by Mortals for a little while. (She is after all, REALLY Ancient)

Anyone else disappointed that Harry didn't steal that badass Outsider Cloak? It was the right color (grey) too...

Book #4: All about the fae, even called Summer Knight.
Book #14: Apparently all about the fae, and was almost called Winter Knight.

I had a theory about that:
The way you can play on the words of this title make me think that Jim is messing with us/throwing us some info here.

What I mean by that is: When I think of the word Summer I tend to think of as "hot/warm/bright" etc. Yet Night (phonetically) is typically cooler/dark.
On the opposite end of that: Cold Days - Why? Daytime is usually sunny/warmer, so you associate Day with warmth or at least Sunshine. (Yes, these are broad strokes i'm painting here, I realize that during winter daytime can be freaking freezing in most parts of the world.)

I think this is one of Jims' patented "I'm going say one thing that can be interpreted literally (as in, Cold Days = Servitude/Bad times for Dresden) but is also a way of telling us that things are terribly terribly wrong in the background. Summer AND Winter are behaving outside of their patterns, and this is leading up to Big Bad Things.

YLC?

#2 part 2 LC v2.0
If the point of LC was to show that Harry was building thaumaturgy muscle (specifically with theater spanning voodoo dolls) and the logical progression after the first one was destroyed is that he would build a 2nd that is more ambitious, what will v2.0 be like? 

I suspect that such a device would somehow be tied to Demonreach.  There is good reason to believe that Harry will end up dwelling in the hut by the lighthouse, and that will be where his new lab will be... So I posit that either LCv2.0 will be one of 2 things. 

• A portable model of Demonreach that he can carry around and use as a portable link to the benefits of that sanctum.
• A fixed model of something else (the world?) built in a new lab on Demonreach.  This diserves some extra bullets
  • Harry's new ability to go pretty much anywhere he wants via ways his mother found would certainly help facilitate gathering material for thaumaturgy links for such a model.
  • Such a model might have some interesting interactions with Harry's Demoreach Sanctum benefits.  Intelectus wherever the model goes?

You know what I just realized? LC is a MUCH weaker version of the Genus Loci(probably spelled it wrong) that Demonreach provides Harry while on the Island. It's use may have been to give Harry training on how to create such a tool, and perhaps now that he HAS it through Demonreach, he can attempt to replicate it across a wider scale given his newfound power and previous attempt (LC 1.0) at it.