[X] Leave it to Regina, that is what she does best (Newborn Regent of Sanctuary)
Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)
- Thread starter DragonParadox
- Start date
- Crossover Fantasy
Goldfish
Friendly Spider-Fish Abomination
- Location
- Formerly of the Far Realm
[X] Leave it to Regina, that is what she does best (Newborn Regent of Sanctuary)
My dude, the Denarians invaded Winter, the original numberless hordes superpower. The setting superpower.
This is from Proven Guilty, less than nine months ago IC:
The last two hundred yards or so were completely open, with no trees or undulation of terrain to shield our approach from the walls of the fortress. I lifted a hand to call a halt at the edge of the last hummock of stone that would shelter us from view. Lily's butterfly drifted in erratic circles around my head, snowflakes hissing to steam where they touched it.
I peered over the edge of a frozen boulder at Arctis Tor for a long time, then settled back down again.
"I don't see anyone," I said, trying to keep my voice down.
"Doesn't make any sense," Thomas said. He was panting and shivering a little, despite Lily's warding magic. "I thought this was supposed to be Mab's headquarters. This place looks deserted."
"It makes perfect sense," I said. "Winter's forces are all poised to hit Summer. You don't do that from the heart of your own territory. You gather at strong points near the enemy's border. If we're lucky, maybe there's just a skeleton garrison here."
Murphy peered around the edge of the stones and said, "The gate's open. I don't see any guards." She frowned. "There are… there's something on the open ground between here and there. See?"
I leaned next to her and peered. Vague, shadowy shapes stirred in the wind between us and the fortress, insubstantial as any shadow. "Oh," I said. "It's a glamour. Illusion, laid out around the place. Probably a hedge maze of some kind."
"And it fools people?" she asked uncertainly.
"It fools people who don't have groovy wizard ointment for their eyes," I said. Then I frowned and said, "Wait a minute. The gate isn't open. It's gone."
"What?" Charity asked. She leaned out and stared. "There is a broken lattice of ice on the ground around the gate. A portcullis?"
"Could be," I agreed. "And inside." I squinted. "I think I can see some heavier pieces. Like maybe someone ripped apart the portcullis and blew the gate in." I took a deep breath, feeling a hysterical little giggle lurking in my throat. "Something huffed and puffed and blew the house in. Mab's house."
The wind howled over the frozen mountains.
"Well," Thomas said. "That can't be good."
Charity bit her lip. "Molly."
"I thought you said this Mab was all mighty and stuff, Harry," Murphy said.
"She is," I said, frowning.
"Then who plays big bad wolf to her little pig?"
"I…" I shook my head and rubbed at my mouth. "I'm starting to think that maybe I'm getting a little bit out of my depth, here."
Thomas broke out into a rippling chuckle, a faint note of hysteria to it. He turned his back to the fortress and sat down, chortling.
I glowered at him and said, "It's not funny."
"It is from here," Thomas said. "I mean, God, you are dense sometimes. Are you just now noticing this, Harry?"
I glowered at him some more. "To answer your question, Murph, I don't know who did this, but the list of the people who could is fairly short. Maybe the Senior Council could if they had the Wardens along, but they're busy, and they'd have had to fight a campaign to get this far. Maybe the vampires could have done it, working together, but that doesn't track. I don't know. Maybe Mab pissed off a god or something."
"There is only one God," Charity said.
I waved a hand and said, "No capital 'G,' Charity, in deference to your beliefs. But there are beings who aren't the Almighty who have power way beyond anything running around the planet."
"Like who?" Murphy asked.
"Old Greek and Roman and Norse deities. Lots and lots of Amerind divinity, and African tribal beings. A few Australian aboriginal gods; others in Polynesia, southeast Asia. About a zillion Hindu gods. But they've all been dormant for centuries." I frowned at Arctis Tor. "And I can't think what Mab might have done to earn their enmity. She's avoided doing that for thousands of years."
Unless, of course, I thought to myself, Maeve and Lily are right, and she really has gone bonkers.
"Dresden," Charity said. "This is academic. We either go in or we leave. Now."
I chewed my lip and nodded. Then I dug in my pockets for the tiny vial of blood Charity had provided, and hunted through the rocks until I found a spot clear enough to chalk out a circle. I empowered it and wrought one of my usual tracking spells, keying it to a sensation of warmth against my senses. Cold as it was, I would hardly mind anything that might make me feel a little less freeze-dried.
I broke the circle and released the spell, and immediately felt a tingling warmth on my left cheekbone. I turned to face it, and found myself staring directly at Arctis Tor. I paced fifty or sixty yards to the side, and faced the warmth again, working out a rough triangulation.
"She's alive," I told Charity, "or the spell wouldn't have worked. She's in there. Let's go."
"Wait," Charity said. She gave me a look filled with discomfort and then said, "May I say a brief prayer for us first?"
"Can't hurt," I said. "I'll take all the help I can get."
She bowed her head and said, "Lord of hosts, please stand with us against this darkness." The quiet, bedrock-deep energy of true faith brushed against me. Charity crossed herself. "Amen."
Murphy echoed the gesture and the amen. Thomas and I tried to look theologically invisible. Then, without further speech, I swung out around the frozen stone cairn and broke into a quick, steady jog. The others followed along.
I passed the first bones fifty yards from the walls. They lay in a crushed, twisted jumble in the snow, frozen into something that looked like a macabre Escher print. The bones were vaguely human, but I couldn't be sure because they had been pulverized to dust in some places, warped like melted wax in others. It was the first grisly memorial of many. As I kept going forward, brittle, frozen bones crunched under my boots, lying closer and thicker, and twisted more horribly, as we drew closer to Arctis Tor. By the time we got to the gate, I was shin-deep in icy bones. They spread out on either side in an enormous wheel of horrible remains centered on the gate. Whoever they had been, thousands of their kind had perished here.
Charity's guess about the portcullis had been bang on. Pieces of it lay scattered about, mixed among the bones. Where the gate arched beneath the fortress walls, there were still more bones, waist-deep on me, and slabs of planed dark ice, the remains of the fortress gate, stuck out at odd angles. The walls of Arctis Tor had been pitted with what I could only assume had been an acid of some kind. There were larger gouges blown out of the walls here and there, but against their monolithic volume, they were little more than pockmarks.
I pushed ahead to the gate, plowing my way through bones. Once there, I caught a faint whiff of something familiar. I leaned closer to one of the craters blown out of the wall and sniffed.
"What is it?" Thomas asked me.
"Sulfur," I said quietly. "Brimstone."
"What does that mean?" he asked.
"No way to tell," I half lied. But my intuition was absolutely certain of what had happened here. Someone had thrown Hellfire against the walls of Arctis Tor. Which meant that the forces of the literal Hell, or their agents, were also playing a part in the ongoing events.
Way, way, way out of my depth.
I told myself that it didn't matter. There was a young woman inside that frozen boneyard who would die if I did not burgle her out of this nightmare. If I did not control my fear, there was an excellent chance that it would warn her captors of my approach. So I fought the fear that threatened to make me start throwing up, or something equally humiliating and potentially fatal.
I readied my shield, gripped my staff, ground my teeth together, and then continued pushing my way forward, through the bones and into the eerie dimness of the most ridiculously dangerous place I had ever been.
The black ice walls of Arctis Tor were sixty feet thick, and walking through the gateway felt more like walking through a railroad tunnel.
Except for all the bones.
Every breath, every step, every rasp of bones rubbing against one another, multiplied into a thousand echoes that almost seemed to grow louder rather than fading away. The bones piled higher as I went, forcing me to walk atop them as best I could. The footing was treacherous. The deep green and violet, and occasionally red or green, pulses of luminance in the black ice walls did nothing to light the way. They only made the shadows shift and flow subtly, degrading my depth perception. I started feeling a little carsick.
If one of the fetches appeared at the far end of the tunnel and charged me, things would get nasty, and fast, especially given how ineffective my magic had been against them and how the bones had slowed my pace. That was more than a little spooky, and it was hard to keep myself from thrashing ahead more quickly out of pure fear. I kept a steady pace, held it in, and refused to allow it to control me.
I had been shielding my thoughts from Lasciel for a couple of years now. Damned if I was going to give a bunch of murderous faerie monsters the chance to paw through my emotions.
I checked behind me. Charity had trouble managing the awkward task of crawling over the bones while armored and holding that big old war hammer, but she stuck to it with grim focus and determination. Behind her, Murphy seemed to have far less trouble. Thomas prowled along at the rear, graceful as a panther in a tree.
I emerged from the gate into the courtyard. The inside of the fortress was bleak, cold, and beautiful in its simple symmetry. Rooms and chambers had either never been built or had been built into the walls and their entries hidden. Stairs led up to the battlements atop the walls. The courtyard was flat, smooth, dark ice, and at its center the single spire reared up from the ground, a round turret that rose to a crenellated parapet that overlooked the walls and the ground beneath.
The courtyard also held a sense of quiet stillness to it, as though it was not a place meant for living, moving, changing beings. The howl of the wind outside and overhead did not reach the ground. It was as silent as a librarian's tomb, and each footstep sounded clearly on the ice. Echoes bounced back and forth in the courtyard, somehow carrying a tone of disapproval and menace with them.
Bones spilled out in a wave from the gate, rapidly tapering off after a few yards. Beyond that were only scattered groupings of bones. Thomas drifted over to one such and poked at it with his drawn saber. The blade scraped on a skull too big to stuff into an oil drum, too heavy and thick to look entirely human.
"What the hell was this?" Thomas asked quietly.
"Troll, probably," I said. "Big one. Maybe fourteen, fifteen feet tall." I looked around. Half a dozen other enormous skulls lay in the scattered collections of remains. Another six had fallen very close to each other, at the base of the spire. "Give me a second. I want to know what we're looking at before we move ahead."
Charity looked like she wanted to argue, but instead she took up position a few yards off, watching one way. Thomas and Murphy spread out, each keeping their eyes on a different direction.
Mixed in with the fallen trolls' bones were broken pieces of dark ice that might have been the jigsaw-puzzle remains of armor and weapons. Each fragment bore the remnants of ornate engraving employing gold, silver, and tiny blue jewels. Faerie artistry, and expensive artistry at that. "Thirteen of them. The trolls were Mab's," I murmured. "I saw some of them outfitted like this a couple of years back."
"How long have they been dead?" Murphy asked quietly.
I grunted and hunkered down. I stretched my left hand out over the bones and closed my eyes, focusing my attention on sharpening my senses, mundane and magical alike. Very faintly, I could scent the heavy, bestial stink of a troll. I'd only seen a couple of the big ones from up close, but you could smell the ugly bastards from half a mile away. There was a rotten odor, more like heavy mulch than old meat. And there was more sulfur and brimstone.
Below that, I could feel tremors in the air over the spot, the psychic residue of the troll's violent death. There was a sense of excitement, rage, and then a dull, seldom-felt terror and a rush of sharp, frozen images of violent death, confusion, terror, and searing agony.
My hand flinched back from the phantom sensation of its own accord, and for just a moment the memories of my burning took on tangible form. I hissed through my teeth and held my hand against my stomach, willing the too-real ghost of pain away.
"Harry?" Murphy asked.
What the hell? The impression the death had left was so sharp, so severe, that I had actually gotten bits of the troll's memories. That had never happened to me before. Of course, I had never tried to pick up vibes in the Nevernever, either. It made more sense that the substance of the spirit world would leave a clearer spiritual impression.
"Harry?" Murphy said again, more sharply.
"I'm all right," I said through clenched teeth. The imprint had been more clear than anything I had ever felt in the real world. In Chicago, I would have thought it was only a few seconds old. Here…
"I can't tell how old they are," I said. "My gut says not very, but I can't be sure."
"It must have been weeks," Thomas said. "It takes that long for bones to get this clean."
"It's all relative," I said. "Time can pass at different rates in Faerie. These bones could have fallen a thousand years ago, by the local clock. Or twenty minutes ago."
Thomas muttered something under his breath and shook his head.
"What killed them, Harry?" Murphy asked.
"Fire. They were burned to death," I said quietly. "Down to the bone."
"Could you do that?" Thomas asked.
I shook my head. "I couldn't make it that hot. Not at the heart of Winter." Not even with Hellfire. The remains of perhaps a thousand creatures lay scattered about. I'd cut loose once in the past and roasted a bunch of vampires-and maybe some of their victims with them-but even that inferno hadn't been big enough to catch more than a tithe of the fallen defenders of Arctis Tor.
"Then who did it?" Charity asked quietly.
I didn't have an answer for her. I rose and nudged a smaller skull with my staff. "The littler ones were goblins," I said. "Foot soldiers." I rolled a troll-sized thighbone aside with my staff. An enormous sword, also of that same black ice, lay shattered beneath it. "These trolls were her personal guard." I gestured back at the gate. "Covering her retreat to the tower, maybe. Some of them got taken down along the way. The others made a stand at the tower's base. Died there."
I paced around, checking what the tracking spell had to say, and triangulated again. "Molly's in the tower," I murmured.
"How do we get in?" Murphy asked.
I stared at the blank wall of the spire. "Um," I said.
Charity glanced over my shoulder and nodded at the spire. "Look behind those trolls. If they were covering a retreat, they should be near the entrance to the tower."
"Maybe," I said. I walked over to the tower and frowned at the black ice. I ran my right hand over its surface, feeling for cracks or evidence of a hidden doorway, my senses tuned to discover any magic that might hide a door. I had the sudden impression that the black ice and the slowly pulsing colors inside were somehow alive, aware of me. And they did not like me at all. I got a sense of alien hatred, cold and patient. Otherwise, I got nothing for my trouble but half-frozen fingers.
"Nothing here," I said, and rapped my knuckles on the side of the tower, eliciting the dull thump of a very solid object. "Maybe the trolls just wanted to fight with their backs to something solid. I might have to go all the way around checking for-"
Without any warning at all the ice of the tower parted. An archway appeared, the ice that had hidden it flowing seamlessly into the rest of the tower. The interior of the tower was all shadows and slowly shifting lights that did little to provide any illumination. Inside was nothing but a spiral staircase, winding counterclockwise up through the spire.
I glanced from the archway to my chilled fingers and back. "Next time, I guess I'll just knock."
"Come on," Charity said. She shifted her grip on the war hammer, holding it at something like high port arms, handle parallel to her spine, heavy head ready to descend. "We have to hurry."
Thomas and Murphy turned to join us at the door.
An idle, puzzled sense of familiarity gave way to my instincts' furious warning. Fetches were the masters of the sucker punch. Like the Bucky-fetch who had jumped us just as we opened the doors to the theater, they knew how to position themselves to attack just as their enemies focused their attention on some kind of distraction.
The suddenly opened doorway was it.
I peered over the edge of a frozen boulder at Arctis Tor for a long time, then settled back down again.
"I don't see anyone," I said, trying to keep my voice down.
"Doesn't make any sense," Thomas said. He was panting and shivering a little, despite Lily's warding magic. "I thought this was supposed to be Mab's headquarters. This place looks deserted."
"It makes perfect sense," I said. "Winter's forces are all poised to hit Summer. You don't do that from the heart of your own territory. You gather at strong points near the enemy's border. If we're lucky, maybe there's just a skeleton garrison here."
Murphy peered around the edge of the stones and said, "The gate's open. I don't see any guards." She frowned. "There are… there's something on the open ground between here and there. See?"
I leaned next to her and peered. Vague, shadowy shapes stirred in the wind between us and the fortress, insubstantial as any shadow. "Oh," I said. "It's a glamour. Illusion, laid out around the place. Probably a hedge maze of some kind."
"And it fools people?" she asked uncertainly.
"It fools people who don't have groovy wizard ointment for their eyes," I said. Then I frowned and said, "Wait a minute. The gate isn't open. It's gone."
"What?" Charity asked. She leaned out and stared. "There is a broken lattice of ice on the ground around the gate. A portcullis?"
"Could be," I agreed. "And inside." I squinted. "I think I can see some heavier pieces. Like maybe someone ripped apart the portcullis and blew the gate in." I took a deep breath, feeling a hysterical little giggle lurking in my throat. "Something huffed and puffed and blew the house in. Mab's house."
The wind howled over the frozen mountains.
"Well," Thomas said. "That can't be good."
Charity bit her lip. "Molly."
"I thought you said this Mab was all mighty and stuff, Harry," Murphy said.
"She is," I said, frowning.
"Then who plays big bad wolf to her little pig?"
"I…" I shook my head and rubbed at my mouth. "I'm starting to think that maybe I'm getting a little bit out of my depth, here."
Thomas broke out into a rippling chuckle, a faint note of hysteria to it. He turned his back to the fortress and sat down, chortling.
I glowered at him and said, "It's not funny."
"It is from here," Thomas said. "I mean, God, you are dense sometimes. Are you just now noticing this, Harry?"
I glowered at him some more. "To answer your question, Murph, I don't know who did this, but the list of the people who could is fairly short. Maybe the Senior Council could if they had the Wardens along, but they're busy, and they'd have had to fight a campaign to get this far. Maybe the vampires could have done it, working together, but that doesn't track. I don't know. Maybe Mab pissed off a god or something."
"There is only one God," Charity said.
I waved a hand and said, "No capital 'G,' Charity, in deference to your beliefs. But there are beings who aren't the Almighty who have power way beyond anything running around the planet."
"Like who?" Murphy asked.
"Old Greek and Roman and Norse deities. Lots and lots of Amerind divinity, and African tribal beings. A few Australian aboriginal gods; others in Polynesia, southeast Asia. About a zillion Hindu gods. But they've all been dormant for centuries." I frowned at Arctis Tor. "And I can't think what Mab might have done to earn their enmity. She's avoided doing that for thousands of years."
Unless, of course, I thought to myself, Maeve and Lily are right, and she really has gone bonkers.
"Dresden," Charity said. "This is academic. We either go in or we leave. Now."
I chewed my lip and nodded. Then I dug in my pockets for the tiny vial of blood Charity had provided, and hunted through the rocks until I found a spot clear enough to chalk out a circle. I empowered it and wrought one of my usual tracking spells, keying it to a sensation of warmth against my senses. Cold as it was, I would hardly mind anything that might make me feel a little less freeze-dried.
I broke the circle and released the spell, and immediately felt a tingling warmth on my left cheekbone. I turned to face it, and found myself staring directly at Arctis Tor. I paced fifty or sixty yards to the side, and faced the warmth again, working out a rough triangulation.
"She's alive," I told Charity, "or the spell wouldn't have worked. She's in there. Let's go."
"Wait," Charity said. She gave me a look filled with discomfort and then said, "May I say a brief prayer for us first?"
"Can't hurt," I said. "I'll take all the help I can get."
She bowed her head and said, "Lord of hosts, please stand with us against this darkness." The quiet, bedrock-deep energy of true faith brushed against me. Charity crossed herself. "Amen."
Murphy echoed the gesture and the amen. Thomas and I tried to look theologically invisible. Then, without further speech, I swung out around the frozen stone cairn and broke into a quick, steady jog. The others followed along.
I passed the first bones fifty yards from the walls. They lay in a crushed, twisted jumble in the snow, frozen into something that looked like a macabre Escher print. The bones were vaguely human, but I couldn't be sure because they had been pulverized to dust in some places, warped like melted wax in others. It was the first grisly memorial of many. As I kept going forward, brittle, frozen bones crunched under my boots, lying closer and thicker, and twisted more horribly, as we drew closer to Arctis Tor. By the time we got to the gate, I was shin-deep in icy bones. They spread out on either side in an enormous wheel of horrible remains centered on the gate. Whoever they had been, thousands of their kind had perished here.
Charity's guess about the portcullis had been bang on. Pieces of it lay scattered about, mixed among the bones. Where the gate arched beneath the fortress walls, there were still more bones, waist-deep on me, and slabs of planed dark ice, the remains of the fortress gate, stuck out at odd angles. The walls of Arctis Tor had been pitted with what I could only assume had been an acid of some kind. There were larger gouges blown out of the walls here and there, but against their monolithic volume, they were little more than pockmarks.
I pushed ahead to the gate, plowing my way through bones. Once there, I caught a faint whiff of something familiar. I leaned closer to one of the craters blown out of the wall and sniffed.
"What is it?" Thomas asked me.
"Sulfur," I said quietly. "Brimstone."
"What does that mean?" he asked.
"No way to tell," I half lied. But my intuition was absolutely certain of what had happened here. Someone had thrown Hellfire against the walls of Arctis Tor. Which meant that the forces of the literal Hell, or their agents, were also playing a part in the ongoing events.
Way, way, way out of my depth.
I told myself that it didn't matter. There was a young woman inside that frozen boneyard who would die if I did not burgle her out of this nightmare. If I did not control my fear, there was an excellent chance that it would warn her captors of my approach. So I fought the fear that threatened to make me start throwing up, or something equally humiliating and potentially fatal.
I readied my shield, gripped my staff, ground my teeth together, and then continued pushing my way forward, through the bones and into the eerie dimness of the most ridiculously dangerous place I had ever been.
Chapter Thirty-seven
The black ice walls of Arctis Tor were sixty feet thick, and walking through the gateway felt more like walking through a railroad tunnel.
Except for all the bones.
Every breath, every step, every rasp of bones rubbing against one another, multiplied into a thousand echoes that almost seemed to grow louder rather than fading away. The bones piled higher as I went, forcing me to walk atop them as best I could. The footing was treacherous. The deep green and violet, and occasionally red or green, pulses of luminance in the black ice walls did nothing to light the way. They only made the shadows shift and flow subtly, degrading my depth perception. I started feeling a little carsick.
If one of the fetches appeared at the far end of the tunnel and charged me, things would get nasty, and fast, especially given how ineffective my magic had been against them and how the bones had slowed my pace. That was more than a little spooky, and it was hard to keep myself from thrashing ahead more quickly out of pure fear. I kept a steady pace, held it in, and refused to allow it to control me.
I had been shielding my thoughts from Lasciel for a couple of years now. Damned if I was going to give a bunch of murderous faerie monsters the chance to paw through my emotions.
I checked behind me. Charity had trouble managing the awkward task of crawling over the bones while armored and holding that big old war hammer, but she stuck to it with grim focus and determination. Behind her, Murphy seemed to have far less trouble. Thomas prowled along at the rear, graceful as a panther in a tree.
I emerged from the gate into the courtyard. The inside of the fortress was bleak, cold, and beautiful in its simple symmetry. Rooms and chambers had either never been built or had been built into the walls and their entries hidden. Stairs led up to the battlements atop the walls. The courtyard was flat, smooth, dark ice, and at its center the single spire reared up from the ground, a round turret that rose to a crenellated parapet that overlooked the walls and the ground beneath.
The courtyard also held a sense of quiet stillness to it, as though it was not a place meant for living, moving, changing beings. The howl of the wind outside and overhead did not reach the ground. It was as silent as a librarian's tomb, and each footstep sounded clearly on the ice. Echoes bounced back and forth in the courtyard, somehow carrying a tone of disapproval and menace with them.
Bones spilled out in a wave from the gate, rapidly tapering off after a few yards. Beyond that were only scattered groupings of bones. Thomas drifted over to one such and poked at it with his drawn saber. The blade scraped on a skull too big to stuff into an oil drum, too heavy and thick to look entirely human.
"What the hell was this?" Thomas asked quietly.
"Troll, probably," I said. "Big one. Maybe fourteen, fifteen feet tall." I looked around. Half a dozen other enormous skulls lay in the scattered collections of remains. Another six had fallen very close to each other, at the base of the spire. "Give me a second. I want to know what we're looking at before we move ahead."
Charity looked like she wanted to argue, but instead she took up position a few yards off, watching one way. Thomas and Murphy spread out, each keeping their eyes on a different direction.
Mixed in with the fallen trolls' bones were broken pieces of dark ice that might have been the jigsaw-puzzle remains of armor and weapons. Each fragment bore the remnants of ornate engraving employing gold, silver, and tiny blue jewels. Faerie artistry, and expensive artistry at that. "Thirteen of them. The trolls were Mab's," I murmured. "I saw some of them outfitted like this a couple of years back."
"How long have they been dead?" Murphy asked quietly.
I grunted and hunkered down. I stretched my left hand out over the bones and closed my eyes, focusing my attention on sharpening my senses, mundane and magical alike. Very faintly, I could scent the heavy, bestial stink of a troll. I'd only seen a couple of the big ones from up close, but you could smell the ugly bastards from half a mile away. There was a rotten odor, more like heavy mulch than old meat. And there was more sulfur and brimstone.
Below that, I could feel tremors in the air over the spot, the psychic residue of the troll's violent death. There was a sense of excitement, rage, and then a dull, seldom-felt terror and a rush of sharp, frozen images of violent death, confusion, terror, and searing agony.
My hand flinched back from the phantom sensation of its own accord, and for just a moment the memories of my burning took on tangible form. I hissed through my teeth and held my hand against my stomach, willing the too-real ghost of pain away.
"Harry?" Murphy asked.
What the hell? The impression the death had left was so sharp, so severe, that I had actually gotten bits of the troll's memories. That had never happened to me before. Of course, I had never tried to pick up vibes in the Nevernever, either. It made more sense that the substance of the spirit world would leave a clearer spiritual impression.
"Harry?" Murphy said again, more sharply.
"I'm all right," I said through clenched teeth. The imprint had been more clear than anything I had ever felt in the real world. In Chicago, I would have thought it was only a few seconds old. Here…
"I can't tell how old they are," I said. "My gut says not very, but I can't be sure."
"It must have been weeks," Thomas said. "It takes that long for bones to get this clean."
"It's all relative," I said. "Time can pass at different rates in Faerie. These bones could have fallen a thousand years ago, by the local clock. Or twenty minutes ago."
Thomas muttered something under his breath and shook his head.
"What killed them, Harry?" Murphy asked.
"Fire. They were burned to death," I said quietly. "Down to the bone."
"Could you do that?" Thomas asked.
I shook my head. "I couldn't make it that hot. Not at the heart of Winter." Not even with Hellfire. The remains of perhaps a thousand creatures lay scattered about. I'd cut loose once in the past and roasted a bunch of vampires-and maybe some of their victims with them-but even that inferno hadn't been big enough to catch more than a tithe of the fallen defenders of Arctis Tor.
"Then who did it?" Charity asked quietly.
I didn't have an answer for her. I rose and nudged a smaller skull with my staff. "The littler ones were goblins," I said. "Foot soldiers." I rolled a troll-sized thighbone aside with my staff. An enormous sword, also of that same black ice, lay shattered beneath it. "These trolls were her personal guard." I gestured back at the gate. "Covering her retreat to the tower, maybe. Some of them got taken down along the way. The others made a stand at the tower's base. Died there."
I paced around, checking what the tracking spell had to say, and triangulated again. "Molly's in the tower," I murmured.
"How do we get in?" Murphy asked.
I stared at the blank wall of the spire. "Um," I said.
Charity glanced over my shoulder and nodded at the spire. "Look behind those trolls. If they were covering a retreat, they should be near the entrance to the tower."
"Maybe," I said. I walked over to the tower and frowned at the black ice. I ran my right hand over its surface, feeling for cracks or evidence of a hidden doorway, my senses tuned to discover any magic that might hide a door. I had the sudden impression that the black ice and the slowly pulsing colors inside were somehow alive, aware of me. And they did not like me at all. I got a sense of alien hatred, cold and patient. Otherwise, I got nothing for my trouble but half-frozen fingers.
"Nothing here," I said, and rapped my knuckles on the side of the tower, eliciting the dull thump of a very solid object. "Maybe the trolls just wanted to fight with their backs to something solid. I might have to go all the way around checking for-"
Without any warning at all the ice of the tower parted. An archway appeared, the ice that had hidden it flowing seamlessly into the rest of the tower. The interior of the tower was all shadows and slowly shifting lights that did little to provide any illumination. Inside was nothing but a spiral staircase, winding counterclockwise up through the spire.
I glanced from the archway to my chilled fingers and back. "Next time, I guess I'll just knock."
"Come on," Charity said. She shifted her grip on the war hammer, holding it at something like high port arms, handle parallel to her spine, heavy head ready to descend. "We have to hurry."
Thomas and Murphy turned to join us at the door.
An idle, puzzled sense of familiarity gave way to my instincts' furious warning. Fetches were the masters of the sucker punch. Like the Bucky-fetch who had jumped us just as we opened the doors to the theater, they knew how to position themselves to attack just as their enemies focused their attention on some kind of distraction.
The suddenly opened doorway was it.
Killed at least a thousand of her soldiers, including her personal troll guard. Molly would have run across the remains of this battlefield as she and the people who came to rescue her ran away from Arctis Tor.
You are badly mistaken about the ability and willingness of the Knights of the Order of the Blackened Denarius to throw down.
They are a bloody terrifying bunch that are willing to take seemingly senseless risks and costs.
And they often act for reasons that are not necessarily obvious
And why do you assume that the 1% has no defense against this sort of thing?
Or equivalent weapons and magic protocols they can unleash in return?
Or that successfully deploying such a thing in that kind of combat might not damage us?
Respectfully, this is an appalling idea.
We are in the Red Court's backyard. We killed the Red King's daughter several months ago. We have just aggro'd them further by killing a Lord of Outer Night and then walking off with one of the gods they have had strung up in their larder for the last millenia or so. They have all sorts of incentive to retaliate, or have someone else we've hurt retaliate on their behalf.
You are just begging for Red Court sorcerers to use Chitchen Itza to funnel a fucking ritual curse down that convenient portal into Molly's magical biology. We are not the only people who know how to make superweapons. Or use them.
The only reason none of Molly's clones was given any ability to take people to and from Sanctuary was to make it so anyone entering Sanctuary had to pass Molly's personal scrutiny.
Any proposal that we should leave a portal to Molly's personal soul-body-hell thing open is brazenly courting disaster.
Mab got hit in her own fucking capital city by someone swaggering up and slapping her with their magic dick when she wasnt expecting it. We are significantly less militarily and politically powerful than the Queen of Air and Darkness and her Court.
I dont see why you think that the Red Court is the only near future threat, either, after we just spent the last nine months aggroing the Outsiders, the Black Council, the Denarians, TWO Yama Kings, the Fomor and at least one Black Court Elder.
If Dracul shows up here tomorrow, we are gonna die. And likely if Ethniu does as well.
Even the Red Court didnt get to the point where they became a regional power by counting bottlecaps.
If you keep treating them like a non-factor, you significantly increase the chance of our Finding Out.
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The problem of the Red Court attacking can be neatly solved by is spending a couple of weeks killing their entire leadership and wrecking their infrastructure.
They're only a threat as long as we choose to let them be one. They're basically not tall enough for the ride they're on.
With us having a portal allowing us to deploy heavy assets next door to them they exist at our sufferance. They can't stand up to significant air strikes or the deployment of strategic weapons.
Previously we held off on stamping them out because of the power vacuum of filling them would possibly be filled by someone worse and we couldn't deploy our own assets Earthside to do it ourselves. Now we can.
We aren't trapped in South America with them, they're trapped in South America with us.
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- Location
- washington
Fair enough for arctis tor invasion. Also our hell has more military power than winter but I get what you mean and we shouldn't exactly start a war of said magnitude to have to use said power. When I mention red court I want to genocide the court like canon not just stay in their backyard permanently. For others being able to have countermeasures sure I was specifically talking about denarians though. Also you know yama kings can't exactly just invade their bound to their areas for the most part unless they wanna be weakened. Also Dracul is a major threat but he isn't destroy our entire hell of a threat. A kill thousands of our men before being put down threat surely but not fight a million armed soldiers with their own magics and nuclear equivalents threat. Also perfect defenses are stupidly rare or should be unless dp adds a bunch I don't think anyone has a defense for everything other than like Archangels and up. A defense for a lot of things sure but not everything.
- Pronouns
- ImBuda
Maybe keeping the gate open is a bad idea, but I dont think creating defense splendors at it would be one. We have a lot of good resources for them and we can develop really strong defence structures. Closing the gate is a priority, but we shouldnt just rely on that. Buy some defences to stop people for entering and in time we will find a way to close it
- Location
- washington
Also in fairness I highly highly highly doubt the red court could devise a ritual to affect our soul body. They'd at least need to fucking see the inside for something like that lets not even mention there's wog it'd take the entire red court to beat Mab by butcher. There's no way they'd understand the structure enough to fuck up the world body. Things inside it probably though even that sounds somewhat difficult to do without being inside said world body. But the idea the red court could do such is fucking ridiculous unless dp starts just making up random bullshit it took their entire court and the sacrifice of thousands of lives to create a bloodline curse and it still fucking required some of said bloodline at least. What the hell would they directly target a world body with?
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Ivar
Dark Reaper
- Location
- Russia Moscow
In fact, right before Morgan's eyes, we are realizing his greatest fears from the report he gave Luccio. Only we are opening the way not in Iceland, but in the middle of Red Court territory.
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We also know that the Reds are summoning Outsiders like there is no tomorrow, and Outsiders are specialised in storming gates into other worlds, aren't they?
- Location
- washington
sure given I mean its unlikely we'll see an outsider army and if they came for us I mean said army probably already would of existed if we're being honest. These things don't come from nothing and we already consider said outsiders an enemy so we were already trying to prevent said breaches. The more worrisome problems are probably intrigue and stealth specialists which we'll have our eyes peeled on. Also gate their an expert on a gate not that this means much just slight correction since their not multiversal like in canon.
Unless dp starts scaling our enemies like he used to in a sword without a hilt in which case be ready for outsider armies possessing red court gods armed with mordite weapons and laser turrets.
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And we are also about to enact a series of rapid decapitation strikes against White Council.
I don't know, it seems like wishful thinking. The Mayan god, that can't be exorcised, also didn't exist, until the moment we met him. Why can't Outsider army? And why do they need an army exactly? They don't need to storm the Outer Gates protected by the infinite number of Winter Court troops, they need to storm gates in the allied territory with light defenses.
Yeah, the problem is the other trick Outsiders are known for is literally being summoned from nothing. Before we decided to take another shiny plot hook, the only thing they could have done is trying to murder Molly. Now they have a wide array of possibilities from infiltration to some bad outsider magic. We gave them scot-free position to bypass all our defensive charms.
So, the best gate storming force in the setting can do nothing, because... Because of what again?
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- Pronouns
- ImBuda
Because the gate connects the physical world and Molly, not the outside. They first need to defeat the outer gates in order to enter, defeat the defenders at the other side and travel to our gate. They cant brute force it with higher numbers, they Will need stealth.
1)Its at best, implausible that a single E4 Infernal could topple the Red Court in a couple weeks.
Win a war? Sure, probably. Decapitate them in their own heartland in a couple weeks? No. I dont buy it.
Never mind the lack of capacity to manage the political, economic or magical aftermath; the fall of the Red Court in canon kicked off multiple mundane wars and a new supernatural one.
Progressing the plans of the Nemesis conspiracy in the process.
The aftermath of the invasion of Iraq demonstrated just how important managing the aftermath is, and how difficult it is when even a minor power chooses to fuck with you while you try.
None of our enemies are minor powers.
2) The Red Court did not acquire and hold South America against all comers in the Darwinian hellscape of supernatural politics in the Dresdenverse by collecting bottle caps.
I put it to you that you fancy our chances a little too much.
3)This is not a movie fight scene.
All the other various factions we have aggro'd arent going to politely take their turn while we try to stomp the Red Court, leaving the glowing weak spot that is a glaring portal to the heart of our power alone.
===
-That is not actually true. Witness the lack of wizards and wizard-equivalent casters in Sanctuary.
We are not the setting superpower.
And I think claiming we have more military power than Winter is ridiculous.
-Yama Kings can and do invade other Hells. Its a risk, and they are less powerful while doing so, but they absolutely do.
Emma-O specifically has done so personally, and so has Rangda.
And they can always send elder akuma and demons. Or ghosts/spectres. And constructs.
-Dracul IS a destroy our Hell kinda threat.
Especially given the suggestions of links between the Black Court and the Neverborn in this AU.
-You dont NEED perfect defenses.
You just need very high soak and regeneration. See the loup garou for an example of what is possible. Then there's the immunities; True Immortals straight up cant die outside of Halloween or in the presence of extreme hax.
And its not like magic hax dont exist; Ethniu was walking around in magic armor that noped most mundane and magic damage.
We dont have infinite AP or infinite reagents.
That time is likely to be better spent figuring out how to close the portal ASAP, than building defensive splendors before trying to close it.The longer its open, the more time for Shenanigans.
My two cents anyway.
1) The Red Court canonically got their hands on the bloodline curse ritual which would have killed McCoy even under the wards of Edinburgh.Wards that would explicitly have required a god to break.
If they cant cook one up, they will outsource it to someone else who wants a favor or wants us occupied.
You are very much underestimating a major supernatural player.
2) The Red Court explicitly has silent partners in this war.
The people who helped them with summoning armies of Outsiders, and who helped them set up a ward in the NeverNever that it took the Senior Council an entire day to break in order to evac survivors? Who helped them make a weapon that infected Mab's second in command with Nemesis? Will happily make them a magic ritual to nuke our soul.
Do you think we are the only people who have favors to spend with other factions?
=====
We canonically see two Outsider armies in canon inside Dresdenverse Creation.
One that shattered the White Council's forces in Dead Beat as the spearhead of the Red Court's armies.
And the second that was attacking Demonreach during Cold Days, which was powerful enough that it held the attention of the Erlking and the entire Wild Hunt even after Dresden had defeated/discorporated the Walker leading it.
And in this quest, Mab came to power leading an army against an Outsider-corrupted queen who was going to fuck everything up according to Bob.
You are very much underestimating the enemy. IMO.
You are forgetting about the fact that the Reds are actively summoning Outsiders and also can provide canon fodder to gain the foothold for Outsider elite troops to run their malicious machinations.
Edit: also check uju32's previous post for examples of Outsider armies.
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- Pronouns
- ImBuda
Sorry I forgot of them
13x.
Morgan killed one last year, but I assume its been replaced. We just killed another; they'll probably get a replacement in a month or two. Will take time to mature fully, but they do have a deep bench.
1a) We aren't just any E4 Exalt. We're an Infernal Exalt with a power set almost tailor made to pull this kind of thing off. Between, RDV, BMI, and the Crown, protecting against decapitation attacks by Molly is very hard indeed.
1b) We aren't just an E4 Exalt, we're the tip of the spear of an entire world. The Red Court isn't just facing us, they're facing the full might of a magitech civilisation.
2) The Red Court in its prime may have been a different beast. Now the Red King is senile, they're riven by internal dissent and literal o outsiders seem to have hollowed them out to use them as a globe puppet to work with capital O Outsiders.
3) The portal isn't a weak spot; it's a strong spot. It's a location where we can deploy a concentration of force unparalleled by any other player in the world. No one else is allowed to casually deploy substantial forces from the Nevernever into reality by the White God. We seem to be able to. Morgan was concerned about this exact kind of scenario for a reason.
Even Outsiders are limited.
And if we do attract a load of heat and focus our enemeis' attention on the portal site. That's an advantage. It means they're attacking where we're strong and are expecting us. They don't have unlimited time and resources, indeed, with the capacity of a magitech government infrastructure behind us, we probably have a massive advantage there. They're apparently a conspiracy of individuals. We're not.
As a side effect, it'll give us lots of Crown focuses.
This is a very dangerous situation, but I think we can do a lot to mitigate these risk. That splendor I posted earlier would make mook spam hard, and more importantly disintegrate immediate red presence in this region of South America. I think lord of the land would help a lot in an invasion too. We need to put our back into it, but it's not hopeless.
I think that we have a bit of time before someone Drakul tier tries this, for the simple reason that old supernaturals do not take blind risks. As much as we're afraid of being invaded by someone stronger than us they should be at least concerned by literally walking into (a) hell.
Once someone feels they have information about how things work we'll have people pulling more serious incursions.
I don't believe there's any evidence in canon that Lords of the Outer Night can be replaced. They're all ancient vampires who were worshipped as gods (after chestbursting and stealing the identities of the originals) by pre-Columbian civilisations before they were made to retire from that role by the White God.
There are no pre-Columbian civilisations that the White God allows vampires to be gods of these days, so there can probably be no new Lords of the Outer Night who have some residue of that status despite being officially retired.
I think there's also a quote from one of the books of a Red saying they can't be elevated to be one of them cementing that.
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- Location
- washington
winter has an active standing army in the tens of thousands we most surely have the stronger army. Stronger individuals no but they don't have anywhere near even the u.s. army power. Given they could easily devastate the u.s. army in so many ways its ridiculous but they do not have the same strict firepower. not counting Mab or mother winter of course those two are way past any military power.
Also we aren't a god our soul is countless times bigger and is actually a fucking dimension if dp pulls a dimension destroying ritual out of the red courts ass then he may as well say the red court can create dimensions or have a destroy arctis tor spell in their ass too. Honestly might straight up quit the quest if they specifically have that kind of asspull up their sleeve. Maybe I could see someone like lucifer having it but he shouldn't be able to act in that way but the red court no just no.
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Another factor to consider is that we can get inside our enemies' decision making loop.
Our apparent response to discovering the Black Council's attempted subversion of the White is to open a portal to our Hell inside the territory of their most important cats paw through which our legions can match.
They need to decide how to deal with that while also managing any potential fallout from what we've learned about the White Council traitors. And they don't know how much we know about that. Any contingency plans they had have now been thrown into abrupt chaos.
Now we can go and start sweeping up traitors while our sorcerers and military work to fortify and expand their beachhead. The longer the Black Council leave this, the worse this may get for them.
They don't know that we won't be working to expand the breach so we can start sending very large assets through, or that we won't start playing standard Yama King games of assimilating and stealing territory. The Black Council isn't go to want to see a Red Court ruled South and Central America replaced by a Brass Court ruled one.
They also don't know what else we can do. Before today they didn't know we could create permanent portals. Now, they need to be on guard for it everywhere. They also don't know that we can't trivially close the portal. For all they know if we bait out significant enough forces that they may be able to overcome the defences there well just pull back, close the portal, and detonate a nuke we left behind as a final f-you.
And we can keep on doing this. After a few days of running down traitorous wizards and either killing or turning them (some of them may not be completely irredeemable) we can switch to headcapping the Red Court, then we can blitz a few ocean floor fomor strongholds, then we can whack the surviving Black Court elders.
We can keep up a tempo of operations that the wizards and immortals on the other side are totally unprepared for.
If we keep hammering them day in and day out, when are they going to get the chance to proactively go after us. They'll be too busy trying to save their own skin.
After all, it's suggested that the Black Council aren't outsider cultists. They want to rule the world, not destroy it. That's hard to do while dead.
On a tactical rather the strategic level, Dresden-verse is very much street level, otherwise Harry Dresden wouldn't be able to be relevant.
Our apparent response to discovering the Black Council's attempted subversion of the White is to open a portal to our Hell inside the territory of their most important cats paw through which our legions can match.
They need to decide how to deal with that while also managing any potential fallout from what we've learned about the White Council traitors. And they don't know how much we know about that. Any contingency plans they had have now been thrown into abrupt chaos.
Now we can go and start sweeping up traitors while our sorcerers and military work to fortify and expand their beachhead. The longer the Black Council leave this, the worse this may get for them.
They don't know that we won't be working to expand the breach so we can start sending very large assets through, or that we won't start playing standard Yama King games of assimilating and stealing territory. The Black Council isn't go to want to see a Red Court ruled South and Central America replaced by a Brass Court ruled one.
They also don't know what else we can do. Before today they didn't know we could create permanent portals. Now, they need to be on guard for it everywhere. They also don't know that we can't trivially close the portal. For all they know if we bait out significant enough forces that they may be able to overcome the defences there well just pull back, close the portal, and detonate a nuke we left behind as a final f-you.
And we can keep on doing this. After a few days of running down traitorous wizards and either killing or turning them (some of them may not be completely irredeemable) we can switch to headcapping the Red Court, then we can blitz a few ocean floor fomor strongholds, then we can whack the surviving Black Court elders.
We can keep up a tempo of operations that the wizards and immortals on the other side are totally unprepared for.
If we keep hammering them day in and day out, when are they going to get the chance to proactively go after us. They'll be too busy trying to save their own skin.
After all, it's suggested that the Black Council aren't outsider cultists. They want to rule the world, not destroy it. That's hard to do while dead.
On a tactical rather the strategic level, Dresden-verse is very much street level, otherwise Harry Dresden wouldn't be able to be relevant.
Yes there is.
Arianna explicitly mentions it as her goal for toppling her father from being the Red King, and says there's precedent:
The night grew silent. Down in the stadium, there wasn't even the sound of wind. The silence gnawed at me, though Arianna looked relaxed.
"So," I said, "your dad is the Red King."
"Indeed. He created me, as he created all of the Thirteen and the better part of our nobility."
"One big bloodsucking Brady Bunch, huh? But I'll bet he missed all the PTA meetings."
The duchess studied me and shook her head. "I shall never understand why someone hasn't killed you before now."
"Wasn't for lack of trying," I said. "Hey, why do you suppose he set up the rules the way he did? If we'd gone by the Code Duello, there's a chance it could have been limited to a physical confrontation. Really seems to be taking away most of your advantages, doesn't he?"
She smiled. "A jaded person might consider it a sign of his weakness."
"Nice spin on that one. Purely out of curiosity, though: Once you kill me, what comes next?"
She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. "I continue to serve the Red Court to the best of my ability."
I showed her my teeth. "Meaning you're going to knock Big Red out of that chair, right?"
"That is more ambitious than reasonable," she said. "One of the Thirteen, I should think, will ascend to become Kukulcan."
"Creating an opening in the Lords of Outer Night," I said, getting it. "Murdering your father to get a promotion. You're all class."
"Cattle couldn't possibly understand."
"Couldn't understand that Daddy's losing it?" I asked. "That he's reverting into one of your blood slaves?"
Her mouth twitched, as if she were restraining it from twisting into a snarl. "It happens, betimes, to the aged," Arianna said. "I love and revere my father. But his time is done."
"Unless you lose," I said.
"I find that unlikely." She looked me up and down. "What a . . . novel outfit."
"I wore it especially for you," I said, and fluttered my eyelashes at her.
She didn't look amused. "Most of what I do is business. Impersonal. But I'm going to enjoy this."
I dropped the wiseacre attitude. The growing force of my anger burned it away. "Taking my kid isn't impersonal," I said. "It's a Kevorkianesque cry for help."
"Such moral outrage. Yet you are as guilty as I. Did you not slay Paolo's child, Bianca?"
"Bianca was trying to kill me at the time," I said. "Maggie is an innocent. She couldn't possibly hurt you."
"Then you should have considered that before you insulted me by murdering my grandchild," she hissed, her voice suddenly tight and cold. "I am patient, wizard. More patient than you could imagine. And I have looked forward to this day, when the consequences of your arrogance shall fall upon both you and all who love you."
The threat lit a fire in my brain, and I thought the anger was going to tear its way free of my chest and go after her without me.
"Bitch," I spat. "Come get some."
The horn blew.
"So," I said, "your dad is the Red King."
"Indeed. He created me, as he created all of the Thirteen and the better part of our nobility."
"One big bloodsucking Brady Bunch, huh? But I'll bet he missed all the PTA meetings."
The duchess studied me and shook her head. "I shall never understand why someone hasn't killed you before now."
"Wasn't for lack of trying," I said. "Hey, why do you suppose he set up the rules the way he did? If we'd gone by the Code Duello, there's a chance it could have been limited to a physical confrontation. Really seems to be taking away most of your advantages, doesn't he?"
She smiled. "A jaded person might consider it a sign of his weakness."
"Nice spin on that one. Purely out of curiosity, though: Once you kill me, what comes next?"
She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. "I continue to serve the Red Court to the best of my ability."
I showed her my teeth. "Meaning you're going to knock Big Red out of that chair, right?"
"That is more ambitious than reasonable," she said. "One of the Thirteen, I should think, will ascend to become Kukulcan."
"Creating an opening in the Lords of Outer Night," I said, getting it. "Murdering your father to get a promotion. You're all class."
"Cattle couldn't possibly understand."
"Couldn't understand that Daddy's losing it?" I asked. "That he's reverting into one of your blood slaves?"
Her mouth twitched, as if she were restraining it from twisting into a snarl. "It happens, betimes, to the aged," Arianna said. "I love and revere my father. But his time is done."
"Unless you lose," I said.
"I find that unlikely." She looked me up and down. "What a . . . novel outfit."
"I wore it especially for you," I said, and fluttered my eyelashes at her.
She didn't look amused. "Most of what I do is business. Impersonal. But I'm going to enjoy this."
I dropped the wiseacre attitude. The growing force of my anger burned it away. "Taking my kid isn't impersonal," I said. "It's a Kevorkianesque cry for help."
"Such moral outrage. Yet you are as guilty as I. Did you not slay Paolo's child, Bianca?"
"Bianca was trying to kill me at the time," I said. "Maggie is an innocent. She couldn't possibly hurt you."
"Then you should have considered that before you insulted me by murdering my grandchild," she hissed, her voice suddenly tight and cold. "I am patient, wizard. More patient than you could imagine. And I have looked forward to this day, when the consequences of your arrogance shall fall upon both you and all who love you."
The threat lit a fire in my brain, and I thought the anger was going to tear its way free of my chest and go after her without me.
"Bitch," I spat. "Come get some."
The horn blew.
- Location
- washington
By the way I'm not saying we'd win a fight with the winter court I'm saying we have strictly more military power and soldiers at least soldiers that can be used. Not that it means much as I don't have much interest in starting a war with the full might of our civilization.
Anyways I don't really mind closing the portal I'd just like the ability to turn it back on if that was possible and not inadvisable by the qm.
Anyways I don't really mind closing the portal I'd just like the ability to turn it back on if that was possible and not inadvisable by the qm.