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I am Jim Butcher author of the Dresden Files and the new Cinder Spires series! Ask me anything! . . .

DaedalusMinion

So Dresden has been going from regular Wizard to semi-immortal over the course of the last few books- when you first started writing Dresden, did you ever imagine him to be this strong later on or was it just something that happened as you wrote the books?

JimButcherAMA Author

Oh, he's been leveling up since the very first short story I wrote him in, "Restoration of Faith."

And yeah, he's doing what I meant him to do from the get-go. We've got a ways to go yet, even now.

Though technically, he's nowhere close to immortal. He's a lot more formidable than he was when he got started, but honestly, most of the older wizards have got their own crazy background of powerups which they do not advertise. Listens-To-Wind's shapeshifting isn't purely a matter of wizardly skill (though his healing abilities are), for example.

But here's the key thing about people of power in the Dresden universe (and in the real world): the truly dangerous folks do not advertise. Not ever. They have no need to show off, and constantly displaying how scary they are would be counter to their own interests. You generally only find out that that little old lady is a spooky-bizarro master of wing-chun when you actually break into her house and try to hurt her granddaughter. Or that the quiet little guy with the receding hairline and glasses is a former Navy Seal when you grab his wife and try to drag her into an alley.

All the senior wizards have got something up their sleeve, and every single one of them is hiding it from all the others. If they don't know about it, they can't plan for it, and the "knowledge is power" wizard crowd is all about planning for things.

But we are coming up on the time when people are going to have their backs to the wall and we're going to start seeing what they've got. And I've been looking forward to writing it for nearly twenty years. >