@Mira
Good pickup! Personally, I don’t believe the Black Council wanted the Ramp war to start when it did - as pointed out, the Ramps needed a couple more decades of preparation & planning in order to beat the White Council. Since the fall of the White Council is one of the Outsiders’ (& Black Council’s) goals, I believe they too would’ve wanted to hold off on the war for a while.

Therefore my theory is that Peabody was ‘nudging’ the Senior Council members into being more suspicious of Harry (they are already afraid of what he may become), so that the Council would give him up to the Ramps & end the war before it starts.

Unfortunately some factions within the Red Court & Black Council believe they are ready for war & attack Archangel. I believe Simon is Cowl & that the Ortegas were not Nfected. I also believe that Cowl & Peabody are in different factions of the Black Council.

@Yuillegan
I don’t think Lord Raith is behind everything - I do think he is behind Sells though. Given his ‘impotence’, Lord Raith needs a magical enforcer to maintain power (WN shows that it has been slipping for decades). His absence from Bianca’s ball in GP is also noteworthy given that it is this cycle’s opening salvo - perhaps this is one of the reasons both Mavra & Cowl take pot shots at him in BR & WN.

About the Heart Spell
The Ramps could’ve tested the heart-ripping spell any time they wanted, had they known about it (they don’t really need Sells’ proof, they could obtain it in a few days) - iirc, Martin is the one to tell the Red King about it in the first place (so maybe he read the same book Sells had?). Besides, Sells performing the ritual sloppily on one person at a time when he has their hair/ fluids vs. the Ramps using it to erase an entire bloodline globally from a child are almost 2 separate things - like the difference between stabbing person X & launching laser-guided missiles at X & the 10-15 people directly related to him simultaneously.

Regarding Nemesis
While I don’t disagree with Outsiders being involved in StF, I don’t see why Sells had to be Nfected for any of their plans to work - after all, Lord Raith or Cowl could have manipulated Sells well enough without Nfection into performing some of the stuff you mention.  For Nemesis to make sense it has to have limits - one of which is likely the number of people it is allowed to Nfect at one time (so not like Ebola). All of it’s confirmed targets so far (Aurora, Lea, Maeve & Cat Sith) are high-ranking Fae - they all have a significant amount of power in their courts. Sells is however, a poorly educated but moderately powerful sorcerer.

What was Nemesis’ end goal of a Nfecting Sells? It is clear that he would not have stood a chance against a real combat wizard. If Harry wasn’t able to stop him, Morgan surely would.

If I were a believer in the humans can be Nfected theory, I’d wager that one of the SC (or Luccio) is Nfected - it follows Nemesis’ pattern of Nfecting the Elders of whatever Court they are infiltrating.

Or

Since it is hard to possess older wizards, a candidate like Hannah Ascher would make much more sense - she is already trained in basic magic theory & is fairly powerful. If she were Nfected, kept in the shadows & made deals where she could, she could’ve potentially become Kemmler 2.0. I don’t see Sells being able to do this - he’s just too much of a noob.

@ Yuillegan
Fair enough about Raith Sr.’s age, although if Raith is indeed the progenitor of the entire White Court, why do other Houses like Skavis & Malvora even exist? It’s not like there were Ramps who didn’t drink blood (the ones who were able to refrain were only half-turned).

It would make more sense that the Whamp Elders like Lord Skavis, Lady Cheserina & Lord Raith were the Whamp version of LoONs to the actual progenitor (who is likely dead or ‘contained’).

On a reread of Stf, a few things jumped out at me that confirm some of theories bandied around this forum.

• Malcolm Dresden is described as being a traveling magician who took little Harry around with him - while Harry rationalizes this as Malcolm taking small jobs at random little towns, it seems to me that this is Malcolm’s best effort to hide little kid Harry from his mother’s enemies
• I don’t think Victor Sells was Nfected - when Monica reveals all she knows about what’s going on, she says that she drank 3Eye & looked at Victor, a memory that makes her almost throw up - I imagine looking at an Outsider with one’s Sight would drive a normal human insane, let alone a wizard.
  Also, other (somewhat sane) people would have looked at Victor with their Sight (like Helen Beckett) & while I’m sure that was a highly unpleasant experience, it’s nothing compared to seeing an actual Outsider
• Despite being a very angry man, Sells decides to use lust as a way to power his spells instead of rage - something that is way more easily available than setting up sex rituals. This screams of the White Court to me - a way for Lord Raith to control Sells, leading credence to theory that he was Sells’ sponsor
• The dark emotions that Harry feels when he sees Sells’ lake house with his Sight - the ones that make him feel like he can just take power & use it for his own ends, seem like the corruptive influence of black magic on someone whose soul has already been tainted by such - it is overt & appeals directly to Harry’s greed (we know goateed Harry exists). This doesn’t seem like Nemesis, which I imagine is infinitely more subtle (sorta like Lash)

Yes I’ve wondered that about the Gates myself - it does seem likely that they are intimately bound to the NeverNever. I dunno about it being what makes traveling between the realms possible.

I would imagine that beings like Mab & MW would have some precognition/ Intellectus as part of their abilities, after all precognition is apparently a trait all wizards develop over time as Luccio tells Harry in TC when he tells her of his dreams about the island.

I agree about Rashid’s ability to find Harry in the most unusual places at the most unusual times - he must be able to do this because of his link to the Gates (since no other SC member seems capable of this). It would seem that the Gates are almost like a spiritual cat scanner that can also map the future vector of the disease once it’s inside the body. If true, this would be an incredibly powerful tool to have in the fight against Outsiders.

@morriswalters
Hmm despite Lea saying so about Harry’s debt we know that Mab possesses the athame by Changes, so we know that she took it from Lea. Whether she took it because she figured it is Nfected & this wanted it away from Lea, or simply because its an object of immense magical power is debatable.

@Mira
I agree, the symmetrical set up of the gift giving at Bianca’s ball had me confused as well. Here is how I see the BC thinking about it:

• They give the Nfected athame to Lea, who in turn gives it to Mab
• They gift Lea a magical artifact of great value knowing that she will owe them a huge, commensurate favor in return in order to ‘balance the scales’. Perhaps the favor they were planning to call in was inside knowledge of the defenses @ Arctis Tor.

So in a way, they didn’t care if Lea had something to gift them in return to balance the scales since they were covered either way. I believe that Mavra was always planning on killing the girl as a way to force Harry & Michael to break their guest privileges - that she had Amoracchius was the cherry on top.

It is also possible that the Ramps reached out to Lea & set up the trade, although it would be awfully last minute. Lea was only able to get Amoracchius through a lucky series of events a day or 2 before the ball. So I doubt there was a longer term plan for Lea to steal Amoracchius- it reads to me as being opportunistic.

@morriswalters
I’m pretty sure Lea (or any other Fae) cannot accept artifacts that change the power balance of the Court without first consulting their ruler. Iirc, Mab says that Lea challenged her power once she had the athame like @Mira says. In the end, Mab is forced to take the athame as well as Harry’s debt in compensation to rebalance things. I’d be really curious about what happened there.

The Gatekeeper likely kills the host & attempts to contain the Outsider (perhaps to banish it back beyond the Outer Gates seeing as he & DR had a past disagreement (perhaps about an issue like this one)?). I’m fairly certain that once an Nfected host dies, the Nfection dies with it. After all, Mab did not seem unduly concerned about containing anything after Maeve dies in CD.

I’m also not sure that Whamps should be considered immortal. During the duel in WN, Harry explicitly says that the Whamps in attendance were entranced by Madrigal’s death since a typical Whamp is supposed to live for centuries. Besides, they are not true immortals since they can be killed any day of year, including Halloween.

@peregrine
I believe Lash says that Vito Malvora was “possessed by an Outsider” in WN. While I also don’t think that humans/ wizards can be Nfected, if I were playing Devil’s advocate, I would say that perhaps wizards/ quasi-mortals who get Nfected get a massive power boost, superhuman resilience & arcane knowledge? These are traits Cowl seems to show.

@g33k
Hmm not sure about that, the Aesir & Jotun don’t seem to be running around much these days (outside of Odin & his cohort). Hell, Monoc Securities seems to be functioning just fine without a Thunderer or any of the other Norse deities, so why wouldn’t Winter without most of its power (since it is derived through purpose in the DV) be able to function in the future without a WK?

@Kindler
That would make sense, although it would make his appearance in TC incongruous since neither Fae nor Outsiders were really involved in the central plot.

@isoycrazy
I would guess that the Outsiders ramped up their attack at the Gates the year of CD so as to put pressure on Mab - a Winter regime change was coming that year, they obviously wanted it to be Maeve replacing Mab. By ramping up their attacks, they put a lot more stress on Mab, leaving her little time to scheme her way out of the trap Maeve was building in theory.