The Dresden Files/Characters/The Kemmlerites

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Heinrich Kemmler

Heinrich Kemmler was considered to be the most dangerous wizard who ever lived. An immensely powerful necromancer who spent over a century planning World War I and wreaking havoc in World War Two, up until the White Council and every ally they could pull together gathered and killed him for good. His legacy remains, however, in a series of books spreading his knowledge of necromancy, as well as his survivng disciples.

Cowl

An incredibly powerful and mysterious necromancer who, with his assistant Kumori, showed up in Dead Beat to try to harness the Darkhallow. Both he and his assistant Kumori are probably White Council members, and they're pretty much confirmed to be on the Black Council, but their identities are otherwise unknown. Cowl does, however, deny being a Kemmlerite.

  • Affably Evil: While not as friendly as Nicodemus or Marcone, Cowl is pretty respectful of Dresden.
  • Ambiguously Evil: Is he really Necessarily Evil or just evil?
  • Badass: He shrugs off Death Curses like ping pong balls and isn't more than a little winded after Harry flips a car over on him.
    • Not to mention the amount of power he'd have to put into taking all of Chicago off the technologicial and communicational grid.
    • He's also said to be stronger than Ebenezar and to pack a magical punch equivalent to a Fairy Queen, making him in all probability one of the five or so best wizards in the world.
  • Black Cloak: Harry, of course, makes lots of bad jokes about it.
  • Chekhov's Gunman: First seen in Grave Peril with the rest of Chekhov's Army, giving Lea the athame. Not really introduced until he shows up 4 books later with the rest of Necromancers-R-Us.
  • Determinator: Again, a car thrown at him or multiple Death Curses will not stop this guy!
  • Evil Counterpart: Dedicated, a bit curmudgeonly, and uses dark power for what seem to be good-ish purposes.
  • The Faceless
  • Hidden Agenda Villain: We know what he was after in Dead Beat specifically, but his long-term goals are still mysterious.
  • Implacable Man: See above, the car.
  • In the Hood
  • No Name Given
  • Not So Different: Harry notices a lot of similarities between the two of them in Dead Beat, and is appropriately disturbed by the implications.
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: Why does he want to become a god in Dead Beat? He thinks its inevitable that someone will and considers himself the least possible evil (and when you look at Corpsetaker and Grevane, he probably has a point...)
  • Wicked Cultured: Prefers Goethe.

Kumori

Cowl's apprentice / sidekick. Apart from the fact that she's female and a pretty solid Well-Intentioned Extremist, she's almost as much a blank slate as her boss.

Capiorcorpus, aka the Corpsetaker, aka the Grey Ghost

One of the disciples of mad necromancer Hienrich Kemmler, the Corpsetaker is a necromancer who specializes in mental magic, raising spectres, and using dark magic to allow him/her/it to jump between bodies. Violent, savage, and thoroughly insane, behind a veneer of affable friendliness. One of the members of the Kemmlerite gang that showed up in Dead Beat to initiate the Darkhallow. When Harry encounters the Corpsetaker, he/she/it has stolen the body of a college student named Alicia. Returns for another round in Ghost Story as, well, a ghost.

  • Axe Crazy: Of all of the Kemmlerites, Corpsetaker is probably the most unbalanced and twisted. Mental magic does that, of course.
  • Body Surf
  • Boom! Headshot!: How Harry manages to kill her after she takes over Luccio.
  • Fallen Hero: Ghost Story reveals that she once a member of the white council before defecting and joining up with Kemmlar
  • Grand Theft Me
  • Karmic Death: In Ghost Story, Mort destroys her with the same wraiths she had used to torture him.
  • Mind Rape
  • Necromancer
  • Pronoun Trouble: Precisely what gender the Corpsetaker originally had is not clear. Whether the concept of gender really applies to a necromancer who seems to exist purely as a body-hopping mind is up in the air. As of Ghost Story, she appears to be female.
  • Weapon of Choice: A tulwar.
  • What Beautiful Eyes!: Harry stops to mention them.

Li Xian

A ghoul serving under the Corpsetaker, both as her assistant and drummer to control her spectres.

Grevane

The first of Kemmler's disciples, Grevane is a leathery old man who was Kemmler's "favored" student. Grevane's specialty is in raising large numbers of powerful zombie minions. As in, hundreds of them at a time.


Evil Bob

Evil Bob is the dark side of Regular Bob that served as Kremmeler's spirit of intellect for centuries. While technically not a member of the Kremmlerites, he made his first appearance in the same book nearly killing Harry in the process. Harry not wanting someone to gain access to that part of him again ordered Bob to forget it completely. Naturally this backfires as Bob took that order as a command to sever the part of himself off leading to it becoming The Dragon to the Corpsetaker's ghost in Ghost Story. The last we see of Evil Bob is him locked in combat with his regular self.

Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/The_Dresden_Files/Characters/The_Kemmlerites?oldid=2040520"