Why is it we are always the targets of the angry Fates? Twice as many men of ours met harm as did theirs, since we've come here.

Your honor blinds you, Tempus, to what's right and wrong these days.

Gods colliding, ethos and mythos trying to combine. The Sacred Band caught up in a whirlwind not of any god's devising: he and Niko had wanted to save twenty-three pairs of fated Theban fighters. Now everything feels fated and fighting oversweeps its boundaries of time and place and plane.

Order is its own reward.

One man can make another's life so much better.

Nothing he knew of, enunciated life like death.

When I write what publishers call 'fantasy' I am writing in what I think is the most important tradition of fiction: starting with Homer and up through Shakespeare and Milton, the most important themes to tackle are those of the mythopoeic domain, tales of the body and mind seen through a temperament and a cosmos divorced from current reality so what is said can be more clear.