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.

Be careful what you pray for.

The meaning of life, Nikodemos, is to live life with meaning. The purpose of life is merely to live it, perhaps to give it.

One man, one horse, one holocaust on demand.

If, as Niko asks, you show them mercy, then the gods will be well pleased.

No ethos, pursued without thought or mercy, is ethical.

In every age he had ever studied, doomsayers abounded. No millennium is attractive to the man immured in it; enough prophecies have been made in antiquity that one who desires, in any age, to take the position that apocalypse is at hand can easily defend it. He would not join that dour order; he would not worry about anything but Tempus, and the matter awaiting his attention.