Listen close and you can hear, Please, bless us and forgive us, and make us good here and strong here. Let us get along here. Let those we love and left behind be blessed. Let us find the proper path and keep to it. Help us act harmoniously, and find work pleasing in the sight of god and man.

You three have done quite enough today: all of you and your feckless, treacherous god.

Only so much can be borne from men, so much from gods

Fight for life itself and everlasting freedom of the human spirit.

Such hubris could only come from a man's mouth.

It was his soul's freedom that was in question. And that question was whether freedom was worth the price when it meant shirking the responsibilities of honor.

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.