Life was never simple, happiness never where you thought you'd left it, and right and wrong no more fixed than clouds in the sky.

There must be love, and understanding, to betray. Most men haven't the wit or the honor for betrayal: not to know it when they see it; not the stomach to apprehend it as they do it. Most men, blind and dumb in their self-centeredness, don't betray: they merely disappoint.

"Dreamers and dreaming dead, lots of them from neither here nor there with no chance of getting home again, lost in place and time.

This is for you. A mage named Randal told me to give it to the Band if you ever came back. 'It surmounts evil,' he told me, 'keeps doom at bay.'

Use him wisely. Few have been given such a weapon by the gods or Fates before.

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

Now the Fates are here on the beach, three shadows blacker than black, walking through the dunes and looking for their own. Just shadows, lamb-white hands beneath black robes spun of tears, glide among the celebrants on this night wherein the spirits of Thebes have found a home, if serendipitously.