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.

And Tempus thought then that nothing was more worthwhile than what was growing in this whitewashed barracks, where he has come to build a force such as men or gods have never seen - a force worth reckoning with, if you were of a mind. And something was of that mind. And something else opposed it. He should have expected that. Battle in the heavens, battle on the earth.

Survival's the thing, isn't it?

Shed your mortal skin and let me take you beneath the waves.

"Mercy is not in favor in my heavens today," says Vashanka, unforgiving and combative, folding vast arms and spearing Harmony with lightning that crackles from his gaze.

Gods are nothing without their worshipers; they act on the affairs and the passions of men.

Here and now was always where Tempus was, not off somewhere in the realm of Greater Good or Mortal Soul or Eternal Consequence. He'd lost the ability to determine greater good, if there was one; his mortal soul he'd given up on long ago. And as for eternal consequence - he was its embodiment.