Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think we're all in Cime's army now. But never mind, the Storm God hasn't forgotten us. Heaven is no farther away than it ever was.
The heavens listen to what is said on these cobbles. Laws of man and nature come together here. Here you must be firm. Here you must be true.
What doesn't bend must break, when dooms are apportioned and destiny takes the lead. As it will now, and as it must, until this struggle ends.
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.'
The gods want to bring a better day, and you are their messengers. Trust not in all you see. Trust only in your hearts. And in us, who love you both.
To take care of the world seemed, finally, a privilege rather than a burden. The Riddler had led them to life's greatest victory. They had found a home.
Some nights, one wants to tell beloveds everything that's been waiting to be said. Some nights, a man needs flesh and blood and warm breath and a loving heart.
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.
Look around you. It's an honor to fight beside you. Today we choose to fight. For the freedom to fight on other days. So we remember what's worth fighting for.
The two stallions, the silver and the black, represent the equine god (whomsoever horses pray to) in this ritual so ancient that no one knows what god to thank.
Strife brings all things into being on her battlefield. This I know. I have been there many times," says Vashanka, lord of sack and pillage. "I have died before.
We've the new hard-steel, though why they're all so hot to pay twice the price when men're soft as clay and even wood will pierce the boldest belly, I can't say.
This was what men fought for, what men died for: a chance at life, and to fight on other days - the battle of your choice, of the body, or the heart, or the soul.
He loves the world so much. I agree it would be a shame to take that love away from meadow and tree, stream and sky, and all that lives in nature, and leave them lonely.
"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.
Bandara was not an easy place to return to: it could hide from the common worlds whose periphery it inhabited. But Bandara never had, in all its years, completely disappeared.
For Tempus...was a dozen storm gods' avatar; no army he sanctified could know defeat; no war he fought could not be won. Combat was life to him; he fought like the gods themselves.
In this new world, this day and forever, then, we are not only Thebans - we are all Stepsons. We are all one Sacred Band. If you will have us. And mine will fight by yours, henceforth, as brothers.
Tempus never left a problem for another to solve. Tempus never let the pain or difficulty of an undertaking persuade him not to pursue a resolution his heart thought was right. Tempus never gave up.
These warriors of the Sacred Band were inscrutable; they loved their war and death and picking through the bones of time to sort out right from wrong, good from bad, holy from profane, honor from dishonor.
Loyalty must be forged - to him, to his: stronger than iron, from experience, from risk - it can't be bought, or taught, or promised before the fact. Allegiance must be earned so it will hold, win or lose.
The universe forgives those who give until their hearts are aching and their spirits weak, and finds a way to renew all strength and cure all ills, in this world or the next, if a soul can just have faith.
These Stepsons tread where mortals don't belong, some of us think. They seek out battle high above their station. Who knows what powers may yet take them and their mystic allies to task, bring them their comeuppance?
Each soul has its appointed doom. How is it you dare to raise a mortal boy so high - high enough to flout the gods? Bring godhead where a man may reach out and take it? growls Enlil, and lightning splits a clear blue sky.
Niko, you're halfway to where you need to go. It's the most dangerous time. And all the gods and forces have a stake in you, Hero. Or do you want to be just a memory, a cult somewhere, with people sacrificing horses to your name?
Here Stormbringer spies the Stepsons, the Theban fighters, and the 3rd Commando, attending to their own. In the face of such unflinching determination and unswerving devotion, the hurricane pauses and calms. Its ravings turn to mutters.
Ask yourselves if the gods are angry, you who have seen Harmony come among us, walk among us, touch us, look kindly upon us. We are the Sacred Band of Thebes. We fight in the forefront, therefore we bleed first. We live, therefore we die.
"Godling? Demigod?" Lysis nearly howled. "You'd be beaten black and blue in Thebes, and staked out overnight for claims like that. In Sparta, the secret police would ambush you, violate you, skin you alive and use your skull for a drinking cup."
Niko's angular face caught a flicker of firelight and Tempus saw his future there: sharp purpose, discipline, and power in perfect balance; love of man and gods, and mercy transcending all. If war ever wore a more humane face, this one would make it so.
Wisdom, Niko thought as he leaned his cheek against his long-handled rake, cannot be had without price. And that price is blood. The sound of it in your veins. The pound of it in your head. The volume of it in a human body; the sickness when you've spilled it.
What we hold sacred is honor, justice, and glory. You need not swear allegiance to our storm god, to serve with us. Fighters are among us from many lands, with many gods and many beliefs. Believe as you will. What is between a man and his god is theirs alone to say.
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.
Always take responsibility for your past. It is your only collateral in life. Unless you despise yourself now, you cannot despise yourself then. Everything you did is a part of the process that brought you here. All your past is as alive and real as your so-called 'present.'
Only from chaos does order come. The angry Fates bring death where they will, when war is king, says Enlil, storm god of the armies, and the tip of his crown rends the clouds above their heads. "Wheresoever I rule, death comes shambling after. So it has always been, is, and will be."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then what difference does human striving make: mortal struggle, valor, pain? If you live, then live for the test of spirit, for the celebration of the heart. Live to fight on other days. Lose your beloveds one by one. And remember. Exalt the kiss of friend and horse and wind and sun, which venality cannot cheapen nor stupidity belittle.
If you want to write something completely unique, you will probably fail or at best write something without redeeming value. The mind works in certain patterns: the mind organizes facts in story form; it is your commonality with that body of human thought that makes a good book, not its estrangement from the common values that humans share.
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.
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.
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.
And what do the Theban hoplites see in this extended rending of the sky, this white-bright glory of Enlil's lightning? The future, but not theirs: paired cavalry fighters; formed ranks of armored death; grim men on their tall horses with lightning limning weapons tailored to the task; men spoiling for a fight if the gods allowed - the Sacred Band of Stepsons, out from shadows and the dark.
Very little in science fiction can transcend the gimmickry of a technical conceit, yet without that conceit at its heart a book is not truly science fiction. Furthermore, so little emerging thought and technology is employed by sf writers today that the genre is lagging far behind reality both in the cosmology area and the technology area: sf is no longer a place to experiment, but is now very derivative.