"I, for one, have an idea that he will never bring this journey off…" – The Odyssey of Homer
A lost creature’s heart is easy to follow. It thunders almost as loudly as its feet, in full flight. Its scent is heavy with the salt of fear and a predator can nearly taste it as the chase goes on. As the prey looks about, hesitating in its escape, the glint of its eyes in the dark keeps its hunters close. Like the light of the full moon, the prey’s every effort is a beacon.
If there is a nuanced theme of moral struggle that can be best illustrated in the genre of fantasy, with it being so fundamentally composed of primal archetypes, that theme would be the nature of legacy.
The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie, takes a much more nuanced and incredibly satisfying approach to the nature of divinity and its role in the lives of the mortally coiled.
I stared into its eyes for a long time, Macthal remembered, in his fevered dreaming. It was the only way I could apologize. I had to force myself to look... back then. I was so... weak.
If men and women have long pondered the world to learn its secrets, why wouldn't a mind made by their hands? If people have long struggled with the desire to change the world, then why wouldn't the gods of quanta and bits?
Failure of the king breaks the realm.
From the edges of the pond that Macthal floated in, while his body bobbed against the fae head, came the whispering of near voices that sounded impossibly far away. Ghosts that had watched his fight, from behind and within the dreaming trees of the ancient forest, began to glide over the gore polluted waters.
