Philip Hart wrote: >Well, exactly my point. In the snippage we were discussing Blackwand. >M has his talents, but he's not a battalion-in-a-stick as it were. My >earlier contention (which I repeat was not well-received by the Author) >was that M should have left B or been prevented from going. > > Time and cause & effect are different for gods than they are for people. I've seen several things that lead me to assume that they are willing to accept some things as inevitable. It's not so much as some things aren't worth fighting over - it's that it's senseless to fight over them. Vera can tell Vlad to put that weapon away - but it didn't occur to her to take it away from him. I get the impression that this isn't because she can't - it's because she knew he would have it later. We know that time isn't the same - at least for a certain little girl. We have seen that the gods were the servants of a people whose concepts of time and space were even more different than ours. Also - demons and gods are the same - except that one is controlled and the other sort of isn't. The demon we know best doesn't seem to be bothered by this. Gods are different from people. And their relationship to time makes a big difference.