Take heart, my friends! If our courage falters now, then all hope is lost before the first arrow leaves its quiver.

What hope? For soldiers of our caliber, there is always hope.

Hope? Do not speak to me of hope. Speak to me of duty. For it is duty, not hope, that will impel us forward on this day.

My friends, against the legions of Byzantium there can be no hope. This is the day we die.

Do not despair! You may still return to your families yet, but you must fight if you wish to live.

I promise you, you will live to return to your families, and when you do, you can tell them the tale of how this small clutch of soldiers drove out the armies of Byzantium with unrivaled skill on the battlefield.

It is far better to abandon your family as a hero than to return to them as a coward.

Your families are doomed! Don’t you understand? The legions of Byzantium will leave nobody alive! Embrace it! Revel in your impending death!

What of it? Those mechanical birds will carry your carcass into the sky whether your sword is drawn or you are lying whimpering on the ground. Cowardice will not save you, but courage still might.

What are a handful of songbirds to soldiers like us? We will pierce their metallic wings with our arrows and send them plummeting out of the sky, leaving them only time enough to curse the Byzantine warlocks who wrought them before they shatter on the rocky ground below.

Wolves? Mammoths? What of them? They are merely the ornamental denizens of a pampered prince’s menagerie! Will you allow those mechanical birds to pluck you shrieking into the sky, or will you face them with your steel and your teeth bared in kind and make yourself a hard-won meal for those unholy automatons?

Yes! They do! They have beasts large enough to trample us into the dust! They have enough mechanical birds to block out the sun! Let those demonic automatons come and swallow us whole! We shall slide down their alloyed gullets laughing like maniacs! We shall exult in our steel-winged demise! There is no escape.

My friends, although the enemy may outnumber us, do not look to me to issue the order to surrender. The armies of Byzantium are at your door, and they will slaughter every man, woman, and child they find alive within these city walls. I cannot command you to surrender, for I should just as soon issue you an order to perish. Do not look to me for orders any longer, for I have been usurped as your general. Fate is your commanding officer now, and She has issued the ironclad command to do battle. And so it is courage, my friends, courage that will save our lives this day! For those who fight fiercely and fearlessly are those who will survive this battle. So, let the Byzantines come in such numbers that their footfalls cause the ground to quake. We shall not tremble at their approach, though the very ground we stand on may tremble. The battle is already won, for our only enemy is fear, and have we not conquered fear, my friends? Though cruel Byzantine eyes dot these craggy steppes as stars dot the heavens, do we not stare them down with an unblinking constellation of our own, and read in those unkind enemy stars the horoscope that portends our victory? Courage, my friends! Courage is the weapon that shall level the armies of Byzantium! Let each arrow that we let fly with an untrembling hand read as an augury of our triumph! Come, my friends, let us plunge with purpose into the waiting arms of our enemies! Let all those who may doubt us discover this day that ten thousand Byzantine blades are nothing against a single blade wielded without fear! Follow me now, friends! Take heart, and march forward!

A thousand to one? Ha! Even if the Byzantines outnumbered us ten thousand to one, I would gladly face them with this paltry army by my side. If Byzantium knew of the deadly accuracy of our arrows or the lightning quickness of our steel, they would turn back now and seek a battle with an army far larger, and they would meet that new adversary gladly, knowing that, had they stood and faced our army—small though it may be—they would not have lived to face another. For we are a small but deadly swarm, forever outnumbered but never outmatched. Weakness and fatigue would be utterly unknown but for the constancy with which we observe them, like alien words written in some arcane alphabet, inscribed across the faces of our enemies! Defeat is an unwelcome stranger in our lands, and victory a rite dutifully and invariably observed among our warriors. We do not know fear, and yet we spread it wherever we go! We are strangers to ruin, and yet we cast it across our enemies as if it were our shadow! Take heart, friends! We are the harbingers of divine fury, and when the legions of Byzantium, no matter how numerous their ranks, witness firsthand the deadly swiftness with which we cut through all who oppose us, then they will know, for one fleeting second before their lives are extinguished, that they have picked a battle not with a paltry company of men, but with the entire pantheon of gods in miniature! So, draw your swords, my friends! Fall in step behind me, and we shall drench these craggy steppes in Byzantine blood!

What of it? I would gladly march alone against these approaching legions of Byzantium, holding high the shield that bears the emblem of our people. For I do not hold that emblem cheap, but hold it instead aloft as a sign to my enemies that I am impelled to battle not by ephemeral trappings of victory, but by the ironclad bonds of duty. I need not issue the command to fight, for all of you who stand here before me who call yourselves soldiers know that it is not your general, but your oaths, that have issued the order to march forward; and if you do not feel so compelled, then you are not a soldier today, nor were you on any other day, no matter how many times you may have washed your bloodstained blade in the Danube. I see fear in your eyes, but what is there to fear? Death? Do not fear death! Death is nothing more than a gateway into legend. I can hear even now the stories that are told in awestruck whispers of the company of honor-bound warriors who waded with no uncertain step into a sea of Byzantine steel and there were drowned. I say it is far more heroic to die a soldier vanquished in an instant than a deserter who languished for a lifetime. So, who among you will march with me this day against the legions of Byzantium? Who among you will greet Death not as an unwelcome wraith, but as the bard who shall draft your deeds into song? Who among you will abandon both hope and despair—those equally false fiends!—and navigate solely by the unfaltering waypoint of honor? I shall go proudly into the fray with the soldiers among you at my back, and nothing but glory before me!

You’re absolutely right! This is it! This is the end for us, my friends! But why despair? Let us run cackling to our dooms! There is absolutely no way out of this. They’ve got us cornered, they’ve got us outnumbered, and they’re going to kill us all in a matter of minutes. When I look at you all, I do not see soldiers, but corpses. I see your sun-bleached bones littering these craggy steppes. There is no glory in fighting in vain for a victory we cannot hope to achieve, so let us, in one last, lunatic gasp, strike fear into the hearts of the Byzantines not with the tenacity with which we fight for our lives, but with the maniacal joy with which we embrace our deaths! Let us turn their stomachs as we drive ourselves whooping into their waiting blades of our own volition. Let our howls of delight as we hold our own viscera aloft warp their dreams for all of their days! In the centuries to come, history will tell of the one-sided slaughter that took place here. The legends will say that the armies of Byzantium conquered our city with little opposition. Nevertheless, the gruesome memories the Byzantines will carry home with them on this day will tell a different tale. The world will remember a Byzantine victory, but the Byzantines will remember only wave after wave of shrieking madman sprinting headlong into death as if it were the sweetest oasis in the cruelest desert! The look in our eyes will scar them in a way our steel never could. Come, my friends, let us luxuriate in our own demise! Let us leap shrieking into the abyss! Today, we shall mark ourselves the harbingers of an eternity of sleepless nights in Byzantium.