What do we say to the god of death?

I woke up this morning to the title line, one given by Syrio Forel, swordmaster at King's Landing and the teacher of Arya in Song of Fire and Ice's first book. For those of you who don't read, just substitute the end part with "from the tv-series Game of Thrones". Anyway, it gave me a topic: epics, epica and epicness, especially in fiction.

I believe that in the bland, cubicle-bound world of today, the heart yearns for something greater. When I wrote about machismo the first time, I spoke briefly about meaning given to man by the black-and-white causes of fiction, especially in our world of grey uncertainties, but I felt I should return to the subject with a bit more detail for (hopefully) one last time.

There are endless possibilities to experience things unavailable to man otherwise through fiction. In the words of a skilled writer or the songs of a talented musician one can find a way to enter a place that is essentially different from our own. In that world, one can live the adventures of anyone and -thing, if the suspension of disbelief holds.

For me, the aforementioned suspension is paramount: the scenes and characters need to be believable. I'm a fantasy veteran, so they need not be believable in our reality, but they need to be so in their own. Often, this relates somewhat to real world sensibilities, but that makes only sense: we cannot perceive that for which we do not have any reference frame at all. There is no way for us to understand a world in more than three dimensions, for example, because we have nothing to relate it to.

If we can be immersed in the fictive reality, we can be, see and follow people and things that are beyond us in our own, subjective reality. This gives us an opening into experiences that are, on a scope that is not possible in a world where there are no ultimate rights or wrongs, epic. This is one of the most important things about fiction, the gateway that is given for us to experience something vehemently different.

As for the answer to the question given by Silvio Forres: "What do we say to the god of death?" For those of you that do not know, it is a simple one:

Not today.