Dialectic Journals part 2

He beg his Majesty's patience with this recounting of the events following the sack of a city of which he has never heard. Over the following decade more then six score battles, campaigns and wars were fought between and among the cities of Greece. Numberless farms were torched, temples burned, warships sunk, men at arms slaughtered, wives and daughters carried off into slavery. Each man of Greece knew what defeat in war meant and knew that sooner or later that bitter would complete its circuit of the table and settle at last before his own place.
His majesty has requested that I recount some of the training practices of the Spartans. Alexandros was a scion of one of the noblest families of Sparta. The Lakedaemonians are extremely shrewd in these matters. The army was at the Oaks, in the Otona valley, a blistering late summer afternoon, on an eight-nighter, what they call in Lake daemon, the only city which practices it, an oktonyktia.
One of the boys diedthat night. His name was Hermion. Sometimes they called him "Mountain". Alexandros nose never did heal properly. His father had it broken again, twice, and reset by the finest battle surgeons, but the seam where the cartilage meets the bone never mended quite right.