He threw his sword away. Screw swords. A magician doesn’t need a sword. A magician doesn’t need anything but what’s inside him. - Lev Grossman

Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.

But of course You can get so much done when everyone thinks You’re dead. No interruptions. No one prays to a dead God, why would they?

As he got deeper into it he began to run into a lot of mathematics, which he had to work out with a pencil and paper—you couldn’t do magical equations with computers, they just spat out inconsistent answers before hanging completely. Magical math had to be thought through with a brain.