A Song of Ice and Fire depicts a violent world dominated by political realism. What little supernatural power exists is confined to the margins of the known world. Moral ambiguity pervades the books, and their stories continually raise questions concerning loyalty, pride, human sexuality, piety, and the morality of violence. The story unfolds through a rotating set of subjective points of view, the success or survival of any of which is never assured. Each chapter is told from a limited third-person perspective, drawn from a group of characters that grows from nine in the first novel to 31 by the fifth.