“What is it that makes a man cross the line?”
“What does one pay when you do cross the line?”
“Life brings us hard choices. No matter what you do, no matter how much you prepare, they roll onto us. Thundering across our futures, our presents, and our pasts like a storm that won’t just seem to leave.”
“When troubles crash down with the force of lightning on us, we’re left to figure out how to handle what feels like a complete and overwhelming force. Pressure builds and builds, threatening to break you as it lashes on.”
“For some, that pressure causes them to break, fighting for their life as they flee from what they see as a deadly force stalking them. Running and running from threats unseen from shadows stalking them, paranoid to a point that will never allow them to feel safe.”
“Others break, throwing everything that they can into the storms that come from them. Even as they grind away what built them up, they roar and scream and clash against it in a desperate attempt to stop the threat. Grinding everything and everyone around them into dust and burying them in a place to be forgotten.”
“And then there are those that surrender themselves to the pressure. Who embrace it wholeheartedly and let it consume them in whole. When that pressure breaks and becomes something monstrous and inhuman. When the line’s gone, you lose definition from a person to a monster. You become hollow, empty of the soul of who you were.”
“There is a reason to have a line, the place where you make your stand. If it becomes something you cross, something you break when needed, there wasn’t really a line there to begin with. To be a full person, you have to have them. For definition, for setting into the stone of your soul of who you are.”
“You have to be stronger than the storm that roars at you to be worse. The mountain of your soul will push you to stand at the waves and winds of the world. I have faced storm and storm, foes bigger and louder that rumble their way again and again into my face. And with each one I stood my ground. I made my line in the sand, to not become a monster and keep who I am.”
“And here I stand. Four presented with the storm, but only one can survive and outlast the storm of the fight. And I see three that have changed and crossed their lines, fear and rage defining them. With no lines to hold them back, they have nothing to keep them in before being swept away by the storm.”
“And I am the mountain that weathers the storm. I am the trust of the people that breaks the foes that thunder against our home. The trust of Arcadia rests upon my shoulders, and I shall not fall in the face of my enemies!”
“For the good of Arcadia!”