Threshold

55555's:

There's some Shakespeare quote about greatness. How one can achieve it, something I forget, or it can be thrust upon one. The first and second options are not relevant to this tale.

I was going for a walk one ordinary day. My dog padded along slightly in front of me and I felt the sun shining on my back. I went this way often. This time was no different from a thousand others, until it was. You rarely know when events are about to deviate from their normal trend, when something unusual will occur, when something will be thrust upon one.

My guard dog was an amazing animal, not just from training, he had an inborn sense of what was safe and what was dangerous, how to respond to the unusual in a logical manner. He had guided me well through many excursions. It helped that I could read his mind of course, but sometimes it seemed extraneous considering his abilities.

I never saw the gateway, as I have never seen the sun, the ocean, or a human face. Nonetheless I understood it, and these other things, remarkably well through my dog's perceptions. The threshold was not necessarily a dangerous thing, nor was it exactly safe. It was an unknown, an unpredictable factor. My dog paused, awaiting orders. Did I want to go through the portal, or to avoid it? To embrace the random (that's from a song), or to continue on my standard path, without this possibly undesirable deviation? Where did it lead? It was not of this world.

I spoke to my dog, and we stepped through.

55555's sister's:

She stood on the threshold.

A week ago, she had been a normal person. Then the voices came. They had told her strange things about herself, about her family and her world. She had wondered, “Am I crazy? Hallucinating? And if they are real... are they true?”

But this morning she had been working at her job, and a man had come up to the counter. She had never seen him before - but she recognized his voice immediately. And her co-worker evidently saw him.

Her doubts of her sanity were finally laid to rest. Did that mean what he had said to her was true?

The vast conspiracy... her family's ignorant complicity in it... her own, strange, responsibilities... all these he had assured her of, with the others.

She had stared at him in fear, and he had smiled. “There's nothing to fear, Ruth,” his voice had said. “I have come to bring you to your new brethren, if you are willing.”

And as she still looked at him, irresolute, suddenly the world around them had changed. Instead of a grocery store, she seemed to be on a garden path...or was it in a building? The Voice stood by her side, and before her was a marble wall, with an archway in it. Beyond it, Ruth saw, though she could not tell how, all the things she had been told of, the things she had dreamed of when she was younger – adventure, power, a mystic brotherhood of good. She knew if she stepped through, she would find the cloistered halls of a secret and a magical band.

She was on the threshold of it all.

Evan's:

 http://ashardofdream.wordpress.com/2012/05/20/what-is-love/