The Story of Evil: Volume I - Heroes of the Siege Read Online Free PDF Page B

difficult to have conversations with.
    Steve was happy with who he was and felt that he had a personality that had a little bit of everything. He was the complete package. You couldn’t get much more average than Stephen Brightflame. Most people didn’t want it that way. Most people wanted to be unique. Being unique meant being remembered. For example, an athletic person would be very popular because he or she would be known as “the most physically gifted person.” Steve would never say it out loud, but why would that person be known as the “most athletic” rather than the “least intelligent?” People tended to focus on the positives in people. After thinking about it, he realized that was better than the implications of the opposite. Having people focus on the best parts of themselves helped their self-confidence and increased overall happiness.
    Steve tried his best to see everything from both an optimistic and a pessimistic point of view. As a warrior, he had been trained to always visualize the full picture along with the good and bad consequences, regardless of personal feelings. Besides, being popular was not important to Steve. He would rather have few very close friends, than a lot of people that only knew his name. By the end of the day, he would come to realize he had both.
    Out of the four races, Steve belonged to the Human race. Humans were known for their good communication, public speaking, and leadership abilities, but were prone to sicknesses if they were not physically fit. If there was a race considered to be the opposite of Humans, it would be the Elves. Elves did not have the aptitude for being great leaders or having a silver tongue like Humans. You would rarely see a person of Elven decent leading warriors on a battlefield. They understood tactics and strategy as well as anyone else, but it was not their fortitude to draw them out and enforce them. The strength of Elves was that they had good metabolisms, were very healthy, and were not easily infected with disease.
    Giants and dwarves were exact opposites. Giants were known for their size and physical strength, but they lacked the talent of building and blacksmithing that the Dwarves were renowned for. Dwarves were the exact opposite of Giants in that they were the smallest of the four races and were not as strong as Giants. Usually the weaknesses of each race were the butt ends of lighthearted jokes told by members of opposite races.
    All four of the races had different lifespans. The lifespan of an Elf was the longest at about 150 name days. At 75 years, Giants had the shortest life expectancy. Dwarves (sometimes called halfmen) tended to live until around the age of 125. Humans had an average lifespan of 100 years. Steve knew, in his line of duty as a warrior, that his life expectancy was much, much shorter than the one century average. Still, a day did not go by that he would have been willing to trade in his adventurous life for anything different.
    Standing tall at 6’4, Steve was still a head and shoulders shorter than the minotaurs he and Ty just defeated in the arena. He had heard of some Giants who stood over the heights of minotaurs at eight feet tall. However, unlike the monsters who seemed to survive longer the larger they were, Giants had a short lifespan for their size.
    Steve’s years of training as a warrior had taken him to his peak physical fitness level. He had a strong upper body. His arms were well-toned and muscular, due to having to carry a sword in his right hand and a shield in his left every day. He could run with all that extra weight for three miles before having to slow his pace.
    As he made his way towards the castle, it seemed like Clyx was moving, but their destination never got closer. He wished he was already inside the castle because every couple of blocks it was one heartbreaking sight after another.
    First there was a screaming man engulfed in flames rushing out of his burning house. He stopped right in