Valentine's Resolve (Vampire Earth 6)

"OUR GREAT TEST HAS COME. WE MELTED IN THE HEAT OF DARKNESS AND DISASTER, BUT SHALL REFORM,

AN AMALGAM GATHERED IN THE SWORD MOLD,

HARDENED LIKE STEEL HAMMERED FROM THE FURNACE".

Valentine circled the rock twice, but kept returning to the Gettysburg Address. Its handful of words renewed him like the free ice water being passed out by the young "scouts" collecting valuables for the extension of the monument.

He had a single gold coin left. He palmed it and tossed it in the old plastic bleach jug as he accepted a hard plastic cup filled from the ice jug. "Please return for reuse", a childish hand had scrawled on the cup's side.

LeHavre was right. He'd made the struggle personal. It wasn't about this or that Kurian, or even some general's ego or his career. Even his family. They were all just caught in the whirlwind, a contest of life and liberty versus tyranny akin to those the men and women who had spoken the words described, even if the stakes were higher.

The Cause wasn't found in Southern Command; it wasn't the Cascades, or even this little band of July Fourth partyers. It was behind barbed wire, in the shadow of the Kurian Towers, in ugly little killing bottles like the Bellevue gardens. In a revolt in the Appalachians, led by a familiar-sounding Golden One.

That's where he'd be too.

He let the clean, cool water pass through his lips and wash him like the baptisms the firebrand preacher was even now attending to at the creek, and read again:

...that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.