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The Slumped and Glowing Vanguard

What better way to celebrate Christmas than with the gift of random words. Tonight's story comes from three words produced on a random word generator. Without further adieu, here are the words given to me: glow, slump, and vanguard. My qualification is that I'm not allowed to hit backspace (that is, delete words I've written). Once I've written a piece of the story, it must remain. Here it goes.

Their sabers flashed and rattled in a cacophony of light and sound as they advanced under peering moonlight. They, the first among equals, would also be the first to die. The soldiers behind them knew this, and the officers to their immediate rear all but spoke the words with their ghoulish glances, their faces dim despite being lit by august moonlight.

That is, until one of them actually spoke. "Freedom is a word that men throw around as though it were something real, something to be touched. I know of no such word. All my days have been handed on scraps of paper to superior officers, who then tell me where I must go. No, there is no such thing as freedom."

"Choose to believe that, and you have died long before a sword and soldier have run you through." It was the man to his immediate front who spoke. Tall, pale, and pocked with the remnants of disease, his appearance betrayed a sense of virtue that clung to his speech. It was as though he had said them before.

"Perhaps," replied the younger officer, "but at least I can rest in the knowledge of my own end. There is less fear in the known than the unknown."

Their pace slowed now as the brigade neared the mouth of a yawning valley, its darkness swallowing the intermittent constellation of campfires that shone from within. This would be their final moment. They knew it, they had prepared for it, and-- most importantly-- they had chosen it.

What was once a quiet and restive fear now broke forth with firm resolution as the men charged into that darkness. This place, this pitched night, was to them a canvas, but it was a canvas painted by their own hands and onto which would be added their own figures. No, these men were no longer slumped, but they were glowing, glowing in the knowledge that they were freemen.

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