[center][b]A LEGACY WRITTEN IN BLOOD[/b]
[i]Rising[/I]

[b]Introduction[/b][/center]

[i]"I prefer to go out at night, when the sun has rested after a long day of polishing the earth. The light is inherently forgiving in nature. It has a way of shining a false beauty over even the ugliest of situations. It gives cosmetic value to an otherwise worthless piece of merchandise. The light is the great deceiver, not the darkness. When the shadows close in around us and threaten to remind us of who we are, it's in the light we seek comfort and salvation. 

I walk the streets of this forsaken city, past the dregs, junkies and whores. I see and hear everything that happens in these streets, this concrete Gomorrah. 

I see a man, a spineless worm, unemployed and hooked on crack cocaine. He collects welfare checks from his brother's mailbox and lives with his girlfriend and her two small children. He spends every penny chasing a high he'll never satisfy and watches her kids suffer, neglected and deprived of a mother and childhood. 

His eyes are fixed upon a young woman, a prostitute. Her long blonde hair, slim figure and schoolgirl face earn her the money she needs to care for the product of a trick gone horribly wrong; the uninvited seed of a low-life rapist. A foreign invader who left upon her both a gift and a curse, a bitter sweet signature left upon her world in the form of a pure, and life-long maternal love, marred by the memory of her violator every time she looks him in the eyes. 

The pipe in his left coat pocket is still warm, and his mind races, the pane of glass between himself and reality slightly cracked and smudged. Only two things rest on his feeble, one-track mind; that perfect backside and the sexual release it will offer him, and the $600 which rests in her purse beside a loaded .45. Nothing good happens tonight, nothing that can be summed up beautifully, or packaged neatly by a deep moral observation. 

People hide within the light, hoping, praying that all of their superficial bullshit is in any way true, or in any way will protect them from the cruel reality of the human condition... evil. Sin, and the capacity to commit sinful acts of violence, greed, or deviance dwell within us all. The road to heaven is paved with corpses... so watch your step."[/i]

—Preacher