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Rule of Darkness -Book II Chapter 3 Last Update 19 June 2008- Book I Completed
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<blockquote data-quote="Ghostknight" data-source="post: 3359289" data-attributes="member: 15338"><p><strong>Rule of Dakkness- updated 22 feb 2007</strong></p><p></p><p>Chapter 3</p><p></p><p>The journey out had taken two days, the trip back four. Jeria felt the comfort of the walls, roots, dirt and rock of the path comfortingly close after the openness of the outside. For Gruzz, the path was complicated by the tight confines and having to carry the body of the comatose woman. He sweated, ducked beneath entangling roots and took twice the time to move each pace as he had when making for the outside.</p><p></p><p>"So, Jeria, now you see the glamour of being an Outwalker; a few hours outside, then you get to carry unconscious strangers on your back. A glorious existence indeed, being a pack horse for the city." He grinned, giving a small laugh as he adjusted the body of Gyv on his back. </p><p></p><p>As they walked, the two Outwalkers listened to the unconscious form of Gyv moaning incomprehensively, her voice alternating between high-pitched screams and guttural mutterings in a voice so deep they could not hear the half of what was said..</p><p></p><p>The end of the fourth day found them at the turn in the passage, heading along the smoothed rock of the final stretch to the city. Both breathed a sigh of relief, glad to be back home; maybe it was the proximity of the city, maybe the relief of the two that bore her was palpable, but as they neared the city Gyv relaxed, her breathing deepening and her face relaxing.</p><p></p><p>"You can't escape me that easily." The face was mocking, handsome, the red flesh, green eyes and sharp fangs enhancing it, not detracting from the visages appearance, despite their alien nature. "Come now, Gyv, life is not that bad, you are strong, far stronger than most of your puny race. You could be a ruler, a wielder of power over vast parts of my realm. Think of the good you could do, the changes you could make for the better in the lives of the slaves." Her mind filled with images, of slaves with food, unharmed backs, clothing upon their bodies, and boots on their feet. Her mind kept shouting no, but in her dream she heard herself pledging fealty, promising herself, her fealty in the service to Jelial, Lord of the Dark, master of the Rule. In her mind the mocking face smiled, laughed and disappeared, as in the world outside two strangers carried her into the final corridor, into a city she had never seen, to people unaware of the approaching danger.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>Gate duty. Mekior chaffed at the imposition on his movement, on his enjoyment of stalking through the corridors that connected the city to others of its kind, hunting down the enemies of the hidden, taking particular enjoyment in finding fiends that were out hunting. Mekior was no ordinary guard, no ordinary soldier, but a Fiend Hunter, a specialist in killing fiends, a master with any blade, his very strike powerful enough to hurt those fiends normally immune to even the mightiest blow of mortals. Today, he stood at the gate, guarding the path from the outside world, the most valued power of the fiend hunter in this position- their instinctive ability to detect a fiend regardless of how it disguised itself. Even magic could not stop their ability.</p><p></p><p>Mekior saw the two Outwalkers as they entered the well-lit final stretch, easily seen from the guard post that stood slightly elevated above the path. As they came closer, and details resolved themselves, he saw that the half-ogre carried another on his back. Quickly he consulted the log and saw that only two had left a mere six days ago, and those two were not due back for another week.</p><p></p><p>"Open the gate, it looks like Gruzz found something interesting out there and cut short his apprentice's first patrol." He left the lookout point, going down into the receiving area, wanting to check on the person being carried in. He stood there, just within the open gate, his short, lithe figure clad in plate armour, its tabard decorated with the city crest; the joints articulated and protected by their own under layer of chain mail and leather padding. </p><p></p><p>Jeria, walking slightly ahead of Gruzz and saw the gates opening first, and a grin broke out on his face. Home, they were home. Gruzz, looked up, saw the fiend hunter standing and waiting for them, and heaved a sigh of relief. In his mind there was the utter certainty that if were not Gyv, not the person he supposed it to be, Mekior would know. He came in through the gate, collapsing onto his knees, and placed her gently on the ground.</p><p></p><p>"Mekior. Here to check us out? When you're finished, organise some stretcher bearers for us, I can't carry her any further."</p><p></p><p>Mekior looked at them all. The half-fiends in the city always unsettled him. They always claimed to be loyal. They said and did all the right things, and this one had obviously proved himself or he would not have been allowed into the Outwalkers. Still they felt wrong, suspicious, his senses tingling in their presence. Not so for the half-ogre, or the woman he had placed on the floor, they felt clean, pure. He came forward, giving the massive Outwalker a clap on his back.</p><p></p><p>"Welcome home." He looked at the half-fiend, and gave him a short nod, before waving forward some of the gate guards to perform stretcher duty.</p><p></p><p>Mekior moved ahead, accompanying Gruzz and Jeria as they followed the stretcher to the House of Healing.</p><p></p><p>"What's the story, Gruzz? Who's the woman?"</p><p></p><p>"It' Gyv, one of the commanders from the House of Souls. I met her a few years back. What I don't get is what she was doing unconscious, on our doorstep, a testing pin nearby. I checked her out on the long journey back- no obvious signs of taint and her only wound a small, already healed, bite." Gruzz looked ahead at the stretcher-bearers and their burden. "I hope she wakes up. I would like some answers to the questions her presence raises.</p><p></p><p>Mekior's face scrunched up, brow furrowed in intense concentration as he wandered over to the woman, and held his hands just above her body, chanting a mantra beneath his breathe. He extended his senses to their full, straining to detect any echo of taint, any remnant of a fiend within. He felt swept up in a maelstrom of sensation, he saw the minute variations in the pigment of her skin, the smell of crushed leaves, of old and stale sweat. In all his inspection nothing screamed at him, nothing hinted at the taint within; so he turned to Gruzz, his face relaxed, at peace.</p><p></p><p>"There is no taint within her, she is pure, clean. There is taint in this corridor, and it walks amongst us." His barbed comment was underscored by a pointed look at Jeria, the disdain he felt towards the half-fiend obvious. Jeria just accepted the barbs, absorbing just one more taunt, the likes of which had peppered his life. Why worry about it- he was an apprentice in the Outwalkers, trusted to leave the city and enter the territory of the devils. So he just walked, his head held high, ignoring the Fiend Hunter.</p><p></p><p>Gruzz, walking between the two, frowned. It was bad enough they had enemies on the outside; there was no need to fight amongst themselves. He said nothing, at this moment peace seemed to reign, the Fiend Hunter content to deliver barbs within words, nothing more, and Jeria blithely ignoring the taunts. He resolved that the matter must be discussed with Delire; Fiend Hunter and Outwalker often worked together, and any trouble must be resolved before it erupted in some unknown, and potentially hazardous, form.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>Delire was sitting, piles of paper spread unevenly across her desk and with no order observable within the chaotic mess. She looked up when Gruzz arrived, trailing Jeria behind. </p><p></p><p>"Heard your patrol was cut short, that you brought an unconscious stranger back with you?"</p><p></p><p>Gruzz grinned, seating himself carefully in one of the flimsy wooden chairs before her desk. He looked back at Jeria, indicating he should do likewise.</p><p></p><p>"You asking a question or telling me, Captain? I am not so foolish as to think you haven't already got a full description of the person and the fact that Mekior has given her a clean bill of health." He leaned back, carefully; he could feel the chair creaking beneath him, struggling with his weight.</p><p></p><p>"Dunno if you've heard, but its Gyv. You've also probably heard of her; from the House of Souls." He watched Delire, hoping to catch a look of surprise on the face of the canny halfling, but he had no such luck.</p><p></p><p>"Gyv, huh? I'm not foolish enough to doubt your information gathering Gruzz, just as you know about mine within the city. Still, it would be a long way out of her home territory. I thought her and her band never worked more than five days from their base. Any idea what happened to her?"</p><p></p><p>Gruzz closed his eyes, massaging his temple with a free hand. "I reckon she was testing someone with the pin we found nearby; someone who objected to it and then used poison or something else on her. Whoever did so obviously thought that she would remain unconscious and get eaten, or found by the fiends. It fits the facts we have. Mekior says she is free of taint, she has no obvious wounds, and would have been dead if we had not found her." He sighed, bringing both hands in front of him, inspecting his fingers as he continued. </p><p>"We have a different problem though, and it's a biggie. Mekior. He and his fellow Fiend Hunters are going to have a hard time with Jeria. They are all bloody obsessed with killing fiends, and they don't seem to want to be too discriminating when it comes to half-fiends. It's going to be a problem in the future when they need to trust him."</p><p></p><p>Delire leaned back, looking at Jeria, rather than Gruzz, when she replied.</p><p></p><p>"You know Mekior's story Gruzz? Let me refresh your memory." She fiddled with a sharp dagger on her desk, one she had been using to open letters. "He grew up in the slums here. Ran with a few of the local gangs and got chased by the guards. Nothing remarkable, nothing beyond the norm for that part of town, nothing that ranked above mere mischief and no one bothered him or the myriad others, clones in the desperation of the starving classes.</p><p></p><p>Anyways, his parents decided they had had enough of poverty. Somehow, his father got hold of a shipment of iron weapons, real cold iron weapons. Instead of earning a few coins by turning them over to us, as is the law, he decided to peddle them elsewhere, try for the big bucks. He left the city with a cart full of weapons, and his wife and son riding alongside. </p><p></p><p>The inevitable happened; he took a path that no one had checked in an age, heading deep into the darkness between here and Fort Livian. In the darkness, they were found. By fiends." She paused, letting the facts sink in, captured by fiends smuggling weapons designed to hurt them. "Mekior saw his parents punished. His father faced torture over the period of a week before he died. His mother, abused and used, by the fiends during that week, then suffered her own fate at the hands of the torturers, but did not last as long as his father. The brutal treatment of the fiends in the week before had weakened her. It was Mekior's turn next. He has never spoken about how long he survived or what was done to him, in either the period before his torture, or during his torture, but when we rescued him he was close to death. The sadistic nature of the fiends meant that in order to increase his suffering, the length of the torture, they had not inflicted any gross injuries upon him, rather using their knowledge of pain to cause him to scream for days, never allowing unconsciousness, or the accumulations of wounds to prevent them from enjoying a long session with their victim.</p><p></p><p>I was the leader of the group that found them. I saw his face as we released him, the pure hatred that drove him to beat on the corpses of his captor, the drive that led him to dig graves for his parents, bury them gently, and all the while swearing vengeance."</p><p></p><p>She turned to Jeria, addressing him now directly. "He looks at you and he sees that fiend torturing his father, raping his mother, doing whatever was done to him. What happened to him out there in the darkness is locked inside, never spoken of, never told. He will learn to trust you, but only after you have proven yourself to him. It will come in time, I am sure of that. Meanwhile, I will see what I can do to defuse the growing tension. Now both of you go, get some rest. Be back here in two days time." She looked down, ignoring the two, waiting for them to leave.</p><p></p><p>Gruzz stood, giving her a sloppy salute before walking out her office. Jeria sat, unsure of what to do, until he realised that she really was ignoring him. He, too, left; his salute sharp and perfect. Outside the office Gruzz stood, waiting for him.</p><p></p><p>"Enjoy the time off, kid. Not too often you get two days furlough after a mere six days out. Now get out there and enjoy yourself. Just remember, keep your mouth shut and don't correct the rumours, or tell anyone any details. This stays with us until we are told otherwise." He put his hand on Jeria's shoulder. "I'm off to see my mother, I'd advise you do the same. Go off, see your family, say hi to your friends, and show off your new threads. He smiled, "it's the first time you get to wear that uniform as a member!" </p><p></p><p>With a smile and a wave, the half-ogre left, leaving Jeria watching after him. Family, yeah, I'll go visit my dad in some fiend hall, or my mom in the Halls of the Dead. He wandered through the city, watching the people at work, and smiled as the children in the marketplace followed behind pointing at his uniform. It felt good, but the loneliness of his life followed even closer than the children.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>In the Halls of Healing, Kiarta leaned over the outsider. Her hands glowed from her healing charms as the energy flowed and removed the last remnants of the bite. She looked down at the sleeping woman and smoothed her hair before placed her hand upon her brow. The healing energy filled Gyv again, flowing through her, touching her in her sleep. She smiled and opened her eyes, and grinned, silently, as she saw a human, not the face of her dreams, looking down at her.</p><p></p><p>Her mouth felt dry, thick, her tongue a plank of wood not wanting to move, yet she managed to croak out, "Where am I? What is this place?"</p><p></p><p>Kiarta's smile was broad; her voice echoed the pleasure in her smile. "You are in the House of Healing in Weald Hall. I am Kiarta, one of the healers here. Rest you are safe here,"</p><p></p><p>Safe, the thought rushed into her head. As she felt herself drifting back into her sleep, she thought she could hear mocking laughter in the background.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ghostknight, post: 3359289, member: 15338"] [b]Rule of Dakkness- updated 22 feb 2007[/b] Chapter 3 The journey out had taken two days, the trip back four. Jeria felt the comfort of the walls, roots, dirt and rock of the path comfortingly close after the openness of the outside. For Gruzz, the path was complicated by the tight confines and having to carry the body of the comatose woman. He sweated, ducked beneath entangling roots and took twice the time to move each pace as he had when making for the outside. "So, Jeria, now you see the glamour of being an Outwalker; a few hours outside, then you get to carry unconscious strangers on your back. A glorious existence indeed, being a pack horse for the city." He grinned, giving a small laugh as he adjusted the body of Gyv on his back. As they walked, the two Outwalkers listened to the unconscious form of Gyv moaning incomprehensively, her voice alternating between high-pitched screams and guttural mutterings in a voice so deep they could not hear the half of what was said.. The end of the fourth day found them at the turn in the passage, heading along the smoothed rock of the final stretch to the city. Both breathed a sigh of relief, glad to be back home; maybe it was the proximity of the city, maybe the relief of the two that bore her was palpable, but as they neared the city Gyv relaxed, her breathing deepening and her face relaxing. "You can't escape me that easily." The face was mocking, handsome, the red flesh, green eyes and sharp fangs enhancing it, not detracting from the visages appearance, despite their alien nature. "Come now, Gyv, life is not that bad, you are strong, far stronger than most of your puny race. You could be a ruler, a wielder of power over vast parts of my realm. Think of the good you could do, the changes you could make for the better in the lives of the slaves." Her mind filled with images, of slaves with food, unharmed backs, clothing upon their bodies, and boots on their feet. Her mind kept shouting no, but in her dream she heard herself pledging fealty, promising herself, her fealty in the service to Jelial, Lord of the Dark, master of the Rule. In her mind the mocking face smiled, laughed and disappeared, as in the world outside two strangers carried her into the final corridor, into a city she had never seen, to people unaware of the approaching danger. *** Gate duty. Mekior chaffed at the imposition on his movement, on his enjoyment of stalking through the corridors that connected the city to others of its kind, hunting down the enemies of the hidden, taking particular enjoyment in finding fiends that were out hunting. Mekior was no ordinary guard, no ordinary soldier, but a Fiend Hunter, a specialist in killing fiends, a master with any blade, his very strike powerful enough to hurt those fiends normally immune to even the mightiest blow of mortals. Today, he stood at the gate, guarding the path from the outside world, the most valued power of the fiend hunter in this position- their instinctive ability to detect a fiend regardless of how it disguised itself. Even magic could not stop their ability. Mekior saw the two Outwalkers as they entered the well-lit final stretch, easily seen from the guard post that stood slightly elevated above the path. As they came closer, and details resolved themselves, he saw that the half-ogre carried another on his back. Quickly he consulted the log and saw that only two had left a mere six days ago, and those two were not due back for another week. "Open the gate, it looks like Gruzz found something interesting out there and cut short his apprentice's first patrol." He left the lookout point, going down into the receiving area, wanting to check on the person being carried in. He stood there, just within the open gate, his short, lithe figure clad in plate armour, its tabard decorated with the city crest; the joints articulated and protected by their own under layer of chain mail and leather padding. Jeria, walking slightly ahead of Gruzz and saw the gates opening first, and a grin broke out on his face. Home, they were home. Gruzz, looked up, saw the fiend hunter standing and waiting for them, and heaved a sigh of relief. In his mind there was the utter certainty that if were not Gyv, not the person he supposed it to be, Mekior would know. He came in through the gate, collapsing onto his knees, and placed her gently on the ground. "Mekior. Here to check us out? When you're finished, organise some stretcher bearers for us, I can't carry her any further." Mekior looked at them all. The half-fiends in the city always unsettled him. They always claimed to be loyal. They said and did all the right things, and this one had obviously proved himself or he would not have been allowed into the Outwalkers. Still they felt wrong, suspicious, his senses tingling in their presence. Not so for the half-ogre, or the woman he had placed on the floor, they felt clean, pure. He came forward, giving the massive Outwalker a clap on his back. "Welcome home." He looked at the half-fiend, and gave him a short nod, before waving forward some of the gate guards to perform stretcher duty. Mekior moved ahead, accompanying Gruzz and Jeria as they followed the stretcher to the House of Healing. "What's the story, Gruzz? Who's the woman?" "It' Gyv, one of the commanders from the House of Souls. I met her a few years back. What I don't get is what she was doing unconscious, on our doorstep, a testing pin nearby. I checked her out on the long journey back- no obvious signs of taint and her only wound a small, already healed, bite." Gruzz looked ahead at the stretcher-bearers and their burden. "I hope she wakes up. I would like some answers to the questions her presence raises. Mekior's face scrunched up, brow furrowed in intense concentration as he wandered over to the woman, and held his hands just above her body, chanting a mantra beneath his breathe. He extended his senses to their full, straining to detect any echo of taint, any remnant of a fiend within. He felt swept up in a maelstrom of sensation, he saw the minute variations in the pigment of her skin, the smell of crushed leaves, of old and stale sweat. In all his inspection nothing screamed at him, nothing hinted at the taint within; so he turned to Gruzz, his face relaxed, at peace. "There is no taint within her, she is pure, clean. There is taint in this corridor, and it walks amongst us." His barbed comment was underscored by a pointed look at Jeria, the disdain he felt towards the half-fiend obvious. Jeria just accepted the barbs, absorbing just one more taunt, the likes of which had peppered his life. Why worry about it- he was an apprentice in the Outwalkers, trusted to leave the city and enter the territory of the devils. So he just walked, his head held high, ignoring the Fiend Hunter. Gruzz, walking between the two, frowned. It was bad enough they had enemies on the outside; there was no need to fight amongst themselves. He said nothing, at this moment peace seemed to reign, the Fiend Hunter content to deliver barbs within words, nothing more, and Jeria blithely ignoring the taunts. He resolved that the matter must be discussed with Delire; Fiend Hunter and Outwalker often worked together, and any trouble must be resolved before it erupted in some unknown, and potentially hazardous, form. *** Delire was sitting, piles of paper spread unevenly across her desk and with no order observable within the chaotic mess. She looked up when Gruzz arrived, trailing Jeria behind. "Heard your patrol was cut short, that you brought an unconscious stranger back with you?" Gruzz grinned, seating himself carefully in one of the flimsy wooden chairs before her desk. He looked back at Jeria, indicating he should do likewise. "You asking a question or telling me, Captain? I am not so foolish as to think you haven't already got a full description of the person and the fact that Mekior has given her a clean bill of health." He leaned back, carefully; he could feel the chair creaking beneath him, struggling with his weight. "Dunno if you've heard, but its Gyv. You've also probably heard of her; from the House of Souls." He watched Delire, hoping to catch a look of surprise on the face of the canny halfling, but he had no such luck. "Gyv, huh? I'm not foolish enough to doubt your information gathering Gruzz, just as you know about mine within the city. Still, it would be a long way out of her home territory. I thought her and her band never worked more than five days from their base. Any idea what happened to her?" Gruzz closed his eyes, massaging his temple with a free hand. "I reckon she was testing someone with the pin we found nearby; someone who objected to it and then used poison or something else on her. Whoever did so obviously thought that she would remain unconscious and get eaten, or found by the fiends. It fits the facts we have. Mekior says she is free of taint, she has no obvious wounds, and would have been dead if we had not found her." He sighed, bringing both hands in front of him, inspecting his fingers as he continued. "We have a different problem though, and it's a biggie. Mekior. He and his fellow Fiend Hunters are going to have a hard time with Jeria. They are all bloody obsessed with killing fiends, and they don't seem to want to be too discriminating when it comes to half-fiends. It's going to be a problem in the future when they need to trust him." Delire leaned back, looking at Jeria, rather than Gruzz, when she replied. "You know Mekior's story Gruzz? Let me refresh your memory." She fiddled with a sharp dagger on her desk, one she had been using to open letters. "He grew up in the slums here. Ran with a few of the local gangs and got chased by the guards. Nothing remarkable, nothing beyond the norm for that part of town, nothing that ranked above mere mischief and no one bothered him or the myriad others, clones in the desperation of the starving classes. Anyways, his parents decided they had had enough of poverty. Somehow, his father got hold of a shipment of iron weapons, real cold iron weapons. Instead of earning a few coins by turning them over to us, as is the law, he decided to peddle them elsewhere, try for the big bucks. He left the city with a cart full of weapons, and his wife and son riding alongside. The inevitable happened; he took a path that no one had checked in an age, heading deep into the darkness between here and Fort Livian. In the darkness, they were found. By fiends." She paused, letting the facts sink in, captured by fiends smuggling weapons designed to hurt them. "Mekior saw his parents punished. His father faced torture over the period of a week before he died. His mother, abused and used, by the fiends during that week, then suffered her own fate at the hands of the torturers, but did not last as long as his father. The brutal treatment of the fiends in the week before had weakened her. It was Mekior's turn next. He has never spoken about how long he survived or what was done to him, in either the period before his torture, or during his torture, but when we rescued him he was close to death. The sadistic nature of the fiends meant that in order to increase his suffering, the length of the torture, they had not inflicted any gross injuries upon him, rather using their knowledge of pain to cause him to scream for days, never allowing unconsciousness, or the accumulations of wounds to prevent them from enjoying a long session with their victim. I was the leader of the group that found them. I saw his face as we released him, the pure hatred that drove him to beat on the corpses of his captor, the drive that led him to dig graves for his parents, bury them gently, and all the while swearing vengeance." She turned to Jeria, addressing him now directly. "He looks at you and he sees that fiend torturing his father, raping his mother, doing whatever was done to him. What happened to him out there in the darkness is locked inside, never spoken of, never told. He will learn to trust you, but only after you have proven yourself to him. It will come in time, I am sure of that. Meanwhile, I will see what I can do to defuse the growing tension. Now both of you go, get some rest. Be back here in two days time." She looked down, ignoring the two, waiting for them to leave. Gruzz stood, giving her a sloppy salute before walking out her office. Jeria sat, unsure of what to do, until he realised that she really was ignoring him. He, too, left; his salute sharp and perfect. Outside the office Gruzz stood, waiting for him. "Enjoy the time off, kid. Not too often you get two days furlough after a mere six days out. Now get out there and enjoy yourself. Just remember, keep your mouth shut and don't correct the rumours, or tell anyone any details. This stays with us until we are told otherwise." He put his hand on Jeria's shoulder. "I'm off to see my mother, I'd advise you do the same. Go off, see your family, say hi to your friends, and show off your new threads. He smiled, "it's the first time you get to wear that uniform as a member!" With a smile and a wave, the half-ogre left, leaving Jeria watching after him. Family, yeah, I'll go visit my dad in some fiend hall, or my mom in the Halls of the Dead. He wandered through the city, watching the people at work, and smiled as the children in the marketplace followed behind pointing at his uniform. It felt good, but the loneliness of his life followed even closer than the children. *** In the Halls of Healing, Kiarta leaned over the outsider. Her hands glowed from her healing charms as the energy flowed and removed the last remnants of the bite. She looked down at the sleeping woman and smoothed her hair before placed her hand upon her brow. The healing energy filled Gyv again, flowing through her, touching her in her sleep. She smiled and opened her eyes, and grinned, silently, as she saw a human, not the face of her dreams, looking down at her. Her mouth felt dry, thick, her tongue a plank of wood not wanting to move, yet she managed to croak out, "Where am I? What is this place?" Kiarta's smile was broad; her voice echoed the pleasure in her smile. "You are in the House of Healing in Weald Hall. I am Kiarta, one of the healers here. Rest you are safe here," Safe, the thought rushed into her head. As she felt herself drifting back into her sleep, she thought she could hear mocking laughter in the background. [/QUOTE]
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Rule of Darkness -Book II Chapter 3 Last Update 19 June 2008- Book I Completed
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