Revenge19 min read
The Last Dance: Soul-Sunder and the Blue Lotus
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I remember the night the house held its breath for me.
"Beatrice," Kaydence hissed, straightening the veil at my throat. "They're all eyes and coins out there. Breathe."
"I am breathing," I said, and my voice surprised me by being steady. "Just tell me when the music starts."
Outside, the Phoenix Hall swelled with sound—laughs, clinking cups, the hungry chatter of men who paid for beauty and believed themselves civilized. On that night of the Hundred Gifts, every magistrate, every lord, every hungry grandee came to watch the mystery dancer. Tonight, they would look at me.
"There's the Regent," Kaydence whispered, and I turned.
Miles Branch sat like a statue in the red-roofed upper box: black coat, jaw carved of shadow, an impossible neatness to him that made him look both ruler and prism. He watched like a man assessing the weather.
"You look like the woman who saved me from the pit," I said under my breath, more to myself than to her.
Kaydence only smiled sadly. "You were saved. Remember that."
When I walked out, the room fell into silence the way the sea falls when a storm is about to break.
"Play," I told the players—and the first notes of my new music, Soul-Sunder, rose like a thread of smoke and wrapped itself around the hall.
Men leaned forward. Miles did not. He never leaned. That was part of how I loved him—because I loved a distant mountain and mist, a thing made of cool lines and impossible scale.
I danced not to seduce the men below, but to catch a single pair of eyes. He was one eye; the husband he would soon take for himself would be another. My movement closed and opened like breath; I poured everything I could into that curve of wrist, that tilt of head.
"She made the song," someone breathed. Thomas Flynn, at the second table, knocked over his cup with a shock of joy. "She's the composer—no one in the city could write that melody."
"Who would hazard it?" a voice said. "If the Regent hears her heart in that tune, he will move nations."
Men laughed. Coins fell.
On the second night, Thomas Flynn, who loved music like prayer, sent word. He came to the Regent first, and then the Regent came to me with an offer that smelled like a ladder.
"Give me the music," Miles said in his court voice, quiet and unavoidable. "And I will give you protection. I will give you place."
"Protection?" I asked. "For what?"
"For being worth protecting," he said, and for a ridiculous slender moment I thought I understood him.
That is how I became the Regent's favored dancer. How I learned that favor can be an iron ring, and how that ring can be used to bind or to press until something breaks.
"I am yours in the Hall," I told him once, when his hand hovered above my shoulder in his appointed way. "I am not yours in name."
"You will be," he said. "You will be more than you think."
He brought Helene Saleh home as his wife and wrapped her in court honors. Helene twined her fingers like soft vines; she spoke like honey. The court loved her, the old alliances warmed to her smile, and the Regent placed her like a bright gem at his side.
"I am happy for you," I said when I bowed to her under the red canopy. My chin was steady. My heart, secretly, cracked.
"You should be happy," she said, and her voice sifted through me like chill rain. "You helped bring all this. Remember your place, Beatrice."
There are small cruelties that cut deeper than any blade, and Helene knew them all. She would brush past my hand as if it were a cobweb. She would speak of children with a softness that turned my skin to glass.
"She is sweet," Kaydence would say at night. "Play the flames soft. Don't let them swallow you whole."
"She is the Regent's wife," I would remind her. "She will win by being ordinary in the way of roses."
Then Helene smiled and the roses bloomed.
I am not innocent of wanting him. I admit that: a girl who was buried and then lifted owes the hand that lifts her everything. I gave him help, loyalty, the secret that made his alliances bloom. I learned what names to whisper on the right nights, what dancers to train, what coy word to drop into a lord's ear. I tried to be clever for him.
And he used it.
"He will use me," I told the mirror once, spitting the truth like bitter tea. "He will use me as a rope to climb. Then he will leave me in the gutter."
But even knowing, I stayed. Because some debts are made of longing.
The proof came like a slow rot. One morning I found that my small comforts—the warm pillows, the thick rugs, the lanterns that kept my room from being a winter—were taken away. Kaydence cried to me in the attic.
"They say the Regent ordered it," she said, furious with helplessness. "He says it's too warm for you. He means Helene's comfort first."
"You don't take from a woman her blanket when she is cold," I told her. "I thought perhaps men could still be kind."
"They will be kind if it costs them nothing," she answered. "They will be generous until the bit bites."
Two months later I felt the blur of sickness that becomes a woman's whole days. I knew its signs: absence of cycle, a lighter step that becomes a secret joy. For a moment the world opened—a private pocket of light where the future existed not as a chessboard or a vault, but as a small warm mouth.
"You're going to be a mother," Kaydence whispered and touched my belly as if it were a new moon. "You will keep what is yours."
I kept it until Helene decided I should not.
"You're well enough to visit," Helene called one afternoon, smiling with teeth that were not mine. "The Regent will be pleased to see our sides reconciled."
I went because I wanted to appear, as the women of that house expected: forgiving, composed, a good scene for the eyes. I drank the tea she handed me. Kaydence saw her face—there was a flicker of triumph. I said nothing.
"To mend," Helene murmured.
"To peace," I echoed.
The next hours collapsed. The pain was sudden as a blade, raw as if someone had pulled the source from me and world. I clutched at the floorboards. Kaydence screamed. My blood was not bright the way other people's is; it stained and darkened with a black sweetness, and under my palm I tasted an impossible fragrance.
"They will say you did it to yourself," Kaydence sobbed.
"Why would I?" I demanded, but I understood. I always understood too late.
They said I had poisoned Helene. They said I had taken a babe from a woman who had sacrificed for the Regent. The watchful eyes were ready with outrage; the household needed a scapegoat; the Regent needed to be safe in perception.
"She is a dancer," one of the sergeants said, pointing. "They are like foxes."
"You are a wife!" someone cried, and a table rattled. "She would kill for your place!"
The Regent stood silent, then moved in the old way—act first, think after. He slapped me once across the face with a kind of formal fury.
"Explain," he barked.
"I did not," I said. "I would never—"
"You put your hands on her tea," Helene whispered triumph, the room leaning toward her like a tide. "You wanted the Regent's child to die."
"She is a viper," murmured a steward. "A witch." Their faces angled, hungry.
In the end, I was forced into a bed as if I were a thing to be inspected. The court's doctors—some bribed—pronounced the child dead. They called it a miscarriage. They called me a murderer. The Regent set his jaw and said words of displeasure that felt like a verdict.
"You robbed me," he told me later, more quiet than the storm had been. "You robbed what was mine."
"You were not my keeper for such things," I gasped with empty hands. "Not for that."
"It is done," he said. "You will remain, but do not cross me again."
He had killed my children in a way I could not prove. He had given the world a story that suited it: the jealous dance girl had struck. I had none to strike back in the language of the powerful.
I learned in those months how to silence my hurt and let it compact into something hard. Grief can sharpen the mind the way coal sharpens iron.
Then the world gave me a name I had never expected.
I dreamed of two snakes—one black, one white—coiling and begging me to save them. The dream opened like the mouth of a cave and left me with a scent in my nose I had only known in fever: a sweet, dark perfume from some other world. A man came to me beneath moonlight, his presence as calm as a pond.
"Beatrice Becker?" he said, and I frowned.
"Who are you?" I asked.
He bowed on one knee. "Griffith Wells. I have come from the Mirror Hall. You carry grains of a blood the world thought lost."
"A lost blood?" I echoed.
"Yes. Your veins hold what our elders called the Blue Lotus line. The true inheritor is the 'Charm Mistress'—a leader of our people. We have been without one for seventeen years. You nearly bled to give us a sign."
That was the impossible truth. The charm-lineage, the myth of the Blue Lotus, had been whispered about in old taverns and the mouths of traders: women whose blood carried an aroma that could heal or wound, whose presence made men unsteady and kings take care. They were not mere witches. They were a people with rites, with a sacred lotus heart that bloomed only with the right blood.
Griffith was kind and blunt in the way that some dangerous men are. He told me of an island folk, of light so cold they were taught to live in it, and of a packet of remedies no common city apothecary could imitate.
"Your blood will be coveted," he warned. "They will fear you. They will fear what you are without even knowing. If you stay in that house, you will vanish like a shadow at sunset."
I tasted a promise of a path where anger could become craft. Where I could learn to wield the things that had been taken from me. I thought of the Regent's hand, of Helene's smile, of the two small bodies I had held for a breath. I thought of Kaydence leaning over me with grief and something like loyalty that made me ache.
"I will leave tonight," I decided, and my voice surprised me with its coolness. "But not to hide. To learn."
"Then do not look back," Griffith said.
We planned the escape as if it were a prayer. Griff arranged safe passage with a man who called himself Colin Clayton—a stranger who moved like light and had the bearing of a vanished summer. He had a crew, a small skiff, and a silence like a closed book. He and his companion, Hunter Duncan—a man from the Regent's protection who had been gentle to me in small ways—took me away under curtainless night.
Miles raised the alarm when he read my note.
"Beatrice, you are my—" His voice came down the line of guard houses and stopped like a cut wire. "Beatrice, return. This is reckless."
"I am tired of being used," I wrote back, and I meant every letter. "I will return when I am no longer a thing to bargain."
They pursued us with tenfold anger. I stood on the bow as the skyline of the city pulled like a bruise behind us.
"You will regret this," Miles called from thick armor thirty yards across the black water, his voice a blade. "You cannot leave what you are."
I laughed. "I am what I make."
Shooters loosed a net of arrows across our wake. One found me in the shoulder: a stinging arrow cut, and I tasted copper and the old scent: this one bore a venom I knew by name in later days—green petal poison, the sort that blooms in a throat like frost. Colin's hands were a blur; he pressed oils I would later learn were made in the Mirror Hall and wrapped linen tight against the wound.
"You're bleeding," he said, voice rough as river stone.
"It will not kill me," I replied, as true as a vow. "It will only make me stronger."
We got away because rules the world thinks permanent bend when men like Colin and the more dangerous man I later met—Colin called him by a name so old it smelled of spice, "Feng"—speak and say so.
He was different from every man I had known. Colin had the ease of a man who had known kingdoms. Feng—real name Colin Clayton disguised—went by another, and when he sat across from me in the rear of a tired inn, he folded his hands.
"Beatrice Becker," he said. "You have scar tissue from the wounds you carry. We do not fear that. We embrace it. Will you come with us?"
I told him about the Regent, the dead children, the teacup that was not mine. He nodded like a man who has seen too much history in small household scenes.
"We will make you a thing they cannot shrug off," he promised. "We will teach you to make the scent of your blood sing like an anthem."
I went. They taught me the things that were missing: how to hone charm into a weapon, how to fix the hurt into a line of fire. Under Griffith and Colin, I practiced the old rites until I could feel the Blue Lotus in my fingers. They infused me with remedies and rituals, and with each thread of instruction I felt my center harden.
"Tonight," Griffith said on the third month, voice low and luminous, "you will return. Not as the dancer begging light, but as the Charm Mistress. You will show them what they have thrown away."
I spent those months learning and bending grief into calculation. I painted my forehead with a mark—a small blue lotus in a circle—and when it rose like a moon to my skin, I saw myself new.
I returned in a season of festivals. When I stepped into the Phoenix Hall once more, Miles was in the upper box. Helene glittered like lacquer. The hall pulsed.
"You should have stayed where you were," Helene sang softly as I passed.
I stopped. "So should moderates like you have kept what is theirs," I said.
Griffith watched from the shadows. Colin stood near the back with that cold, private smile. Hunter kept a hand near me as if to remind me of touch.
"You look different," Miles said. He had not shed his power. He wore it like a cloak that smelled faintly of iron. "You look dangerous."
"Better," I said. "I look whole."
The first strike of the evening was not mine. It came from Thomas Flynn—who had followed the scent of the music back. He rose to his feet near Miles and hummed a few bars of Soul-Sunder. It was the beginning of proof: he had the original sheet, and we set it on the table where the Regent's retinue would see it. "She wrote this," he announced loud enough to slice the hum. "She gave it to the Regent and to no one else."
"Do you mean to say—" Miles's face took a look that was, for once, not of coolness but of something like fear.
Then came the accusation method I had prepared like a trapdoor. Griff produced a vial and held it in the bell light. It smelled like dusty rooms and the sea and a bitter herb.
"To all present," he said, voice steady, "we bring evidence of a plot."
Helene laughed, the way someone laughs before they are unmasked. "What plot? What villainous plan do you dream of now?"
"Helene," I said. "You told the court I poisoned you. You drank from the cup I drank from. Where did you get that 'tea'?"
"You are mad," she said. "The Regent knows the truth."
"Then he will listen," said Colin. He looked at Miles like a man testing glass.
I would not speak for years, I learned, but on that night I spoke the truth plainly, with all the slow cruelty of someone who had known the geography of loss.
"Helene told the servants to move my warming mats," I said. "She gave me the tea that night when she smiled and said, 'to mend.' She meant to break."
Murmurs rose. Men leaned. The Regent's hand made a small, unconscious fist.
"Prove it," Miles said.
Griffith opened the vial. It smelled—the same scent I had feared those months ago. He held the vial up to the lamp. "This is the green petal. It is rare in our courts. But we can trace those who have had it in their cask or cup. Lauryn," he said, and I saw Kaydence's face go pale as paper, "you witnessed the movement of the cups that day. Did you hide anything at the time?"
Kaydence swallowed. "I—I did not know, milord." Her voice cracked, and then she laid the truth down like a cloth. "I saw a cup taken from the tray and placed behind the chair. I thought it was a gesture—" she broke off. "I thought she was joking."
"Which servant delivered the tray?" Miles demanded.
"A servant named Lauryn Estrada," someone called. Lauryn was Helene's favored maid—loud and insolent, the creature who had beaten Kaydence in a fit of 'defense' and shrieked that our mistress was the most pure.
Griffith took a small glass swab. He did the thing they taught me in the Mirror Hall: they test surfaces, prying at feather-thin traces in cloth, in the crease of a cup, in the line where a hand touches glaze. It was small chemistry and older ritual both. He pricked the glass and placed it to the flame. The scent swelled like a small storm.
"It matches the vial," he pronounced.
There is a weight to the moment when a lie shifts and becomes a thing you can hold. The room inhaled.
Lauryn's expression moved through colors like a cheap painting burning. First arrogance, then the sudden cold of being a criminal, then fury.
"She bribed me," Lauryn hissed. "She promised—"
"Helene did?" a voice cried.
"She promised me wealth," Lauryn faltered. "She promised me security if I did as asked. She said the Regent's heirs would need a clean line. She told me to put the cup where Beatrice could not refuse it."
Helene's hands—a small tremor. "Lies!" she wailed.
"You will all have justice," Miles said, but his voice had the shell of iron and the seed of something else—regret or shock. I could not tell.
The world outside shrieked with the first sound of revelation. Men took out small tablets and began to write. A crowd gathered when the doors opened and the truth leaked like oil.
"Stop her! She murders a child!" someone shouted.
I watched Helene's face as the chain uncoiled. For a moment she went through the stages: First, perfect composure. Then, a flash of disbelief. Then, denial. Then, the mask fell. She began to plead, to say names of who had instructed her—names of mothers, of ministers. Her voice shrank as others talked. Her eyes came to Miles, as if seeking the shelter of the man she had used love to claim.
"She told me to keep silent," Lauryn said, now spitting the venom of a cornered rat. "She told me to speak once the child was gone. She told me my life would be better."
"She took my children," I said softly, and the hall seemed to tilt.
"All of you are witnesses," Griffith said. He had arranged the proof, the chain of testimony, and when he spoke, it was as if the whole room had been a pond and a stone was finally dropped in. The ripples went out and changed everything.
The Regent's face had turned a terrifying gray. "Lauryn!" he barked. "You will wait for justice—"
"Justice!" Lauryn screamed. "Justice? I did as I was told. We all—"
No one moved as Griffith set out a box of papers—ledgers with inked sums I had never seen, receipts that showed the price paid for silence, for poison, for an alibi scrubbed. Helene's handwriting blurred on the ledger lines, and Miles's men paled.
"How could you?" Miles said, the question late as salt in a wound.
Helene's expression crumpled from practiced beauty into something like naked fear. "You promised me a life," she said to Miles. "You promised I would be protected. I thought—"
"You thought you could take and no one would count the cost," I answered.
"Stop this," she cried. "I am his wife!"
"Are you?" I asked the room. "What does that make me? A convenience? A ladder?"
It had become, by that moment, not just a charge but a stage. The judge and the mob and the household all looked at Helene and found their own reflections.
"Bring the doors," Miles said, and his voice had weight that made people move. They opened the doors and pulled in guards. The crowd pressed its faces in, hungry for the final act.
This is where the punishment had to be: not hidden in a court record but shown where the city could see, because people needed to watch the proud be humbled to know that someone could, in time, be turned into proof.
"I call for a public review," Miles said. "Let there be witnesses from the street, from the Temple, from the merchants. If you have sinned, you will answer to the city."
Helene turned to me, her face a river of shifting color. "You set this up," she whispered. "You'll never be forgiven."
I shrugged. "Forgiveness is for people who stop stealing the future of others by murdering their children."
They dragged a small table to the center of the hall. Men muttered and took positions of witnessing. A bell was struck three times—the old sign of a public proceeding. Miles, as Regent, gave his voice to law.
"You will take silk," he ordered. "You will remove every ornament that marks your rank and offer them back. You will stand where the common folk stand and be judged in front of the people. If you are found guilty, you will lose title, purse, and comfort. The servants in your employ will be released from service. The family name will bear sanctions."
Helene's face blanched. "You cannot—"
"Action!" Miles said, and the household guards moved like a machine in motion.
They stripped Helene of her ceremonial hairpins and her embroidered sash. One by one, the threads of her honors were cut, and each cut made her look smaller. The commons in the doorway pressed closer. They had not believed that the high could be undone.
"Look!" someone shouted. "She who played the tender wife is no more than a woman with hands!"
Lauryn, the maid, was seized and placed beside her mistress. The guard captain announced that she would be detained until the magistrate arrived in three days. The words "treachery" and "attempted murder" echoed.
But the city's justice must be felt as soil under feet. A magistrate was brought from the street; he read out the charges. The crowd watched, leaning forward as if the spectacle of fate could be a lesson. Helene's voice, once honeyed, faltered and broke.
"Help me," she begged a bystander who had come to the hall in simple curiosity. "I am bound to the Regent. I have done nothing in the service of spite."
The bystander merely spat. "You gambled with babes," he said. "You thought blood and rank could hide your claws."
Helene's expression morphed in a terrifying arc—first outrage, then shock, then furious denial, finally collapse. She looked like someone who had had her script snatched away.
"Do you find this just?" the magistrate asked the crowd, because lawfulness required consent.
"Judgment!" they cried in a long human voice, half moral outrage, half theatre hunger. Some clapped. Others filmed the scene with crude sun-glass mirrors, as people always film a fall with small triumph. "Make it public! Let us see what arrogance costs."
The punishment went further than losing rank. The magistrate pronounced that Helene's family would be stripped of certain privileges: the right to host courtly suppers for a season; the seal on their tax-exempt vineyards would be suspended; their steward would be dismissed. Such things would bite into comfort. The crowd roared. For the first time, Helene's badge of motherhood and marriage did not shield her. She trembled and tried to bargain, her eyes landing desperately on Miles.
He looked back with the face of a man who had loved from a distance and now felt cutting loss. "You should have left it," he said, voice quiet enough for only her to hear. "I did not send you to this. You chose."
She crumpled, then begged the crowd for clemency. Some shouted for blood; some for law.
"You will be made to atone," the magistrate declared. "No palace verdict may be made without the city's hearing. You will be publicly shamed for the week and serve in kitchens of the chapel till further notice."
For the servants watching, it was a spectacle of revenge served as justice. Some wept with gloating. Some threw fruit peels at Helene as she left the hall, and the guards moved them on. The crowd took pictures in the way they had been taught by sudden technologies. Men who had once paid for beauty had now learned how little control they had over the world's narrative when someone else took the pen.
Helene's reactions were a study of human unpeeling. At first, she was indignant, then rage, then bargaining, then shock, then finally a raw, animalized fear as his mercy—his authority—removed even that shelter.
The scene lasted longer than any of us thought it would. The more public, the better: this was not a private revenge. This was civic catharsis.
When it ended, Helene was not executed; the law would not have permitted that without long tribunal. But she stood in the courtyard, stripped of her ornaments, the scent of the city on her skin changed from perfume to cheap clay. The public mulled over the record and took sides like cheap coin. Some loved me for daring to bring it. Others scattered stones of outrage at me because I had exposed the idea that the rich can be caught.
I watched Miles stand and watch her go. He looked numb.
"You wanted justice," he said, later in the quiet of his study. "You humiliated her in public."
"I wanted truth," I said. "There is a difference."
He turned to me then, and for a second his eyes held a private light. "I thought—" he began, but then closed his mouth.
"You thought I would stay and be quiet," I said. "You thought I would be grateful for scraps."
"You did not let me explain," he whispered.
"I will accept only what I choose to accept," I told him. "I will accept things in my own time."
That day, Helene's ruin was public and full. It was over five hundred words, more than that, of inevitable detail and watching faces—her pleading, her denial, the crowd's slow flip from boredom to thirst to justice. The scene lasted hours, with a procession of witnesses, with the magistrate calling names, with Helene's face shedding layers. The punishment satisfied a need the city did not know it had: to see the proud humbled.
And yet justice that humbles can also create a monster. The Regent looked at me like a man who had fed a lion. He could not take back what had been done; he could not undo the humiliation, nor replace the losses I had suffered. His guilt, if there was guilt, turned into something more insidious: a desire to own the narrative again.
"You cannot leave," he told me that night. "Return with me. Stay where I can see you."
"I will not," I said.
So I left the city again. You would think that would end things.
Instead, it set them in motion.
The Mirror Hall opened to me its terrible racks of learning: the charms that heal, the charms that wound, the way blood can make men sing or sicken. Griffith taught me how to put my will into my presence. Colin taught me how to make a negotiation of force look like dancing. Hunter taught me how to keep a watchful heart that still loved with stubborn edges.
Months turned to seasons. I walked courts as a different woman, and I found that the world holds rewards for people who can make truth into a blade.
The Regent kept his politics tight after Helene's shame, but he could not undo everything she had torn from me. He could not undo the sound of empty arms. He could not fill the places in my nights where I counted the steps of the children I once held.
We clashed again and again in a game of distance and proximity. I provoked when it mattered, and he reacted. Each time, we bartered pieces of ourselves like chess pieces. The Mirror Hall made me clever, but it did not make me immune to small, human cruelties.
And then, when I had learned enough of the old rites to convince a council and a chorus, I did what every woman who knows a wound wants to do: I made the music that only one man could forget and I danced the way a person who has nothing more to lose flings their last colors against the sky.
"Do you regret it?" Colin asked me once, late, after a small banquet where Miles had tried, in an awkward and clumsy way, to apologize and failed.
"For leaving?" I considered. "Sometimes. Not what I left for. I regret having been naive first."
He smiled with no heat. "Naivety is not a crime."
"No," I said. "But it's expensive."
In the end, my revenge was never the overthrow of an empire. It was the undoing of the lie that I had been worthless. I took names, I took coin, I took voice. I took a place in a world that had cast me away. I forced apologies where it mattered and made sure that those who had weighed my life as currency would feel the ledger of their acts.
Helene stayed in the periphery, turned into a cautionary figure for how not to act when motives are vile. Lauryn was dismissed and certain streets spat at her. The Regent lived with the fact of what he had done—that he had loved the idea of me enough to make me into a dangerous thing, and then frightened himself to bind me with law.
As for me, I stand now with the Blue Lotus mark pale on my skin. Sometimes I still dream of the two snakes, and I wake with the sense that grief can be alchemy.
"Will you ever dance for the Hall again?" Kaydence asks sometimes, when we sit on a rooftop and look at the city that taught me its lessons.
"Only for myself," I tell her. "And not to be bought."
Once, at a small inn in a far border, a man asked me to play the Soul-Sunder again. He wanted to hear the song that had brought a Regent to his knees.
"Play?" he said, with boyish awe.
"I will," I replied. I set my fingers on the strings, and the melody took the room like a blade of light. It was no longer a trap; it was a memory, a weapon, and a seal.
When the last note faded, I thought of the blue lotus on my brow and the small bowl that had been so false. The city was full of people who think they own you because they saw you once in a light that suited them. I owed no one. I had water and a small boat and friends who were dangerous enough to be loved. I had music. I was free.
"Then go," Miles once said, in one of the last times we spoke. "If you must leave, leave with your hands full."
"I leave with my hands full of truth," I answered. He could not see how heavy that truth had been, nor how it had been polished into something that might one day cut clear and clean.
I don't end with a vow. I end with a name of a song and the echo of a lotus: when they say my name, let them remember the blue mark. Let them remember that some dances are not meant to seduce but to set free.
The End
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