Eureka Moment / Literature

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• Miranda has one at the end of When You Reach Me.
  I am jumping up and down because at the very moment Dick Clark said the word "Go," it was like an invisible hand reached out and snatched away my veil. And for almost a minute, I understood everything. When that veil isn't hanging down right in front of a person's face, a minute is long enough to realize a lot of things.
• Agatha Christie loved doing this in the Hercule Poirot novels. Very frequently, he fits the pieces together after inspiration from a chance remark by one of the other characters; to Poirot's credit, he never fails to explain precisely how it helped him break the case.
• In The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie two people have Eureka moments in short succession. Several people have died, supposedly by magic. Mystery writer Ariadne Oliver suddenly realizes that all the deaths have one thing in common: all the victims were losing their hair when they died. She knows this is a vital clue but she has no medical training, so she doesn't know what it means. She calls Mark Easterbrook, a doctor who has been investigating the deaths, to tell him what she has realized, and he has his own Eureka moment, realizing that all the deaths were due to Thallium poisoning.
• The Cat Who... Series: Every book features Koko the Siamese doing something odd which eventually leads to Qwilleran having a Eureka Moment. How plausible Koko's behavior is, either taken at face value or with the strong hint he's trying to give clues, varies considerably.
• In book two of the H.I.V.E. Series, Laura has one of these in the form of Dreaming the Truth.
• Lampshaded in The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams: While Bernie Rhodenbarr is talking with a friend, she mentions the Cat Who... series, when his cat suddenly launches into strange behavior and Bernie solves the crime. Subverted, in that he'd already solved the crime, but didn't care about revealing the result. When the cat acted, as if on cue, he decided to play along.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Sansa supplies her father with one when she says that Joffrey (who she has a mad crush on, the poor girl) is nothing like his father, Robert. This finally makes Eddard realize that none of Cersei's children take after Robert — though all of Robert's bastards do — and the kids are most likely the product of incest between Cersei and her brother, Jaime.
  • Tyrion gets one two books later, when the readers have all pretty much forgotten about the never-quite-solved mystery of who sent the assassin with the dagger to try to kill Bran from the first book, when he hears Joffrey bragging about how he's very familiar with expensive things like Valyrian steel. Because the chapter is told from Sansa's point of view, the readers only find out what's on his mind when he gets her alone for long enough to ask "Hey, do you know if Joffrey had any reason not to like your brother?
• In American Gods, this is how Shadow figures out where a small-town serial killer has been hiding his victims' bodies, acting on a comment from a god who knew what was going on, and was trying to clue him onto it.
• In "The Honour of Israel Gow," Father Brown has an explanation that he thinks covers almost all of the strange evidence they've found — snuff without snuff boxes, candles without candlesticks, holy images with the halo around the baby Jesus removed — but not the fact that the title character decapitated a dead man and stole the head. It's not until his friend Flambeau mentions going to the dentist that Father Brown manages to tie that in with the rest of the evidence. He realizes that the dead man must have had a gold tooth. All of the missing things are those that are made of gold. Israel Gow was promised "all the gold in the castle," and taking it literally, Gow took everything that was gold (the snuff boxes, the candlesticks, etc.) while leaving behind everything that wasn't.
• Isaac Asimov:
  • Dr Asimov wrote an essay about how this sort of thought process works called "the Eureka effect". It's even made it into a few high school literature books.
  • Elijah Baley constantly tries to "solve" his cases by fixating on a new piece of evidence, until something happens that makes him revise his understanding of the evidence he already has.
    • The Caves of Steel: In the first novel, Lije Baley figures out the murder mystery when his partner casually brings up Enderby's glasses. All pieces of the puzzle then come together: Lije realizes that Enderby (who was earlier established to be psychologically incapable of killing a human) accidentally murdered a person, instead of destroying their robotic lookalike, because he couldn't see clearly when his glasses shattered. Then Daneel has a different one when he begins to grasp the distinction between 'legal' and 'ethical', which humanizes him in Baley's eyes.
    • The Naked Sun: In the second novel, Baley asks Daneel to "give him a hand". The robot responds by looking at his hand as if he was supposed to actually give it to him, leading Elijah to realize that the murder weapon was a robot's detachable arm.
    • The Robots of Dawn: The third and final book in the series even barely gets away with justifying it. Baley has a eureka moment three times just before falling asleep. Each time he forgets what it was he discovered by the time he is fully awake again. Fastolfe at one point suggests using a potentially dangerous mind probe device to try to help Baley remember what it was he realized, but Baley does not take him up on the offer. Giskard eventually admits that he used his telepathic powers to prevent Baley from remembering what he had discovered each time in order to protect the secret of Giskard's telepathic abilities.
  • Foundation Series' "The Mule": Bayta has been thinking about the fact that she felt desperate both during the Time Vault event and in Neotrantor. When recently converted Han Pritcher reveals to them that the Mule was the one that caused the desperation in the Time Vault, she makes the connection that Magnifico, the half-idiot jester she has been friends with, is actually the Mule.
  • "The Last Trump": Etheriel realizes that the Act of Ascendancy is scheduled to take place in 1957, but it doesn't specify Anno Domini; arguing with God that the Act should be postponed until everyone on Earth agrees that the current year is 1957.
  • Powell and Donovan:
    • "Reason": Powell's moment of realization comes while inspecting the report from Cutie's shift during the electron storm. The robot was able to maintain focus far more precisely than any human could, which means his Robot Religion is useful for training each of the successive QT models on how to operate the remote space stations.
    • "Runaround": Powell and Donovan are quite proud of themselves for thinking of using the mining laboratory to create oxalic acid to chase Speedy away from the danger. Up until they realize, too late, that it only shifts the problem a few meters in one direction or another without solving the Logic Bomb.
    • "Catch That Rabbit": Powell's moment of clarity occurs just in time for them to shoot one of the subsidiary robots, getting Dave to work again. Using the analogy of subsidiary=finger, Powell realized that the dancing and marching was due to Dave "twiddling his fingers" while he worked out what needed to be done.
• Isaac Asimov and Janet Asimov's Norby's Other Secret: In chapter six, while Norby and Fargo are racking their brains to figure out how to open the hassock, Jeff suggests they take a break by singing a few songs. Fargo calls him a genius and starts laughing, leaving Norby to explain that Fargo now thinks the numbers they'd deciphered stand for musical notes.
• Timothy Zahn likes this trope. Or, more accurately, this trope fits his style. Many of Zahn's original works are First-Person Smartass, and the settings are similar to Hitchcock-style suspense/intrigue mysteries, so there's guaranteed to be one when the protagonist finally puts the pieces together. (Though the reader, unless he figures it out too—which is sometimes possible and sometimes not—won't know until The Summation.) Some examples:
  • The Icarus Hunt has at least two: One when a comment makes the protagonist realize another person's murder was connected with something completely different than he'd been assuming; another when a different comment triggers a flashback. The Summation indicates he may have had another couple more along the way that the audience wasn't even privy to.
  • The Quadrail Series tends to have one per book, minimum; most notably, the moment in Night Train to Rigel when Compton figures out how the FTL trains work.
  • This even shows up in his Star Wars Expanded Universe work, though those get more promptly revealed to the reader: in Survivor's Quest, a random comment by Luke triggers a flashback for Mara, in which she recognizes a major inconsistency in some of their companions' back story.
  • And finally, one for Leia in The Last Command. Talon Karrde mentions how he was a Chimaera prisoner, and for Leia, "suddenly, all the pieces had fallen into place...and the picture they formed was one of potential disaster."
• Aside from the few times they recognize the answer instantly, the characters in The Da Vinci Code seem to rely solely on this trope to solve all the various puzzles and sub-puzzles. For the last puzzle before the book's climax, we don't actually get to see the main character work out the answer.
  • We don't get to see it, but we do get the lead in. The answer to the last puzzle is a word: apple, and the last thing Langdon happens to look at before his off-screen Eureka Moment is an apple tree.
• Nero Wolfe does this quite a bit. He's got all the pieces, but can't make them fit together, Archie (or one of the suspects) says something that causes him to look at one particular thing in a different way, and everything falls into place. He will often admit to Archie when it was something that he said or did; if it was someone else, he saves the information for the Parlor Scene. Both Archie and the reader know one has just occurred when Nero starts doing his "lip exercises".
• Subverted, while lampshading the subversion, in Mil Millington's "Love And Other Near-Death Experiences", in which the central character has a startling realization that he recognizes would qualify as a Eureka Moment — except that nobody did or said anything to trigger it, it just happened without prompting.
• Harry Potter:
  • In Half-Blood Prince, a sarcastic comment by Harry ("Fifty-seventh time lucky?") about his inability to get a crucial memory of Voldemort from Slughorn inspires Ron to suggest Harry use his luck potion, which proves effective. A similar scene occurs in the movie, only (in keeping with the screenwriter's general inclinations) reversed: Ron's comment inspires Harry.
  • In Deathly Hallows, we're treated to Harry's entire train of thought as a broken talking stone gargoyle triggers his memories and he realizes exactly where the last Horcrux is hidden.
• In Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, near the climax of the third novel, Binabik the troll has a classic Eureka Moment during his party's escape from the Norns beneath Asu'a, as a result of an offhand comment from the dwarrows who are aiding them. Unconventionally, this leads not to the solution to the plot but the horrifying realization that the heroes have been doing the Big Bad's bidding the entire time.
• In the grand tradition of mystery novels, happens frequently in Ngaio Marsh's Inspector Alleyn series. An interesting departure is that the Eureka moment for Alleyn usually occurs near the middle of the book, with the reader catching up as more evidence is gathered.
• Discworld:
  • Feet of Clay:
    • Subverted where Vimes specifically warns against this.
    • Played straight at the end, when remarks of Detritus and Fred Colon make Vimes realize the Big Bad had been rubbing the hints of his plot in Vimes' face, assuming Vimes wouldn't get them.
    • Lampshaded in that "eureka" is a Ephebian word meaning "Bring me a towel". And in fact, we learn this is a regular occurrence for Ephebian philosophers, to the point that nearby stores keep a large supply of soap, towels and bath salts.
  • Subverted in Reaper Man; Inventor Ned Simnel is trying to think up a way for his combination harvester to move without a horse when a blast of steam goes off. Ned just gets annoyed on how he's always getting interrupted when trying to think. According to The Discworld Companion, this has happened over 150 times.
  • Subverted in Moving Pictures. CMOT Dibbler has been selling advertising space in some pictures, but is told to stop. Then he hears about a mistake someone made while editing a film, leaving in a frame which was just a picture of gold. Nobody noticed, but everyone was thinking about gold when they left the theater. It looks like he's about to figure out a way to sell advertising after all... but he puts in five minutes of film depicting what he's trying to advertise, on the reasoning that if one frame can do that, five minutes worth must work wonders.
• In Dorothy L. Sayers' Whose Body?, Lord Peter Wimsey's moment of revelation is explicitly compared to staring at jumbled letters until they formed a word of their own inclination.
• In Remote Man, Ned comes up with his plan to bring down Laana's smuggling operation when he's browsing in a dime store. He picks up a pin cushion that he discovers has a music box inside playing a familiar tune: The Entertainer. This brings back memories of watching The Sting with his father, which in turn sparks his plan, which is to invent a person, a rich businessman with his own fabricated website, to be a client of Laana.
  • Earlier, Ned overhears a conversation mentioning "an anchorman in Kingston". When he later learns that Kingston is the capital of Jamaica, he realises that what he heard was "a nanka-man", nanka being a local term for the Jamaican Boa.
• "Take a chill pill" in Mystery Team.
• When Chichikov gets the idea for his scam in Dead Souls.
• In Heroes Die, Toa-Sytell has one when he reads the Monastic records on Caine and realises that he's an Aktir.
• In Anno Dracula, Genevieve and Charles are struggling with their investigation into Jack the Ripper's murders. Genevieve wishes aloud that Dr. Seward were with them, as he treated all the victims and could have told them what they had in common. As soon as she says this, Charles realises something; They had Seward in common. Jack Seward.
• Happens quite a bit in The Dresden Files. Most recently, in Cold Days, Harry was talking with someone about his daughter and how much he would give to not have her hurt from any source, which makes him pause. Seconds later, he unravels a plot that's been in play for eight books.
  • A villainous and horrifying version happens in Skin Game, when Harry specifically starts to needle Nicodemus about the latter's plan to willingly sacrifice his daughter to reach the treasure they were after, hoping to make him angry enough to make a mistake. It works, until Nicodemus, despite his fury, recognizes that only a father would know how make those particular barbs sting so badly, and he rushes off to kill Harry's daughter, who he didn't previously know about, out of vengeance.
• In I Want My Hat Back, the Bear, after a long and fruitless search for his hat is asked to describe it: "It's red and pointy and... I HAVE SEEN MY HAT!"
• In Astrid Lindgren's Emil of Lönneberga books, there is a part where a man buys an unshod horse. All attempts to shoe it fail due to the horse kicking, and one man remarks that the buyer was cheated — at home, they tried to shoe it twenty times. Angry, the trader says anyone can have the horse for free, but when Emil takes him up on the offer, says he'll need to get him shod first. However, the horse's reaction reminded Emil (a five years old) of his family's servant, and he realized that the horse was merely ''ticklish''. So, he manages by holding the horse's hoofs, which have no nerves by definition. The trader tries to back out of the deal, but the crowd forces him to keep his word.
• In the thriller The Day Before Midnight, a group of commandos take over a missile base in Maryland but are delayed as the launch key is sealed behind a stone block that will take nearly a day to burn through. The military assumes they're dealing with some radical militia group, but Peter, the base's designer, isn't sure. It's then discovered the "terrorists" are actually a batch of renegade Spetsnaz commandos as Peter realizes they have "figured out how to win World War III." As he explains, if they launch, the Soviet Union may lose about 30,000 people, but the Soviet attack will take out most of the U.S. When the leader of the American forces points out the obvious problem in that the American counterattack will wipe out Russia, Peter says it won't. He reminds them that when the commandos took the base, they sent out a short-burst radio message Peter now realizes was a signal to a compatriot to hold off on the action that guarantees the U.S. response is hopelessly crippled to the point they may not get anything in the air at all.
  Peter: You better kick this over to the FBI because if I'm right, he's gonna launch here and then he's going to nuke D.C.
• Ellery Queen is prone to these. For example, in The Scarlet Letters he is watching some wet paint run in the rain when the meaning the victim's Dying Clue suddenly becomes apparent to him.
• In the Vorkosigan Saga, Lord Miles Vorkosigan is prone to this; for instance in Diplomatic Immunity,
  “The crime isn't murder,” Miles whispered, his eyes widening. “The crime is kidnapping.”
  The murders had come subsequently, in an increasingly panicked cascade, ...
  “My lord, are you all right—?”
  Ekaterin's voice, in a fierce whisper: “No, don't interrupt him. He's thinking. He just makes those funny leaking noises when he's thinking.”
  • Cordelia (then) Naismith has one in the prequel Shards of Honor when she realized that Commodore Aral Vorkosigan could not have used interrogation drugs on her to extract information as he had claimed (she was hiding in the quarters he was confined to, and the only conscious person that knew she was there was no less surprised by what he supposedly gotten out of her than she was)... which meant that he (and only he given how badly the Barrayaran fleet was blindsided) had known of the top secret trump card Beta Colony had deployed in defense of their neighboring system ahead of time... which in turn forced her to conclude that the whole invasion of Escobar was a smokescreen for an internal Barrayaran assassination plot with Vorkosigan as the triggerman.
• T*A*C*K: Often, just before "turn the page for the solution". Another character will usually make a reference to something vaguely related that will trigger a "I just figured out the answer!". It's usually Toria who triggers Will, but occasionally other characters will trigger Will or Toria into figuring things out.
• Wet Desert: Tracking Down a Terrorist on the Colorado River: Grant realizes that the bomber is aiming at restoring the Colorado River delta, after figuring that the bomber's warning of a poisoning of the All-American Canal does not fit that of a terrorist trying to kill people.
• In The Dry by Jane Harper, this is how Aaron Falk cracks the case of whether a Pater Familicide was real or a murder staged by someone else. In a casual conversation about a customer with gambling problems, The Bartender mentions that while gamblers always look for loopholes and strategies, it all comes down to backing the right horse. Back in his hotel room, Aaron realizes that all his theories so far have been built on one fatal assumption - that whoever killed the family would have a grudge against the father, his old friend. It never occurred to him that his friend's *wife* might have been the real target.
• A big theme of "Legwork" by Eric Frank Russell is that the dull, dreary legwork gives us more opportunities for Eureka moments. Without all the investigation of the bizarre bank thefts, the police commissioner would not have been able to connect them with Harasha Vanash's UFO.
• Aaren has one in the second Sky Jumpers book, Forbidden Flats, after Alondra mentions the periodic table of elements. It leads him and the others to deduce that iron's magnetic properties may have been transferred to ruthenium.
• The title character of Franny K. Stein does this in several of the books.
  • Attack of the 50-Ft. Cupid has Franny trying to figure out how she can stop the titular gigantic cherub. Remembering her little brother Freddy snarking about using a reverse setting on the Biggerizer so she could shrink her mouth, Franny gets the idea to use the invention to enlarge herself so that she and the giant Cupid would be on equal footing.
  • In The Invisible Fran, Franny gets the idea to become invisible and whisper suggestions into her friends' heads to lure them into pursuing mad science like she does after seeing her chameleon use its camouflage ability to sneak up on her dog Igor.
  • In The Fran That Time Forgot, Franny glances at her Time Warp Dessert Plate she invented for the science fair when everyone at school laughs at her Embarrassing Middle Name, which inspires her to retool her invention and use it to go back in time to change her middle name.
  • In The Frandidate, Franny tries to think of a way she can make everyone want to vote for her for class president. She gets her idea after noticing Igor's uncanny ability to get her what the wants before she even asks, her chameleon being able to change itself when she accidentally sits on it and her parrot imitating her squeal when she sat on the aforementioned chameleon. This makes Franny realize that she can win over the student body by creating a suit that changes her appearance to match everyone's interests and enables her to say exactly what they want to hear.
• To Shape a Dragon's Breath: Anequs, has one regarding drawing and learning skiltakraft while at home for the whaler's return celebration, after nearly a whole term of struggling through it (with no help from her Sadist Teacher Professor Ezel, who refuses to let her interact in class). She realizes that the paths of dances her people have done for generations—with curved lines, rather than straight, and using various natural items such as shells and ashes for the source of the aethers—are drawing skilta, which would be visible as such from the sky when in the air on dragonback. She passes this information on to Theod to help him finally grasp the subject, with his promise that they both won't inform anyone at the school what they've discovered.
• A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs by Ellis Peters has an interesting example, where Simon Towne has an epiphany regarding one of the mysterious deaths after George Felse repeats a comment made by his son Dominic. The interesting part is that Simon was present when Dominic made the comment in the first place, but it didn't trigger an epiphany then because he didn't have enough of the other pieces of the puzzle yet.
• Warrior Cats:
  • In Tigerclaw's Fury, Tigerclaw's reflecting on his situation while looking for moss to cover his wound, but instead finds leaf mulch. This makes him realize that his goal to become leader can be attained in more than one way too: while he might not become ThunderClan's leader, there are other options.
  • In Shattered Sky, StarClan has given the cryptic advice that in order to defeat the villain, "the Clans must remember their names". Everyone's a bit baffled at what this means, but then Alderheart happens to walk past Hawkwing telling his daughters about SkyClan's history and how they certainly live up to their name due to their attack-from-above techniques. Alderheart realizes that this means that each Clan must use their own unique battle strategies to fight Darktail.
• In "Ayla and the Birthday Brawl" in the Whateley Universe, Phase has a Eureka Moment in the middle of the final battle of the story. It nearly turns into a Brick Joke when we don't get to hear the deduction until well into the next novel, as the attack used by the Necromancer tells Phase that there is a link between the Necromancer and Hekate, another of their Big Bads.
• Seven Stars: In the chapter "The Trouble With Barrymore", the first-person detective protagonist has one when Geneviève mentions that they don't even know if the key part of the prophecy (which is in French) is supposed to be translated into English, or if it's a French translation of something in a third language. The key phrase is "Maison Blanche", which in English is "White House"... and in Spanish is Casa Blanca.
  This was what it was like. When you saw it, and nobody else did. This was what made a detective.
• The Lotterys More or Less: While Sumac is watching The Sound of Music at the Warming Center, at the point where the song about Liesl and Rolf being in love is playing, it immediately occurs to her that Catalpa, her sister, is crushing on Luiz.
• Katt Loves Dogg: Oscar has one regarding his cousin Romanldo's love poem to Molly's cousin Violet. The reason the lines are spaced the way they are is so that the first letter of each line can spell out the secret message "Meet Me At The Giant Stones".
• Space Case: While watching the security footage of Dr. Holtz before he goes out the airlock, Dash and Kira take note of Dr. Holtz's hand movements in the video. Dash thinks of them as signs, and it leads him to realize Dr. Holtz is relaying a message in sign language.
• Jaine Austen Mysteries:
  • In Last Writes, Jaine has two that let her figure out that Wells is the killer and how he pulled off poisoning Quinn; hearing Marco the prop man recount stories Quinn told about his days as a valet (giving Wells a very good motive to kill him) and the warm up guy doing magic tricks (remembering Wells was a magician and explaining how he could have poisoned the doughnuts without being in the prop room).
  • Throughout Death by Pantyhose, Kandi has been trying to find an actress to go through driving school for her. Jaine scolding Kandi for hiring someone to do her dirty work for her leads her to realize Reagan Dixon did the same thing with killing Vic.
• Max & the Midknights: The Tower of Time: In chapter 1, when Max is pondering on how to find out why she and her sister Mary were separated at birth, an idea pops into her mind, sending her running to someone she figures can help: Mumblin' the Magician.
• Angela Nicely: In “Cupcake Wars!”, Angela gets the idea to decorate her brown-iced cupcakes like monsters when Maisie complains that they “look like blobby monsters”.
• In Vigilauntie Justice, Baz has one about the identity of the Goldsmiths Groper when Daisy describes the Signature Scent of her attacker, which matches only one of the possible suspects.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
  • One day, two thousand years after one human being had been nailed to a tree for saying how wonderful it would be if everyone was nice to each other, a young woman sitting in a café in Rickmansworth comes to the realisation where it had all been going wrong, and how the world could finally be made a bright and happy place... and then the Earth is demolished to make way for an interspace bypass, and the thought is lost forever.
  • The invention of the Infinite Improbability Drive came about from one. Beforehand, respectable physicists had been trying to invent such a drive, only to meet with failure. Then, one night after a particularly unsuccessful party one younger scientist who was moping up came to the conclusion that if it was a finite impossibility it would be possible to determine just how improbable it was, and hooked up a thinking engine to a particularly strong pot of tea to do just that, which did indeed summon the Infinite Improbability Drive in existence, earning the young physicist a prize for extreme cleverness and a violent lynching from a mob of angry physicists.
• In Alice Scanlan Reach's "Father Crumlish's Long Hot Summer" Nick LoVarco is stabbed with Angel Flores' switchblade, which he claims fell out of his pocket while playing stickball. When one of the spectators, Tony Scalaro, is asked whether he saw anybody pick it up, he states that all he saw was that Angel's team lost. While watching a sportscaster interview Willie Mays on TV, Father Crumlish realizes that the look of pride in Mays' eyes when he comments on helping the Giants win is the same look that was in Angel's eyes when he mentioned scoring two goals during the stickball game. This means that Tony wasn't present for the whole game like he claimed and therefore is the probable culprit.
• Galadriel 'El' Higgins gets two highly unpleasant ones within as many chapters (about 72 hours, 96 on the outside) of The Golden Enclaves:
  • When El was confronting the wizards who were in the midst of sacrificing her friend Liu to shore up the collapsing Beijing Enclave she was brought up short by the realization that the elaborate ritual involving slowly crushing somebody under bricks made of more mana than anything inscribed with spells for longevity, eternal life, deathlessness, etc. was for something rather worse than merely killing the victim.
    "A maw-mouth. You're making a maw-mouth."
  • El was storming towards the rural Maharashtra compound of the so-called "Speaker of Mumbai" to confront the ancient Seer that proclaimed she was destined to shatter Enclaves and cause great slaughter when she found a maw-mouth pawing at the warded gates, wondered briefly why a great precognitive would send the Enclave at Dubai into a tizzy over an attack that had not even happened rather than warn her family to evacuate, then realized that Deepthi Sharma did see the maw-mouth coming... and saw the coming of her prodigal great-great-granddaughter... and saw what would happen to the Dubai Enclave when the paths of the two crossed^note (Or perhaps when El managed to corner it)... which would be much like what happened the other times El put those mad things down and granted those they had consumed the release of death.

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