The Chantry Guild

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A little before dawn, Amanda Morgan woke in the front room of the tiny apartment rented by the family which had risked giving her shelter. A young girl shared the front room floor with her, but she still slumbered, as did the rest.

Amanda had slept in the shapeless brown smock that had been all but forced on the inhabitants of this world and its sister planet of Mara by the Occupation Forces now ruling them. She rose now without putting on her ankle-high bush boots, and squatted on her heels beside her borrowed sleeping mat, and rolled it up.

Stowing it in a corner of the room and picking up the boots in one hand, she quietly let herself out into the hall. Still carrying the boots, she went along it to make use of the communal bathroom at the hall's end, then descended the narrow wooden stairs into the street.

Just inside the tenement's street door, she stopped to put on the boots. The smock had a hood, which she now pulled up over her head to hide her face. Silently, lifting the latch of the door, she slipped out into the mist-dimmed, pre-dawn light of the empty streets of Porphyry. It was a small town in the subtropical uplands of Hysperia, the northeastern continent of the Exotic planet of Kultis.

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