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neuxue · 5 years ago

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Wheel of Time liveblogging: Towers of Midnight ch 1

A wind passes through an apple orchard, and the world is changed.

Chapter 1: Apples First

Dragon chapter icon – does that mean we get to see Rand post-Dragonmount? I am… very curious.

Though apples in this story just make me think of Perrin, what with his entire family buried beneath the apple trees.

But first, the Wheel, and the wind.

Crisp and light, the wind danced

That’s a marked shift in tone from how the wind has been introduced in the last few books, as a darker and more violent or vicious force. It is entirely possible that I’m overthinking this. But the wind has always felt like something of a binding thread in the whole idea of ‘the Dragon is one with the land’ and it would be fitting for the wind to change as Rand does.

Then again, it does accelerate somewhat in the next paragraph or so.

Are we starting off in Seanchan? That wind sure does get around.

These were towers meant for war. By tradition they were unoccupied. How long that would last – how long tradition itself would be remembered in a continent in chaos – remained to be seen.

That’s an excellent line. It reminds me of another one from an introductory wind sequence: Trade slowed for winter and wars, and the Dragon Reborn, but it never really stopped, not until nations died. I’m not sure why, really; there’s not a huge amount of similarity there beyond an abstract concept of socioeconomics phrased in a particularly lovely way, but there you go.

Beyond that, though… how long tradition itself would be remembered in a continent of chaos is applied to Seanchan here, but it also touches on a rather central theme of the series overall: the tension between past and future, the weight of story and tradition, of myth and legend, against the inevitability of change and the passage of time.

The wind continued eastward, and soon it was playing with the masts of half-burned ships at the docks of Takisrom.

I like the contrast here between playfulness and violence, between caprice and destruction.

The Fields of Peace were aflame

Well that’s… an image. Okay. Damn.

Semirhage really did do her work well. She may be dead now but before she died, I think she made a pretty solid case for herself as one of the most effective Forsaken. Throwing an entire continent into utter chaos, even while helping that empire bring chaos to another continent? Driving Rand across the last of his own thresholds? You could even argue that her death was itself a triumph, because in pushing Rand to the point where he was willing to kill her, she achieved precisely what she needed to.

I mean, Moridin’s nihilism certainly played a role in Rand’s ‘none of it matters’ on Dragonmount, but Semirhage played a rather starring role in getting him there, and for that she deserves some villainous accolades in whatever terrace of hell she’s now decorating to her tastes.

Eventually, the wind encountered another continent, this one quiet, like a man holding his breath before he headsman’s axe fell.

Well. Depending on the exact timing of this – and I certainly have my guesses – that’s… exactly what’s happening. The land waiting, breath held, for the Dragon to decide its future. Salvation or destruction. And so of course the wind arrives to bear witness.

By the time the wind reached the enormous, broken-peaked mountain known as Dragonmount, it had lost much of its strength.

No, I’m not having emotions about wind, you’re having emotions about wind.

But…yes. Because by the time Rand reached Dragonmount, so had he, for all that he held more power than ever before (but power is not strength; the last several books have been a testament to that). Rand is the wind and the wind is Rand and the land is one with the Dragon and the wind both represents that and carries it outward and I just love how this is done.

I love how this sense is created of everything looking towards Dragonmount, and of this silence as the world holds its breath to learn its fate, as the whole dance that’s been spiralling out from Rand at its centre for so long now pauses, draws back towards that centre, and it all turns on the edge of a decision, a perspective, a single choice alone on a mountain that represents at once death and rebirth.

Hi, I’m Lia, and we’re like two pages in and not even done with the wind sequence and I’m already having a Situation about it. Anyway, what else is new?

An orchard of apple trees rather than a grove of olives at the base of Dragonmount. I mean. That works too.

Two figures stood there: a youth and a sombre man in his later years.

Tam? And Rand?

Oh wait no.

Hang on, Almen Bunt? As in, the NPC cart driver from all the way back in The Eye of the World? Wow. That’s some true dedication to conservation of characters right there.

The boy of thirteen had golden hair from his father’s side.

Uh oh, you’d better keep an eye on that one, Almen; sounds like a potential future protagonist and possible long-lost scion of a royal line you’ve got there.

And during the night, every single one of [the apple trees] had shed their fruit. Tiny apples, barely as large as a man’s thumb. Thousands of them. They’d shrivelled during the night, then fallen. An entire crop, gone.

Damn it Rand. (But also… how appropriate. Apples for innocence, and all of them lost).

‘I don’t know what to say, lads,’ Almen finally admitted.

I think in this situation, ‘…fuck’ would not be inappropriate.

So their storehouse looks about like a grocery store’s shelves during lockdown. No grain, no fresh fruit, probably no toilet paper.

Almen’s determined to make the best of it, but it’s hard to make the best of ‘cosmic shenanigans turned to possibly destroying the world with a stray thought because there really is only so much pain a person can stand and when that person happens to be tied to the fate of the world, things get a bit dicey’. But best of luck to you, Almen. Hold on a few minutes and things might get… better.

In all his years, he’d never seen anything like this. This was something evil.

And yet it’s caused by the one who is meant to be the champion of all that is good and bright in the world. He never turned to the Shadow, but with what he had become by the time he reached Dragonmount… he didn’t need to.

I like the way we see this, as well, not just by watching Rand directly in the latter half of TGS, but also in these brief thoughts and viewpoints of complete outsiders, who really don’t know what’s going on. I like that, from that perspective, there isn’t even any doubt. That it’s so obviously something evil, something wrong, something terrible. It serves to highlight just how far wrong everything had gone. Because watching Rand, book by book, you see it happening, but it’s slow. Gradual. So easy, a step at a time, to justify and understand. But then you take a step back and look through a pair of eyes with more distance and see only what he is now – or rather, what he was right before that realisation – and that realisation is terrifying.

The land is dying all around them and at the centre of it is the Dragon Reborn, who is one with the land and yet dying himself even as he lives. Who, at this point, no longer wants to live. And so the land obeys his will. It’s a slow suicide of a world because the weight of that world is too much for the one who has to carry it.

Staring down those neat, perfect rows of useless apple trees, Almen felt the crushing weight of it. Of trying to remain positive.

Rand your nihilism is contagious. Well. Moridin’s nihilism. Which sort of proves the ‘contagious’ point.

I like this as well, that Rand’s own despair is mirrored and echoed not just in the land, but in the people who inhabit it. Like a very slightly less literal wind; the wind is the land’s version of ‘something that reaches everywhere, far beyond where it originated’ and this despair – for now – is the more metaphorical.

This is it then, isn’t it? He thought, eyes toward the too-yellow grass below. The fight just ended.

Well. Yes, very possibly. But not quite in the way you might think.

This is so well done: the way you can tell precisely where we are in Veins of Gold by the thoughts and despair of a single farmer. The way it shows so clearly the reach of Rand’s… self? Effect? I can’t think of the right word, but it’s like how we see the wind brushing across Almen’s shirt, and now Rand’s despair brushing across his mind. Land and Dragon, and it’s all tied together.

Maybe it was time to let go.

He felt something on his neck. Warmth.

Oh no this is beautiful.

It just tracks so perfectly to Veins of Gold, and none of that even needs to be shown. And you can see the precise moment where that despair (‘none of this matters!’) turn to hope. Which is entirely the point, in a way: it may just be one lonely broken hero on a mountain finally trading despair for hope, but it touches everything. He may be alone and unwitnessed, but the entire world feels it. The sun, the wind, a change.

And I think part of what I love about this is that it’s not dramatic. Neither the despair nor the warmth. Instead it’s this soft almost aching gentleness, because that’s all any of it is. It’s not a battle or a dramatic pronouncement or a cheering crowd or a display of power. It’s just… a thought. A shift.

A gentle warmth rather than a… well, a force of light, if you will.

Which serves as the perfect contrast, really, to one of Rand’s darkest (for all that it was blindingly bright) moments. At Natrin’s Barrow he shone with all the cold brilliance of the Light’s power bent on destruction; all light and nothing of warmth. Now, though, in the moment that truly matters, the moment where everything changes, it’s as simple as the sun emerging from behind the clouds, a warmth on the back of a farmer’s neck, a quiet, unseen but all-encompassing realisation that there is something left to fight for.

He hesitated, then turned weary eyes toward the sky. Sunlight bathed his face.

I just… I love that such a simple statement can carry so much weight behind it. It’s the mark of an extraordinarily well-crafted plot point, that this is all it takes to invoke all its effect, and to convey that effect so perfectly. We know what this means, and it’s neither subtle nor heavy-handed; it’s just… right.

And I still can’t get over how perfect it is that we’re seeing this through the eyes of an utterly random and otherwise unimportant character, because that’s the whole point. That’s what Rand, finally, realises he’s fighting for. The chance for people – any people, random people, villagers and farmers and merchants and monarchs alike – to just live. And so of course we see this through the eyes of, to borrow another chapter title, just another man. Because that’s all any of them are.

The apple trees were flowering.

Oh.

I’m.

This whole scene is just hitting the exact tone of gentle yet powerful beauty-in-simplicity, little-things-that-mean-everything that just gets me.

The apples fell and famine seemed certain and yet here they are, flowering once more, a second chance. A rebirth, if you will.

OH NO OH NO HERE HE IS I’M NOT READY FOR THIS

Almen spun to find a tall young man walking down out of the foothills.

Coming down from the mountain like a benevolent wind and bringing flowers with him like the Aiel and the Nym of old, bringing life back to the land like a goddamn messiah and it’s all done so gently and I’m fine.

‘Ho, stranger,’ Almen said.

I don’t even know why this gets me but it does. Stranger, and yet he is the centre of everything. The centre of everything, and yet at the end of the day he is just another man, another stranger.

It’s been a long time since Rand has walked unrecognised. Maybe that’s it.

‘Did you… did you get lost up in the foothills?’

Well. That’s one way to put it. But the point is: he found his way back.

Or his way forward.

Or something.

‘No. I’m not lost. Finally.’

I’m FINE, this is FINE.

Maybe what really gets me about this scene is that it’s hard to remember the last time there was a scene involving Rand that wasn’t overshadowed by pain and desperation. And now it’s… yes, the pain is still there on some level, but it’s like this weight has been lifted, and so the gentleness of this scene stands as a – well, not sharp because the whole point is it isn’t – contrast to everything that came before, and it’s only in the absence of that pain and despair that you realise how heavy it was.

‘There’s nothing back there of use.’

Except for everything.

‘There are always things of use around, if you look closely enough. You can’t stare at them too long. To learn but not be overwhelmed, that is the balance.’

Ah. And so at last he understands. The importance of balance, but also in this specific circumstance which, I think, is in reference to his memories of his life as Lews Therin.

Because at last, at long last, he has accepted those. He has learned to accept them without losing himself, without fear of losing himself, without feeling as if it is an existential struggle, as if he must keep a barrier between them, as if accepting those memories means accepting that fate.

But now he understands: that he can remember, and learn, but still move on, move forwards, grow. Try again, try differently. Have a second chance, informed by but not bound to the doom of the first. To be himself, but to accept the entirety of what that means. Who he was, who he is.

The man’s words… it seemed they were having two different conversations.

It’s okay, Almen, you get used to him.

Perhaps the lad wasn’t right in the head.

No, see, the thing is, he finally is.

‘Do I know you?’ Almen asked. Something about the young man was familiar.

‘Yes,’ the lad said.

Okay, I love this? On so many levels.

Because sure, there’s the literal: Almen has in fact met Rand before, and Rand answers honestly. And then there’s the next layer down: Rand is the Dragon Reborn and therefore known to most at this point, and he answers that honestly as well.

But then there’s this sense of something even more figurative, less tangible. The Dragon is one with the land, and Rand stands as the Light’s champion and the land personified and the centre of the fight and the wind that brings the apple trees to flower. He’s a part of the world and so Almen knows him, as all know him, as all will know him, even those who have never met and never will meet him.

And finally, I love that Almen has to ask. That there’s still this sense of anonymity, for all that it’s threaded through with a familiarity deeper than any acquaintance. That Almen looks at him first and sees a man, a lad, a stranger, rather than the Dragon Reborn: saviour and destroyer, rather than a monster or a madman or a force of nature. That they’re just two strangers in an orchard, and yet they’re not.

Honestly any kind of play on names and naming and identity gets me every time, and when you combine it with my other fictional love of the space between humanity and divinity and monstrosity, you get a very happy Lia.

‘Gather your people and collect those apples. They’ll be needed in the days to come.’

I mean, for projectile weapons you’d be better off sticking with Aludra’s fireworks, but sure.

‘Gather those apples quickly. My presence will hold him off for a time, I think, and whatever you take now should be safe from his touch.’

There’s just this almost startling and yet utterly peaceful sense of calm to him, that we haven’t seen since… honestly ever. Calm and accepting of who and what he is, and for the first time since he left the Two Rivers, not fighting himself in some way. And what a difference it makes.

It's also remarkable how differently it comes across compared to the icy emotionlessness he surrounded himself with after Semirhage. Because that, too, was conveyed as a perfect calm – but there was a wrongness there that’s lacking here. It’s only a few lines of dialogue, and yet it’s so clearly different.

‘I do know you,’ Almen said, remembering an odd pair of youths he had given a lift in his cart years ago. ‘Light! You’re him, aren’t you? The one they’re talking about?’

HE FINALLY REMEMBERS HIM AND IT’S AS THE BOY RAND AL’THOR FIRST, RATHER THAN THE DRAGON REBORN. I’m sorry, but everything about this just gets me. That for once, he is the person first, and the role second. That the true recognition is of a boy from a dusty road.

It's a lovely kind of irony – rather than cruel, for once – that it’s only after he truly comes into his power and accepts it and stops fighting himself and his role and everything he was and is, and is finally ready to face the world as the Dragon Reborn as the Dragon Reborn is meant to be, that he is at last recognised as human by a stranger who sees him.

Meeting those eyes, Almen felt a strange sense of peace.

Well that’s new. And a welcome change. How long has it been since people looked at him and felt anything but fear, or saw him as anything but dangerous?

‘It is likely,’ the man said. ‘Men are often speaking of me.’ He smiled, then turned and continued on his way down the path.

Peaceful and wise and making his way through the orchard like the wind, knowing and acknowledging but not forcing his place in the world. A force of nature still, but this is worlds away from ‘I am the storm’.

He just… is. And he understands that. And accepts it not begrudgingly, or out of duty, or despite the pain it causes, but entirely and unreservedly and with the understanding, at last, of why.

‘Where are you going?’

The man looked back with a faint grimace. ‘To do something I’ve been putting off. I doubt she will be pleased by what I tell her.’

I would bet actual money that means he’s going to see Egwene, and I had to laugh at how even this new wise, calm, peaceful Rand is fully recognisable as the boy from Emond’s Field in this moment. Because those two are never going to be anything but at least a little exasperated with one another at all times, and it’s such a perfect childhood-friends-turned-sweethearts-turned-basically-siblings dynamic and the faint grimace really sells it. (I would not be remotely surprised if there is name-calling. ‘Woolhead’ and ‘stubborn’ will likely be thrown around)

But it also serves as a reminder that, for all his newfound wisdom, Rand is still human. Which... even that little touch is perfect, in this scene. To ground him, just a little. I just love everything about this entire chapter.

Almen thought – for a moment – he could see something around the man. A lightness to he air, warped and bent.

WHERE ONCE THERE WAS DARKNESS. Because he is who he is meant to be now! The champion of the Light in truth! There is finally light to Rand, in more ways than one, and it’s really kind of surprisingly beautiful.

Everything is different, even if no one but Rand will understand why.

I still just love the way such an absolute change came not from a battle or a crown or a display of power, or even an achievement, but purely from… himself. So much played into creating that moment, yes, and so much was focused on it, but ultimately it was just Rand, alone on the mountain of his suicide and birthplace, coming to terms with himself and seeing something in the world worth saving.

And I’m struggling to express precisely why I like that, but I think it’s something about, I don’t know, the power of the individual, I suppose? The way something so existential can come from something as simple as acceptance? The way nothing has changed, and yet everything has changed, and the cause of it all is finding a purpose, a reason, a last decision to choose a chance at hope over the certainty of despair.

I mean, so much of epic fantasy is about the magic and the power and the politics and the battles, about everything taking place on a grand scale, about the fantastical. But sometimes you also get moments like this, where balanced against all of that you still see the importance of just… a person, and a choice.

Next (ToM ch 2) Previous (ToM prologue pt. 3)

#I'm! fine! this is fine!#wheel of time #neuxue liveblogs WoT #Towers of Midnight

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neuxue · 6 years ago

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Wheel of Time liveblogging: The Gathering Storm ch 41

EGWENE!!!!!!! And excellent use of outsider POV! And could Gawyn be more irritating? And EGWENE!!!!!

Chapter 41: A Fount of Power

Ah, the unique and entirely self-inflicted frustration of having to pause for three weeks in the middle of a major battle…

Gawyn continues to exist in this sequence and I am irritated. You’d better impede the awesome, Gawyn.

But we all know what Gawyn’s track record at the Tower looks like, so I’m not holding out a great deal of hope here.

The White Tower itself seemed to burn. It lit a daunting profile in the sky, all white and red, outlined by flames. Smoke boiled toward the midnight clouds above, fires blazed in many Tower windows, and a glare at the base indicated that outlying buildings and trees were also alight.

It’s such a great image, the once-untouchable White Tower burning against the night sky. And on a more symbolic level, it’s as if the truth is finally made visible: the Tower is burning, wounded, vulnerable, and it’s there for anyone to see.

Though right now Gawyn and the soldiers with him are more interested in seeing that there is in fact a secret entrance. And here I was hoping Gawyn might have to resort to banging really hard on the stone wall and shouting for someone to let him in, and eventually Egwene would notice him and shout down to him while lighting a to’raken on fire that she might need to take a rain check on tonight’s date, this really isn’t the best time, she has to go wash her hair.

At least he was finally doing something to help Egwene.

IS HE THOUGH?

Not all princesses want to be rescued from their fiery towers beset by dragons, Gawyn. Some of them might rather like it there. Standing in a badass hero pose, silhouetted against the night sky, surrounded by power, with their hair blowing in the wind.

She’s doing far more to help herself than you are to help her, is what I’m getting at here, Gawyn.

They were gliding directly into a war zone where both sides were stronger than they were, both sides had little reason to like them, and both sides were wielding the One Power. It took a special kind of man to stare those odds in the eyes.

‘Special’ is not exactly the word I would use.

But this frames the whole situation quite nicely: they’re heading straight into a battle in which they are hideously outmatched, with very little idea of what’s going on, for no reason but to rescue someone who has specifically asked not to be rescued. WHY.

They’ve brought a hundred soldiers with them? Again…why? What do they think that will possibly do against a Seanchan attack mounted on dragons and wielding the One Power? It’s too many for stealth, and not enough to actually have an effect. I’m just so confused as to why they’re doing this at all. You’re all going to die and to what purpose?

I suppose disguising themselves as Tower guards helps a bit on the stealth front, but still. Everything about this plan seems terrible.

“It’s always a good idea to have a few copies of your enemy’s uniform.”

“It’s not proper,” Siuan said, folding her arms. “Serving on the Tower Guard is a sacred duty. They—”

“They’re your enemy, Siuan,” Bryne said sternly.

Are they?

How long can they look at the Tower as their enemy before it becomes insurmountable truth? This is why Egwene does not want to be rescued; this is what she has learned in her time as a supposed captive of the Tower. She came here as a result of her own declaration of war against them, true, but that’s a part of this whole arc for her, realising that the Tower and the Aes Sedai there are not her enemies, that she cannot afford for them to be her enemies, even if Elaida is. That the solution must somehow be unity, not war.

Gawyn, Siuan and Bryne took up positions at the front—Gawyn and the general walking just ahead of Siuan, as if they were Warders

Gawyn Trakand, the things you do not notice could literally fill books.

All in all, the illusion was very good. On first glance, Gawyn himself would have bought the disguise.

Yeah, sorry, that’s really not a high bar.

The billowing smoke reflected red firelight, enveloping the Tower in a menacing crimson haze. Holes and gashes broke the walls of the once-majestic building; fires blazed within several of them.

It’s so starkly different from how the Tower has always been described up until now; it’s the sort of language that would much more naturally be associated with, say, Dragonmount. But the illusion of a pure white structure, beautiful and untouchable and eternal, a monument and a lasting symbol of strength, has been shattered, and beneath it is…this. A nightmare of fire and a crumbling structure and chaos, burning.

I just love the contrast, because up until now the descriptions of the Tower have been so consistent, so perfectly crafted to suit an entity that presents only and exactly the image it chooses, never changing, never faltering, never letting anyone see what is truly there. In hindsight, all those descriptions feel a bit like looping a single piece of film across CCTV footage while carrying out a bank robbery. Too perfect, too still. And so to now get these descriptions instead is perfect in its suddenness, jarring in the way a shattering is as the illusion is forcibly broken away.

Up above, near the middle of the Tower, several gashes were spewing fireballs and lighting back out at the invaders.

EGWENE! Maybe Gawyn will see her as the absolute fucking badass that she is and will realise that she is way, way out of his league, and will give up and go home and leave Egwene to be awesome in peace.

“Now what?” Gawyn whispered.

Great plan, guys.

“We find Egwene,” Siuan answered. “We start at the base, then head down to the basement floors. She was locked down there somewhere earlier today, and it’s probably the first place we should look.”

Oh, ye of little faith. How can even you, Siuan, have so little confidence in her? You’ve seen her take on a Hall that treated her like a puppet, you’ve sent her to hunt the Black Ajah as little more than a novice, you know her strength and resourcefulness and ability.

Gawyn, she’s supposed to be the woman you love, and therefore someone you should have confidence in, and assume competence of. That’s how it works, right?

Bryne, you swore allegiance to her when, again, she was to all appearances just a girl raised Amyrlin so that it would be easy to pull her strings. You gave her an army and trusted that she would know what to do with it.

And yet NONE OF YOU look at the battle taking place, and think that maybe Egwene is in the middle of it, that maybe Egwene has done what she does and found a way to turn an impossible situation to her advantage, or at least found a way to fight back. Give her some credit already!

I know, I know, based on the information they have, her situation is Hashtag Not Great, but…come on, this is Egwene we’re talking about! Even if ‘ah she’s probably found a way to be badass and claim the Amyrlin’s authority at least as a battlefield commission in order to get shit done when no one else can and save the Tower’ isn’t the default assumption, they should at least entertain the possibility that she’s managed to figure something out, that she’s found a way to fight back.

Though in Siuan’s case, I wonder if there’s an element of…projection? After all, she was a clever and capable and powerful Amyrlin, but she was dancing on thin ice for a long time with the coming of the Dragon Reborn and the secrets she held and the course she was trying to take, and she did not see the coup coming, and for all her own resourcefulness and strength she was unable to save herself from it. So from her I wonder if it’s not so much a lack of confidence in Egwene as a sense of something almost like déjà vu, of looking at this situation and being terrified that it’s happening again, that what happened to her will happen to Egwene because even the most capable can be brought down.

Gawyn has no excuse though. He’s had many, many opportunities to give his girlfriend a single vote of confidence and he always seems to…not do that. It’s very frustrating.

Oh thank the Light it’s a POV switch.

I should have known it would be Saerin trying to actually implement some sort of strategy. Or one of that group, anyway; they’re some of the few who have managed bipartisan talks cooperation and effective work towards an actual goal lately.

Around her, the room was in virtual chaos.

I think this is a case of somewhere the word ‘literal’ would actually be appropriate…

Moradri was a long-limbed Mayener with dark skin, and she was trailed by two handsome Warders, both also Mayener. Rumours said that they were her brothers, come to the White Tower to defend their sister

Okay I know we’re in the middle of a battle here but this is such an interesting little aside! On the one hand, I’m almost surprised we haven’t seen instances of the Warder bond being used between siblings, but on the other hand, speaking as someone who has a sibling…wow. That would be uh. Interesting. And yet it also makes a lot of sense, given that it is by definition an incredibly close bond requiring a great deal of trust and a long partnership…but also two brothers as Warders. What a family! I suddenly want all of the backstory here.

No Greens to be found. We know where Adelorna is, at least, but it’s really not all that surprising, if you think about it.

“A pity,” Saerin said. “They like to call themselves the Battle Ajah, after all. Well, that leaves me to organise the fighting.”

They’re the Battle Ajah, but I think that the Tower’s long tendencies towards secrecy, isolation and insulation, noninterference between sisters, and manipulation rather than outright participation in any sort of war or battle has not just had an impact on the Greens’ ability to work as anything resembling a cohesive group, but is also a set of attitudes that would end up forcing tactics over strategy in a battle situation.

Whereas someone like Saerin, or really any of the Brown Ajah who have made war and strategy a part of their studies might well be better suited to the more administrative – but oh so massively underrated and vitally important – aspects of fighting.

Saerin eyed the Green sister, then tapped the map. “Mark the locations, Moradri. You can go back to the fighting soon enough, but your knowledge is more important right now.”

Yes, exactly this. Moradri wants to be out there fighting, because that’s what her Ajah’s attitude is or has become. And because if they all see themselves as individuals acting separately, of course the impulse is to go out and fight directly, rather than recognise that they’ll actually be more successful if they coordinate, and that all of them just throwing all their firepower at whatever they can reach is not the most efficient approach.

They have fighting skills, it seems, but they don’t know how to function as any sort of military force. Because the Tower’s attitudes haven’t allowed for that sort of thinking or cohesiveness to ever emerge.

So you need the people who can stand back rather than rushing straight in to where the fighting is thickest, who can pull out the maps and watch what’s happening and bring some level of organisation to the chaos, and send out those who do have the actual hands-on fighting ability but may lack the mindset for looking at the bigger picture.

Which of course is just another of the already myriad reasons the Ajahs need to work together and maybe, I don’t know, communicate and recognise that they all have valuable but different skills to contribute and that they’re stronger and more capable as a whole than as a disparate set of individuals, but…well, that’s sort of the whole point of the Tower’s story, isn’t it? United we stand, divided we fall, and all that.

“Captain, our most important task is to form a centre of operations. Aes Sedai and soldiers alike are scrambling about independently, acting like rats faced by wolves. We need to stand together.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Not that that’s ever stopped me from spending a few hundred words trying…

It’s not just that they need to stand together, though. It’s that they need to work together, and delegate tasks, and understand that it’s not just about firepower here. That they need a centre of operations, and that means some of them hanging back from the fighting, in order to make that fighting more efficient.

And I like that it isn’t Egwene organising this. Because Egwene is so much better suited to doing exactly what she’s doing: leading from the front, by example, and demonstrating in highly effective fashion the importance of having battle-ready tacticians who can hold their own in the middle of a fight and respond quickly. Egwene is somewhat more of a tactician than a strategist, and in a way she’s an example of what the Green Ajah could and should be, because she doesn’t only consider herself, and she doesn’t approach the fight as an individual but rather as a leader, taking into account the other people around her and how they can have the most impact.

But she goes straight for the front lines; Egwene is not exactly a character to hold herself back from…anything, really. She’s not the sort of person who would be in Saerin’s role—before or after a battle, maybe, but not during one. So I like that we get to see the importance of both. That Egwene gets to be badass as the Amyrlin in battle, but we also get this quiet emphasis on how important it is for the rest of the Tower to come together, to figure out how to strategise as a whole rather than a bunch of individuals. Egwene is fighting for the Tower, but the Tower also needs to learn how to fight for itself in order to back her up, and follow that lead. And for that, they need not just a leader like Egwene, but people like Saerin who can fill those desperately needed administrative and strategic roles, and look beyond the divisions as Egwene has been trying so hard to get them to do.

I also like that Saerin explicitly acknowledges Egwene in her thoughts, because Egwene isn’t here—and shouldn’t be; she’s doing just fine right where she is—but this is largely due to her influence. She can’t play every role herself, and what she’s doing right now is probably the best thing she could possibly be doing, but this is why she’s been trying to get them to break down those barriers between the Ajahs and even between the sisters themselves. Because Tarmon Gai’don is coming, and they need all of those skills—not just the fighters, or the healers, or the strategists, or the historians, but all of them, contributing their individual strengths. Just as we see Saerin doing here.

“This is a disaster!” an angry voice shouted.

Katerine, at least fifteen minutes late and not even bringing Starbucks.

“How dare they strike here!” Katerine continued.

Yes, Katerine, we see what you’re doing. It’s something the Black Ajah has been frighteningly successful at: sowing this sort of discord and inward-looking righteous anger and doing everything in their power to keep the Tower, and the Aes Sedai within it, from looking past themselves and their status and superiority.

So she comes into this ad-hoc centre of operations trying to rile them all up, because that’s the best way to ensure that they continue to face this threat as no more than an angry set of individuals, rather than putting aside insult or anger or fear for a while in order to fight back.

“We need to scour the Tower and eliminate each of them!”

It’s such a transparent attempt to divide them, and yet they’re all so divided already that would probably work, if Saerin weren’t here to immediately stomp out the bullshit.

Saerin raised an eyebrow. “Since when did the Mistress of Novices outrank a Sitter in the Hall, Katerine?”

Katerine tries to play the Red vs Brown angle but Saerin’s response is excellent not just because Katerine is a pain in our collective arses and it’s nice to see someone give her the verbal slap in the face she so deserves, but because it completely…not just ignores but takes all the relevance out of their difference in Ajahs. Saerin is a Sitter and Katerine is not and they’re under attack and it doesn’t matter what Ajah they are.

It reminds me, really, of Egwene telling Adelorna that for now, Adelorna and the others must call her Mother and accept her authority (also can I just say as an aside how much I love that the title of authority claimed by a leader in the midst of battle is Mother? Like what a way to quietly and without even addressing it subvert military and battle gender expectations and stereotypes). Saerin’s doing a similar thing in the…centre of operations, such as it is. She claims authority through competence, and for now they have to just accept that.

This battle isn’t really about the Seanchan so much as it’s about the Tower having to confront some hard truths about itself, which means it’s a time when characters like Egwene but also characters like Saerin get a chance to shine.

Another boom sounded outside.

“Where do those keep coming from?” Saerin asked in annoyance. “Haven’t they made enough holes?”

They?

“No, Aes Sedai!” the guard said. “I think it was a blast thrown from within the Tower, launched from one of the upper floors out at the flying creatures.” “Well at least someone else is fighting back,” Saerin said.

OH YOU HAVE NO IDEA.

She doesn’t, does she? Of course she wouldn’t. Because the Tower is a mess and there’s so little communication and even those like Egwene and Saerin who are trying to coordinate an actual defence—either by enacting it with whatever resources they can reach, or by trying to form a central command hub—are isolated from one another, and no one knows what’s going on.

“It appears that there’s a second rallying point for the defence, and it’s doing very well.”

YOU DON’T SAY. Tell us more, Captain. Paint us a picture of Egwene being a force of light, a rallying point for the Tower.

Have I mentioned I love outsider POV? We’re not even seeing Egwene through any of these characters’ eyes but that almost makes it better, because as the reader you know who they’re talking about even when they don’t. You can watch them try in wonder and surprise to work it out, or to see Saerin take it in stride but also with a clear sense of relief and even excitement, and you know who is causing that, who is having that kind of impact. There’s a particular kind of delight as a reader in seeing other characters in some form of awe or respect or even just surprise or relief at what you know to be another character’s actions, but their reaction isn’t for the character, it’s for what the character has done. It’s for the awesome, even when they don’t know the source of the awesome, but as a reader you do and it’s wonderful. This is maybe a weirdly specific thing to love, but love it I do.

“Where?” Saerin asked eagerly. “Specifically?”

“The twenty-second, Aes Sedai. Northeastern quarter.”

“What?” Katerine asked. “The Brown Ajah sections?”

No. That was what had been there before. Now, with the swapping of the Tower’s corridors, that area of the Tower was…

THIS IS EVERYTHING I WANTED IT TO BE.

This slow realisation, the amazement first at the fact that there’s a strong defence at all, and then wondering who and how, and then this gradual realisation that wait, wait…

It’s not suspense, exactly, because as a reader you know exactly who and how, but watching other characters realise is just delicious.

“The novices’ quarters?” Saerin said. That seemed even more ridiculous. “How in the world…” She trailed off, eyes widening slightly. “Egwene.”

I LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS SO MUCH.

This, this is why I absolutely adore outsider POV. It’s that sense of…triumph by proxy, that thrill of other characters realising, and really seeing Egwene for the first time in a new light, even when she’s not actually there. Perhaps even because she’s not actually there. Those moments when characters recognise something in another that you’ve known all along but seeing it through new eyes it’s almost like getting to see it again for the first time.

Also okay, I’m just a simple girl with simple needs, and so if you give me a character breathing another character’s name in astonishment and realisation, I will be happy.

It’s especially effective because this is what Egwene has been working towards for so long, and we’ve seen bits and pieces of it—of the way the other Aes Sedai see her shifting—but this is where it really seems to happen. Where someone like Saerin fully understands that this girl is no novice, that she’s not a wilfull child or a puppet manipulated into declaring herself Amyrlin. This is where, again perhaps because Egwene isn’t actually there, she and maybe the others can look past Egwene’s youth and her novice dress and see what they’ve been unable or unwilling to see before. That this woman is the Amyrlin, and she is a force to be reckoned with, and she will save the Tower by sheer force of will if she has to.

I also like how that realisation is coming right on the heels of a very different mood of outsider-POV-realisations-about-a-character with Rand. Mostly in seeing him through Tuon’s eyes, but even seeing him through Min’s when he burned Natrin’s Barrow. There, it was watching other characters finally realise just how terrifying he has become—or in Tuon’s case, you get the same impression because it’s her first time meeting him and what she sees and thinks about shows Rand in a very different light, seen through the eyes of someone who has not been watching him all along and doesn’t still see, at least a little bit, the boy from Emond’s Field.

And now you get the same thing with Egwene—the realisation that she is not just a girl from Emond’s Field claiming authority she doesn’t have, and that she is a force to be reckoned with, and that she’s so much more than they assumed her to be—but in every other aspect it’s opposite to what we see with Rand. And yet conveyed through the same techniques, and even with the Seanchan as backdrop, to some extent.

Now over to Egwene herself!

Egwene stood at an open hole in the side of the White Tower, wind pulling at her white dress, tugging at her hair, howling as if in accompaniment to her rage.

I do love these…Hero Pose Portraits we get of her. Egwene at the heart of the storm, wind in her hair and fire in her eyes. It’s a strong visual, and a very recognisable one. This is absolutely and immediately recognisable as a Hero Pose, and I suppose it’s a good example of how some tropes are tropes because damn it they work.

Her anger was not out of control. It was cold and distilled. The Tower was burning.

Are you tired of me drawing parallels and contrasts between her and Rand yet? Yes? Well, too bad.

‘Cold’ is definitely a description pretty strongly associated with Rand at this point, cold and hard and emotionless. And right at this moment, yes, Egwene is cold and calm and ruthless. She’s in the middle of a battle; she has to be. She has to be able to order the novices to form circles and fight with her, she has to be able to strike to kill, to bring down raken that may be carrying Aes Sedai captives. She has to be able to think, and to respond to the Seanchan’s attacks, and plan her own.

But the difference between her and Rand here is that Egwene uses that as a temporary state, and even then she doesn’t deny her emotions, or push them down so far that they end up stabbing her to death from the inside with their tiny spiteful knives (don’t lie to me, Rand, that’s exactly what’s going on and we both know it).

It’s like when she told herself steel yourself, Egwene, before reading through the list of dead ladies Black Ajah members. There are times when a measure of cold is needed. There are times to put emotion aside for later. But she doesn’t try to become that cold. She doesn’t try to become steel. She can harden herself to battle when she has to, and she does a bloody good job of it, but she’s not trying to flay herself into ��a permanent state of it as a way of dealing with what she must do.

She can embrace pain, but embracing it also means accepting and acknowledging and feeling it, and understanding that her aims are simply more important than the pain. She can steel herself to harsh truth, but she also takes a few moments to work through the emotional turmoil it causes.

It’s an issue of moderation; Egwene seems to have found a balance of sorts, where Rand has gone to an extreme. She can access that place of calm, cold determination, but she doesn’t have to take up permanent residence there (which is good because wow, here I thought America’s citizenship path was demanding). And she has a very clear sense of why she’s doing this; it’s something she has chosen, and something she will fight for because she believes it is worth fighting for. The fact that she cares is what enables her to do this at all, whereas Rand feels like he has to not care about anything in order to reach a state where he can do anything.

She directed her anger—the anger of justice, the wrath of the Amyrlin.

She can be cold in the midst of battle, but she’s channelling her anger into that rather than denying it. She is not unfeeling, here; this is not like Rand so calmly and so quietly erasing a fortress with balefire, knowing it should terrify him and yet feeling nothing at all. She is angry and she accepts that anger and both the power and the consequences of it.

And I think maybe it comes down to choices, again. Egwene can kill for the Tower because she chose her role; she may not actually want to kill people but it doesn’t threaten to destroy her when she has to, because she accepts it as part of the path and cause and role she has chosen. Not that she specifically chose the killing people part, or necessarily would have, but I think she doesn’t see it as a duty she is forced to bear, a role she is forced to play, blood that is demanded of her. She chose the Tower and she chose to be Amyrlin and she chose to leave Emond’s Field and she chose to be the person she is now and give herself to this cause, and so if this is part of it, well, then, that is what she will do. It feels like one of those lines that is both vast and yet so small, just a matter of perspective and nuance, and yet it makes such a huge difference to almost everything.

She was a fount of Power, drawn from deep within the fluted rod in her hands, channelled through a group of novices and Accepted hiding in the room behind, bound to her in circle. Egwene was part of the fires that burned in the Tower, bloodying the sky with their flames, painting the air with their smoke. She almost seemed not a being of flesh, but one of pure Power, sending judgement to those who had dared bring war to the Tower itself. Blasts of lightning stormed from the sky, the clouds churning above. Fire sprouted from her hands.

This is absolutely beautiful, and so, so similar to how Rand was described, as a force of Light, a being seemingly made of light and Power rather than flesh, channelling through a ter’angreal that shone in his hands. And at the end, fire.

It’s such an eerily similar description, and it carries the same beauty and power, and yet the context and therefore feeling it evokes is so completely different. These are the parallels I love, where the scenes are almost mirrors of each other, where the actions or situations are almost identical, and yet a simple shift in perspective or sense of agency or reasoning can make it look completely and utterly opposite.

With Rand, this image was one to evoke a sense of quiet horror, beauty and yet terror, a pause before the step across a line, the sort of silence and blinding power and then act that leaves no breath or words for making sense of what has just happened. But now, the almost identical image is one of wrath and justice and power and triumph—there’s a harshness to it, yes, but it’s all for a purpose, and there is no silent gaping absence of emotion, no moment where it seems the whole world is drawing in in horror before the release.

With Rand, the eeriness came in part from the complete absence of violence in the description. It was just beauty and power and then…that. Whereas with Egwene the violence is a part of it; the description is beautiful and she is a being of power but we have fires the burned the Tower and bloodying the sky and painting the air with their smoke and blasts and churned. There is no denial of violence here, just as there is no denial of the emotional aspect of it. This isn’t quiet the way Rand’s scene was, because nothing is being muted or suppressed here. There isn’t a sense of absence, or of something vital missing. There’s just violent, terrible, beautiful power and triumph and anger and desperate defense and vengeance and justice. No, it’s not kind. But it’s not meant to be. And so it has none of the eeriness of A Force of Light, none of the growing horror at how soft and quiet everything was contrasted with what it was.

And I like the nod here to the Amyrlin being one with the Tower, in the way we’re always given the Dragon as one with the land.

Perhaps she should have feared breaking the Three Oaths. But she did not. This was a fight that needed to be fought, and she did not lust for death—though, perhaps, her rage against the sul’dam approached it. The soldiers and damane were unfortunate casualties.

The White Tower, the sacred dwelling of the Aes Sedai, was under attack. They were all in dagner, a danger greater than death. Those silvery collars were far worse. Egwene defended herself and each woman in the Tower.

Okay, I’m glad we at least got some acknowledgement that this is on the fuzzy side of compliance with the Three Oaths, though I’m still surprised Adelorna didn’t even think about it.

For the record, I have absolutely no problems with what Egwene is doing; the Seanchan attacked first, and they’re attacking to capture or kill, and if Egwene can spin that into defending her life and the lives of all the Aes Sedai in the Tower in order to comply with the oath against using the Power as a weapon, great. But it is definitely in a slightly grey area of that particular oath, so I’m glad we’re seeing some awareness of that.

And…yeah, she’s not killing because killing is fun, but she’s also not going to be torturing herself with the blood on her hands after this. Would she have chosen this battle? No. But it’s here and this is the role she has chosen, and so this is a part of what that means, and she can accept that. Even somewhat coldly, in the moment—but again I don’t think it’s a complete absence of feeling so much as an acceptance, and a lack of…heaping unnecessary pain on herself because of the things that she has to do.

(And I’m just going to continue to ignore the ‘worse than death’ thing because I said so).

The attackers prepared weaves to strike her down, but each time Egwene struck first, either deflecting the balls of fire with a blast of air or simply bringing down the to’raken who carried the women trying to kill her.

A one-woman anti-aircraft gun.

Something I really like about this fight is that it doesn’t shy away from the fact that Egwene is in battle, with a body count, aiming to kill. It’s something that often is…avoided…with female protagonists. Implied, sometimes, but often euphemised or glossed over or never really verified on-screen. A bit like how we see Aviendha, actually; she’s a former Maiden of the Spear and it’s kind of assumed that she has been in fights and has killed people, but it’s definitely told more than shown. So you get a fair amount of that (and then there’s Tamora Pierce, doing the Good Work and providing all kinds of Ladies With Swords content), but this is definitely more rare.

And yet Egwene gets to have that, and it’s not written as a stain on her character, or as something that’s going to cause an existential crisis. It’s just who and where she is: she is the Amyrlin and the Tower is under attack and she is on the front lines defending, and that means she is in a battle, and she is fighting and fighting to kill. Just as Mat and Perrin and Rand have been. And it’s not written differently because she’s a woman, or even written in such a way as to highlight that at all. It’s just written as a powerful main character in a battle for her life and the cause she’s defending.

Between Falme and Cairhien and now this, she’s probably in the running for second-highest body count after Rand (maybe third; Mat is almost certainly higher and it’s hard to say with Perrin), but it’s not made into a Thing any more than it is for any of them. Nor is she the seductress/femme-fatale type you often see with women who have blood on their hands. She’s just…a powerful character in a position that means she sees battle, and she’s really not treated any differently in that sense than the male characters in similar positions. Which I really, really appreciate.

Some would escape. But they would pay dearly. That was another goal. She had to make certain they never attacked the Tower again.

This raid had to cost them.

And this is the other thing I like: that she’s allowed to have this edge. She is fighting on the defensive, and out of necessity, but she is also approaching it as a tactician, and it is a battle, and could turn into an ongoing war. So she’s doing what she can to prevent that, which means making it cost them—which means killing them. She’s allowed that ruthlessness, just as she has always been allowed ambition; two traits that are sometimes hard to find in non-villain female characters.

Over to Bryne now, who is busy dodging a burning raken. Probably Egwene’s welcome gift to him; she’s a bit busy to send flowers.

It’s a shame Bashere isn’t here; he’d probably commandeer one and honestly I want nothing more.

Were the Seanchan running away from something or just looking for a fight?

Not something, Bryne. They are absolutely fleeing someone and I cannot wait for you to work it out. Because watching people work out how very capable and frankly terrifying Egwene is has been the best part of these chapters.

Well, aside from Egwene herself, of course.

I don’t want Bryne to admire Gawyn’s swordsmanship because that means I have to accept that Gawyn’s good with a sword and—okay, this sentence was actually going somewhere but it got derailed when I realised I was just diving headfirst into truly awful innuendo. Ow. Well, whatever Gawyn, Galad is still the better swordsman and Mat could take both of you with a stick and Lan could probably take all three of you without breaking a sweat and—yeah, no, that sentence wasn’t any better. I give up.

Gawyn unsheathed his own blade, on edge. “Look up there,” he said, and pointed with his sword. […] “By the Light…” Bryne whispered, focusing on the gap. A solitary figure wearing white stood in the Tower’s rent.

AW YEAH.

The theme of this chapter is whispered awe at the sight or even realisation of Egwene and I am here for it.

And yes, Bryne. By the Light indeed. Even more so than you meant it, I think.

It’s just SUCH A GOOD IMAGE, a solitary figure in white, alone and yet the essence of the Tower itself, as it should be; the Amyrlin even dressed as a novice, standing in a fracture in the Tower because she is the one holding it together, holding its attackers at bay.

It was too distant to make out her face, even with the spyglass, but whoever she was

ARE YOU SHITTING ME. ‘Whoever she was’? Surely one of you at least has a fleeting suspicion at this point?

Whoever she was, she was certainly doing some damage to the Seanchan. Her arms were upraised with fire glowing between her hands, the burning light throwing shadows across the outer Tower wall around her.

Setting aside the fact that her boyfriend and her general can’t seem to recognise her, I love all these glimpses we get of her throughout the battle. We only see briefly from her POV, but to those who see her…the descriptions are all in this mode of the heroic bordering almost on the divine. A force of light and power, a solitary figure in white, arms upraised and fire in her hands, a symbol of strength and determination and everything the Tower should be. And she is always met with awe and almost wonder; it’s such a great way to show a character coming well and truly into her own in the eyes of those around her.

Except, apparently, for Bryne and Gawyn, who still don’t even consider that it could be her. WHO THE FUCK ELSE WOULD IT BE?

I am Disgruntled.

(Also, the burning light throwing shadows is again so similar to the description of Rand in A Force of Light that it’s almost hard to tell the quotes apart…and yet while the visual imagery is the same, almost nothing else is. On the one hand destruction, and on the other, salvation).

The badly wounded would be abandoned into enemy hands, but they had been warned of that possibility before coming on this mission. Recovering the Amyrlin outweighed all other concerns.

Except by ‘enemy’ he means the Tower and not the Seanchan, and he looks at the whole battle against the Seanchan as a distraction from their real purpose, and really none of them should be enemies and he just saw the Amyrlin and she certainly did not need recovering and really…everything is wrong here. None of them should be fighting, and yet they are, and all sides or contingents involved have a different thought as to who the enemy even is, and it’s just confusion and chaos because none of this should be happening at all.

“And if you’d been recognised?” he demanded. “Siuan, these people tried to execute you!”

She sniffed. “Moiraine herself wouldn’t recognise me with this face.”

Wow, okay, I’m not sure why this hit me the way it did but something about the fact that she so reflexively uses Moiraine as the reference point her …as far as Siuan knows, Moiraine is dead, and yet she has for so long been the person Siuan was closest to, the one other person who shared their secret for twenty years, her best friend and onetime lover and just the way she says it, ‘Moiraine herself’, without seeming to even think about it…I don’t know, it came out of nowhere and yet of course that’s what she would say and suddenly I’m a little bit sad.

There are a lot of reunions—or even first-time meetings—I’m hoping for before the end, but Moiraine and Siuan are very high on the list. They are the only ones left of the ones who began this, and I just want them to have a moment to see one another again and be able to share that knowledge of how far they have come and all they have done, even if it’s bittersweet, and maybe even get to finally lay that duty down and look ahead to a life in this world they’ve given so much of their lives to save.

Anyway she’s found a novice who should at least be able to tell them what’s going on, and by ‘what’s going on’ I mean ‘that Egwene is a badass and they don’t need to rescue her because she’s busy rescuing the entire Tower, so maybe they could just go help her out with that’.

“The Amyrlin, Egwene al’Vere,” the novice said in a quivering voice. “She was released from the cells earlier today and allowed to return to the novices’ quarters.”

And the novices’ quarters aren’t where they were, so there’s still some reason for Siuan and the others to not immediately put two and two together to make ‘Egwene is a badass and they don’t need to rescue her because she’s busy rescuing the Tower, so maybe they culd just go help her out with that’ but the fact that still none of them have even considered the possibility is DRIVING ME MAD.

“But she’s probably up on the twenty-first or twenty-second level somewhere. That’s where the novices’ quarters are now.”

Okay, no more excuses.

AND YET. THEY STILL. DO NOT EVEN THINK. THAT MAYBE THE GLORIOUS AND TERRIBLE WOMAN WITH FIRE IN HER HANDS AND A WHITE NOVICE DRESS IS THEIR AMYRLIN.

I am, of course, most disappointed in Gawyn who should be the one going ‘Wait! What if that was Egwene! My girlfriend is awesome and capable and maybe she’s managed to find a way to fight!’ but instead goes straight for ‘We’ve got to reach her!’

He was the one who pointed her out, even. Worst Boyfriend of the Year.

I cannot believe I have been forced to a point where I wish that, if she had to choose one of the Brothers Arthurian, she had chosen Galad. I resent this.

“You’re here to rescue her, aren’t you?” The novice sounded eager.

Bryne eyed the girl. Child, I wish you hadn’t made that connection.

What, you thought there was even a slight chance that she wouldn’t? With you storming into the Tower and talking about Egwene and immediately saying you have to go and find her? Just because you three are all being as dense as bricks about what’s right in front of you doesn’t mean everyone else is.

As much as I loved the way Saerin’s realisation that Egwene was the one organising the fight against the Seanchan, the astonishment as she said Egwene’s name and understood what was happening? That’s how much I’m annoyed at seeing Bryne and Gawyn and Siuan fail to realise the same thing.

Especially because really, they have just as much information as Saerin did, and she worked it out. More information, even; they’ve actually seen Egwene, even if they couldn’t make out her face. *Shakes head* I’m not mad; I’m just very disappointed in the three of you.

Pause for a quick Healing break because this lot have brought swords to a One Power fight.

Would [the Tower] ever be the same again, or had a seemingly eternal monument fallen this evening? Was he proud or grieved to have witnessed it?

This, I like, because it’s one of the threads running through this whole chapter—and, really, through most of the series, especially since The Shadow Rising. Now, though, the cracks that have spidered their way up the Tower are made plain for the world to see, thrown open beyond anyone’s ability to hide. It’s that destruction of the illusion of invincibility, which can utterly flip entire worldviews. The realisation that something once considered untouchable is just as vulnerable as anywhere else, and I am…somewhat put in mind of an aspect of a nation’s response to fall of another (set of) tower(s); a lot has been written about the realisation of vulnerability that caused, and the effect it’s had on the sociopolitical landscape of the entire country pretty much since then. There’s definitely a paradigm shift that occurs with that sort of realisation or fracturing of worldview.

I like Bryne’s…confusion isn’t the word I want but it’ll have to do…at whether he feels proud or grieved to be seeing this. He’s not really a part of the Tower—I mean, he serves a claimant to the Amyrlin Seat and he’s bonded now to a former Amyrlin and his focus has been on fighting to reclaim the Tower, so okay, he’s got some ties there, but he’s not Aes Sedai, and he’s not from Tar Valon, and for most of his life he has been no more tied to the Tower than anyone on this continent. But it’s been a constant throughout all that time; love it or hate it or fear it, the Tower has been the Tower for as long as anyone alive can remember. So to watch this…there could be a sense of pride, or perhaps of justice or vindication in seeing the arrogance of the Aes Sedai brought low. But at the same time…it has been a constant, and while the Aes Sedai are far from perfect, what does it mean for the world if they are show to be truly fallible? If the Tower can break, what else will follow? It’s the sense of an ending; it’s one thing to know Tarmon Gaidon is coming, but another to watch as a symbol of your time is destroyed.

No time for philosophical pondering, though, because he has to go stab a guy.

Was this one of the Bloodknives? It certainly looks to be; pity that didn’t help him against a Warder’s reflexes.

Assassins. They always seemed to look the same, regardless of the culture.

This feels like an author poking fun, and I had to laugh.

“Min,” Siuan said, sounding tired. Those Healings seemed to have taken a lot out of her. “She said I had to stay near you.” She paused. “If you hadn’t come tonight, I would have died.”

“Well,” Bryne said, “I am your Warder. I suspect it won’t be the only time I save you.” Why had it grown so warm all of a sudden.

“Yes,” Siuan said, standing up. “But this is different. Min said I’d die, and…No, wait. That’s not what Min said exactly. She said that if I didn’t stay close to you, we’d both die.”

And she proceeds to pull a poisoned needle out of his arm. So Min was right, but her viewing only ended up being true because she told Siuan about it, because if she hadn’t, then Siuan wouldn’t have paused to think about it and about the other half of it, which implies that—okay, no, that way lies brain-pain. Do Not Think Too Hard About Foretellings And Prophecies: rule number one of reading fantasy (without falling into an infinite loop).

“But I wouldn’t have been poisoned if I hadn’t come!” “Don’t try to apply logic to a viewing or Foretelling like this”

It’s like you read my mind, Siuan. Or, more likely, Sanderson. A little nod to the nature of the genre, there?

Egwene sat, exhausted, on a pile of rubble, staring out of the hole in the White Tower, watching fires burn below.

I love that this is how we begin her POV here. We’ve seen her glorious in battle, full of cold anger and justice and determination, we’ve seen other characters look to her in awe, and the Seanchan have fled from her…

And, in victory, all we see is exhaustion. Exhaustion and the aftermath—the Tower is still broken, the fires still burn. They have won, but there is a price.

It’s such an excellent contrast to the imagery and mood from the battle itself, and it’s perfect in the way so many of the battle-aftermath scenes have been in this series. It’s that sense of…only a battle lost is sadder than a battle won.

She has fought, and she has won, but while there was a sense of triumph and strength in the moment, now there’s just…exhaustion and rubble. They’ve won, but it has taken so much, and they’ve taken wounds, and it’s not truly over. And like so many battles in the series, it wasn’t even against the Shadow; it was against those who should not be enemies and yet are, because they cannot find common ground.

And…I just realised something. This was Egwene’s parallel to A Force of Light (well, parallel and inversion) but it was also her Dumai’s Wells. The Seanchan are, in a way, her Shaido; the Shaido were the catalyst for much of Rand’s early arc and steps along the path that led him to where he is now, and at Dumai’s Wells he broke free from the box he was kept in and found himself surrounded by them and thought They will pay. I am the Lord of the Morning. And then he destroyed them—or, commanded and witnessed their destruction until he couldn’t take it anymore and they fled—in a vicious battle that ended in definitive but pyrrhic victory, as well as Aes Sedai swearing fealty to him.

Meanwhile, the Seanchan were the catalyst for much of Egwene’s early arc and steps along the path that have led her to where she is, and now she has just been freed from the box-like prison cell where she was held and beaten, and she finds herself surrounded by the Seanchan and thinks They would pay dearly. This raid had to cost them, and destroys them with fire and the One Power resulting in victory, but one that comes at the high cost to the nearly-destroyed Tower, but has led to Aes Sedai accepting her authority and seems likely to lead to Aes Sedai acknowledging her as Amyrlin.

Though, of course, there’s the usual inversion of tone to a certain extent; this doesn’t feel like Egwene’s darkest hour, even with the exhaustion and destruction that follows. But I think the point is that it so easily could have been, that so much depends on perception.

It’s also just a really cool set of parallels.

A few sisters weaving Air or Water could make short work of the flames, preserving the Tower. What was left of it.

Egwene closed her eyes and lay back, resting against the fragments of a wall, feeling the fresh breeze blow across her.

Here, again, we get a sense almost of the Amyrlin as one with the Tower. Victorious, technically, but beaten and exhausted and still burning, unable to do anything but lie back against the fragments of what was. With the wind, of course. Of course a wind rises, here.

Egwene wanted to help. A part of her did, at least. A sliver. But Light, she was tired! She couldn’t channel another trickle, not even using the sa’angreal. She’d pushed the limits of what she could manage. But she was so worn out now that she woudn’t be able to embrace the Source if she tried.

Oh, Egwene. It is a heavy mountain to carry, even if it is one she has largely chosen, or believes she has chosen. But she has been through so much in the last…well, twelve books but particularly the last few weeks, and she just faced the strength of the Seanchan while barely able to channel unaided, and still the Tower is broken and still there is more to do and she wants to help but there are limits and she is far past them.

Not that that always stops her, but…there’s a sense here not quite of despair but I guess that she’s been doing too much of this alone for too long. She’s held the Tower together and defended it all while those within it have tried to break her even as the Tower itself was breaking—the Tower is one with the Amyrlin and the Amyrlin is one with the Tower—and maybe now it’s up to some of them to put the fires out. To begin the repair. To help her hold the Tower together, because there’s no point if they don’t join her; there’s no point in her holding it up if the Aes Sedai don’t rally to the same cause.

And so perhaps it’s not up to her to help, here. She has done what she can for them, and she will continue to do more, but right now it’s time for them to take some steps of their own, to decide whether the Tower will in fact be saved, or whether they will let it fall.

She’d fought. She’d been glorious and destructive, the Amyrlin of judgement and fury, Green Ajah to the core. And still, the Tower had burned.

This is so, so lovely. I love that glorious and destructive are the words she chooses. There is absolutely a salvation/destruction duality to what she has done here, and I’m not even going to parallel it with Rand’s own entire character and story of salvation and destruction, but instead I just think it’s perfect for her situation and for the Tower itself.

She fought, and fought beautifully, and despite all her power and determination, the Tower burned. Because it can’t just be her; for the Tower to stand, it has to be unified. There is only so much she can do alone, and until the others truly join her and decide for themselves to save the Tower, she can only just hold it together, no matter how strong she is. She can lead, but only if they decide to follow. Otherwise she is holding together an empty shell of a memory of a possibility.

I just love aftermath scenes.

So much.

Especially the way they’re done in this series. Joyful or despairing, gloriously alive or exhausted, bittersweet or just bitter, triumphant or anticlimactic, they’re so varied and yet so perfectly suited to what they follow.

Egwene has done everything she possibly can and more, and yet the Tower is still crumbling around her, and so this almost-despairing exaustion is perfect, because what more can she do? Alone, nothing. And yet she can’t give up, can’t stop trying.

The White Tower was broken, physically now as well as spiritually. They’d need a strong leader to rebuild. The next few days would be pivotal. It made her more than exhausted to consider the work she’d need to do.

I’ve talked a lot about how Egwene is a hero-by-choice rather than a Chosen One, but I like that she gets to have these moments where…despite all of that, sometimes it’s really fucking hard. She belives in what she is doing, and embraces her role, and has a sense of agency that many heroes lack because she did choose, but that doesn’t mean she can’t be pushed past the limits of her own endurance. It doesn’t mean she is immune to despair or to doubt or to sheer tiredness. So much has been asked of her, and she has taken so much upon herself, and there’s still so much more to do, and she’ll do it, but right now…well, I can’t blame her for wanting just a few moments to rest.

She had protected many. She had resisted and fought. But this day would still mark one of the greatest disasters in the history of the Aes Sedai.

Can’t think of that, she told herself. Have to focus on what to do to fix things…

You can almost see her all but physically dragging herself out of that beckoning despair. She’s done everything, and still it’s not enough.

She has saved many but what will be remembered is the destruction, and oh, how familiar that sounds. It’s Rand after so many battles, after so much death and pain and people who hate him for tearing nations apart because it’s the only way to save the world. It’s Rand as a figure, hated and feared and yet the world’s hope for salvation. Seen as a monster but demanded as a saviour. It’s the duality not just of salvation and destruction but of perception and reality, of achievement and cost.

She fought and was glorious and still today will be remembered as a disaster, and how easy it would be to give in to that, to let it drag her down, but she can’t and so she pulls herself back up because if she doesn’t, then they are all lost.

She would get up soon. She would lead the novices and Aes Sedai on thse upper floors as they cleaned up and assessed the damage. She would be strong and capable. The others would be tempted to fall into despair, and she needed to be positive. For them.

And for herself. In a moment, she will be the Amyrlin again…

But she could take a few minutes. She just needed to rest for a little while…

And remember a girl named Egwene al’Vere…

Oh, Egwene. You can only do so much alone.

She barely noticed when someone picked her up.

NO. NO NO NO NO NO.

She tiredly opened her eyes, and—thought numb of mind—was astonished to find that she was being carried by Gawyn Trakand.

I DO NOT WANT THIS.

“I’ve got you, Egwene,” he said, glancing down. “I’ll protect you.”

DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT SHE HAS DONE? DO YOU? ‘I’ll protect you’ IT’S A LITTLE LATE FOR THAT, SHE’S ALREADY SEEN TO THAT HERSELF. And not just protecting herself but the whole damn Tower. That’s why she’s tired, Gawyn, or hadn’t you noticed? Do you think she just…decided to nap through the battle or have you finally figured it out?

And she doesn’t want to be ‘rescued’ but she’s too tired to say anything and I’m so very indignant on her behalf.

“They just left her there, Siuan,” Gawyn said. His voice was so nice to hear.

IS IT THOUGH? He still assumes she was just…left there. That she did nothing. That she was in need of rescue because of course she couldn’t possible be tired from having basically fought the entire damn battle on her own.

“Defenceless in the hallway! Anyone could have come upon her like that. What if the Seanchan had discovered her?”

WHAT IF

THE SEANCHAN

HAD DISCOVERED HER

I can barely breathe I’m laughing so hard at the wall of unintentional irony upon which I am now going to hit my head repeatedly.

Gawyn you idiot.

Seriously, the degree to which I find it frustrating when characters’ achievements go unrecognised by those around them is entirely proportional to the degree to which I love watching those around them realise or see those achievements. It is possible I am projecting just a little bit here, but I hate it when this happens—when a character does something astonishing but no one who is with them sees or knows or realises, and so they all assume that character is less than they truly are.

I destroyed them, she thought with a smile, thoughts slipping away from her. I was a burning warrior, a hero called by the Horn. They won’t dare face me again.

This contrast here, between his complete lack of even the slightest thought that maybe she was involved—he doesn’t even consider it, just as usual goes straight for the option that accords her the least agency or competence possible, because what more would someone want in a boyfriend—and her unspoken response. The knowledge that the Seanchan sure as hell discovered her, and it was to their grief that they did.

His denial of her competence and her own certainty of it, her own quiet triumph that goes unrecognised by her own strongest allies.

But not by those in the Tower; Saerin realised who she was, and the novices she was with know, and Adelorna was with her. They know what she has done. And Egwene herself knows, and holds to that knowledge.

I like that she gets to have that line, too. That she gets to take pride in what she has done, even if parts of it were terrible, even if she is so tired she can barely think, even if the Tower is broken despite all her efforts. I like that she gets to have that kind of confidence and that she doesn’t have to belittle her accomplishments. Because she was fucking awesome, and she should get to say so.

Called by the Horn is an interesting thought for her to have, by the way.

She distantly heard Siuan’s voice. “What’s this? Light, Egwene! Where did you get this? This is the most powerful one in the Tower!”

“What is it, Siuan?” Bryne’s voice asked.

“Our way out,” Siuan said distantly.

It’s also really the last puzzle piece you should need, to work out what exactly Egwene’s role in all of this was. Seriously, Siuan, if you and all your political and pattern-finding skill can’t put it together, I’m disappointed. Hm, I wonder what Egwene—who has been given forkroot and so can’t channel strongly—would be doing with the most powerful sa’angreal in the Tower, wearing a white dress and on the same floor of the Tower where Gawyn pointed out a woman throwing fire at the Seanchan. Probably just left ‘defenceless in the hallway’ to have a nap. Yep, sounds about right.

No! Egwene thought, clawing through her drowsiness, forcing her eyes open. I’m winning, don’t you see?

But they don’t see. Because for all that these three are the ones who should believe in you the most strongly—and two of them have shown themselves to be exactly that in the past, by helping you become Amyrlin in truth and acknowledging you as such, and by giving you the army and accepting your true authority—they apparently still see a defenceless prisoner in need of rescue.

It’s especially weird coming from Siuan—enough so that it almost seems out of character—because that’s really not so different from how Egwene appeared, to most, when she was with the rebels. At least until the declaration of war, she gave every outward impression of being the puppet child Amyrlin they wanted, naïve and powerless against the Hall and set up to take the fall if it all went wrong. And Siuan knew how much truth there was to that illusion.

Sigh.

Well, as soon as she wakes up I look forward to her giving them an earful.

And breaking up with Gawyn.

A GIRL CAN DREAM, OKAY?

I must say, though, that this chapter has made excellent use of outsider POV, across its whole range. We’ve had those moments of realisation from those who have seen Egwene, and even from Gawyn and Bryne who didn’t recognise her but were still awed by her, and last chapter from Adelorna who almost immediately understood and accepted her authority. And then we’ve had, too, the misperception of her as helpless, by those who found her after the battle had already been won when she’s too tired to do anything more. It’s a great way of showing the effect perception can have, and it also lends it this…kind of bittersweet sense of extraordinary accomplishment and the awe from characters like Saerin, but also the complete ignorance of characters like Gawyn, who don’t even know what an incredible thing she’s done.

It’s very well done, and such an interesting way to play it, even in the times when it’s INCREDIBLY FRUSTRATING.

All in all, a truly excellent battle. I sort of wondered whether, under Sanderson, the battles would continue in the standard of excellence but each in their own entirely unique way, because it’s something I’ve really, really loved about the series so far. And in this book, at least, that standard has continued.

Anyway, back to Saerin, who is also very tired.

There were a frightful number of dead, including over twenty Aes Sedai so far.

Yeah, I think this might have been what Min’s vision was about, back in TSR. I assumed it was the coup, when that happened, but I don’t think the death toll was nearly so high then. That’s impressive manipulation of foreshadowing and deception, if so.

And also, once again we’re seeing the cost of the victory. They’ve won, but not without a high price.

Saerin has definitely taken command of the administrative side of this battle and its aftermath, and seems to be doing a good job of it. I like it when relatively minor characters get a chance to shine this way.

It also feels like the beginning of…exactly what Tower needs, which is others stepping up to help—well, not just to help Egwene, but to help the Tower itself. To help her help the Tower. She cannot do it all herself, but now there are those who are finally following the example she has tried to set, and the unity she has tried so hard to foster. It’s the beginning of the Tower saving itself.

Where under the Light was Elaida?

Yeah, good question.

Also, where has Alviarin been in all of this? We saw Katerine, but Alviarin’s been conspicuously absent. Where was Mesaana?

Nobody had seen anything of the Amyrlin during the battle

On the contrary, Saerin. Many saw her. The Seanchan certainly did, by the light of the fireballs she was throwing in their faces.

Only three novices in Egwene’s group of over sixty had died? And only one sister out of some forty she had gathered? Ten Seanchan channellers captured, over thirty raken blown from the air? Light! That made Saerin’s own efforts seem downright amateur by comparison. And this was the woman Elaida kept trying to insist was simply a novice?

Salvation and destruction, all in one neat report.

Can you forward that report on to Gawyn and Bryne and Siuan, Saerin?

Oh shit is Elaida dead?

“The entire wall burst in, Saerin Sedai.”

Yeah, walls and rooftops are dangerous enemies in this series.

Oh. Okay. No, Elaida is not dead.

She’s on a raken with an a’dam around her neck.

That’s…uh…

Huh.

I’m not completely sure how I feel about that, actually.

On the one hand, there’s a certain sense of balance to both claimants to the Amyrlin Seat being taken against their will from the Tower at the end of the battle, with none realising until afterwards. In that sense, maybe it’s a way of handing the fate of the Tower to the Hall—Elaida has done her damage and Egwene has done what she can to heal it and now the Tower stands shaken and poised to tip one way or the other and it is up to the Aes Sedai themselves to decide whether the Tower will be saved or destroyed.

On the other hand…what a weird way for Elaida to exit that storyline, after so much has been built up there.

I’ll wait and reserve judgement on this until I see what comes of it, but that’s…an interesting development, for sure.

Also I really, really want to be a fly on the wall when Egwene wakes up.

Next (TGS ch 42) Previous (TGS ch 40)

#this chapter was definitely worth waiting for #Wheel of Time #neuxue liveblogs WoT #The Gathering Storm

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neuxue · 6 years ago

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Wheel of Time liveblogging: The Gathering Storm ch 37

Two words: Natrin’s Barrow

Chapter 37: A Force of Light

That sounds almost positive, so it probably isn’t.

Oh it’s a Min POV! I’ve been wanting one of these.

I like the way the POV is shifting in this book so far, bouncing off of Rand to other characters briefly, then coming back to him on the way to another character, touching sometimes on his own thoughts and sometimes on those around him. It’s a change from the previous few books, and adds to the sense that we’re drawing closer to an ending; everything is being pulled tightly around him as he stands at the centre of this storm.

The previous few books, we’ve seen more of things falling apart, divisions growing, unity failing, the right hand falters and the left hand strays – reinforced by the way POV sections were grouped by character, so you’d see one character and one storyline for a few chapters, and then either not at all or maybe only once or twice before the next book. The stories were separate, the characters were separate, and the impacts of the Dragon Reborn and the impending Last Battle and everything that goes with it were being flung across the world. Now, there’s a sense of pulling that back in, and so it becomes tighter, faster, and yet at the same time slightly more chaotic and frantic.

And Rand stands at the centre, but he still has relatively few viewpoint chapters of his own; often, now, he is narrated by one of those near him. Because while he is the point around which everything turns, he inhabits a slightly different level – partly out of his own doing, deciding that the Dragon Reborn cannot be truly human, giving himself to his role and duty and leaving nothing for himself, writing out his own agency in a way; and partly out of the role he is given.

Anyway, let’s get to the actual chapter, shall we?

These opening paragraphs, with Min watching Rand dress in meticulous detail, sharp and tense and exact, remind me a great deal of two other scenes. The first is Rand preparing to go to Caemlyn to face Rahvin at the end of TFoH, where he thought about how he needed to be cold, with no mistakes, and Aviendha watched him. The second is Min watching Rand prepare to go to Illian to face Sammael. There’s a trend here, is all I’m saying.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

Rand did not turn from the mirror. “About what?”

“The Seanchan.”

“There will be no peace,” he said, straightening his coat collar. “I have failed.” His tone was emotionless, yet somehow taut.

“It’s all right to be frustrated, Rand.”

“Frustration is pointless,” he said. “Anger is pointless.”

Tuon left that meeting and immediately declared herself Empress and war on the Tower (like my zeugma there?). Now, I think, we’re seeing Rand’s version of that. Two leaders walk away from a ruined attempt at peace and set their held plans in motion, cold and clear and ruthless.

The air shimmered above Rand, and a mountain appeared there. Viewings were so common around Rand that Min usually forced herself to ignore them unless they were new – though she did spend time some days trying to pick them all out and sort through them. This one was new, and it caught her attention. The towering mountain was blasted out on one side, making a jagged hole down the slope. Dragonmount?

Finally someone says it. Dragonmount’s been hanging over Rand for…well, technically his whole life I suppose, but in the last few chapters those hints have been getting heavier than either duty or a mountain.

It was cloaked in dark shadows, as if shaded by clouds

Or by metaphor.

That was odd; whenever she’d seen the mountain, it had reached higher than the clouds themselves.

With your self-taught philosophy, Min, I trust you can work this one out without too much difficulty.

Dragonmount in shadows. It would be important to Rand in the future. Was that a tiny prick of light shining from the heavens down onto the point of the mountain?

A memory of light, even?

He will stand on his grave and weep, laughter and tears, death and rebirth, memory and shadow and light…

Lews Therin killed himself in a blaze of light on what would become Dragonmount, and it would be fitting, would it not, for Rand to at last choose life in the very place his past self chose death? A fitting way to answer the question he has been struggling with since learning who he was: does sharing Lews Therin’s soul mean sharing Lews Therin’s fate?

My question is how. How does he get to that point? What would drive him to Dragonmount, and what would compel him to such a choice, as far past the edge as he is? It seems so perfect, so fitting; I can’t see what else all of this could be leading to, but nor can I see how we get there.

She’d begun to think of herself as a last defense for Rand.

Ah, Min. And she has been – her bond with him and her love for him have been among his very few anchor points for so long. But he is absolutely his own worst enemy right now – the external threats pale in comparison and they’re not insignificant – but it’s hard to defend anyone against that level of commitment to self-immolation.

Min had discovered just how useful she was as a ‘line of defense’. She’d been about as useful as a child! In fact, she’d been a hindrance, a tool for Semirhage to use against him.

Yeah, I knew she must have her own reasons for not pushing to accompany Rand to the meeting with Tuon. And of course it’s not quite the same reason Rand assumed. But why can he not feel this through the bond – her frustration with herself, her growing sense of helplessness? Or if he can feel it, why does he not think about it?

(Yes those questions are mostly rhetorical).

So she studied and tried to stay out of his way. He’d changed on that day, as if something bright had turned off inside of him. A lamp flickering out, its oil gone, leaving only the casing. He looked at her differently, now. When those eyes of his studied her, did they see only a liability?

It’s not a lack or a diminishing of love, but it is a…distancing…between them. Yet another anchor Rand is slowly losing, because now there is this thread of uncertainty and fear and doubt and misunderstanding between them, even if each reads a different reason or cause into it. And the fact that this is happening even with Min, who has been closer to him than anyone for a very long time, is indicative of just how far gone he is.

“You’re going after her, aren’t you?” Min found herself asking. “Graendal.”

So she’s not the only one getting a sense of déjà vu from this scene.

“Fix the problems you can, don’t fret over the ones you cannot. It was something Tam once told me.”

Okay, Rand, that’s good advice and all, but I’m fairly certain Tam al’Thor did not intend it to apply to this particular situation.

“Don’t think you can leave me behind!”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said flatly.

Maybe Nynaeve can dream of it on his behalf.

Too soon?

Once, he would have done everything in his power to persuade her not to. But now, the possibility of her death is something he has…accepted, in the cold way he accepts anything and everything he must do or sacrifice. It would be just another wound to carry until he can die.

From the night stand he picked up the statuette of a man holding aloft a globe. He turned the ter’angreal in his hand, inspecting it, then looked up at Min, as if in challenge. She said nothing.

He does not challenge her decision to accompany him, so she does not challenge his decision to bring the nuke along. (Great).

It all adds to this very well-executed sense that something is very, very wrong here. He’s so different, eerily so at times, and so the characters around him are caught in this…dance, almost, of trying to figure out how to get him to respond, trying to either unsettle or provoke him or get any sort of reaction from him at all besides this terrifying calm.

He glanced at the pair of Maidens guarding the door. “I go to battle,” he said to them. “Bring no more than twenty.”

However misguided his earlier attempts were to keep them from the fighting, this is more frightening by far, because it’s not him. It doesn’t come from a place of finally understanding and accepting their choices; it comes simply because he’s stopped caring – or at least, stopped acting on his caring – about any of the things he once did. He is a different person, and all can sense it, and it comes across so exquisitely in the narrative, and it’s both beautiful and terrible, and filled with this sense of foreboding, of calamity on the horizon.

He had rushed off like this to fight Forsaken before

And that’s always worked out so well. He wins, but there’s always such a high cost to pay. Rahvin, maybe, was the one where the scales tipped the most in his favour, but even that had its price.

He seemed like a thunderstorm, contained and wrapped up, somehow bound and channelled towards a single goal. How she wished he’d just explode and lose his temper, the way he used to! He’d exasperated her then, but he’d never frightened her. Not as he did now, with those icy eyes she couldn’t read, that aura of danger.

More than most, she sees the depth of the changes in him. It’s an excellent description, and she’s not wrong to be afraid, though it’s heartbreaking to see that she is.

One of the interesting things here is the comment about his temper. Because in the early-to-middle books, he and others thought about how that was a change in him; how he’d never shown much of a temper before. And he didn’t, until TDR/TSR. But now, this lack of a temper, this complete failure to explode even when pushed to what should be a breaking point, doesn’t feel even remotely like the gentle shepherd he once was. It’s not a return to or a remembrance of that. Instead it’s a warped, twisted reflection of it, the way so much about him now is. There are echoes of the person we first met, and yet they’ve been distorted, given these harsh edges, taken too far and reached from the wrong direction.

Since the incident with Semirhage, he spoke of doing ‘whatever he had to’ regardless of cost, and she knew that he must seethe at having failed to convince the Seanchan to ally with him. What would that combination of failure and determination lead him to do?

YOU AND ME BOTH, MIN.

I’ve been wondering that pretty much since The Last That Could Be Done, because that was the crossing of his personal threshold, but you don’t have a character become unfettered in their own minds without then giving some…outward indication of that. Rand is cold and terrifying and not at all like himself, but he hasn’t yet crossed that line externally. And I think so much of the tension from his last several chapters has been a result of that sense of waiting for him to do exactly that. It seems an inevitability, and because there are no limits it’s just a question of when – because it could be any time. It could be anything. So the reader and the other characters alike are walking on eggshells here, because he’s already at that point, he doesn’t need to be pushed, he just needs to decide something is necessary…

And we’re heading for Graendal’s hiding place. Bets on this ending well? Anyone?

Speaking of ending well…there are those arguments that crop up periodically in this genre that anything not ‘gritty’ or grimdark or ‘anyone can die’ is boring because you know it’s going to end with good triumphing over evil and minimal major deaths. And I think this serves as a good illustration of how that’s not at all true. I am 99% sure this series will end with a victory for the Light, that Rand will remember laughter and tears before the end and will rise from this low point, that most if not all of the main cast will make it out alive. But that doesn’t make the story less compelling, or this current darkness of Rand’s arc less tense or frightening. It just shifts the focus. The question is not who will win and who will die (to paraphrase a certain proponent of the other side of this argument), but how they will win, and what the cost will be, and how far they will go and what that will do and how they will find a way back and a way forward and what that future will look like, with ‘the battle done, but the world not done with battle’.

This chapter – Rand’s whole arc this book – is filled with a sense of foreboding, a sense of the true darkest hour, and the almost certain knowledge that he will somehow come through this doesn’t make that tension any less. I’m still waiting to see him do something catastrophic, and throughout the books leading up to this I was watching him break slowly, and it wasn’t a question of whether he would survive, or even whether he would fall to darkness, but of what he would do in order to endure. It becomes not an exploration of simply life or death, of failure or success, but of the difference between hardness and strength, of the balance of desperation and hope, of identity and duty and power, of the limits of endurance.

And I don’t think that’s boring. Because it’s not about how it ends, really. It’s about how the story gets there, about watching these characters walk these paths, wondering what it will do to them, wondering how they will reach their destinations and how much of themselves they will leave behind, or perhaps discover.

Don’t get me wrong: I also enjoy stories that do have the potential to end in true darkness, or in failure or death, and where those are the main uncertainties. But sitting here, reading as Rand prepares in calm cold apathy to eliminate one of his enemies and holds the power in his hand to destroy the world, sure this can’t possibly go well, I don’t feel like that sense of dread and anticipation and excitement is in any way lessened by the probability that eventually, he will come through this.

Once that would have made him smile. She kept forgetting that he didn’t do that anymore.

It’s so casually phrased that it’s funny until the meaning hits and it’s not funny at all.

Instead of smiling Rand decides to give us all a lecture on the history of Natrin’s Barrow. I suppose having a lifetime of memories from three thousand years ago, but nothing between then and now, would give some people an interest in history. And send others running for the hills.

“Tell me this: How do I outthink an enemy I know is smarter than I am?”

With a long-range sniper and very good aim.

The actual answer to this is to not try to outthink them, because you won’t. Don’t try to outplay a master of the game but don’t refuse the invitation; take the first steps as expected and then ignore the rules completely, and in the most erratic or unpredictable – and preferably final – way possible. Move your pawn and then flip the table over and start shooting. Don’t engage in the game of wits and strategies. Go for simple, and for overkill, as far outside the rules as you can. It helps not to care about consequences or collateral damage.

As for why Rand is asking this of Ramshalan, idiot and worst fashion disaster since Tylin had control of Mat’s wardrobe, I have no idea.

“I…My Lord, if your foe is that clever, then perhaps your best course of action is to request the aid of someone more clever?”

Rand turned to him. “An excellent suggestion, Ramshalan. Perhaps I’ve already done just that.”

He’s mostly mocking Ramshalan without Ramshalan noticing, because that’s a fun cruel game, but there’s a possible double meaning here because…Lews Therin. He has the memories of a man who by all accounts was a great strategist.

“I’d make an alliance, my Lord,” Ramshalan said without pausing for another second. “Anyone that powerful would make a better friend than foe, I’d say.”

Yeah that worked out so well for Sammael. It’s not a bad idea in theory, but only if you’re certain you would hold the upper hand in that ‘alliance’; in a problem such as the one Rand has posed, where your enemy is the cleverer strategist, this would fall squarely into the category of playing their game, allowing them to determine the rules, and then having to try to outthink them where they are at their best.

And now Rand’s just sending him off through a gateway, presumably to Natrin’s Barrow, as his ‘emissary’…this feels quite a lot like moving that first pawn. So what does flipping the table over look like?

What was Rand’s game?

Sha’rah, technically.

“Go in my name and seek those who rule the keep. See if they are willing to support me, or if they even know about me. Offer them rewards for allegiance; since you have proven yourself clever, I will let you determine the terms.”

This is also clever, because by leaving a lot of the specifics of whatever encounter takes place up to Ramshalan, he adds another layer of uncertainty and thus unpredictability.

Min found herself feeling sorry for the man.

Yeah, life’s hard on pawns sometimes.

“Graendal understands people better than anyone. Twisted she may be, but she is crafty, and should not be underestimated. Torhs Margin made that mistake, I recall, and you know his fate.”

Min frowned. “Who?” she asked, looking at Nynaeve. The Aes Sedai shrugged.

Insert ‘margins of history’ pun here.

It’s odd that neither Min nor Nynaeve seems to pick up on what’s happening here, though. They both know about Lews Therin, and by extension about Rand having knowledge that does not come solely from this lifetime.

“You’ve obviously already decided what you intend to do. Why ask me?”

“Because what I am about to do should frighten me,” he said. “It doesn’t.”

Oh.

I…okay, yeah, wow, give me a second here because there’s a lot in that.

We’re there, aren’t we? At the last line I’ve been waiting for him to cross; he’s crossed his own last threshold, so now we need to see what that actually means. It’s one thing to see it in his mindset, in what he says, even in walking away from a peace accord. But all of that feels like the build-up to something. And now this…seems like it. Whatever it is that he’s about to do.

Which brings us to the other part of this: he knows it should frighten him. He’s so cold, so calm, so apparently unfeeling, and yet even through all of that he knows that whatever it is he is walking so calmly towards should frighten him. But it doesn’t. And that’s the truly chilling part.

He knows on some level that the fact that it doesn’t frighten him is wrong. Which means he can tell, on some level, that what he’s about to do is worthy of that fear. He just can’t let himself feel it, but that he even knows that, that he voices it and it clearly worries him even through that layer of ice, the fact that he even says this, as if he’s reaching out to two of the last people he trusts and begging them to stop him, conveys a staggering sense of magnitude here, in scale or in horror or simply in how far across that line it is. And so there’s this sense that some part of him – a part he can no longer acknowledge but that same place from whence came the quiet warning “He named you friend. Do not abandon him…” – is screaming. But without any way to be heard.

It’s a hell of a line.

But neither of them says anything to him because what can you say to that? He’s reaching out so desperately for help he could never accept, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop him at this point. And so whatever small part of him is still truly him has to just…watch.

I feel like there’s some small element of symbolism to the fact that he steps through a literal gateway – across a threshold, if you will – right after he says this.

The mountain air was more chilly than the breeze had indicated.

Colder than the wind, hmm?

Atop a ridge of its own, high above the water, was an impressive white stone structure. Rectangular and tall, it was built in the form of several towers stacked atop one another, each one slightly thinner than the one beneath. That gave the palace an elegant shape – fortified, yet palatial. “it’s beautiful,” she said breathlessly.

Nice palace you have there. Would be a shame if something happened to it.

The palace was distant, but not so distant that Min couldn’t make out the figures of men walking the battlements on guard, halberds at their shoulders, breastplates reflecting the late sunlight. A late party of hunters rode through the gates, a fine buck deer lashed to the pack horse, and a group of workers chopped at a fallen tree nearby, perhaps for firewood. A pair of serving women in white carried poles, bucket at each end, up from the lake, and lights were winking on in windows the length of the structure. It was a living, working estate bundled up in a single massive building.

Thanks for the census there. How many civilians, precisely? And do tell me, what colour shirts are these numerous people wearing? Because it’s sounding a hell of a lot like red.

And now Rand’s stroking the statue again (there’s no clean way to say that; believe me, I tried).

I have a very, very bad feeling that I know what’s about to happen here.

Not sure what Ramshalan’s purpose is, though. Rand seems sure Graendal will get the whole conversation they had from him, which implies he wants her to – which means she’ll know about Rand asking how to beat someone cleverer than you are, which means she’ll know Rand is looking for a way to defeat her, which would put her on guard…or maybe make her think she has the upper hand? Seems like a risk regardless, but perhaps she’d have found out anyway, and this way Rand can control to some extent the delivery…

“You make it sound as if you can’t win,” Nynaeve said, frowning. […]

“We can’t win, you say?” Rand asked. “Is that what we’re trying to do? Win?”

Ah, Rand. Wise of you not to try to beat her at her own game, but the mindset behind this is…troubling.

Nynaeve raised an eyebrow. “Do you not answer questions anymore?”

Did he ever?

Rand just does that new staring trick of his and Nynaeve is thrown by it and every time he does it it’s still kind of chilling. Especially when it works on people like Nynaeve, who have never truly feared him before.

They waited quietly on the mountain ridge as the distant sun made its way toward the horizon. Shadows lengthened

And so the pathetic fallacy continues. I honestly love this. The Dragon is one with the land, after all…

More lights had been lit in the fortress windows. How many people did Graendal have in there? Scores, if not hundreds.

Why does this sound so much like a pre-emptive tally of collateral damage?

Oh hey Ramshalan’s back.

Oh.

“Is he infected?” Rand asked of Nynaeve.

“By what?” she asked.

“Graendal’s touch.”

He was literally just a canary in a coal mine, wasn’t he? To make sure Graendal is actually there. While Rand still stands at a distance. On a ridge. Looking down at the mansion. Full of collateral damage people.

It was growing dark

Yeah no kidding.

And yet this chapter is called A Force of Light. I’m…Concerned.

Besides the dim evening light, the only illumination came from the still-open gateway behind them. It shone with lamplight, an inviting portal back to warmth, away from this place of shadow and coldness.

There is no light ahead, only vanishing sunset and darkness. The only light and warmth is behind, back across that gateway, that threshold. Light only if you look back, but none ahead, not this way, not on this path…

“Rand,” she said, touching his arm. “Let’s go back.”

“I have something I must do,” he said, not looking at her.

Something that should frighten him. Something that does not allow him to look back, towards light and warmth, but only ahead, towards growing darkness and lengthening shadows and cold and a fortress full of people and his enemy. Oh, Rand, no.

His face was clasped in shadow, but as he turned toward her, his eyes reflected the light from the open gateway.

Shadow ahead, consuming him, but as he turns towards her, towards Min, towards one of his last anchors even though she’s not enough to hold him back now, there’s a remnant of light there. But that’s all it is. A reflection, a remnant, a memory if you’ll pardon my extreme overuse of that particular pun.

The sun set; Rand was now just a silhouette. The fortress was only a black profile with lanterns lining the holes in its walls. Rand stepped up to the lip of the ridge, removing the access key from his pocket. It started to glow just faintly, a red light coming from its very heart.

As ominous and frightening as this is, it’s also an absolutely lovely image. Everything in silhouette, Rand merely a shape, an outline, a space in the world rather than a person. A role that must be filled, a silhouette that shows no human features, no identifying marks. Just a shape, a darkness against the setting sun. A fortress that, too, is no more than a shape, an outline, a representation rather than a reality.

And then just this glowing light of power. Outlines and representations and roles, and power, and all else fades. It’s terrible but it’s so, so lovely.

He’s going to destroy it isn’t he?

“Neither of you were there when Callandor failed me,” he said into the night. […] “Cadsuane told me that the second failure came from a flaw in Callandor itself. It cannot be controlled by a lone man, you see. It only works if he’s in a box. Callandor is a carefully enticing leash, intended to make me surrender willingly.”

Okay why are we talking about Callandor now? No doubt because he’s holding the access key, but still. Does it have to be a willing surrender? And Rand, it’s need not be a box, or a leash. Willing surrender has its place; trust has its place. But he cannot do either anymore, and after the Domination Band is it any wonder he would see Callandor as simply a more elaborate trap?

The access key’s globe burst alight with a more brilliant colour, seeming crystalline. The light within was scarlet, the core brilliant and bright.

Light – strong, brilliant, bright light – but terrifying. Light against the shadow and darkness of night, but there is no sense of warmth or comfort to this.

“I see a different answer to my problems,” Rand said. Voice still almost a whisper. “Both times Callandor failed me, I was being reckless with my emotion. I allowed temper to drive me. I can’t kill in anger, Min. I have to keep that anger inside; I must channel it as I channel the One Power. Each death must be deliberate. Intentional.”

Once, you tried to use Callandor for life rather than death…but of course the solution is to be colder, to be harder, to turn inwards rather than to surrender and rely on trust, or to care about the outcomes.

This whole passage is chilling in that quietly escalating way horrifying things are. The way the light from the access key keeps growing as Rand speaks, the way we’re given this alternation between descriptions of it and Rand’s calm, emotionless words against that escalation of building power and brilliant light and yet nothing but cold…it’s so well done, and the sense of anticipation and dread is excellent.

Min couldn’t speak. Couldn’t phrase her fears, couldn’t find the words to make him stop.

There are no words to make him stop, Min, and that’s what makes it both so terrifying and so heartbreaking. Even he couldn’t find a way to make himself stop; he knew this should frighten him. But it doesn’t, and if they cannot stop him, none can. Nothing can. There are no limits, no restraints, and this is what that means.

His eyes remained in the darkness, somehow, despite the liquid light he held before him.

That says it all, really, doesn’t it? Despite the brilliant light he holds, despite all this power, his eyes are in darkness, because that’s all he can see before him now.

That light hurled shadows away from his figure, as if he was the point of a silent explosion.

The only light is from the gateway behind him and he cannot look back; the only light is from the immense power he holds but he cannot let himself feel, and so all is in darkness though he is the champion of Light, holding light and wreathed by light, yet all he sees is darkness, and all the light does is throw more shadows. A brilliant light, but the shadows it casts from him…a force of light, and yet who stands to gain? A champion of the Light, and yet with this cold, unfeeling, unfettered power, which side does he truly serve?

And Min and Nynaeve are just watching, because what else can they do? What can anyone do?

When he’d been so close to killing her with his own hand, she hadn’t feared him. But then, she’d known that it wasn’t Rand hurting her, but Semirhage. But this Rand – hand aflame, eyes so intent yet so dispassionate – terrified her.

Oh Min. She has stood by him through so much and never turned away, never flinched, never feared him. No matter what he did, or what people thought he had done, or what so many feared him capable of. Always she stood by him in love, and if she was afraid it was for him, never of him. Now even she fears him. And still nothing is said of the bond between them, of what she feels through it or perhaps what he does.

“I’ve done it before,” she whispered. “I once said that I didn’t kill women, but it was a lie. I murdered a woman long before I faced Semirhage. Her name was Liah. I killed her in Shadar Logoth. I struck her down, and I called it mercy.”

It was mercy. A painless death, ‘gone before her agony began’ as I think it was phrased, or the torment of Mashadar? There’s no question.

He turned to the fortress below.

No.

Oh, no.

“Forgive me,” he said, but it didn’t seem directed at Min, “for calling this mercy as well.”

...

That sound you might have heard was me literally, quite literally, gasping out loud.

It is, perhaps, the most perfect line that could have been written there—

Something impossibly bright formed in the air before him

—because this is unforgivable; this is not mercy; he knows it, and does not expect the forgiveness he asks for. Just as he knew this should frighten him but it did not. There is nothing for him now, nothing to hold him back, and there will be no forgiveness but he believed that the moment he reached for the True Power, the moment he killed Semirhage, the moment he stepped across that line. He asks forgiveness here the same way Lews Therin cried for Ilyena’s forgiveness: with the assumption – no, the certainty – that it could never be granted, that there will be no absolution.

The air itself seemed to warp, as if pulling away from Rand in fear.

The world afraid of him. The land is one with the Dragon and yet now even the wind pulls back from him, turns away from him, fears him.

Min could no longer make out Rand, only a blazing, brilliant force of light.

Before, he was a silhouette. Just a shape in the darkness, to be filled in. Now…similar, and yet opposite. Not a person, still, but a shape made of light. The Light’s champion, the Dragon Reborn, a being of sheer power and light rather than flesh and humanity.

Light, but terrifying, because there is no humanity to it, nothing of Rand in that shape of power, nothing to contain it and direct it. Unfeeling light, that could burn anything it touches, with no sense of meaning. Rand is gone, subsumed by this force, by the outline of what he must be, by all he has let go of himself, to feed this force of light until it is as destructive as any darkness could ever be.

This is light unfettered, and it’s terrifying. He has gone too far; he is too far gone, and this is what it looks like when that is unleashed.

In that moment, she felt as if she could understand what the One Power was. It was there, before her, made incarnate in the man Rand al’Thor.

Except there’s nothing of Rand to it; he has emptied himself of that, to become little more than a vessel for this power and for the duty and role he must take on, because that is the only way he could find.

It’s still beautiful, though. Despite what he is undoubtedly about to do, despite what this power is building towards, despite all its destructive potential.

And then, with a sound like a sigh, he released it.

Ahhhhhhh this is perfect.

All this power, this blazing force, this sense of something bursting to light, of power that can barely be contained…and then this breath of softness. With a sound like a sigh. The contrast of force and gentleness, of furious power and a soft sigh, so much destructive potential and energy and very likely death, released so gently, so quietly. Easily, almost. So light, for such a weight. This is absolutely gorgeous.

Just a sigh. Just a breath. That moment of almost quiet, of gentleness and softness and simplicity before…well. It’s almost long enough to forget where this is leading, almost enough, with the paragraph before it of pure light and power and Power, to make this only a moment of beauty. Except.

A column of pure whiteness exploded from him and burned across the silent night sky

And here is the violence. There’s the gathering of power, the potential, then that sigh of gentle release…and then it all hits. It’s like that effect you sometimes see in movies where everything is slowed, everything is quiet, and then just at – or sometimes just after – the moment of impact, sound returns and everything is jolted back to its ordinary speed and that brief moment of soft waiting out of time is lost.

The stones came alight, as if they were breathing in the force of the energy. The entire fortress glowed, transforming into living light, an amazing, spectacular palace of unadulterated energy. It was beautiful.

It is beautiful; this whole scene has been beautiful, but. It’s balefire. It has to be; he knows now that nothing else can absolutely kill the Forsaken beyond the possibility of resurrection.

So.

It was beautiful.

And then it was gone.

Yeah. That.

He just.

This is the thing I’ve been waiting for. The point where he crosses that last line, not just for himself but for all to see.

Well, those few remaining who matter, anyway. Those who have – had? – not yet turned away from him.

Burned from the landscape—and the Pattern—as if it had never been there. The entire fortress, hundreds of feet of stone and everyone who had lived in it.

Yeah.

It’s such an exquisitely done scene, the quiet but inexorable approach, the ‘forgive me for calling this mercy as well’ and then the sense of simplicity and silence, and yet immense gathering power, and then that single quiet moment of release, the whole thing beautiful and lit only by the fading light of the sunset and then the brilliant light of destruction, silence and beauty and power. And then devastation, but even in that, silence. Nothing remains; there is no visible destruction, no visible harm, nothing to draw feeling or pain. There’s just…nothingness. Emptiness. Void. (The Dragon is one with the land…)

Something hit Min, something like a shocking wave in the air. It wasn’t a physical blast, and it didn’t make her stumble, but it twisted her insides about. The forest around them—still lit by the glowing access key in Rand’s hands—seemed to warp and shake. It was as if the world itself were groaning in agony.

And this is where reality returns, where that silence and softness and beauty is broken, where the true force of the devastation hits. Because there is damage; there is pain. The world itself has been shaken here, the Pattern torn. There’s no visible damage, but beneath that, reality itself is being pulled apart. It’s not a quiet, beautiful, consequences-free display of power. It’s not mercy.

So this scene echoes something of his own state of mind, gives us an outward expression of just how far he has gone, of what he is doing not just to himself but to the world he is meant to save. That’s what this is here for. This is the cost, of what has been done to him and of what he has done to himself as a result. This is where we stand now.

This is a lot.

And one of the things that’s so well done about it is this sense of…not numbness, quite, but of delayed impact. Of understanding without feeling, of observing what is happening as it happens, yet in such a way that the description doesn’t quite allow for horror until afterwards, and even then…all of it is softened; it’s presented clearly, and there’s no blurring of details, but that sense of quiet and gentleness and beauty, the focus on the power itself rather than on its effect until later, the way we just get ‘It was beautiful. And then it was gone.’ with none of the signs that would ordinarily be associated with violence or death or destruction; just beauty and then nothingness…it conveys, wonderfully, the state of mind in which this was done. The emptiness, the sense almost of surreality even as what is happening is all too real. And then it’s done, it’s gone…and then we get the horror, as the impact hits Min and the world shakes and the full truth of this strikes home.

It’s not the immediate shocking ‘no’ or ‘it is HIM’ of The Last that Could Be Done. It’s a different kind of horror, a different kind of realisation, a different kind of impact. And yet they are inextricably linked; that is what led us here. (That, and everything that came before it).

“What have you done?” Nynaeve whispered.

Yeah.

It’s…yeah. A Force of Light indeed.

And again, the pacing here is excellent, in the way that we’re given such a long, almost gentle scene of the buildup and the actual releasing of the power…and it’s not until the moment that it strikes that everything snaps back into place, and we’re brought back to something like normal speed as the impact hits, and now we’re back to reality, after that long dilated moment that seemed to hang suspended. And so now all the realisation is happening, all the reactions you’d expect, and that comes through to the reader as well, with this sense of ‘wait this actually just happened’.

Rand didn’t reply. Min could see his face again, now that the enormous column of balefire had vanished, leaving behind only the glowing access key. He was in ecstasy, mouth agape, and he held the access key aloft before himself as if in victory. Or in reverence.

Only now, now that we’ve had the chance to take in a little more of what has just happened, now that we’ve felt that resulting impact and taken a second to understand the enormity and the truth of it, now we get to see Rand through a slightly different lens, see what this actually looks like, and see not the soft, silhouetted emptiness or power or bright pure light, but the horror behind it. This image isn’t beautiful or gentle; it’s jarring and terrible. He’s just destroyed a city, burned it out of existence, but all we see is ecstasy, a man almost consumed by this power that just moments ago seemed beautiful.

Or in reverence. If that had come earlier, when he was just a figure of light and power, before all of it was unleashed, when it was still a force of light and frightening in its way but beautiful, that line would read very differently. Yet instead it’s here, where the sheer wrongness of it comes through, where it feels jarring and warped and ominous.

Then he gritted his teeth, eyes opening wide, lips parted as if he were under great pressure. The light flashed once, then immediately vanished. All became dark.

The light vanishes immediately now, after…that. And once more we’re in complete darkness, which again feels like a revealing of the truth.

Had he really done what she thought he had? Had he burned away an entire fortress with balefire?

Yes. Yeah. He did that.

Yeah.

And again, it’s paced so that only now do we get the stark statement of it, as part of this growing horror of realisation.

All those people. […] They were gone. Burned from the Pattern. Killed. Dead forever. […] So many lives, ended in an instant. Dead. Destroyed. By Rand.

Now it’s all short, fragmented sentences, or even single words, as reality has hit and she’s trying to encompass it, trying to put it to words but it hardly even goes.

It’s not as if Rand hasn’t caused death and destruction before. But in a world where rebirth is a guaranteed part of life – and when the continuation of that cycle is a large part of what he’s supposed to be fighting for in the first place – this is different, because he’s taking even that away.

And it’s also just the way approached this. This wasn’t desperate self-preservation, or a battle, or a war. This wasn’t even losing control of his power and killing his own people as a result. This was planned, calmly and coldly; he stood on a ridge and looked down at this palace and wiped them from existence without a sound, without a fight, without warning or care.

I suppose whether or not that makes it worse than what he’s done before depends on whether you consider intent or only outcome in your morality, but it is undeniably a different situation.

Strategically, it was clever. How do you beat someone who is smarter than you are? Refuse to play the game, and then destroy it completely. Send in a pawn, then stand on a ridge and wipe the gameboard from existence. It’s a good solution.

It’s just also…well. That.

A light appeared from Nynaeve, and Min turned, seeing the Aes Sedai illuminated by a warm, soft glow of a globe above her head.

It’s fitting, that she is the source of light here. A gentle, soft light, so unlike the power Rand just unleashed. A guiding light, a beacon of sorts if only he could follow it.

“I do what must be done,” he said, speaking now from the shadows.

Speaking now from the shadows indeed. I see what you did there.

And now he just wants her to see if the Compulsion is still present in Ramshalan’s mind, because still he’s the canary here.

“I hate what you just did, Rand,” Nynaeve snarled. “No. ‘Hate’ isn’t strong enough. I loathe what you’ve done. What has happened to you?”

Nynaeve, who has always seen him as Rand al’Thor before the Dragon Reborn, who has never truly stopped seeing him as the boy from her village, even as she has recognised the changes in him. Who reached out to try to heal him, after he faced Rahvin and told her he wasn’t sure how human the Dragon Reborn could afford to be. Who linked with him to cleanse saidin, and who never hesitated to scold him when she thought he needed it. But now she’s seeing him differently, because this is so much different from any of what she’s seen before. This is too far; this is across that last line.

Before, he was irredeemable mainly in his own eyes. Now…

(‘Dream on my behalf, Nynaeve’)

“Before condemning me, let us first determine if my sins have achieved anything beyond my own damnation.”

Wow okay that’s a line.

Ends before means. But he knows, without any doubt, that he has damned himself. He cannot see any possibility for redemption, is certain he will not be forgiven, knows this is an act to condemn. He just…sees it as an inevitability, and thus as something to simply accept and let go. He is damned; so be it. What more does it matter? And so it’s all about the results now; the methods no longer matter because what more could be done to him, that he has not done to himself already?

Only it’s not just about him, it’s about the entire world; he could end existence and carry all of them into this damnation he has already accepted for himself as a guarantee.

Okay the Compulsion is gone but I’m not quite as sure as Rand is that Graendal is dead. The evidence would point that way, but we didn’t see her die and there’s no corpse and in this genre, that spells ‘suspicious’.

Min felt at her neck, where the bruises of Rand’s hand on her neck hadn’t yet faded.

Yikes.

Min, too, looks at him differently now. This has made her do that, when nothing else he has done ever has. This is where he crosses the line.

And has he? I live for this sort of thing, for watching as characters are dragged to moral event horizons and made to do cartwheels on them, so I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t enjoying this, awful as it is. But I’m also fascinated by where those lines are drawn and how they can be manipulated and how characters can be pushed across or pulled back from them, and at what point a character truly tips into irredeemability. I think it’s different for every reader, and depends on all kinds of other factors, but that’s part of what makes it interesting.

So where is Rand, with respect to that line? We watch this scene through Min’s eyes, as even her view of him is forced to change. We see Nynaeve struggle to express how much she hates what he’s just done. And so as a reader it puts us in the position of wondering much the same thing – how far is too far? Is this too far? Can he come back from this and if so, how?

“How do you fight someone smarter than yourself?” Rand whispered. “The answer is simple. You make her think that you are sitting down across the table from her, ready to play her game. Then you punch her in the face as hard as you can.”

Well. I can’t really argue with that, as it’s very close to the way I answered that question earlier. And he’s not wrong, strategically speaking.

It’s just that the reason it’s a good strategy is because it’s so far beyond what anyone would even fear to expect. Because it’s so far across that line. Especially with no threat, no warning. Just zero to balefire in a few seconds, because it’s the only way to completely annihilate the game and opponent.

(I’m probably not the only one thinking of certain…decisive actions taken near the end of the second World War here.)

And then he just turns and walks back though the gateway, calm and without looking back. It’s done; time to move on.

“What you have done is an abomination, Rand al’Thor,” Nynaeve said as soon as the gateway was closed.

But all he does is justify it. Calmly. Last time they spoke, her words reached him on some level and he told her to dream on his behalf and there was just a hint of Rand still there. He dismissed her concerns, but he also agreed with them, and there was that moment of…not vulnerability, or even emotion, but a sort of wistful echo of both, a handing over of the hope he could no longer let himself hold.

Now, though, it’s just flat justification. And it’s different as well because this isn’t Nynaeve telling him that he’s destroying himself. This is Nynaeve being forced to consider that he’s destroying other people, destroying the world perhaps. It is an abomination; this isn’t about concern for him anymore. It’s now about facing someone who has done something monstrous, and she can’t get through to him.

He knows it’s an abomination. He just doesn’t…think that matters anymore.

Which is horrifying.

As Nynaeve is realising, I think.

Though it’s telling that she even tries to confront him, rather than simply walking away. That’s not her way. This is abhorrent on every level, and she doesn’t know what to do with that, but still it’s not in her nature to just give up. But it’s…different from when she just wanted him to stop hurting, wanted to help him, or wanted to protect him.

“I did them a favour.”

“A favour?” Nynaeve asked. “Rand, you used balefire! They were burned out of existence!”

“As I said,” Rand replied softly. “A favour. Sometimes, I wish the same blessing for myself. Good night, Nynaeve.”

Um.

Second of all, that…sounds perhaps like Moridin, which is a whole lot even on its own, but first of all…um.

I just…

I don’t even think I can summon a ‘this is fine’ because this is so far away from fine it’s in another dimension entirely and ‘as I said, a favour’ and he does hate what he’s done, hates it and hates himself enough that he wants to be wiped from existence and thinks he deserves it, but…it’s not enough to stop him. Because what’s the point?

A favour. A mercy.

It’s…he is coming very close, with this, to a ‘wouldn’t it be kinder, more merciful, to just end it all?’ sort of moment. Which is rarely the province of heroes, but that’s where Rand has been driven. He wants to die, and he no longer lets himself care about costs, and he believes he is damned and that there is nothing he can bring to the world but more destruction, and even a fragile peace is doomed to fall apart at his death anyway so what does it matter; he wants to die and he shares a link with a man who seems to want existence itself to be destroyed, and how far is he from looking at that and calling it mercy? It’s so much easier to burn everything with cleansing (bale)fire, to put an end to pain, than to find a way forward, a way to rebuild. To break the cycle rather than embrace it. It’s easier to end the suffering by an ending, rather than by continuing. There are no beginnings or endings to the Wheel of Time, after all, so providing an ending…

It would be a victory for the Shadow, but how far is Rand from seeing it as a…force of Light?

Until that moment, [Min] hadn’t realised just how drained she was. Being around Rand lately did that to her.

Oh Min. I feel like it would be laughable at this point to point out that that’s not exactly the sign of a healthy relationship, but she doesn’t even consider abandoning him. Still, their relationship is more…strained, now. She still loves him, and he her, I think, but it’s…harder, now, than it once was.

“I wish Moiraine were here,” Nynaeve muttered softly, then froze, as if surprised to have heard herself say that.

Pretty much speaks for itself. It’s a nice way to close that arc that began almost at the start of EotW. I hope Nynaeve and Moiraine have a chance for a reunion, to truly bring closure there, but there’s so much growth and understanding in just that simple statement.

“What if he’s right?” Nynaeve asked. “Woolheaded fool though he is, what if he really does have to be like this to win? The old Rand could never have destroyed an entire fortress full of people to kill one of the Forsaken.”

“Of course he couldn’t have,” Min said. “He still cared about killing then! Nynaeve, all those lives…”

“And how many people would still be alive now if he’d been this ruthless from the start?” Nynaeve asked, looking away.

That seems…huh. I was about to say that seems very much out of character for Nynaeve, the one who almost always chooses compassion over pragmatism. But I wonder if that’s kind of the point; it’s out of character for her because he has absolutely no idea how to confront what just happened, how to process it or make sense of it.

And so maybe because she’s trying to look at it through something more like Moiraine’s pragmatism, or maybe just because she’s…lost, and grasping at anything at all, trying to put all this horror into some kind of coherent picture, trying to find a way to…not quite deny it, but make it make sense. I don’t know how much she truly believes any of what she’s saying here.

“Can we dare send a man to fight the Dark One who won’t sacrifice for what needs to be done?”

Min shook her head. “Dare we send him as he is, with that look in his eyes? Nynaeve, he’s stopped caring. Nothing matters to him anymore but defeating the Dark One.”

“Isn’t that what we want him to do?”

(Isn’t that what we’ve asked him to do? Isn’t that what the world itself has demanded he do?) There’s an element almost of realisation in that question, of the enormity of the task he has been set. Of the fact that he is doing all this because of what they – the world entire – want and need him to do.

“Winning won’t be winning at all if Rand becomes something as bad as the Forsaken…We—”

“I understand,” Nynaeve said suddenly. “Light burn me, but I do, and you’re right. I just don’t like the answers those conclusions are giving me.”

Yeah, that feels like Nynaeve. She agrees with Min, and knows she does, but that’s a harder truth to face.

And apparently it comes with Cadsuane attached. First Moiraine, now Cadsuane…Nynaeve’s making all kinds of strides today.

“I dislike the woman, and I suspect she returns the emotion, but neither of us can handle Rand alone.”

I’m so proud of you, Nynaeve.

“Handle” Rand? That was another problem. Nynaeve and Cadsuane were both so concerned with handling that they failed to see that it might be best to help him instead. Nynaeve cared for Rand, but she saw him as a problem to be fixed, rather than a man in need.

I’m actually not sure I completely agree with Min here. I think the focus on handling rather than helping him is true of many, and probably more so of Cadsuane than of Nynaeve, but even Cadsuane I think does want to help him, for himself as well as for the world. She’s more or less said as much. Still, I’ll grant it with her; she’s tried too hard to manipulate rather than simply aid, and it has cost her.

Nynaeve, though…yes, she’s spoken sometimes of handling him, or of trying ot get him to do what she thinks he should, but it’s always seemed more like a holdover from when she was his babysitter, and now something of what she has become as an Aes Sedai. That’s just who Nynaeve is, to some extent. And the rest of their relationship really has been about her trying to do what she can to help him. She followed him and the others from Emond’s Field to try to protect them. She captured a Forsaken and went to Caemlyn in a dream just to have a chance of helping him in some way when she knew he could be in trouble, and at the end asked ‘at least let me heal you.’ She linked with him to help him cleanse saidin and has stayed by him since to try to help as she can and to protect him from what she sees as threats, and has tried at every possible opportunity to heal him (“how can it be enough, when you’re still bleeding?”). And then recently, in that conversation they had…she just wanted to get him to stop doing this to himself, because it’s destroying him. So yes, she’ll stand up to him and contradict him and push him. But she’s there, in the end, to try to help him however she can.

He’s just at a point, now, where he isn’t letting himself accept the help she or Min or anyone else can give.

Nynaeve stepped up to the front and knocked on the sturdy oak door; it was answered shortly by Merise. “Yes, child?” the Green asked, as if intentionally trying to goad Nynaeve.

“I have to speak with Cadsuane,” Nynaeve growled.

“Cadsuane Sedai, she has no business with you right now,” Merise said, moving to close the cottage door. “Return tomorrow, and perhaps she will see you.”

“Rand al’Thor just burned an entire palace full of people from existence with balefire,” Nynaeve said, loud enough to be heard by those inside the cottage. “I was with him.”

I have to laugh; I do love these kinds of moments, where one character just drops a truth like a bomb on everyone around them. That’s definitely news that will get you in to see Cadsuane at midnight.

And so Cadsuane and Sorilea and the others get the story, because this is not a time for withholding information or pettiness of any sort.

Oh, Rand, Min thought. This must be tearing you apart inside. But she could feel him through the bond; his emotions seemed very cold.

Mention of the bond, finally. And…there’s effectively nothing there. I think Min is right to some extent; it probably is tearing him apart inside, but he’s shut all of that off so completely that he can’t actually feel it, and so it’s just another necessity, just another reason to hate himself and reaffirm his belief that he deserves annihilation. There’s no more that can be done to him, so it’s just another thing.

“You were wise to come to us with this, child,” Sorilea said to Nynaeve. “You may withdraw.”

Nynaeve’s eyes opened wide with anger. “But—”

“Sorilea,” Cadsuane said calmly, cutting Nynaeve off. “This child could be of use to our plans. She is still close to the al’Thor boy; he trusted her enough to take her with him this evening.”

Okay, so maybe there is still plenty of space for pettiness. Not that Sorilea or Cadsuane would see it as such, but this is not a time for dismissing Nynaeve, or keeping things from her. They may not see her as Aes Sedai or as anything more than a child, but this is not a time to try to simply use her.

Though perhaps they’re giving her a chance:

“But can she be obedient?”

“Well?” Cadsuane asked of Nynaeve. They all seemed to be ignoring Min. “Can you?”

Nynaeve’s eyes were still wide with anger. […] Nynaeve tugged on her braid with a white-knuckled grip. “Yes, Cadsuane Sedai,” she said through clenched teeth. “I can.”

For this, she can. For this, she can swallow her pride and agree to obey even Cadsuane. That’s how important this is. It’s not about her pride or her assertion of authority or any kind of rivalry she has with Cadsuane for any reason. This is about what may be a last chance.

Come on, Cadsuane, the least you could do is reward her with the whole plan. But she won’t, and Nynaeve accepts even that. And for Cadsuane’s part…it doesn’t seem like she’s giving much, but Cadsuane is not a woman accustomed to making compromises. But there’s an element of grudging respect between them now; Cadsuane is testing her, but from her that means she’s giving Nynaeve a chance to prove herself, rather than dismissing her entirely. It is, in its own way, a kind of trust.

“Your part,” Cadsuane continued, “is to find Perrin Aybara.”

…What?

Why Perrin?

Does she intend to find Mat as well? Could this be anything at all to do with Verin’s letter to him? Trying to bring all three ta’veren together for some reason? It has to happen eventually, but how would that help with Rand’s whole…uh…inability to be a person right now?

Or maybe it’s about Perrin’s whole group? People from the Two Rivers, maybe? People from Rand’s home, to try to make him remember—oh. Tam is with Perrin. Or was, last we saw Perrin. Could that be part of it? His friend, his old village, his father…hmm.

Whatever the plan, someone would need to watch out for Rand. His deed this day would be destroying him inside, no matter what he proclaimed.

Destroying him, as he just destroyed. Tearing him apart, as he just tore at the fabric of reality. Fisher King indeed.

There were plenty of others worrying about what he would do at the Last Battle. It was her job to get him to that Last Battle alive and sane, with his soul in one piece.

Somehow.

No easy task. But she has not turned away from it, nor from him. She still wants to help him, still wants to look out for him and help him, still worries more about what he’s doing to himself than anything else. And she may be the last, or one of the last, who can look at him that way. He needs that, as he has needed that for so long, but if he can’t accept even that anymore, if it’s not enough to pull him back from this edge, not enough to keep him from doing what he’s done, what will be?

Next (TGS ch 38) Previous (TGS ch 36)

#um. that was a lot.#this one got...a bit long #Wheel of Time #neuxue liveblogs WoT #The Gathering Storm

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neuxue · 6 years ago

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Wheel of Time liveblogging: The Gathering Storm ch 40

In which oaths are bent, bonds are formed, and Egwene is both awesome and kind of terrifying.

Chapter 40: The Tower Shakes

Siuan awoke with a start. Something was wrong.

Oh so very many things, Siuan. Where to even begin?

Gareth Bryne is a blademaster? Did we know this before? Also he’s shirtless, for those who appreciate such things. Siuan certainly seems to.

He’d buttoned up his high collar, marked with three stars on the left breast

I thought WoT military rankings were denoted by knots, not stars?

“Scout’s report. Something is going on in the city.”

“Something is wrong.” “Something is going on in the city.” Alright, we need to have a talk about what exactly constitutes a report. And also about specificity in general.

Bryne seems to agree, and the scout gets as far as ‘bursts of light’ and ‘dark shadows’ near the Tower. That’s…helpful to those of us with the benefit of foreshadowing, but not so helpful to the in-world layperson.

Though I suppose Siuan is among those who have had the benefit of foreshadowing, as Egwene did tell her about her dream of the Seanchan attacking.

“They could be Shadowspawn, my Lord,” the soldier said, trotting after Bryne. “Stories tell of creatures of shadow that fly in such a way.”

Stories like ‘The Nine Rings’, perhaps?

Either way, Siuan and Bryne know a plot point when they see it and figure that this must be Egwene’s predicted Seanchan attack on the Tower. Bryne’s confused about the lack of a ground assault, but as someone who’s adjusted his own strategies to account for instantaneous travel it seems like he’d be a bit more openminded. And nervous; tactics that don’t seem to make sense should be something of a red flag to a skilled general, I should think.

“Well,” Gareth said, “so long as they attack Tar Valon, they are no problem of ours.”

Except Tar Valon is a problem of yours. That’s the entire point. You can’t unify the Tower if you sit on the sidelines as it’s attacked and think ‘at least it’s not us’. This isn’t a ‘their issue’ versus ‘our issue’ – it’s all your issue, and treating it as anything else only reinforces the sense of division when there needs to be unity. Their entire purpose here is the Tower, one way or another; they can’t just sit back and watch it try to defend itself without their aid.

“I’m getting her out,” Siuan said suddenly, surprising herself.

Bryne spun toward Siuan, into the light of her globe. His chin was shadowed by evening stubble. “What?”

“Egwene,” Siuan said. “We need to go in for her. This will provide a perfect distraction, Gareth! We can go in and grab her before anyone is the wiser.” He eyed her.

“What?”

“You gave your word not to rescue her, Siuan.”

Not only that, but how would it look to those in the Tower if the one who has so long claimed to be their Amyrlin and stood for Tower unity and tried to get them to see how Elaida was destroying the Tower around her just up and vanished when the Tower is attacked? How would it look if she were to disappear the moment the Tower needs all the help it can get defending itself? Surely that would undermine her efforts more than just about anything else could.

But Siuan and Bryne aren’t looking at this the way Egwene is. Their thinking is aligned with the Rebels, not with the notion of a unified Tower. They, too, are part of this division – hard not to be, given that they’ve declared war on Elaida and are camped outside the Tower and preparing for invasion and war…but it’s not division they need, right now.

“The Amyrlin is confident that she can care for herself.”

“I thought I could care for myself too,” Siuan said. “And look where it got me.” She shook her head, glancing toward the distant spire of Tar Valon.

Oh, Siuan. One can almost forget, sometimes, just how far she has fallen and how much she’s been through. Because she just keeps fighting, and doesn’t dwell on it…but then there are moments like these, where you remember alongside her.

And from that perspective, it becomes easier to see why she is so immediately determined to go get Egwene out of there.

“When Egwene speaks of the Seanchan, she always shivers. Very little upsets her—not the Forsaken, not the Dragon Reborn. Gareth, you don’t know what the Seanchan do to women who can channel.” She met his eyes. “We nee to go for her.”

Egwene is facing her worst fear right now; Siuan is right that very little upsets her, and there’s not much that can genuinely frighten her at this point. But now the Seanchan are attacking, as she’s known they would and dreaded they would and no one listened to her, and now they’re there and Egwene can’t even channel, and she’s effectively alone. Being treated as a novice and then a prisoner in the Tower, and embracing pain was one thing; there, Egwene had her sense of self and her absolute conviction that she was fighting for a necessary cause. This must be so much harder, to face the people who collared her and enslaved her and have haunted her nightmares. It’s not a pain she can just embrace; it’s a fear she struggles to even be rational about—and for good reason. But now she has to face even that, and somehow do so in a way that won’t undermine everything else she’s doing.

No pressure or anything, Egwene. Just face some of your worst fears and traumatic memories while effectively powerless and still more or less a prisoner in a hostile environment you’re trying to win to your side right after you’ve just been handed a massive shock in the form of a list of all the Black Ajah who surround you by a woman who died in your bed. That’s not too much to ask, is it?

“I will not be a party to this,” he said stubbornly. “Fine,” Siuan spat. Fool man! “Go take care of your men. I think I know someone who will help me.”

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Fine.

Egwene!

Maybe it’s because I’ve been sitting on last chapter’s cliffhanger for a few days now, but I feel even more invested than I should be in whatever is about to happen. I think it’s also because there are a few layers to this: on the individual character level, you have Egwene facing her worst fears and memories from probably the entire series so far in a very direct and immediate way. She hasn’t had any contact at all with the Seanchan since TGH but they’ve left a very clear impact on her psyche, and so there’s a lot riding on a battle with them at this point in the series, when character arcs are being wrapped up and the final stage is being set. It’s always exciting to see a character face and potentially even overcome their fears, or be confronted with and have to somehow deal with something traumatic from their past…but of course, that’s not all this is.

Because there’s also the level of not just Egwene’s own character arc, but her role as Amyrlin in the struggle for the Tower. She’s a girl facing some truly horrific memories, but she’s also trying to defend the Tower itself, and still trying to unify it from within, to win it over to her, to claim authority so that she can preserve the Tower and the Aes Sedai. And so she has to face this fight not just as herself, but with the additional pressure of having to face it as a strong Amyrlin, having to face it on the entire Tower’s behalf. To protect not just herself but all of them.

And to do so from a position of what should be no power at all.

So there’s…a lot riding on this; multiple arcs and storylines could turn on this one battle. It’s a critical point on several different levels, and they all feed into and play off of one another, so it’s this sense of hundreds of threads all being pulled into this one single point, this one climactic event around which everything will turn and on which so much depends.

I’m excited to see how this goes, is what I’m trying to say here.

“The Dark One!” Nicola wailed. “The Last Battle! It’s come!”

“Nicola!” Egwene snapped, straightening up. “Control yourself.”

Yeah, Nicola? You are really just not helping. That is absolutely the last thing Egwene needs to deal with right now.

But that’s part of what makes this so…I can’t think of a good word. It’s part of what makes it feel like the stakes are so high here, part of what drives the tension and importance up, part of what makes it feel like something that’s about to be monumental and very likely impressive. Is there a word for the anticipation of the particular brand of awesome that comes when a character comes well and truly into their own, against the greatest of obstacles? Because I think—at least, I sincerely hope—that’s what we’re about to see here. And this is the sort of thing that builds that sense of anticipation and…investment, I suppose.

It’s that sense of everything piling on top of Egwene, coupled with the belief in her that she will triumph.

Because there is so much being put on her shoulders right now.

Faced with one of the only things that has the power to upset or frighten her, she cannot afford even a moment or a semblance of weakness. It’s not fair, but there it is. She has to be strong for all of them; she has to be their strength, and reassure those who need it, and there is no one to reassure her. She has to help Nicola through her fear, and likely help others; she has to be someone they can draw strength from in order to face this…but all of that strength has to come from somewhere. And so she has to find it in herself, not just for her but for those around her; she has to not only find it but be able to give it away freely. While faced with one of her greatest fears, she cannot look to anyone else for comfort or reassurance, and on top of that she must provide it. It’s the price of the role she seeks to claim but damn.

Although…not to minimise the difficulty of the situation she’s in because it really is A Situation in every possible way, but I’ve always found it actually easier, perhaps oddly, to remain calm and in control and capable in a situation that’s difficult or frightening if others are depending on me to do so. If you’re the one who has to see everyone through something, there’s almost a kind of clarity to be found in that particular form of pressure. Not detachment, exactly, but the ability born of necessity to set aside your own sense of fear/stress/other immediate negative emotion and just…deal with the situation because someone has to. So maybe there’s something to be said for that.

Of course, this is taking that to an extreme—to put it mildly—so…there’s that.

Portions of the Tower’s wings below were alight with flames, and to her horror, Egwene saw several gaping holes directly in the sides of the Tower.

All of her efforts and holding it together and it’s like the Tower is just determined to fall apart around her in any way it can. In the way a three-year-old is absolutely dead-set on not eating their vegetables, and if that means throwing the entire plate on the floor then, well, that’s what’s going to happen.

Also I feel like this is probably not what the Aes Sedai were going for with the whole ‘flame of Tar Valon’ image. Like, WRONG METAPHOR. ABORT, ABORT.

Soldiers would soon follow. Soldiers and sul’dam. With those leashes. Egwene shuddered, wrapping her arms around herself. The cool, seamless metal. The nausea, the degradation, the panic, despair, and—shamefully—guilt at not serving her mistress to the best of her abilities. She remembered the haunted look of an Aes Sedai as she was broken. Most of all, she remembered her own terror.

Oh, Egwene. It’s too much, to ask her to somehow face all of that and not be afraid. And none of those in the Tower even know; none of them have been subject to the a’dam and few seem to know or believe or understand what it means that Egwene was. There’s no one she can look to for the comfort and reassurance she could so desperately use right now, no one to draw strength from, but she has to. She has a moment to herself, now, to wrap her arms around herself and try to hold herself together, but she’s not going to get more than a moment, and she’s going to need to do so much more than simply hold herself together.

The Tower shook. Fire flashed in the distant hallways accompanied by shouts and wails of despair. She could smell smoke. Oh, Light! Could this really be? She wouldn’t go back. She wouldn’t let them leash her again. She had to run! She had to hide, flee, escape…

No!

She pushed herself upright.

No, she would not flee. She was Amyrlin.

And how much determination does that take. This is so much more than deciding to embrace pain, and succeeding at it. This goes beyond pain; it’s something that may as well have been specifically crafted to hit her at her most vulnerable point, to strike directly at her worst fears and make her feel at her most powerless—especially as, right now, she effectively is.

And to decide not to be, to decide not to give in to that, is such an incredible effort of sheer will and determination.

She is Amyrlin, even now. She is Amyrlin through pain and imprisonment and she will be Amyrlin even through this. That is not just her role; that is who she is, and she will not back down from it.

Nicola huddled beside the wall, whimpering. “They’re coming for us,” the girl whispered. “Oh Light, they’re coming!”

“Let them come!”

Egwene al’Vere is HERE and she is STANDING HER GROUND and anyone who tries to get her to do otherwise can FUCK RIGHT OFF, THIS ARC ENDS HERE.

Given just the facts of the situation, the bare bones of it, it could so easily be her own darkest hour. Her greatest fear, the ones who held her prisoner and tried to break her mind coming to destroy the Tower that’s already falling to pieces around her despite everything she tries, and her powerless to channel more than a trickle, much less stand up to them…and yet it’s as if through sheer will she decides that it won’t be her Darkest Hour, because She Says So.

Blessedly, enough time had passed to dull the forkroot slightly, and she was able to grab a faint trickle of the Power. It was tiny, perhaps the least amount of the Power she’d ever channelled. She wouldn’t be able to weave a tongue of Air to shift a piece of paper. But it would be enough. It had to be.

Like when she had to read Verin’s list by the light of a single candle, there’s a sense of contrast here with the immense power Rand used a few chapters ago that I really like. I’m not even completely sure I can articulate why. But the way it suggests that she…makes her own power, I suppose. Something about strength and where it comes from and what it really is.

“I will protect you,” Egwene said. “I promise.”

She’s facing her own worst fear but she just calmly puts herself in the role of protector, and despite her apparent lack of strength in the Power right now, there’s no sense of doubt. She has the kind of strength that can back up statements like that even when it seems impossible.

It’s a sign of how much she’s grown since she last faced the Seanchan. Then, she had raw power but little practice with it; she was just a girl still new to the world outside her village, unsure of her place in it and still stubborn and determined to fight this nightmare but what could she do against something that could break experienced Aes Sedai? And it left its mark on her…but now that it’s time to face that again, after that moment of panic and remembered pain, she finds this source of strength in who she has become—who she must be, and who she has chosen to be. She is Amyrlin in truth, and in that is a determination and a strength greater than her fear.

There’s this sense not that the fear born of those experiences and trauma has lessened, but that she has grown and found her own strength and self and so it looks diminished in comparison, when it comes time to truly face it again, because there’s so much else to her that can push against it.

Anyway, Egwene has found herself…a crowd of novices. Her first allies in the Tower…Egwene, what exactly are you planning, here?

“I’m going to teach you how to link.”

Oh. That’s…resourceful, certainly. Pragmatic. But just a little bit…not quite ruthless but something akin to it.

They’ll be stronger, linked. Perhaps more able to defend themselves. But as Egwene acknowledges to herself, it’s not something usually taught to novices; she is pushing them out of necessity…as was done to her. She promises to protect them, but she’s also aware that they will need to be able to defend themselves; she cannot realistically hope to keep them out of this completely. She went to the harbour chain herself and ended up captured because she didn’t want to send a novice unnecessarily into danger, but now she doesn’t have that option—at least, not as she sees it. And so she readies them to fight.

Hopefully, at least some of them would figure it out.

What mattered was that Egwene now had the Power. A fair measure of it, almost as much as she was accustomed to without forkroot.

She’s preparing them to defend themselves, but she is also using them. Out of necessity, and because she’s trying to defend all of them and has to somehow make that possible when she herself is all but powerless, but using them nonetheless.

To weave a gateway?

She hoped that the gateway would open in the right location; she was going on Siuan’s instructions, which had been somewhat vague, though she also had Elayne’s original description of the place.

Oh! The angreal storeroom! That’s clever. So she’s using them to make the gateway, but perhaps just for that. She doesn’t seem to be sending them straight off to fight, or bringing them with her to where the fighting is happening; she’s using them as a source of power, but maybe only to make a gateway to a different source of power…interesting.

“Are you escaping?” Her voice was edged with fear, and not a little hope, as if Egwene might take her, too.

“No,” Egwene said firmly. “I’ll return in just a moment. When I come back, I want at least five good circles formed!”

Egwene’s not going anywhere, not while the Tower is under attack, but I wonder if maybe she should think about getting the novices out, via gateway, to somewhere they can be safe. But then maybe there isn’t enough time for that. Or maybe that’s the cold pragmatism: they can’t afford to weaken the Tower further. She doesn’t approach it from the same place as Rand, and she hasn’t gone in the same direction or nearly as far, but Egwene too will do what must be done, and sometimes that means making decisions she might wish she didn’t have to. She doesn’t want to put novices in harm’s way, but harm’s way has come knocking on their door, and it’s not just them but the whole Tower at risk, and she has to work with the situation she has.

I don’t think it’s moral event horizon material, but it’s definitely one of the more morally grey decisions Egwene’s made recently. And I love it, because that’s the sort of decision I like to watch characters make, but I will certainly not deny that there’s an element of harsh pragmatism to it.

And now she has her own absurdly strong sa’angreal. Which brings us to a different potential parallel.

She looked at the three novices, smiling broadly. “Now we’re ready,” she announced.

Let the sul’dam try and shield her while she was wielding one of the most powerful sa’angreal that the Aes Sedai possessed. The White Tower would not fall while she was Amyrlin!

There is still an element of fear, there, and while I don’t think it’s her primary motivator I think it does still play a role. Her first thought is that she has enough power to protect herself – let the sul’dam try and shield her. As if she has to take that second to reassure herself that she will not be taken again, that she will not be made helpless, that she can face them. Which is, you know, understandable. To not let her have even that moment of…need to reassure herself, need to touch that vast Power to feel secure in facing some of her worst memories, would I think take something away from this scene, because it would be making her too perfect. She’s human, and that’s the point; she’s human and she’s afraid and she’s able to do this anyway.

But her next thought, and the one she focuses on, is that the Tower will not fall. She is not just Egwene al’Vere; she takes a moment of thought to reassure herself on that front, and then she moves on to the bigger task: not protecting herself, but protecting the whole of the Tower, for that is her duty as Amyrlin, and there is no place in that for Egwene al’Vere’s own fears.

Does Gawyn have to be in this chapter? Can’t we just…not?

Bryne stepped up beside her, hand resting on the hilt of his sword. He eyed her with dissatisfaction. Well. She wouldn’t let him be the judge of her honour.

A bit too late for that, Siuan; how much laundry have you done in the last few months?

And now too late to decide that going to Gawyn is a terrible idea.

“Are we being attacked?”

“No,” Siuan said, glancing at Bryne. “But Tar Valon might be.” “Egwene!” Gawy cried, hurriedly doing the last loops on his belt. Light, but the boy was single-minded.

YOU DON’T SAY. And he doesn’t exactly have a track record of strong decision-making skills where Egwene is concerned. It’s single-mindedness without perspective, which is a terrible combination on every level.

I’m not sure I agree with Siuan on the necessity of a rescue operation in the first place, and I think Bryne has a point, but I also have a reasonable amount of faith in Siuan’s ability to assess a situation and make the pragmatic decision based on what she sees. Gawyn, on the other hand…getting him involved means they’re committed to this, because he is not the sort of person who can take in additional information as it becomes available and adjust his decisions accordingly. Which means he is THE LAST PERSON YOU SHOULD BE INVOLVING IN THIS, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING.

Case in point: Gawyn doesn’t even take half a second to ask specifics of what’s happening, or to think about whether or not this will work, and the logistics of it – he hears ‘Tar Valon’ and is immediately 110% committed to this fool’s errand, and doesn’t seem to worry that they’re working on almost no information whatsoever. Because since when has that stopped him from acting as if what he ‘knows’ is a certainty?

ARGH.

It was so much easier to like him when he wasn’t tangling up the plotlines of characters I like more. Watching a character make bad decisions in relative isolation, when he’s the one who will suffer for them, is fascinating. Watching a character make bad decisions when the repercussions will most likely be felt by other characters is irritating.

Also one of my greatest pet peeves in fiction is when characters make terrible decisions Because Of Love, so that’s not exactly helping.

This would all be so much easier if she could create a gateway, but she didn’t have enough strength in the Power for that.

Well, you could always borrow some novices.

“Then come with us,” Siuan said.

“I will not be party to you breaking your oath again.”

“Egwene said we could do something if it looked like she was in danger of execution,” Siuan said. “She told me she’d let us rescue her then! Well, the way she vanished from the meeting with me tonight, I’m inclined to think she’s in danger.”

“It isn’t Elaida who put her there, but the Seanchan!”

“We don’t know for certain.”

“Ignorance is not an excuse,” Bryne said sternly, stepping closer to her. “You have made oathbreaking far too convenient, Siuan, and I don’t want it to become a habit for you.”

Of course, she would argue that she’s not breaking her oath so much as bending it, which seems like something you might appreciate, Bryne, given that it’s what Brought You Together, after all. It’s a sign of true love! Or something.

“Aes Sedai or not, former Amyrlin or not, people must have rules and boundaries.”

How adorably Lawful Good of you.

“To say nothing of the fact that you’re likely to get yourself killed attempting this!”

And that’s just adorably transparent.

Then again, everything about these two has been SUBTLE AS A BRICK, and yet they still haven’t managed to actually work it out between themselves. Schoolchildren, I swear. Schoolchildren who could run rings around you politically and militarily, and then throw you a paper aeroplane note with ‘do you like me? Tick yes or no’.

“Blasted woman,” Bryne said from behind. “You’ll be the death of me.”

…I worry. That gets rather close to Min’s vision, and is second only to ‘we’ll talk when I return’ for Famous Last Words in fantasy.

“I’ll come,” he said, hand gripping the hilt of his sheathed sword.

*raises eyebrow*

“But there are two conditions.”

“Name them,” she said.

“The first is that you bond me as your Warder.”

Awww. About damn time, too. Also, I think this is the first time we’ve seen a man make this request of an Aes Sedai, rather than the other way around. Granted, we’ve mainly seen bonding situations that are more anomalous than ordinary if the narrative statements about such things are to be believed, but still, it’s kind of…sweet. It’s nice to see that it can happen this way.

And then she just bonds him right there. Alright then. No sense wasting time, I suppose.

Emotions! Concern! Romance! So much sweetness I think my teeth are rotting!

“Would that I could give this to each man in my army!”

Siuan sniffed. “I highly doubt that their wives and families would approve of that.”

Once again there’s this dissonance between what we’re told about the relationship between Aes Sedai and Warder and what we’re shown.

Maybe it’s just because I am not really a fan of romance subplots in the first place, but I sometimes feel a bit cheated that we’re presented with this form of bonding that is meaningful and important and platonic – something all too rare in the genre – only to have it turn out to JUST KIDDING actually be romantic in almost every major-character instance.

But Siuan and Bryne are not a particularly annoying couple, and they’re even relatively sweet, so okay, fine, I’ll try not to hold it against them.

“You said you had two requirements?”

“I’ll tell you the second at a later time.” Bryne still sounded a little breathless.

That’s fair; bonding is one thing but this doesn’t seem like the best time for a marriage. Wink, wink.

That would actually be a kind of hilariously ironic second condition: ‘I’ll go along with what I consider to be oathbreaking but ONLY IF we can swear a different oath entirely to each other in exchange’.

“It’s odd,” he said, smiling. “I can sense your emotions now. For instance I could tell…” He cut off, and she could sense him growing just faintly embarrassed. He can tell that I half want him to demand something indecent of me! Siuan realised, aghast.

They even flirt like schoolchildren. The former Amyrlin Seat and one of the best living generals, and they’re basically pulling each other’s pigtails and giggling over what Siuan’s blank-cheque promise could be used for.

Luckily they are in fact adults, and can set aside their hilariously incompetent efforts at flirting because there’s something just slightly more important to deal with at the moment.

“What’s happening?” Gawyn asked.

Something about that just sent me into uncontrollable laughter. Like, that one oblivious question just sums up approximately everything about Gawyn’s entire character. We have Matrim ‘battles interest me’ Cauthon and Nynaeve ‘“I won’t shout at you!’ Nynaeve shouted’ al’Meara and now Gawyn ‘what’s happening’ Trakand.

Now if only you’d pause for maybe ten seconds every now and then to try to actually find an answer to that question, Gawyn, you might not find yourself in these situations.

“We don’t have to go in alone. […] That means our chances of surviving long enough to take Egwene just improved. Which is fortunate, since after what we’re about to do, she’ll undoubtedly want the privilege of killing us personally.”

I mean, you are probably not wrong there, Siuan. Not that that’s enough to make any of them reconsider, of course. And I suppose it’s not a bad idea to at least enable an option B should one become necessary, but…yeah, I’m still very unsure about all of this.

But! On the plus side! Maybe it’ll piss Egwene off enough that she’ll finally break up with Gawyn! (Shut up and let me dream, okay?)

And now we seem to be with Adelorna. Fitting, I suppose, that we get to watch a battle for the White Tower through the eyes of the Captain General of the Green Ajah. But you know what this also most likely means? Do you?

Outsider POV of Egwene motherfucking al’Vere. Also known as: precisely the sort of thing I live for.

Anyway. Yes. Adelorna.

Who is really not having a great day as she runs through the ruined corridors of the White Tower and I’m reminded, just a little bit, of the Prologue. Ruined corridors and horror and death…

Adelorna felt ashamed. The Battle Ajah indeed! The Greens with her had stood only minutes before being defeated.

I wonder if this will serve as a kind of wake-up call. There’s a lot about the Green mission statement that’s admirable, but for all that they don’t seem to have a lot of practice, nor do they behave like an organised, trained, cohesive military unit. The fact that they don’t train to use the Power as a weapon is an obstacle, but even more than that I think they struggle because they’ve fallen prey to the same tendency as most Aes Sedai: they act as individuals and don’t know how to set that aside and function as a group.

She froze; she sensed channelling coming from her right. That could mean invaders, or it could mean sisters. She hesitated, but gritted her teeth. She was the Captain-General of the Green Ajah! She couldn’t just run and hide.

This, though, is the admirable part. She’s watched friends and sisters die, and one of her Warders seems to have been killed, and the Tower is in chaos and under attack, but she’s not going to back down. She’ll face this and she’ll go down fighting.

It’s a similar determination to what Egwene herself showed: this is her role, and she cannot allow her own personal fear to hold her back. She won’t give up, even in the face of horror.

She rounded another corner and nearly stumbled out of a rift in the side of the Tower. She teetered on the exposed ledge, looking out upon a sky filled with terrible monsters and lines of fire.

Think there’s a metaphor in there, perhaps? Just a bit? Holes torn in the Tower, leaving it riddled with unexpected and sudden dangers that an Aes Sedai can find herself teetering on the edge of, looking out into vastness and danger because the Tower cannot hold against that as it is, and they are all at risk of falling.

And Adelorna’s reward for her determination to continue fighting is to be shielded and collared.

This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening.

This is the White Tower, aloof and untouchable. Except it’s not; it’s vulnerable and cracked and unable to unite itself enough to stand against these threats. This can’t be happening, because the Tower is meant to be invulnerable and all-powerful…but it isn’t. And for some of them, I think this is the first time where that realisation actually hits.

Then, shockingly, the collar unclipped from Adelorna’s neck and fell to the floor. Gregana looked stunned for a moment before she was consumed in a blast of fire.

Does being collared count as a life-threatening situation? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I don’t exactly disagree with the actions here. But it seems to me that Siuan’s promise is not the only oath being strained to the breaking point in this chapter.

Especially as two more sul’dam are killed by lightning and fire here, not just the one who actually put the a’dam on Adelorna. It’s interesting that Adelorna doesn’t immediately wonder how that’s possible.

A woman in white stood atop the rubble a short distance away, a massive halo of power surrounding her, her arms outstretched toward the fleeing soldiers, her eyes intense. The woman stood like vengeance itself, the power of saidar like a storm around her. The very air seemed alight, and her brown hair blew from the wind of the open gap in the wall beside them. Egwene al’Vere.

HELL. YES. This is very much a Sanderson-style image but it’s also EXACTLY WHAT I’M HERE FOR . Egwene’s own I am the storm moment, standing surrounded by power like a…force of light.

And yes, there are absolutely some darker edges to this. She is killing with this power despite the oaths she has promised herself to live by, and she’s still surrounded by a group of novices. There’s definitely more of a parallel to Rand here than when she was reading a list of names by the light of a single candle, unable to summon enough of the Power to do more than that but also not needing to.

It’s a harsh image…but she is the Amyrlin in the midst of a battle for the Tower’s survival, against those who would kill or enslave them all, and it’s also an incredibly powerful image. She who should be a prisoner frees Aes Sedai from collars, she who is dressed and treated as a novice commands immense Power and has true novices achieving what the Aes Sedai seem incapable of: organised fighting, and unity, and success against this force that seeks to destroy them. She who has been beaten and disdained by the Tower stands to defend it when no one else seems able.

The Amyrlin Seat is not nice, and at this moment she’s certainly not gentle, but she is what the Tower needs right now. A source of strength and power and determination, someone who can stand against those who seek to bring the Tower down, someone who can hold it together and fight for it. Because she is fighting for something here, not just against something (though there is definitely an element of that, I think).

Blasts of lightning flew from Egwene’s open hand, flashing through the opening in the wall, and something screeched and fell outside. Adelorna stepped up to Egwene, embracing the Source, feeling a fool for having been captured. Egwene struck again, and another of those flying monsters fell.

“What if they’re carrying captives?” Adelorna asked, watching one of the beasts fall amid Egwene’s flames.

“Then those captives are better dead,” Egwene said, turning to her. “Trust me. I know this.”

Um…yikes. It’s not quite on the level of ‘forgive me for calling this mercy as well’ because for one thing this is in the middle of a battle and the Seanchan attacked first and while Egwene might be on the offensive in this particular instance, the whole thing is being done in self-defence and defence of the Tower. Also, harsh as it is, it would probably be…unrealistically idealistic to assume that they could rescue those captives and defeat the Seanchan without some collateral damage.

Some collateral damage is, perhaps, inevitable; both for the Amyrlin Seat and the Dragon Reborn. Natrin’s Barrow wasn’t horrifying because people died—that’s happened before, at Cairhien and outside Ebou Dar and at Dumai’s Wells, to varying degrees of horror—but because it was balefire and it was so calmly and coldly planned and because it wasn’t even a battle and perhaps above all because Rand didn’t care.

And that’s where Egwene gets a little dark here; she lets herself go a little bit into that colder place where those losses can be dismissed as better dead. It’s still not to the same extent or on the same scale, but it does feel a little bit like hardening herself to that fact in the moment so that she can keep fighting.

I think part of it is that, for all that she absolutely has grown since she last faced the Seanchan, and for all that she is fighting for something here, that fear does still exist, and she’s still not entirely capable of perfectly rational thinking where the Seanchan are concerned. Which is entirely understandable, but it does give her this colder, harsher edge here, because of that part of her that is reacting out of fear and vengeance.

But for all that, she has not lost sight of what she is fighting for; above all, she is standing in defence of the Tower, in a sense standing as the Tower, to protect it as much as she can. And I’ll be curious to see how she deals with all of this after the battle is done and it’s not a case of immediate necessity; as last chapter showed, she’s very capable of putting emotion aside for a time, and processing it later, which is a little different from shutting it off completely. I feel like that’s a little bit of what’s going on here; she does have to prioritise, and she has to be able to focus on defending as much of the Tower as she can, and so for the moment—combined with the fact that there’s a fair amount of trauma associated with the Seanchan even if she’s mostly handling it—that results in a somewhat harsh pragmatism. But I don’t think she’s treating that as a permanent state, and again, she is fighting for something here. It’s more a ‘that is an acceptable level of loss’ and she just can’t dwell on it right now, more than ‘I no longer care because I am completely dead inside and will do anything it takes to get to the end at any cost’. We’re still quite a ways distant from that, methinks.

Egwene marched down the hallway behind them, like a general at the battle lines. “Well,” [Adelorna] said. “You have done nicely to organise, Egwene, though it’s good that an Aes—”

Adelorna? Shut up. How can you think she looks like a general and in the next breath address her like a child? Also she is apparently the only one organising an effective defence right now, so maybe cut the bullshit.

Seems like Egwene is on the same page.

“I am in command until this threat passes. You will call me Mother. Give me penance later if you must, but for now my authority must be unquestioned. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Mother,” Adelorna found herself saying, shocked.

Yeah. Right now is not the time to be fighting about who’s in charge, or trying to claim authority over the one person who’s actually getting shit done.

Egwene’s not trying to seize power here for herself; she’s establishing the chain of command in the middle of a battle because all around her is chaos, and there isn’t time for anything else. Someone has to take charge, and so she did, and for that to work it has to be recognised. Yes, she wants to be Amyrlin, but she wants it because she believes that is what the Tower needs…and right now, it certainly doesn’t seem like she’s wrong. Her first priority is the Tower; her own interests are secondary. First, they need to survive this.

“Where are your Warders?”

“One wounded,” Adelorna said. “One safe, with the other. One dead.”

“Light, woman, and you’re still standing?”

Adelorna straightened her back. “What other choice do I have?”

Egwene nodded. Why did her look of respect make Adelorna swell with pride?

It’s such an honest respect, and earned. Adelorna’s pretty damn impressive herself, all things considered. Her first reaction may have been to treat Egwene like a child, but she was also quick to understand the importance of a clear chain of command, and she’s still fighting despite the fact that one of her Warders was just killed and she was just collared. So yes, of course Egwene respects that, and doesn’t try to hide it. And Adelorna deserves it. It’s a nice exchange between them, I think because it’s so simple and honest.

“Well, I’m glad to have you,” Egwene said, resuming her walk.

It’s honest, and also very matter-of-fact. There’s no jockeying for power here; neither of them is trying to assert her authority excessively or argue about how to continue. It’s just…this is the situation, I’ve got it under control so right now I need you to work with me, but you’re also badass and I’m glad to have you here, now let’s get back to work. Simple, honest, respectful, effective.

“I’ll have one of the novices show you how to unlock the bracelets, but don’t take any risks. Generally, it’s easier—and much safer—to kill the damane.”

Again…yikes. Necessary, perhaps, but once again there’s a harsh edge to that. I’m also still very curious about the fact that Adelorna hasn’t at any point questioned—aloud or even to herself—how this squares with the three oaths.

Though of course there is the not irrelevant fact that the damane, horrible as it is, are either enemy combatants or weapons in the hands of enemy combatants, and they’re currently in the middle of a battle, and that means the options are a little…limited. Self-defence is a pretty key factor here.

But it comes back to the same thing: they shouldn’t be fighting the Seanchan. They don’t have much choice, because the Seanchan are trying to kill and capture them, but this entire battle should not be happening. They should be working together, not killing each other; they should be preparing to face the Last Battle. But…events have made that all but impossible, and there are some pretty enormous differences of opinion and worldview and methods between Seanchan and Aes Sedai, and so here they are. Forces of the Light, fighting against one another.

I had hoped that maybe this battle could somehow lead to Egwene establishing the treaty Rand could not, but that’s…not looking particularly likely right about now.

Egwene’s openly using Travelling in front of Aes Sedai now; it seems like the days of that being kept secret are…limited. I’m honestly amazed it’s been kept this secret for this long.

“We need to stop them and destroy any to’raken we see, with captives or not. If there’s any chance of stopping them from returning to Ebou Dar with someone who can Travel, we must take it.”

I…get where you’re coming from, because Travelling is absolutely a game-changer, and in the hands of the Seanchan without a peace between them it’s a pretty terrifying concept, but…I also think it’s way too late for that. Too many know it, now.

It does create a very zero-sum approach on both sides here: the Seanchan have been told to capture as many Aes Sedai—marath’damane—as possible but kill the rest. Meanwhile because of this last attempt to keep Travelling from the Seanchan, Egwene and the Aes Sedai are now approaching this not just with the aim of repelling the Seanchan but killing or capturing all of them. So that can only end well…

“You could have run,” [Adelorna] said. “You could have fled at any time.”

Yeah. Take a minute to think about that. And what it means that she hasn’t. That she’s here, facing this same nightmare you are, when she doesn’t have to be. Fighting for all of you, who have treated her like a child at best and an enemy at worst.

Egwene turned back to her, looking through the portal. “Fled?” she asked. “If I left, it wouldn’t have been fleeing you, Adelorna, it would have been abandoning you. I am the Amyrlin Seat. My place is here. I’m certain you’ve heard that I dreamed this very attack.”

She is the Amyrlin Seat, and now Adelorna and anyone else who sees her here can see that she truly believes it, and is committed to it. It’s not just something she says; she’s not just in it for power. Here, when she could so easily have fled, she instead chooses to stand and defend the Tower, because to do otherwise would mean abandoning them. Because she is the Amyrlin, and that means fulfilling the Amyrlin’s duties, no matter how difficult or dangerous they may be. She is the Amyrlin, and she is fighting for the Tower, because that is what she has chosen.

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