#so i understand that they might be a little way away from aes sedai :) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

markantonys · 2 years

Text

diving into lord of chaos! the 3 terms i know from this book going in are The Box, dumai’s wells, and asha’man kill. what do they mean? i don’t know, but i know they’re iconic (and traumatic) and i will be keeping an eye out for them

the similar names are starting to get out of hand. took me a solid paragraph to remember demandred was a forsaken and not some cairhienin (since a lot of cairhienin names have the -dred ending). and every time i see “mazrim taim” i feel like mat and tam al’thor are making up fake names to get free trials of stuff

our first glimpse of shayol ghul and the dark one! very exciting. does the dark one have a corporeal form or is he just like a spirit entity? a deity of sorts? how will rand be able to battle and defeat him? (all rhetorical questions ofc)

i wonder if shayol ghul will exist at all in the show since they’ve changed the dark one’s prison to the eye of the world. now that i’m thinking about it i think that was a great decision bc a) shayol ghul feels like a lotr knockoff whereas the eye and the blight are more distinct and memorable b) what even is the point of the eye in the books? does it ever come up again after the first one? why did moiraine even need to take the kids there in the first place (i’m sure this was explained at the time but i completely forget)? why is there just a pool of untainted saidin chilling there? how is that possible? how can saidin be matter, i thought it was just some intangible force? why doesn’t rand think about going back to the eye to try and use this untainted saidin? all this to say that the show’s version of “the eye is the dark one’s prison and moiraine has to take the kids there to defeat him” is much more clear-cut. and c) older hardened rand going to the eye to battle the dark one in the series finale the same way little baby rand did in the s1 finale will be a beautiful full circle moment and WILL make me cry my eyes out

is it just me or is the aes sedai not letting elayne go to caemlyn very uhhhhh stupid? i understand they want her to finish her training but, political powerhouses as they supposedly are, you would think they’d realize that a huge country being in turmoil because they have no ruler MIGHT cause problems. “if rand has you and caemlyn he has andor” so you think the solution is to keep elayne away and let him have caemlyn all to himself? how is that not worse?

if elayne can make ter’angreal now, i think she should make a matching set of Fuck Hut-esque ter’angreals for all members of the polycule so that they can long-distance date more effectively

"min’s laugh had a huskiness to it; elayne supposed many men would find that attractive. and she was pretty, in a mischievous sort of way.” i swear to god elayne is the most bisexual straight character i’ve ever encountered. i can’t wait for the show to make bi elayne canon

“if [rand] learns about the viewing he might decide it isn’t what we want, only the pattern, or his being ta’veren. he could decide to be noble and save us by not letting either of us near him” elayne says, and she is bang on, but min replies “more likely, if he realizes we’ll both come running when he crooks a finger, he’ll crook it. he won’t be able to help himself.” doing rand a huge disservice and proving that elayne knows him WAY better than she does

“you and i will divide him up like a pie. maybe we’ll let the third have a bit of crust when she shows up.” ugh. min you are losing my esteem left right and center. i absolutely loved her the first 4 books, things took an abrupt nosedive in book 5, and book 6 is not off to a promising start. some of you guys have assured me that min/rand will get much better once they actually have screentime together (though others have said that it remained their least fav rand ship throughout), which i hope is the case bc at the current moment there’s a long ways to go before i will ship it. at this point i’m advocating for mat straight up taking her spot in the polycule rather than being added as a fifth jkdjfg

very fitting that the next scene opens with faile saying “a man is not a horse or a field, neither of you can own him” i do feel like she ought to take her own advice there lmfao but i’m glad to see her again!!! despite how much the tsr relationship drama pissed me off, i actually really love faile? i think that’s an unpopular opinion, but I Just Think She’s Neat

so it seems it’s perrin’s turn to experience the homoerotic ta’veren pull! very interesting how faile thinks about “sharing” perrin with rand with similar language as elayne and min do about sharing rand romantically with each other. if you wanna be my lover you gotta get with my fellow ta’veren to whom fate has inexorably linked me

tangent but i’m realizing that mat’s struggle with his fate-pull to rand is so fucking SIMILAR to min’s and aviendha’s. good GOD just put him in the polycule!

“why did the dragon reborn need perrin now, so strongly that perrin could feel it across however many hundred leagues lay between them?” fellas is it gay to need your buddy so strongly that he can feel it from hundreds of leagues away

i know we hate gawyn, but him thinking about swearing an oath to give his life for elayne’s when he was “barely tall enough to peer into elayne’s cradle” 🥺🥺 that got to me okay? and i can’t blame him for believing the rumors that rand killed morgase and elayne and now wanting to kill rand for it. “gawyn had chosen to stay because his mother had always supported the tower, because his sister wanted to be aes sedai” that was an aha! moment for me where i felt that i understood gawyn’s decision in the coup much better - he has no reason to disbelieve the charges against siuan (esp since he was already suspicious of her for concealing elayne’s whereabouts) and he truly thought that supporting elaida (who was his mother’s advisor for most of his life) meant supporting the tower, and therefore his mom and sister. i still have no strong opinion about gawyn either way, time will tell whether i join the ranks of gawyn haters or end up taking him under my wing as a problematic fav

sevanna mentions a small cube that a wetlander gave to her with instructions of what to do with it once she had rand. mesaana mentions something called a “stasis box.” could one or both of these things be THE box????

i am 65% sure osan’gar is ishamael brought back to life (we know he’s a male forsaken but not rahvin, and i don’t think any of the other dead ones are important enough to make a comeback), but i wonder who aran’gar could be

“stripped to the waist...sweat slicked his hair to his skull, rolled down his chest...figures like that on the white banner overhead twined around his forearms, glittering metallically red-and-gold” god bless, we continue our tradition of a sexy description of rand to kick off the book (post-prologue). i vividly remember tfoh opening with a sexy description of him lounging by a window in rhuidean, and i believe tgh began with him shirtlessly sparring with lan

“sometimes he was so sick of himself that he really was ready to die” 😭😭😭😭😭

“rand said nothing; mat’s secrets were his own” protective boyfriend! “he supposed mat had to have read a book sometime, somewhere, but mat did not have much interest in books” exasperated boyfriend!

bashere is so chill i love him. how he has a daughter who is Like That i have no idea. i hope we get to see him and faile interact sometime.

“he would welcome more men who could channel walking the earth unmolested. finally he would stop being a freak.” 😭😭😭😭 man that just shattered my heart. sometimes it really hits that rand is only a deeply lonely 20-year-old trying his best. also, rand’s channeling abilities as metaphor for queerness example #372456

“i’m going to build something, leave something behind. whatever happens, i will do that! i’ll defeat the dark one. and cleanse saidin, so men don’t have to fear going mad, and the world doesn’t have to fear men channeling” just copy in all my commentary from the previous bullet point, crying emojis included

lots of mentions of rand’s luck, and taim even says he has the dark one’s own luck. which as we know is a mat thing! leave me to grasp at what cauthor straws i can, ok? now that i mention it, i’m 90% sure that the very first instance of “time to toss the dice” was actually rand, when he was trying to take them all thru the portal stone in tgh

lews therin when rand yells at him to shut up: surprised pikachu.jpg. interesting that he may be an actual conscious (?) voice that rand can talk to, rather than just memories etc. but does this mean that lews therin will never truly get to rest in peace, if some part of him is still alive thru rand? that’s so sad :(

i feel that entrusting all these male channelers to the tutelage of some powerful and dangerous guy who just showed up who rand is getting bad vibes from right off the bat may not be the smartest idea, but poor rand is so overworked, he really doesn’t have many other options

“to the maidens, rand was all those children come back, the first child of a maiden ever to be known to everyone”

okay okay okay i’m fine moving on

“he had to stay away from [aviendha]. he carried death with him like a contagious disease; he was like a target, and people died near him” see? elayne was bang on

rand absolutely owning the maidens by telling a joke so bad even i can’t work out the punchline. i love him.

“tolmeran’s doubts centered on mat. despite what he had heard from cairhienin of mat’s skill in battle, tolmeran thought it flattery from fools for a country man who happened to be a friend of the dragon reborn” i just KNOW there are rumors that mat only got his job because he’s sleeping with rand, i just know it

“they were honest objections, and semaradrid’s even had validity” so rand thinks that tolmeran’s objections about mat are NOT valid. supportive boyfriend!

the maidens giving rand advice for how to get aviendha’s attention i’m crying they are his big sisters and moms!!! i love them!!!!

had to post this passage in full bc i’m hollering. i rest my case about there being rumors that mat is sleeping with rand. he is so anxious about anyone finding out rand teleported to his room for a pre-dawn bootycall (which, come on, rand, you can’t just teleport directly into someone’s room in the middle of the night, mat would’ve been well within his rights to stab you)

“how do you know you’re in love with a woman, mat?” “how in the pit of doom should i know?” mat has no time for your heteronormative assumptions rand

i feel like rand didn’t even need mat’s input on anything, he just came bc he wanted to talk to him 🥺 usually rand keeps his problems close to his chest, but he’s venting pretty freely to mat rn

rand saying “no man should have another man’s voice in his head” about his own problems and mat thinking he’s talking about HIS problems AAAAAAHHHH JUST FUCKIN TALK TO EACH OTHER YOU IDIOTS!!! YOU HAVE (SOME OF) THE SAME PROBLEMS!!! GIVE EACH OTHER THERAPY!!!!! GODDAMMIT

mat has adopted a child!! he really went “i’ve only had olver for a second and a half but if anything happens to him i’ll kill everyone in this town and then myself.” he is such a dad!!!! him kneeling down to talk to olver instead of talking about him over his head to another adult because he used to hate when adults did that to him 🥺🥺🥺 this will be all the more touching in the show with Dad Mat already established by his devotion to his sisters

i am so sooooo curious about the lands beyond the aiel waste and wonder if we’ll ever see more of them

#wot #wot book spoilers #oh i forget whereabouts this happened but i cracked up when rand was like 'uh oh i lost asmodean. oh well!'#poor asmodean really did get the most unceremonious offing

62 notes · View notes

suainraineendgame · 2 years

Text

Conversations with Lan and Moiraine: A fanfic attempt

Lan and Moiraine were still sitting on the floor at the eye, having finished their conversation on the curiosities of broken cuendilar and what this meant for the final battle. Moiraine had fallen silent again. And the two of them had been sitting there in that silence which became more and more unbearable the longer it went on.

“What does this mean for us?” Lan finally got up the courage to ask.

Moiraine looked at him with vulnerable eyes, but she still didn’t say anything. Before the block she wouldn’t have needed to because Lan could feel her emotions and he would know exactly how she was feeling. But now all he felt was the wide gulf between them.

“I can still feel the bond,” he said. “I can’t feel you because of the block. But the bond did not break. This must mean that you haven’t been st....”

Moiraine shot a glare at him that required no bond to understand. In the past he would have immediately corrected himself, but this time he was beginning to feel frustrated and angry. Lan couldn’t remember the last time he had been truly angry with her, but today he was. This was all her fault! If she wouldn’t have masked their bond. If she wouldn’t have gone off on her suicide mission without him then none of this would have happened. He could have protected her. Protected her power. That’s what a warder was supposed to do. But she had prevented him. Had pushed him away into the arms of another woman.

And so he said the word. “Stilled.” And then he said it again. “If you had been stilled the bond would have broken. But it didn’t break which means that whatever the dark one did to you it must only be blocking you from touching the source, just as your block prevents me from feeling you.”

Moiraine wordlessly averted her eyes. The two of them hadn’t needed a lot of words before the block. They were both more comfortable with silence, especially when difficult subjects or strong emotions were involved. But things were different now and they were going to need to use their words much more than either was comfortable doing until the block was removed.

And so he carried on. “There must be a way to remove your block, and we will find that way together.”

Moiraine turned toward him again. She shook her head, a small smile touched her lips. “You make it sound so easy.” She reached out for his hand, and he took hers. Her own hands were trembling as she wove her fingers through his own. The touch comforted him a little.

“I didn’t say it would be easy. But we’ve accomplished harder things together.”

Moiraine shook her head again. “I don’t know if this has a solution. There may not be anything anyone can do. So much knowledge from the past has been lost to us.”

“The Aes Sedai have records though. Many of your brown sisters keep their own private libraries. Surely one of them must know how to help you.”

Moiraine squeezed his hand but didn’t respond.

“You must have an idea of someone who might have the information we seek. And if you don’t know then ask your blue sisters. Someone must know something.”

“You are not to breathe a word of this to anyone.” Moiraine said sharply. “Especially not to a sister. No one must know what really happened here, today.”

“Not even Siuan?” Lan asked.

Tears brimmed to the surface and a few new ones slipped down Moiraine’s face resoaking the old dried tears which she had yet to wipe off. “Let her think I died here,” she whispered so quietly, Lan barely heard.

“I don’t understand,” Lan said. “If you don’t trust someone and let them in no one will be able to help you. Help us.”

Moiraine didn’t respond again. She just looked at him sadly then pulled her hand away. Then she stood and brushed the dirt from her trousers. His trousers, actually, he realized as he rose with her. She had borrowed from him again.

“You should return to her. Tell them you arrived too late and you couldn’t find us. Comfort them as best you can, and escort the girls to the White Tower.”

“No,” Lan was incredulous. She couldn’t possibly be sending him away again. She could try, but there was no way he would ever willingly leave his Aes Sedai’s side again.

“Nyneave will become Aes Sedai and when she does you can bond with her. I know how you feel about her. How you long to be as close with her as you and I are -,” she caught herself, “were. She’s young and she is strong, and she’s going to need someone equally strong to be her champion.”

“No.” Lan said again. “I swore an oath to always be by your side and I will not abandon you now. Not in your condition.”

“And what condition is that?” Moiraine challenged him, her voice rising. “Helpless? Feeble? You don’t think I can take care of myself?” Moiraine shook her head. “I don’t need you, Lan. I never did. I only kept you around because I’m selfish and you’re good company.”

Lan didn’t take the bait. He didn’t need the bond to see the terror in her eyes and to know she was spiraling. She was pushing him away because that’s what she always did when she felt a loss of control. Lan stepped closer and firmly grasped her by both of her arms and shook her just a little. He needed her to feel his strength.

“I’m selfish, too. And I am not leaving your side again as long as we both breathe. I’m here for you, Moiraine. Even though I can’t feel you. And even though I’m furious with you. You’re stuck with me whether you like it or not,”

For a moment he thought she was going to break down again. But then she seemed to recover herself. “Are you certain?” Her eyes bore deeply into his. “I have no idea what the future holds, but I have a feeling it won’t be pleasant.”

“I choose you,” Lan said clearly. “No matter what happens next, you and I shall face the consequences together.”

Moiraine smiled a little wider, this time. A smile that actually reached her eyes. “You were right about one thing,” she said. “I need to study. I need to learn more about the dark one, more about the eye, cuendilar, the last battle, and everything else I don’t know that I don’t know. And I think I know just the place.”

Lan nodded his head and released her. This was the Moiraine he knew. Steadfast and in control.

“It’s dark out there now,” he observed. “We should stay here for the night and return to Fal Dara in the morning.”

Moiraine shook her head. “We’ll leave in the morning but we won’t be returning to Fal Dara. I was serious when I said I want everyone to think we’re dead. Including Siuan. It’s better and safer for her that way.”

Lan knew better than to try reasoning with her or changing her mind. He’d gotten away with challenging her once. He wasn’t willing to risk trying again. Besides, in the 20 years they’d traveled together he had learned to trust her more than he sometimes even trusted himself. If she believed this was the necessary path then he would follow it. Even though he knew how much additional pain this path would cause her.

#Lan Moiraine Wheel of Time WOT Fanfic attempt S1 WOT Spoilers

36 notes · View notes

ivanaskye · 4 years

Text

I’ve been thinking about making this post for a while, since I finished reading Wheel of Time, a series whose first book I read many years ago and hated, a series which ended up being very much one of my favorite of all time if not my single favorite, a series that has my two favorite characters ever.

A series that is very flawed.

So behold, my long answer to the question...

Should you read The Wheel of Time?

I’ll split this into three sections (but not three posts): What Even Is The Wheel Of Time, Some Likely Dealbreakers, and Tl;Dr.

Under the readmore, of course.

1. What Even Is The Wheel of Time?

A system of circular time in which the same rough eras of humanity repeat

However, the fact that time in the series operates this way... doesn’t actually matter that much.

And out of seven total repeating ages, we only spend time in one, and only know anything at all about four others.

The last three? A mystery

Don’t worry about it

Okay, that’s probably not what you were asking. You were probably asking something more like: what’s the plot of this series?

Let me be straight with you about that one.

It’s a Chosen One plot.

But,

It also has a very large cast of characters, many of which are very Protagonist in their own right

Including the main character’s immediate foil, who is absolutely not a “Chosen One” except for the fact that she freaking chose herself, basically manufacturing her own call to adventure out of the main character’s.

The six Most Main characters (by most fans’ understanding), can IMO be divided exactly into three foil-pairs: the Central Saving The World one, the Self Awareness Whomst? I Hate People Of Course I’d Never Help Anyone (Trips over 139289131 Pictures of Helping Other People) one, and the Study In Leadership one.

And remember that Chosen One I mentioned?

Yeah, he actually has a shit deal with being Chosen

Specifically: he is 100% prophecized to destroy the world. Whether he also saves it is a little more up in the air.

He’s also almost certainly fated to Go Insane.

(...Which is why the first ~3 books of the series are just him Running Away From His Fate at Full Speed, which--spoiler alert--Does Not Work.)

See also: Alienating All Your Friends 101, How NOT To Accept Being Polyamorous, It’s War Crimes Time

(Yes, there is canon polyamory.)

(...And a LOT of canon war crimes.)

But. In order to go any further, I have to talk about the Possible Dealbreakers of these series.

2. So, About Those Dealbreakers

Broadly speaking, I’d say there are three: length, The Gender Binary, and Oh God Why Is Everyone Such A Dumbass.

Let’s go at these one-by-one.

Length

Let me be very clear here: WoT is over four million words long in total.

This has at times been calculated as perhaps the longest word count for any series... ever? It’s certainly one of the longest English-language series that occurs to random statistics geeks to look at the word count of.

For reference, in case you needed it... that’s longer than Homestuck. This is true even if you translate images, videos, and so on into equivalent word counts. And include the epilogue. And... yeah.

It’s like, shonen-long.

The upside of this, however... is that it’s really long.

That might seem like a weird upside, but if you’ve ever wanted to get really immersed in a series... especially if you read very quickly and usually get through things fast... well.

To put things in perspective, I often read 300-page books in one sitting without trouble. WoT took me about six months.

So uh

Do you want your life, mind, body, and soul to get eaten by a book series?

The answer to that question will probably tell you if you should read Wheel of Time

The Gender Binary

Okay, so here’s the thing: in the time period WoT takes place in, only women can use The One Power (the main form of magic in the setting).

The reason for this is that the One Power, despite being called one right there in the name, is divided into the Female Version and the Male Version. Only women can use the former, only men can use the latter. And the latter has been tainted such that any man who uses it goes mad.

Our main character is a man who can use the power.

The upside is that things actually go very un-sexistly from here. The different ways to access male (saidin) vs female (saidar) power don’t actually correlate to any consistent difference in personality or attitudes between men and women.

The fact that the MC is The One Man Using The Power and The Most Powerful, Because Chosen One... is actually also played shockingly un-sexistly.

However, there very much always is that binary. Trans people? Nonbinary people? Uh... you can headcanon if you want, but the canon is not giving you that much to work with.

To make matters a little worse, men and women distrust each other to an almost hilarious amount in the setting. (My guess is something about Mostly A Patriarchy + Women Are The Mysterious Powerful Magic Users has really frayed gender relations in this society.) There are many, many in-character statements of “All men are [x unflattering thing]” “all women are [y unflattering thing]”, but these do not seem to in any way reflect the author’s beliefs, and are never actually true in-world; the characters are just Bad At This.

(A common example of this is “Women are all gossips!” *cut to a group of women* “Men are all gossips!”. Of course, the truth is that there are both male and female gossips and non-gossips in the series).

You would think this situation would lead to more just-women and just-men groups, but except from Magic-User Stuff, there isn’t that much of that, becaaaaause

~Heterosexuality~

Sigh, yes, this series is very het.

It’s not as het as it is binary; the Aes Sedai (female magic users) have a word for women who are having sex with each other, and there’s an onpage FF kiss in the prequel.

But it’s... not a lot.

So if you need a hit of sweet, sweet LGBTQ rep, it’s... not going to be here. Sorry. (Thankfully, a very large amount of fantasy books coming out today do have rep! It’s not that hard to find!)

Thankfully, most of WoT’s het romances are pretty good and believable/shippable. Though not all are.

And, the final likely dealbreaker...

Everyone Here Is A Dumbass

Listen. Nobody in this series drank their Having Brain Cells juice, uh... ever.

(Okay, exactly two characters--Min and Loial--did, but that’s it)

You know how I was talking about the gender mistrust? That’s just one example of an endemic problem of absolutely no one trusting other people, telling anyone things, or in any way having functional conversations

Min Literally Saves Lives By Being The Only Person Who Tells People Things

In addition to interpersonal problems, the characters’ problem-solving skills are uhh

Uhhhhhh

Uhhhhhhhh

Well, as I said, Rand, our main character, spends three books running away from his problems at full speed

After that, he’s only uh... dodging! Jogging away! Yeah

Meanwhile, basically everyone is doing the I Must Put Myself In Extreme Danger To Protect My Friends Who I would Never Accept Doing The Same (bonus points for when two people are doing this to protect each other at the same time) thing

And I Will Face God And Run Into Danger At Mach Speed

The upside is... you might like reading about these kinds of characters

But if you prefer characters who are not walking trash fires

Then I’m sorry

WoT is probably not for you

3. Tl;dr

In summary, Wheel of Time is an almost comically long series about a large cast of characters who have never functioned in their life trying to prevent the end of the world and having a really bad time.

(For some reason it doesn’t have a reputation as a Dark SeriesTM, but it actually is very dark at times. Although far from grim--every action seems to really matter, nothing is meaningless, it’s just that sometimes those actions are war crimes and people dying and a shit-ton of torture).

IMO, some of the other series that might be good predictors for liking WoT are Homestuck, Hunter X Hunter, and ASOIAF. In other words, other very long, large-casted series about trash fires.

If you want one other bit of enticement, the main character has the lowest nadir of any character arc I’ve ever seen, followed by the most impressive high and resolution. So if that’s your kind of thing, and if the dealbreakers don’t break your deals. Go ahead and give it a try.

#wot #wheel of time

232 notes · View notes

neuxue · 4 years

Text

Wheel of Time liveblogging: Towers of Midnight ch 5

Gawyn tries his hand at a murder mystery and relationship negotiation, Graendal tries her hand at wolf-hunting, and Moridin is, as ever, a Situation.

Chapter 5: Writings

Gawyn? Must we? Though there’s a Forsaken chapter icon so I hold out some hope for this chapter.

And Sleete’s back, it would seem. And okay Gawyn your description of him is rather detailed and lingers lovingly on his ruggedness, grace, and cheekbones. Maybe you should ask him out and leave Egwene alone.

Oh, I see; we’re doing a murder mystery. Mesaana? Is that you?

“Do you really think you’ll find anything the sisters did not, Trakand?” Chubain asked, folding his arms.

“I’m looking for different things,” Gawyn said

Sorry Gawyn, but I don’t think you’ll find any critical thinking skills beneath that rug. You never know, though! Or maybe it’s hiding that sense of purpose you left behind in Andor?

Jokes aside, I think I know what’s going on here: we’re setting up a murder mystery so that Gawyn can solve it where no one else could and, in doing so, redeem himself in Egwene’s and I suppose theoretically the reader’s eyes as well.

Meh. It feels a little contrived, but that might just be because my patience with Gawyn ran out a book or two ago.

Or maybe because he was actually more interesting to me, in a kind of character-study sense, when he was falling, and I’m just not that interested in watching him rise.

[The guards] weren’t as antagonistic towards [Sleete] as they tended to be towards Gawyn. He still hadn’t figured out why they were like that with him.

Wow, Gawyn, I wonder why that could possibly be. Maybe because Sleete’s a Warder and also doesn’t go about antagonising the Amyrlin Seat and demanding to be let into places and annoying everyone within earshot? And also changing sides several times – and okay, yes, Gawyn picked the ‘right’ side in the end, but from the perspective of the guards… really, Gawyn? You can’t think why they might not like you?

At least he can figure out that this is probably not the Black Ajah’s work.

Why did nobody sense channelling from the places where the women were killed?

So this still fits with it being Mesaana but it reminds me of something that I’ve wondered about a few times: if Mesaana is masquerading as an Aes Sedai, how does no one notice her strength, if she’s not hiding her ability, or the fact that she apparently can’t channel, if she is? Or is it possible to partially mask the ability to channel?

When Egwene had told Gawyn he could visit the scenes of the murders if he wished, he’d asked if he could bring Sleete with him.

Good first date ideas: visit a murder scene!

(To be fair that’s basically the plot of most crime dramas, so)

True, he didn’t know much about gateways yet, and people could reportedly make them hang above the ground so they didn’t cut anything. But why would the Black Ajah care about that?

Because not all villains like to chew scenery? It’s awfully gristly, you know.

Also to avoid leaving evidence and make forensics harder. Come on, Gawyn, you’re going to have to step up your detective game a little bit here.

I am with Gawyn, though, on feeling itchy at the thought of setting up a desk that seats you with your back towards the door. How are you supposed to tab away from the embarrassing fanfic you’re writing on the shared family computer in time when someone can just walk in and see your screen? Clearly this Aes Sedai did not grow up in the early 2000s.

Aes Sedai, for all their cunning, sometimes seemed to have remarkably underdeveloped senses of self-preservation.

Gawyn. Please. No one in this series has a functioning sense of self-preservation, with the possible exception of Moghedien.

“But why kill with a knife?” Gawyn said. All four had been killed that way.

Ah. Not Mesaana, then; sounds more like one of the Seanchan bloodknives has thus far avoided notice or death. So we are setting up a victory for Gawyn. Fine. If we must.

Sleete thus far actually seems better at thinking things through and generally playing the detective game, but no doubt Gawyn’s going to get by on instinct and ‘it just doesn’t feel right’. Yes, I am probably being too hard on him. No I don’t care.

A part of him thought that if he could aid Egwene in this, maybe she would soften towards him. Perhaps forgive him for rescuing her from the Tower during the Seanchan attack.

Well, you’re in luck, Gawyn; that seems to be exactly what this narrative arc is being set up for.

Chubain really doesn’t like him. Shame, Chubain; he thinks you’re handsome.

Insufferable man! Gawyn thought. Does he have to be so dismissive towards me? I should—

No. Gawyn forced himself to keep his temper. Once, that hadn’t been nearly so hard.

Why was Chubain so hostile towards him? Gawyn found himself wondering how his mother would have handled such a man as this.

Character growth!

Seriously, though, this is a step in the right direction for Gawyn. To be able to think past that sense of anger and…entitlement, I suppose. To take a step back and think about the situation from another perspective, and think about how best to handle it, rather than just pressing forward with his first instinct. And to consider the wisdom of others who have experience in dealing with things like this, and learn from them.

Though he segues straight into blind rage over Rand al’Thor, Dragon Reborn and murderer extraordinaire, so we’ve still got a little ways to go.

In his heart, Gawyn wanted to meet al’Thor with sword in hand and ram steel through him

Pretty sure that’s not a euphemism.

Also, Ishamael tried that once. Didn’t work out too well for him. Not sure you’d fare any better.

Light! Gawyn thought as Chubain shot him a hostile glance. He thinks I’m trying to take his position.

The triumph of critical thinking! Okay okay, I give Gawyn a lot of shit, but this is the sort of thing he’s not actually bad at, when he takes half a second to do it. It’s just that for the majority of the last several books he’s been jumping to premature conclusions and acting on them without a second thought, assuming he knows best, refusing to listen to others or consider their perspectives, and trying to play his role as he thinks it should be, rather than as it is.

Gawyn’s reasonably clever and reasonably perceptive and generally reasonably competent; his downfall is that he thought he knew his place in the world, and the world didn’t comply. He was the fairytale prince, the noble hero, brother to a future queen and loyal to his oaths and son of a great nation and he knew how all of that fit together, knew his place in it, understood and embraced it.

Only this isn’t his story, and the world went ‘nope, fuck you’ and he’s spent the last several books scrambling to find his footing and not quite understanding that the world isn’t reading from the same script he was handed at age four.

(I think I’ve said elsewhere that it’s like he’s reading, say, Romeo’s lines in a production of The Tempest, and not understanding why nothing makes sense).

Gawyn could have been First Prince of the Sword—should have been First Prince of the Sword—leader of Andor’s armies and protector of the Queen.

And yet, you’re not. How lightly you take that broken oath, Gawyn.

Also, he thinks that makes it laughable that he would want Chubain’s position, but let’s continue to look at it from someone else’s perspective. The man who should have been First Prince of the Sword for some reason isn’t, and you have no idea why, and now he’s here doing some kind of independent investigation and trying to talk to the Amyrlin at every opportunity, having deserted an opposing force that he was commanding. Wouldn’t you be a little confused as to what he actually wants? He clearly doesn’t want the role you assumed he’d hold, so who’s to say he doesn’t want yours?

To give him credit, though, he handles the ensuing conversation with Chubain rather well. Keeps his temper, makes it clear without shaming Chubain that he’s not interested in usurping his role, and thanks Chubain graciously as a way of basically saying ‘I submit to your authority here, or at least I will recognise it and not challenge it’. Well done.

“I don’t think this is the work of the Black Ajah,” Gawyn said. “I think it might be a Grey Man, or some other kind of assassin.”

Yeah I think you’re actually right. Or close, anyway. My money’s on Bloodknives.

Especially now that Sleete’s found a scrap of black silk. What is this, Cluedo?

“I think this is more proof. I mean, it seems odd that nobody has actually seen these Black sisters. We’re making a lot of assumptions.”

Since when has that ever stopped you?

Egwene’s clearly still giving Gawyn something of the cold shoulder, and Gawyn’s being somewhat petulant about it and no, Gawyn, letting Hattori bond you in order to make Egwene jealous is probably not a wise move, but you know that.

It had not been easy to decide to give up Andor—not to mention the Younglings—for her. Yet she still refused to bond him.

Yeah, funny thing about choosing to make sacrifices for someone: if they haven’t asked it of you, it doesn’t actually entitle you to anything in return. A measure of respect or thanks, perhaps, but beyond that, they were your choices, Gawyn, and that’s kind of the point here.

Silviana’s clearly running interference for Egwene, telling Gawyn to wait while she writes a letter which probably means trying to teach him patience and what it actually means to date the Amyrlin.

Egwene saw him. She kept her face Aes Sedai serene—she’d grown good at that so quickly—and he found himself feeling awkward.

Good. You should.

Gawyn’s pursuit of Egwene just makes me want to hit my head against a wall repeatedly, in no small part because I’ve been on the receiving end of something similar and it is Not Fun.

Then again Egwene actually likes Gawyn, which… Egwene you could do so much better. But fine. Sure. Whatever. Sigh.

“Burn me, Egwene. Do you have to show me the Amyrlin every time we speak? Once in a while, can’t I see Egwene?”

“I show you the Amyrlin,” Egwene said, “because you refuse to accept her. Once you do so, perhaps we can move beyond that.”

YES. DRAG HIM.

But, my delight in this aside, this is exactly the point Gawyn needs to get through his head. She is the Amyrlin, and he has to actually understand that, and right now he still… doesn’t. I mean okay, being in a relationship with someone like a head of state is probably not exactly easy, but this is important water to be able to navigate. She is the Amyrlin, and he has to understand that sometimes that’s who she needs to be, and that he doesn’t get to ignore that just because he also knows Egwene. He needs to understand where those boundaries are between Egwene and Amyrlin, public and private, lines he can cross and lines he can’t, and when and how and where. Is that fair? Eh, maybe, maybe not. But it’s the reality, and if he can’t deal with it then maybe dating the Amyrlin Seat is not for him.

“Light! You’ve learned to talk like one of them.”

“That’s because I am one of them,” she said.

He still doesn’t get it. This isn’t just an act she’s putting on for fun, or something she can drop whenever she pleases. He doesn’t get all-hours access to Egwene al’Vere of Emond’s Field, because her role means she can’t be that all the time. She isn’t just that anymore. That’s what she’s trying to tell him here: just as Rand is both himself and Lews Therin, shepherd and Dragon Reborn, both and not separate, she is Egwene al’Vere the girl he first met but also the Amyrlin Seat, innkeeper’s daughter and Aes Sedai. That’s a part of her now, not just decoration (and not a distinct personality she can toggle on and off).

Gawyn sees her as playing a role, when in reality she is that role. And you know what they say: if you love someone you have to accept them for who they are. Or something like that. I wouldn’t know.

“I accept you,” Gawyn said. “I do, Egwene.”

Oh, if saying it made it so.

“But isn’t it important to have people who know you for yourself and not the title?”

Yes. Critically so. But you’re still missing a key part of that: it’s important to have people who know her for herself, but who also understand the title, and understand the necessity of it, and what it means for her.

Like Nynaeve and Elayne: they accept her authority as Amyrlin, and know that when she gives them commands as Amrylin to Aes Sedai, it doesn’t impinge on their friendship. And they also know that there are times to be her friend, and times not to be.

It’s about balance: the point of having people who know her for herself is to have an anchor, a steadying force. But Gawyn doesn’t see the balance; he’s just looking at a single part of her and trying to make that into the whole.

And again: it’s not easy! This is not going to be a simple relationship to navigate! But it’s not going to work if he can’t respect her day job that actually demands quite a lot of her and is sort of a little bit important and sometimes means he’s going to have to take a step back and let her be Amyrlin.

Right now, though, he’s still acting as if… as if he knows better. Which has kind of been the tone of their relationship all along, and is probably part of why it grates on me so much. He listens when he wants to, but as soon as he thinks he knows better he just ignores her. And so even this point he makes comes across as a form of entitlement: ‘play at Amyrlin, but I Know Better, so you should keep me around’.

(Also, how much does he really know her for herself? For one thing they never actually spent much time together, and for another he continually underestimates her, questions her judgement, sides against her because he doesn’t realise she’s not just a helpless child caught up in politics…I could go on).

Anyway. Point being: you still have to accept the title.

Her face softened. “You aren’t ready yet, Gawyn. I’m sorry.”

He set his jaw. Don’t overreact, he told himself. “Very well. Then, about the assassinations.”

Okay, credit where it’s due: this is exactly the right response.

Because this is, in effect, treating her like the Amyrlin. This is listening to her, much as he doesn’t like what he hears. Rather than pushing back again with hollow claims of accepting her, rather than saying ‘I am too ready’, he accepts, however grudgingly, the chastisement and also the framing of the conversation. She is speaking to him as Amyrlin, and so he pushes everything else aside and responds in kind.

Which is exactly the point she’s been trying to make, so… we’ll go ahead and call it progress.

And now he’s rewarded narratively by getting to make a point she apparently hasn’t considered: that there aren’t enough Warders given they’re heading into the Last Battle.

“The choosing and keeping of a Warder is a very personal and intimate decision. No woman should be forced to it.”

“Well,” Gawyn said, refusing to be intimidated, “the choice to go to war is very ‘personal’ and ‘intimate’ as well—yet all across the land, men are called into it. Sometimes, feelings aren’t as important as survival.”

I have…very mixed feelings on this particular argument, and kind of don’t want to go into that right now because I know a can of worms when I see one, but it sets my teeth on edge a bit.

I also don’t want Gawyn to get to score any points right now just because he managed to react the right way one time, but I can accept that this is, in fact, petty of me.

Egwene is less petty than I am and says she’ll consider it.

And I have to say, the two of them are actually navigating this whole conversation rather well. Gawyn’s trying his best to interact with her as the Amyrlin Seat, and Egwene, probably because of that, is answering his questions as much as she can. They’re establishing a working relationship, basically; they can work on their personal one next.

“You’re keeping secrets,” he said. “Not just from me. From the entire Tower.”

“Secrets are needed sometimes, Gawyn.”

“Can’t you trust me with them?” He hesitated. “I’m worried that the assassin will come for you, Egwene.”

Okay that’s toeing the line a bit, but again, he at least asks for her trust here now, rather than demanding it. Expresses his concerns, but in a way that feels more like open communication than like ‘I know best’.

And that earns him a measure of that trust, moments later:

“One of the Forsaken is in the White Tower.”

True, but I actually think Egwene is perhaps mistaken about her being the assassin. Which again annoys me because I’m petty and don’t want Gawyn to be right where she’s wrong, but hey at least I acknowledge it, right?

Point being, Gawyn, that you have to earn the trust you’re asking for, but you’re on the right track, and so you get a part of it.

And she even explains a bit of why she’s keeping it secret. This is the most openly and honestly these two have communicated with each other in… uh… ever. Round of applause.

Light, a Forsaken in the Tower seemed more plausible than Egwene being the Amyrlin Seat!

Damn it Gawyn, you were doing so well. This is the kind of thinking you need to train yourself out of. This is exactly what Egwene is referring to when she says you don’t accept her as Amyrlin. Yes, she was an unlikely appointee to that seat. Yes, she’s young and wasn’t even Aes Sedai when she was raised. Yes, it’s hard to believe. But you need to get past that now, because this just comes across as… incredibly condescending, honestly.

“For now, there is something I need of you.”

“If it is within my power, Egwene.” He took a step towards her. “You know that.”

“Is that so?” she asked dryly. “Very well. I want you to stop guarding my door at night.”

“What? Egwene, no!”

She shook her head. “You see? Your first reaction is to challenge me.”

“It is the duty of a Warder to offer challenge, in private, where his Aes Sedai is concerned!” Hammar had taught him that.

“You are not my Warder, Gawyn.”

That brought him up short.

YES. GOOD.

It is… a rather excellent demonstration of her point. They’ve made some progress here, but this… she makes an open request and he immediately promises anything in his power. But then, Gawyn’s made other promises before, and doesn’t exactly have a perfect track record of keeping them, when it comes down to it.

What he means is: ‘if it is within my power, and if I want to’.

His challenging of her request is almost secondary; the real issue here is that he says one thing (‘if it is within my power’) but immediately shows that he doesn’t actually mean it. Just as he says he accepts her as Amyrlin, but when it comes down to it, he still doesn’t. And that’s the part that erodes trust; that’s the part that means he’s not ready.

A challenge to that request—or perhaps a question as to why she’s asking it—is not completely out of line here. Like, leaving aside the question of whether or not Egwene needs a guard, or of whether he should get to guard her door when she hasn’t actually asked him to, if he hadn’t promised blindly to do whatever she asks, it would be more or less fair to ask why, before agreeing.

But he doesn’t. He makes that empty promise—so like his empty words that he does accept her as Amyrlin, really, I swear—and then immediately goes back on it. Shows that he’ll only actually listen to her when it suits him, and that he still thinks he’s free to do whatever the fuck he wants when he thinks He Knows Better. That he doesn’t actually trust her, or listen to her, when he doesn’t want to.

Turns out Egwene is literally setting herself up as bait, hence not wanting a guard. And again, challenging her on that is, I think, fair. It’s a pretty big risk! It is arguably kind of reckless! And that’s the sort of thing he could and should be able to do as someone who (supposedly) knows her as more than just Amyrlin: say ‘are you sure’ and ‘I don’t like this’.

That’s not the problem. The problem is that he doesn’t approach it that way at all: he approaches it with a blank-cheque promise that he then pulls back as soon as he realises what she’s actually asking, because in his view he only needs to listen to her when he wants to.

It's not a good look, Gawyn.

“Exposing myself is only one of my plans—and you are right, it is dangerous. But my precautions have been extensive.”

“I don’t like it at all.”

“Your approval is not required.” She eyed him. “You will have to trust me.”

“I do trust you,” he said.

“All I ask is that you show it for once.”

That’s pretty much it. It’s easy to say ‘I trust you’ or ‘I accept you’ or ‘anything within my power’. But those words have to mean something, and unfortunately he’s shown that they don’t. And so in this case she needs to see that he can obey her as Amyrlin, because this is a plan she is making as Amyrlin.

And Gawyn, you’d probably be better able to protect her if you demonstrated that trust once in a while, because then she’d know she can let you in on her plans without worrying about you going rogue and doing something against them. Then she’d know she can actually rely on you. Then your challenges – if you’re no longer challenging everything she says – would probably carry more weight, because she’d know they’re not just coming from a place of ‘I know better and I’m not listening’.

Well. They’ll get there. Maybe.

***

Over to Egwene now, which means I have to deal with the fact that she does actually like him and feels emotions and things when he’s around. Why, Egwene? Why?

That passion of his was entrancing

Trust me, it’s vastly overrated.

And it was important that she have people she could rely upon to contradict her, in private. People who knew her as Egwene, rather than the Amyrlin.

But Gawyn was too loose, too untrusting, yet.

That’s kind of what I was getting at. Because it is sort of ironic: he wants to be let into her confidence and be able to protect her and challenge her—and they’re both right that she needs people to do that! But she has to be able to trust him, and has to know that he understands her and her role, in order for him to be able to do that in a meaningful way. She has to know that it’s not just him refusing to listen, or not understanding what her role as Amyrlin actually demands of her. And has to know that she can trust his judgement when it comes down to it, and weigh up how he feels for her as Egwene vs what she needs as Amyrlin.

She looked over her letter to the new King of Tear, explaining that Rand was threatening to break the seals. Her plan to stop him would depend on her gathering support from people he trusted.

Ha. Speaking of trust. I am certain the placement of this is entirely intentional.

I’m still rather uneasy about this, but I also think there’s a decent chance that it’s not so far from what Rand actually expects or even wants. Because even if her intention right now is to ‘stop’ him, if she can get all the rulers behind her and get everyone to the right place at the right time…

But it could also go so badly. I have a feeling this is going to be one of those razor-edge kinds of moments, where the world hangs in the balance and the thing that will tip it one way or another is whether or not Egwene and Rand can in the end trust one another.

***

Oh hey it’s Graendal! Is this my reward for putting up with Gawyn? (For a certain definition of ‘putting up with’…)

Poor Graendal, having to make due with a mere cavern, in which she’s still managing to lounge on a silk chaise. I weep for you, really, I do.

Moridin stood inside his black stone palace.

YES! GOOD! MORIDIN!

Er. I mean. Oh no, scary, evil, bad. Listen, I love him.

“Aran’gar is dead, lost to us—and after the Great Lord transmigrated her soul the last time. One might think you are making a habit of this sort of thing, Graendal.”

THE CHOSEN DWINDLE, DEMANDRED. BECAUSE GRAENDAL FOUND A SNIPER RIFLE.

Anyway, whatever Moridin is here for, it’s not to play Graendal’s games. Sorry, Graendal; you’re good but he’s kind of… quite literally operating on an entirely different level here.

He’s a bit more…direct here than he usually is, and I can’t tell if that’s just Sanderson or if it’s because he’s bored of these petty games he has to play with the others and impatient with them and it’s time to move things into position for the ending so he doesn’t have time to deal with their bullshit. Probably a bit of both.

“Moridin, don’t you see? How will Lews Therin react to what he has done? Destroying an entire fortress, a miniature city of its own, with hundreds of occupants? Killing innocents to reach his goal? Will that sit easily within him?”

Moridin hesitated. No, he had not considered that.

But I wonder: did he?

Graendal is…not wrong, here, in what Natrin’s Barrow very nearly did to Rand. Did do, really; he was so close to the edge there at the end, repressing everything because if he allowed himself to feel the reality of it, it would break him. And so it drove him, ultimately, to Dragonmount, and nearly to destroying the world.

Graendal and Semirhage did their parts very, very well in that regard, even if Graendal is er… playing up how intentional it was on her side. It’s just that, at the last, Rand understood something deeper.

But how much of that whole process did Moridin himself feel? He and Rand are linked, after all, and I’m all but certain some of his existential despair crossed that link to Rand, so could he feel Rand’s suppression of emotions, and his anger and despair and everything else that threatened to overwhelm him? (Or is Moridin all too familiar with that, or simply too practiced at his own form of apathy, to even feel it as a difference?)

‘He must know pain of heart’, Moridin said; I don’t think he is as naïve here as Graendal seems to believe.

And still, I have to wonder if he felt anything, anything at all, of Rand’s remembrance of hope on Dragonmount. Or if, as the Betrayer of Hope, that is too far lost to him.

She could vaguely remember what it had been like, taking those first few steps towards the Shadow. Had she ever felt that foolish pain? Yes, unfortunately.

DAMN IT you can’t just TEASE me with things like this! That’s rude! It’s unfair! I need this story now! This is where I live! Turning points and the pain of them and your logic destroyed you, didn’t it and crossing thresholds that lead too far and losing yourself along the way but reforging something else until that loss no longer hurts and and and

But others of them had taken different paths to the Shadow, including Ishamael.

YOUR LOGIC DESTROYED YOU, DIDN’T IT.

CALLED FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF EVERYTHING.

BETRAYER OF HOPE.

(Did you betray hope or did it betray you).

I’m fine.

She could see the memories, so distant, in Moridin’s eyes. Once, she had not been sure who this man was, but now she was. The face was different, but the soul the same. Yes, he knew exactly what al’Thor was feeling.

Yeah. That. He… very much does, I think, and maybe even more so than you realise. (But if he can know the anguish why can he not know the hope—).

Also the face was different, but the soul the same is pretty and reminds me of men wear many names, many faces; different faces yet always the same man except that in this context there’s a sadness to it: as if that soul, that self, is something he cannot escape. Which, of course, seems to be exactly what Moridin himself believes: that so long as the Wheel turns, this is his fate. To be the Betrayer, the Shadow’s Champion, the one whose role is always to fight, always to oppose, and always to fall. The one for whom there is no hope except nothingness, and so that is his goal.

And it’s so close to Rand’s thoughts, there on Dragonmount just before that moment of epiphany. Why keep fighting, if all it means is another fight? What does it matter? It will only demand his soul and his self and his life over and over, and the Light’s victory only means another battle and the Shadow’s victory means annihilation so why even try?

Rand, in the end, has love and enough light to draw him back. The hint of a promise of a future that will come, even if he does not live to see it this time around. He has something – though he has had to struggle to see it – that he is fighting for. What is Moridin (Ishamael, Elan) fighting for? What does he have left to fight for? Nothing – for him there is nothing but darkness and despair and perhaps, if he is lucky, the nothingness of oblivion. For him there is no promise – and perhaps not even a memory – of Light. This is how he sees it, this is his role, and he does not see an alternative.

And so once again I have to wonder if he felt anything at all when Rand stood on Dragonmount and remembered the hope that Elan once betrayed. Perhaps not.

Sorry. I just. This is where I live and Moridin is a Situation for me and we all just have to accept that.

Anyway, Moridin may or may not be able to communicate – or at least be communicated to – directly by the Great Lord, so that’s a thing.

And Graendal’s going after Perrin now. Everyone’s set on a Perrin Aybara collision course this book, it would seem. Better get your levelling up done quickly, Perrin; she’s not exactly an easy opponent.

“He’s important,” Graendal said. “The prophecies—”

“I know the prophecies,” Moridin said softly.

Oh, and how. Knows them, knows—or certainly knows what he believes to be—his own role in them. And sees in them no way out, except the annihilation of everything.

Moridin’s not too confident in Graendal’s ability to take down Perrin.

And also has an entire storage unit full of objects of Power. That’s…interesting and terrifying, and I am keeping careful track of the mentioned inventory.

A dreamspike? That sounds…ominous, and also very much like something suited to a Perrin-centric storyline. So that should be fun.

It also comes with a very clear warning to not use it against Moridin or the others, and I’d recommend sticking to that advice, Graendal, because he will destroy you.

Then again, if he gets his way and you all achieve your victory, that will destroy you too. So, you know. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Oh and Slayer as well! Buy one object of power, get one wildcard villain free!

That voice of his… it sounded, just faintly, like that of the Great Lord.

Are his eyes on fire yet though?

But it would seem both Champions have well and truly been chosen, and invested with their power now. Rand can make crops grow with a thought and warp the air to light around him and hold a room in thrall; Moridin can speak with and almost as the Great Lord and wield the True Power and orchestrate annihilation.

“If you do succeed, the Great Lord will be pleased. Very pleased. That which has been granted you in sparseness will be heaped upon you in glory.”

She licked her dry lips. In front of her, Moridin’s expression grew distant.

Distant as those promises are empty, for I don’t think there will be any rewards or glory in the aftermath of a true success for the Great Lord. All that will remain is chaos, forever. And still, none of the Chosen but Moridin seem to quite…get that. Selfishness, Verin said, and it blinds them here.

(Which is not to say Moridin is free of that selfishness; I just think what he wants is…different).

Oh hey dark prophecies.

“They have long been known to me,” Moridin said softly, still studying the book. “But not to many others, not even the Chosen. The women and men who spoke these were isolated and held alone. The Light must never know of these words. We know of their prophecies, but they will never know all of ours.”

(But what do these prophecies say of you, Moridin? Or what do they demand?)

Interesting to have these referenced now, though, especially when we don’t actually get any of the actual text of them. Where do these come from? Are the like the Prophecies of the Light: true, but not always in the way they seem to mean, and not a guarantee but merely a possibility?

“But this…” she said, rereading the passage. “This says Aybara will die!”

“There can be many interpretations of any prophecy,” Moridin said. “But yes. This Foretelling promises that Aybara will die by our hand.”

Hm. Which of course immediately makes me think it absolutely does not promise that, but it’s a little annoying to have this as a kind of… supposed-to-be-ominous foreshadowing without actually having anything of the wording there to pick apart and see what it might really mean. That’s where the fun of a lot of the other prophecies and fortellings and viewings lies: in knowing it doesn’t always mean what the characters think it does, and trying to look at it from another angle.

Whereas here, all I can really say is ‘okay Perrin’s probably not going to die by their hand’ but I don’t get to have any reasoning or justification or ‘oh, maybe it means this’ other than ‘that doesn’t feel like where the story is going’.

Meh, oh well.

Next (ToM ch 6) Previous (ToM ch 4)

#weird POV combination but okay #I guess they both start with G?#wheel of time #neuxue liveblogs WoT #Towers of Midnight

43 notes · View notes

insomnia-productions · 4 years

Text

In The World Of Dreams - a mat/rand drabble

Summary:

“This is a dream, isn’t it?”

“It is. And it isn’t.”

Mat rolls his eyes, tugging gently on the medallion around his neck. “Of course. That clears that up.” But he smiles slightly, crookedly, in that way only he can.

Note: this can be read as a standalone fic, but it is intended as a sequel to The Dragon And His General.

Read on AO3

It isn’t hard to find Mat’s dream in Tel’aran’rhiod .

Maybe it’s to do with ta’veren. Most things are, it seems. He thinks maybe someone once told him, or told someone he used to be, that it’s easiest to find the dreams of people you love. That, oftentimes, their dreams find you. He doesn’t know what about that thought scares him.

Maybe Mat’s dream is easy to find because it is dark and opaque. Not hidden, in the way Aes Sedai dreams are hidden, not all locked up and murky, like his own dreams are. Just dark, like curtains drawn quickly over a window, like a door hastily shut just before some illicit activity takes place in a room. It might be surprising to anyone else, for such a brash person to have such private dreams. But he knows Mat better than most, understands the depths of his inner world better than anyone, and the quiet pride he feels at that fact only sours his mood.

He turns away from Mat’s dream. Unseen, it approaches from behind.

“Rand?”

Rand turns, stamping down surprise as he feels the dream wash over him. His fingers turn in his pocket, rolling cool metal between them.

Mat sits cross-legged on a large bed, deep pink curtains with heavy gold embroidery hanging from the tall wooden frame. His gaze flits between Rand’s face and the crown driving thin cuts into his forehead. Rand looks around, looks at the unfamiliar scenery outside the window, at Mat’s torn clothes, at the ribbons on the floor. He thinks of a hundred things to say. Where are you and I miss you and I shouldn’t stay with you and There’s something I’ve wanted to ask you for years and years.

In the end, he only says, “You’re alive.”

“More or less,” Mat shrugs. And then, slowly, “This is a dream, isn’t it?”

“It is. And it isn’t.”

Mat rolls his eyes, tugging gently on the medallion around his neck. “Of course. That clears that up.” But he smiles slightly, crookedly, in that way only he can.

Rand feels warmth flood through him, washing over his whole body, in a way he hasn’t felt in what must be months but feels like years. Altara was cold, Cairhien colder, and Min’s easy friendship alleviates the chill, but it was Mat who warmed him, made him feel like Illian, Cairhien, Rhuidean, every place was home. It feels good, and it feels familiar, and it feels somehow scary, like a Grey Man, like a threat that is unseen but not unfelt.

He struggles to shake the feeling, struggles to force out words to distract him. “Where is this?”

Suddenly Mat seems to notice his surroundings, eyes darting around the room, to the ribbons, to the door, cracked just slightly open. His clothes flicker and repair themselves; the ribbons disappear; heavy padlocks grow like thick vines over the door, forcing it shut.

“Ebou Dar,” he says shortly.

What happened here, Rand wants to ask. Mat shouldn’t have been in Ebou Dar at all, but somehow, looking at the expression on his face, why is not the question he cares about. Before he can ask, Mat starts to talk again. Perhaps he, too, is looking for words to distract himself from some uneasy feeling. Rand doesn’t interrupt him; he doesn’t have the right to. After all, he is the one who sent Mat away.

“You have a new crown.” Mat slips from the bed and comes to stand before him, one hand brushing lightly over the Crown Of Swords. Even that hurts, thin metal spines pricking his skin. Mat frowns. “I liked the old ones better.”

Rand looks at him. “Cairhien? Illian? You hated those, too.”

Mat shakes his head, stepping away. “Emond’s Field.”

The world ripples around them, tiled floor turning to dirt, sky stretched out above them, vast and cloudless, the air stirring gently and infused with the scent of mid-spring flowers.

Mat pulls a face, looking down at his brown farmer’s clothes with an odd sort of fondness. “I never imagined I would be happy to be back here, in these boring old clothes.” A thin shiver ripples through him and he turns away abruptly, rubbing absently at his wrists. Rand watches him stumble a few steps away, and then realizes with a jolt that his royal attire has vanished, too, replaced with the clothes he had worn on that summer evening so many years ago, when he and Mat had sat by the brook and talked about the future. He feels a smile touch his lips at the memory. They had talked about running away, traveling the world… and something else. His hand slips into his pocket, touching cool silver; he pulls it out again, as though burned.

A few paces ahead, Mat is running his fingers over the petals of tall flowers. They weave together as he does so, forming a ring of green, speckled with sunbursts—work completed in that effortless way only possible in dreams. And Rand remembers.

“Emond’s Field,” he echoes, and smiles. It feels unfamiliar on his face. “My first crown was in Emond’s Field.”

Mat looks over, and grins at him. For a moment, the Crown Of Swords flickers, vanishing from his head, leaving a soft ring of yellow flowers in its place. The crown returns too quickly, colder and sharper against his forehead than before. Rand curls his hand into a fist to keep himself from flinging it from his head.

Suddenly he feels the urge to run, to let the One Power rip through him so that it tears the World of Dreams apart before he can succumb completely to the urge to stay here and live this dream forever.

It’s so quiet here, in the meadow just beyond the village. He can hear the brook gurgling somewhere nearby, hidden by tall grasses. Ladybugs buzz softly, red ones flitting from one plant to another, little yellow ones perched on the stalks, blue ones climbing steadfastly past them. A faint breeze stirs the air; Rand watches it ruffle Mat’s hair. And, oh, Light, Mat, Mat is here, and safe, and grinning at him like they’re still boys playing in the meadow, with no knowledge of the outside world beyond the notion that fireworks came from there.

Already the memories of battle, of madness, are fading. Rand clings to them, forcing them to the forefront of his mind, feeling cold and sick flush away his warmth. He can’t afford to stay the night in this dream; if he must wake without it, he doesn’t think he will be able to wake at all.

Mat notices the change and comes closer.

“Rand? What’s wrong?” Rand backs away from him and Mat halts, irritation flashing across his face. “Don’t say what you’re about to say.”

“I have to go,” Rand forces out. “I- I can’t stay here. It’s not—safe.”

Mat throws up his hands. “Why not? It’s just a dream.”

“I can’t stay,” Rand says softly. “If I stay, I won’t be able to leave.”

The sigh he receives in response is infuriated and heavy. Once again, the scenery shifts, and Rand finds himself in a small, messy room with brown walls and a sturdy bed; Mat’s old bedroom in Emond’s Field. It smells like wood and earth; Rand breathes in the scent of home while Mat throws himself backwards onto the bed, pulling a face as it creaks loudly.

“It’s smaller than I remembered, but I reckon we’ll both still fit.” Sitting up, he squints at Rand. “You look like you’ve been to the Pit of Doom and back. Get some sleep, at least.”

Rand shakes his head, hand dipping into his pocket again. Moving slowly, he sits next to Mat on the bed. “I really can’t stay. But, before I go…” He takes his hand out, fist closed, and gestures for Mat to hold out his own hand. Mat watches with interest as Rand places the object onto his palm, closing his fist before Mat can see it.

“You don’t have to decide yet, but… keep this safe for me. Then, when you come back, you can give it back if you want… or you can keep it.”

Mat looks at him in confusion. “Rand—”

“It doesn’t matter—whether you want it or not. Just come back soon, so you can tell me—whatever the answer is.” Rand stands up from the bed, moving away. He feels himself pull away from the dream, sees his physical form start to flicker and fade.

Mat is on his feet in an instant, fist still clenched tightly around the object. He reaches the other hand out, expression caught between a scowl and a plea. “Rand, wait—”

“I love you,” Rand says, but the dream is distorting, and he isn’t sure if Mat hears.

The dream drifts idly away. Rand watches it go from within the Void, and returns to his wandering.

Mat wakes in the infirmary room to the sound of moans and sobs. Healers and Wise Women rush around in a flurry; no one here pays any notion to yet another man with tears in his eyes. He wipes them roughly away, colored dots dancing over his eyelids. Eyes shut, he runs his fingers over the cold metal.

“Where’d you get that?” the man in the next bed asks. Mat ignores him.

He slips the ring onto his finger, and when he opens his eyes, they are dry.

#cauthor #rat #mat cauthon #rand al'thor #wot #wheel of time #the wheel of time #wot fic #wot path of dagger #wot pod #wot spoilers #but not really #mat x rand #rand x mat

27 notes · View notes

neuxue · 4 years

Text

Wheel of Time liveblogging: Towers of Midnight ch 4

Perrin goes hunting and we consider the problems with zero-sum solitaire, and Galad... is Galad.

Chapter 4: The Pattern Groans

We’re with Perrin, but it smells like corpses and the grass looks infected and it’s not the first time this has been brought up, so… how sure are we the Blight is staying put?

Oh, the Aes Sedai agree. Is this part of the Pattern fraying and the Dark One reaching out into the world, then? That the Blight sort of crops up in those stretched spaces?

Especially because at this point in the timeline, Rand’s not exactly counteracting it.

Light, Perrin thought, taking the leaf as Nevarin handed it to him. It smelled of decay. What kind of world is it where the Blight is the good alternative?

I don’t know, ask Lan.

“It’s probably not dangerous,” Perrin said.

Presented without further context. Famous last words, Perrin. Right up there with ‘a trap’s not a trap if you know it’s there’ –Rand al’Thor.

Meanwhile Perrin’s still dealing with Office Politics: Epic Fantasy Edition on a constant basis. Well, you and Egwene will have plenty to talk about when you finally meet in Tel’aran’rhiod or maybe for that dance you owe her on Sunday.

(I have absolutely no expectation of the latter happening; I just like to remember it sometimes because it’s the right kind of sad. The former though… please).

If only those clouds would pass so they could get some good sunlight to dry the soil

Given where you seem to be relative to Rand’s timeline, Perrin, you… might be waiting a little while. Might I recommend an umbrella? Or perhaps some fire insurance?

A strange village with an architectural style that seems out of place? Shiota again, perhaps? Either way, You probably do not want to go into that village. You may not ever come out. Well, okay, you’re a protagonist so you’ll probably be fine, but all the same.

Light! How bad were things becoming?

The thing with the timeline misalignment is that it takes away from the effect of this a little bit, for me. Because while I get that the Pattern itself is being strained and the Dark One is drawing closer to the world and all that, and Rand’s revelation on Dragonmount isn’t going to immediately fix everything, some of the tension there is gone. When such a major arc has finally passed its darkest point and reached a kind of catharsis, it’s a little weird to then go back to ‘okay but pretend that hasn’t happened yet’.

So, yes, I think this is probably not specifically related to Rand (inasmuch as anything at this point can be said to be not related to Rand, given his power and his role and his Fisher King-like link to the entire world), and therefore isn’t just a ‘oh don’t worry this will fix once the timelines are caught up’ but I can’t help feeling some of that anyway.

“Burn the village,” he said, turning. “Use the One Power.”

Should’ve invited Rand.

WOLF DREAM WOLF DREAM WOLF DREAM!

Even in Tel’aran’rhiod there’s a storm. But again, I can’t help but feel that some of the impact that should have (‘I am the storm’) is lacking a little, now. It’s not a major criticism and a lot of it is probably just me, but… I don’t know. It just feels ever so slightly off.

The wolves are calling to Perrin and so of course we come back to his central conflict with himself but surely this, too, must be approaching its point of crisis soon. There’s just not that much time left, and he’s been circling this one for so long, and especially after Malden he’s constantly being forced to look at it, just as Rand came closer and closer to that necessary confrontation with himself and the part of him that was Lews Therin and what he’s doing.

The invitations awakened something deep within him, the wolf he tried to keep locked away. But a wolf could not be locked up for long. It either escaped or it died

This touches on a particularly ironic aspect of this conflict: Perrin tries to lock the wolf aspect of himself away, to shut it out and refuse it, because he is afraid of losing himself to it. But it is a part of himself, and so by shutting it away in order to keep from losing who he is, he is in fact trying to kill or lose… a part of who he is.

Again, there’s the obvious parallel to Rand here, and the whole question of how to accept a part of yourself you’re terrified of, a part of yourself you hate or fear or cannot reconcile with the rest of your self-perception. The whole struggle of identity, of acceptance and denial, of answering that age-old question of who are you?

And I like how we get to watch so many different characters take on that struggle, from slightly different directions or with slightly different variations, but at the centre of it all that same question of identity, and what it means to be who you are versus who you must be versus who you choose to be, and how to find that balance. So many characters at war with themselves one way or another, and ultimately they all have to find some way to make peace, and so we just get Identity: Theme and Variation across the series.

(Of course, there are also the characters who aren’t at war with themselves, and whose stories of identity take on a slightly different flavour – Egwene being an obvious example – but I’ll just… save that one for another time or else we’ll be here all day).

“No!” Perrin said, sitting up, holding his head. “I will not lose myself in you.”

(Said Rand to Lews Therin).

Except by denying them, Perrin, you only lose a different part of yourself. And if so much of your energy and self is dedicated to fighting yourself, are you not also then lost? You can’t win a war when you are your own opponent.

He’s looking at this as a zero-sum game: himself against the wolf, and only one can win, and the other must be lost. And so he chooses himself, and tries to suppress or defeat the wolf, but it’s not a zero-sum game, for the very simple reason that there is no other player. He just thinks there is. Much as Rand viewed Lews Therin as an opponent, rather than as a part of himself.

In summary: don’t play prisoner’s dilemma with yourself, because that way lies madness.

You are invited, Young Bull, Hopper sent.

An invitation, not a demand. A gift, an offering, and of course a choice. It’s not something trying to consume him or fight him.

“Hopper, we spoke of this. I’m losing myself. When I go into battle, I become enraged. Like a wolf.”

Like a wolf? Hopper sent. Young Bull, you are a wolf. And a man. Come hunt.

I like the way they talk almost across each other here; Perrin is so set on viewing this as a fight, as a zero-sum game, as an either-or. And Hopper doesn’t understand what he’s on about, because as far as Hopper is concerned, Perrin is a man and a wolf and the two are not mutually exclusive. (Rand and Lews Therin are one and the same).

“I will not let this consume me.” He thought of a young man with golden eyes, locked in a cage, all humanity gone from him.

Except that as he is now, the wolf-aspect of him is effectively encaged, and that’s probably not healthy either. Still, though, so long as he insists on seeing it as something separate to himself, something invasive or antagonistic or other, some part of him will always be trapped.

Which… we’re given Noam as an example, and I do think there’s a path down which Perrin could theoretically end up being ‘consumed’ by the wolf, just as there was a path down which Rand could have ended up, as Moiraine put it, calling himself Lews Therin and Lanfear’s devoted lover. Or, you know, killing his father and the world and himself, and succumbing to the exact fate he pushed Lews Therin away in fear of in the first place.

Because when you’re that committed to framing it as a fight, and suppressing one side or the other, it’s hard to keep it from becoming that, even if that’s not what it ‘should’ be. Not all battles against oneself end in reconciliation. But there’s a bitter kind of irony to it, in that I think the only way Perrin would end up truly ‘losing himself’ to the wolf would be because he framed it as something he could lose to in the first place. (Or, I suppose, if he specifically chose that path and chose to suppress the human side of himself instead).

“I must learn to control this, or I must banish the wolf from me,” Perrin said.

Except that perception, right there, is the entire reason it’s such a struggle in the first place right now. It’s not an either-or. They’re not two separate things, and it’s not something that needs to be leashed.

It's that whole… the more you fight against some part of yourself, the harder it becomes to actually keep it in check, and so we arrive back at something very like ‘surrender to control’. Or, perhaps more accurately, ‘accept in order to control’. Control being also not quite the right word here, because that’s also part of the point.

Basically, throwing up a wall against parts of yourself you’re afraid of rather than understanding them and figuring out how to integrate or improve or work with or channel or grow past or whatever-else them is not a sustainable solution, Perrin. Because those parts of you aren’t just going to go away if you deny them strongly enough; you have to at least understand them, and acknowledge them for what they are, and then you can figure out where you want to go from there. Which, likely, will mean recognising that they’re neither as simple-black-and-white nor as terrifying as you think. It just also means having to do some introspection and maybe realise some things about yourself that challenge your existing self-image. It’s good for you. As Rand could perhaps tell you, once he’s done picking apples.

I do sort of wish this could have been done in the previous book, aligned with Rand’s own last stages of his fight with himself and eventual realisation – sort of the way the cascading ending of characters coming into their power was done in TSR – but also I get that sometimes it’s just not possible to fit everything in exactly the way you want. I promise I’ll stop complaining about having to play timeline catch-up soon.

Anyway, Hopper’s bored of this and wants to go hunting already. Especially because he’s looking at the calendar and realising they have maybe half a term to cram at least a few years’ worth of learning into, so can we get on with it already.

In a previous visit to the wolf dream, Perrin had demanded that Hopper train him to master the place. Very inappropriate for a young wolf – a kind of challenge to the elder’s seniority – but this was a response. Hopper had come to teach, but he would do it as a wolf taught.

Yes. And I think the point there, beyond anything to do with a challenge to seniority, is that if Perrin is going to learn how to walk the wolf dream, he’s going to have to come to terms with the part of him that brings him there in the first place. He can’t learn if he’s holding half of himself back at the same time.

“I will hunt with you – but I must not lose myself.”

But this is you, Perrin. And okay on the whole issue of hunting, I think Perrin sees it as a kind of… succumbing to base instincts, which is part of why he fights it. But I really don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here. I don’t think it’s ‘sure, go for murder breaks whenever you get bored’; I think it’s about… finding a balance in the side of himself that is capable of violence and that thrills in a fight, not by just letting it run wild but just by… understanding that it’s there, because once he does that, he can decide how to direct it.

I mean, we all have parts of ourselves that maybe aren’t always fit for polite company, but pretending they don’t exist isn’t going to make them go away, but understanding them and accepting them sometimes makes it easier to find another way to channel them that’s more… well, I suppose the word Perrin would want here is ‘controlled’. But really, I think it’s more ‘conscious’.

To use his own analogy, it’s the whole ‘the iron in front of him, not dreams of silver’ idea. Work with what you have; understand the components for what they are. That doesn’t mean you can’t work them at all, or reshape them, or hone them, or turn them into something better; it just means seeing those pieces, those starting points, honestly. And understanding what will and won’t work in terms of shaping them. He’s been given these pieces of metal but he insists on not using some of them, or on not even looking at them closely enough to see what metal they are, and I don’t know anything about metalworking so should probably stop this analogy here before I break it.

Anyway Hopper is just enjoying the opportunity to drag Perrin repeatedly, for his own amusement and that of the other wolves.

Meanwhile Perrin’s getting stuck in the long grass, which is absolutely not a metaphor for anything.

I can’t ignore my problems! Perrin thought back.

Yet you often do, Hopper sent.

Well and if that’s not a perfect summary of Perrin’s arc pretty much since the Two Rivers, I don’t know what is. ‘I can’t ignore my problems,’ says Perrin, ignoring at least five problems he doesn’t want to acknowledge in favour of the one or two he can do something about.

Or, as may be more accurately the case, ignoring his own problems in favour of the external ones he can hammer out a solution for.

Credit where it’s due: Perrin knows Hopper’s right.

There, lying on the ground, were the three chunks of metal he’d forged in his earlier dream. The large lump the size of two fists, the flattened rod, the thin rectangle.

Those are oddly specific. Shame there’s not twenty-three of them.

I’d say it sounds like the makings of a hammer except I don’t know what the thin rectangle would be in that case, and he already has a hammer.

Oh hey his prophetic dream-visions are back! It’s been a minute.

Mat stood there. He was fighting against himself, a dozen different men wearing his face, all dressed in different types of fine clothing. Mat spun his spear, and never saw the shadowy figure creeping behind him, bearing a bloody knife.

So the immediate association I have between Mat and a knife is, of course, the ruby dagger currently in the hands of our good friend Padan Fain. Though I suppose we’ve also now introduced the Seanchan Bloodknives to the scene, which would fit with the whole ‘shadowy figure’ as well.

But it’s the rest of this vision that has me intrigued, here. Because my immediate thought – that he’s fighting himself in the sense of all the men whose memories he now holds – doesn’t really make sense at all, because Mat accepted those memories a long time ago; they’ve not felt like a challenge to his identity in nearly the same way as the wolves have been for Perrin or Lews Therin was for Rand.

So then… more figurative? Is it still an identity thing but more about reconciling all the different roles he holds, that pull him in different directions (and some, like his status as Prince of the Ravens, that he has perhaps not quite so fully accepted)?

Or is this some Eelfinn/Aelfinn shit? We know he’s headed there, and it’s another dimension so all bets are off, really.

Or are we going to get into some kind of… decoys strategy? He’s being set up as a general for the Last Battle, so maybe someone or something turning his own strategies or forces against him?

Perrin’s not sure either, and next up we get wolves chasing sheep into the woods full of monsters. That… could honestly be anything. The wolves look wrong, so Darkhounds, maybe? Though in that case I’d expect him to recognise them. As for who he’s chasing… I mean, you can hardly swing a cat in here without hitting a malevolent force these days, so your guess is as good as mine, Perrin.

Hopper doesn’t have time for prophetic movie screenings and would very much like to get on with this hunt now, please, seriously Young Bull it’s been two years, I’m not getting any younger here.

(Hopper, you’re dead; you don’t even age. ‘NO BUT MY PATIENCE DOES’).

Perrin remembered the time; it had been during the early days of Faile’s captivity.

Had he really looked that bad? Light, but he seemed ragged. Almost like a beggar. Or… like Noam.

Oh okay this is a really interesting realisation from Perrin, and a perspective I hadn’t actually considered from this angle. There’s more than one way to lose yourself, and in giving entirely in to the very human side of him (and, perhaps, what Hopper might call a human need for control), and fixating on a single task in that sense, he came close to the same kind of loss of self that he associates with becoming entirely wolf.

And that this version of himself came not as a result of ‘giving in’ to the wolves at all. That maybe, Perrin, the wolves aren’t the source of the problem you’re having with finding a balance within yourself; they’re just a convenient scapegoat, something to project the division within yourself onto.

“Stop trying to confuse me!” Perrin said. “I became that way because I was dedicated to finding Faile, not because I was giving into the wolves!”

Which is… kind of the point, Perrin. There is more than one way to lose yourself. And your dedication to finding Faile was just… another form of focusing only on aspects, and neglecting all the other parts of yourself. But how is neglecting the wolf part of yourself going to solve that? Is that not just another way of fixating on what you think you should be, or on a single task, to the exclusion of what is there?

Hopper’s decided to move on to an object lesson: if you want to keep up, you’ll have to figure out how to run. No more holding back.

I want Hopper and the Wise Ones to meet, sometime. I just think that would be entertaining on all sides.

And so Perrin runs. Finally.

The forest was his. It belonged to him, and he understood it.

His worries began to melt away. He allowed himself to accept things as they were, not as he feared they might become.

Now, the next step: do the same for yourself. Accept yourself as you are, not as you fear you might become. You’re so close, Perrin.

It was exhilarating. Had he ever felt so alive? So much a part of the world around him, yet master of it at the same time?

There’s a surrender/control kind of feeling to this, as well. So much of this is so very, very close to what Perrin needs to learn – or rather, learn to apply to himself. This idea of being part of yet master of at the same time. Master of my fate, captain of my soul, that whole deal. That he can accept and be the wolf, but not be lost in it, just as he is not lost in this world around him that he allows himself to be part of, yet still retains himself and his control.

Whoops caught a whiff of a stag so no more time for existential crisis because that means DINNER.

The stag, I mean. Not the existential crisis. I don’t think they make edible versions of those.

He was the herald, the point, the tip of the attack. The hunt roared behind him. It was as if he led the crashing waves of the ocean itself. But he was also holding them back.

I cannot make them slow for me, Perrin thought.

And then he was on all fours, his bow tossed aside and forgotten, his hands and legs becoming paws. Those behind him howled anew at the glory of it. Young Bull had truly joined them.

ROUND. OF. APPLAUSE.

But actually the main reason I quoted this is because it strikes me that Perrin is, perhaps more so than any of the other major characters, a very Sanderson-esque character in some ways. I’ve compared him to Kaladin before, but even without trying to draw a like-for-like relationship to one of Sanderson’s characters, his character concept feels very much along the lines of what Sanderson would write.

Anyway, I thought of that here because this reads a little like – again not like-for-like but just in the same vein of – some of the other discovery-of-magic or acceptance-of-power or learning-the-scope-of-one’s-abilities scenes Sanderson has written.

I don’t mean it as either criticism or praise; it’s just something that struck me here.

The stag has twenty-six points on its antlers, so that’s not the missing twenty-three from last chapter either.

And we’ve shifted to Young Bull in the narrative now, so Perrin’s actually going along with this wolves-do-guided-meditation class for once.

He needed to be ahead, not follow.

Definitely not a thought applicable outside of this hunt, nope, not at all, nothing to see here, nothing more abstract about needing to act rather than react, or claim the wolf thing and all the aspects of himself he hides from rather than let them drag him along or anything like that.

The stag bolted to the right, and Young Bull leaped, hitting an upright tree trunk with all four paws and pushing himself sideways to change directions.

I am quoting this solely because WOLF PARKOUR.

Sorry.

He howled, and his brothers and sisters replied from just behind. This hunt was all of them. As one.

But Young Bull led.

Leader of men, leader of wolves, LET’S DO THIS.

It’s interesting as well because for all that it’s a hunt, there’s a rather meditative quality to this scene – the simplicity of it once he fins his place, allows himself to be a part of this world around him, acting almost on instinct and leading a perfect chase, not thinking or faltering or hesitating, every movement fluid and precise and beautiful – that actually reminds me of that scene way back in TDR when he worked at the forge in Tear.

Just these few simple moments of Perrin being… himself. A kind of beautiful economy of motion and a meditative sort of rhythm and the absence of doubt or uncertainty.

Which is perfect, of course, because that first scene is for Perrin as he was, for the part of himself he knew and knows and now fears to lose, the part of him that he linked so closely to his identity. It was a reminder of who he was, at a time when he needed it – this whole story just beginning and Perrin away from his home and out of his depth and not sure who he was or what he was becoming. It was a grounding in his foundations.

And now, nearly at the end, we get something with a kind of similar feel to it, but this time it’s the wolf, the part of himself he has yet to accept. There’s almost a bookending here of past and future. One scene to ground him, and one to carry him forward. Once for acknowledgement and once for realisation. Name him true and set his path, I suppose, if I really want to shoehorn another character’s quotes in here.

Anyway.

Perrin – or rather Young Bull – brings down the stag and is looking forward to that sweet sweet venison.

There was nothing else. The forest was gone. The howls faded. There was only the kill. The sweet kill.

A form crashed into him, throwing him back into the brush. Young Bull shook his head, dazed, snarling. Another wolf had stopped him. Hopper! Why?

The stag bounded to its feet, and then bounded off through the forest again. Young Bull howled in fury and rage, preparing to run after it. Again Hopper leaped, throwing his weight at Young bull.

If it dies here, it dies the last death, Hopper sent. This hunt is done, Young Bull. We will hunt another time.

Oh.

Why, Perrin wonders here. And I think the answer here is, because this is how we do not lose ourselves. The hunt is about the joy of it, but it’s not just mindless violence. That’s Perrin’s fear, and Hopper here is teaching him… nuance, I suppose. Control. Restraint.

Because there is a difference between the hunt, between being a wolf, and just succumbing to bloodlust and violence. And I think part of Perrin’s fear comes from conflating the two in his mind, but they’re not the same thing. But without letting himself ever know or be the wolf, without understanding that side of himself, it’s hard to distinguish. And so we come to this, where he sees the wolves acting with this restraint that still does not tarnish their joy, and can perhaps understand it himself and see that ‘joining the wolves in the hunt’ does not mean ‘losing all humanity and becoming a mindless killer’.

“That,” Perrin finally said, “is what I fear.”

No, you do not fear it, Hopper sent.

Thank you, Hopper, for being absurdly wise and also for your patience.

But this is the crux of it all, isn’t it? That Perrin fears – or does not quite fear – what lies at the end of this hunt for him. And hasn’t yet learned to… I suppose trust himself? Or understand that it’s not an all-or-nothing black-or-white kind of thing. To hold on or to let go. But it’s about, as so much of this story is, a more nuanced kind of balance, and an acceptance.

And self-awareness. That too.

Worry, worry, worry. It is all that you do.

“No. I also kill. If you’re going to teach me to master the wolf dream, it’s going to happen like this?”

Yes.

You do kill, Perrin, but it’s not all you do. And I think part of this hunt was also about learning that there’s nuance even in that, maybe. That he can kill and not be monstrous.

But he had been avoiding this issue for too long, making horseshoes in the forge while leaving the most difficult and demanding pieces alone, untouched.

YES! THANK YOU PERRIN AYBARA! YOU’RE GETTING IT.

Man I love when characters finally stop fighting themselves. (I’m me, so I have a slight preference for when that surrender actually takes a much darker ‘so be it’ kind of form but listen, the heroic side is also lovely and this has been such a long time coming).

I also do really like that Perrin comes to these realisations himself. Yes, it’s taken him a long time and yes, Hopper has been pushing him and pushing him to try to get him here (along with Tam, and various others), but ultimately it has to come from him. From an understanding of himself, and an acceptance of that.

Much like Rand’s own realisation, though so many others played into it and guided him along the way or pushed him towards the edge, anchored him or tried to cut him loose, ultimately came down to him, on a mountain, thinking.

Or how Nynaeve breaking her block happened alone at the bottom of a river, in a moment where at last she understood surrender.

These books do self-realisation well, is what I’m getting at. Giving characters those chances to see themselves, and to reach these understandings, and then letting those moments – those quiet, unwitnessed, outwardly unremarkable moments – carry such weight.

He relied on the powers of scent he’d been given, reaching out to wolves when he needed them—but otherwise he’d ignored them.

YES! THIS IS! SO GOOD!

(Like Rand with Lews Therin’s memories, and knowledge of the Power).

But he gets it now. You can’t use this if you’re also trying to fight it. You have to accept it, even when that’s terrifying, even when that means confronting parts of yourself you’d rather pretend weren’t there. Because the reward, ultimately, is that you’ll actually be able to wield them, rather than being at their mercy by virtue of being constantly at war with yourself.

You couldn’t make a thing until you understood its parts. He wouldn’t know how to deal with—or reject—the wolf inside him until he understood the wolf dream.

YES THAT’S EXACTLY IT I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS.

“Very well,” Perrin said. “So be it.”

HERE. WE. GO.

And now over to Galad. Fine. If we must.

Those Light-cursed swamps were behind them; now they travelled over open grasslands.

Because they’ve figured out their leadership situation and murdered the corruption from their ranks, get it?! So they’re not mired in the swamp of their own indecision and division now! They’re united and can move forwards in a cleaner direction!

If there was no danger of death, there could be no bravery, but Galad would rather have the Light shine on him while he continued to draw breath.

I mean, fair enough, and same, but that’s almost a surprising thing for Galad to think. Not that I think he’s the type to want martyrdom, but…hm. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the whole bravery thing here, but it just feels a little odd for Galad. Then again I will be the first to admit that there’s a lot about Galad that just Does Not Compute for me, so…sure. Lawful Good Paladin and all that.

He wanted to know what kind of traffic the highway was drawing

Refugees with a chance of wolves, most likely.

He remembered well the words that Gareth Bryne had once said: Most of the time, a general’s most important function was not to make decisions, but to remind men that someone would make decisions.

I just find it weirdly endearing that all three of Galad, Gawyn, and Elayne end up relying on Bryne’s wisdom from time to time, quoting him in their thoughts. Of course, it just as likely leads them in entirely opposite directions because this family is a bit of a mess, but still.

“The letter must be sent,” Galad said.

Okay but if we’re on the topic of shared family traits, evidence suggests letter-writing is not exactly a strong suit. You sure about this, Galad?

Ah, it’s a letter to the Children with the Seanchan giving them the bullet-points version of everything that’s happened. Well, far be it from me to criticise open and honest communication in this series, I suppose.

And he still plans to ally with Aes Sedai, which understandably is going over as well as a pile of Blight-mud with some of his men.

“But the witches are evil!”

Says a member of an organisation perfectly willing to overlook the torture of innocent people in order to wring confessions from ‘Darkfriends’, but…sure. Just, you know, glass houses and all that.

Once, he might have denied that. But listening to the other Children, and considering what those at Tar Valon had done to his sister, was making him think he might be too soft on the Aes Sedai.

Listening to other Children and thinking about his sister but consider this, Galad, have you ever thought of listening to her, maybe? Or, like, actually trusting her judgement when you do? Just a passing thought.

Seriously, what is it with Elayne’s brothers and continually underestimating her, her ability to look after herself, and also her reading of her own damn situation?

“However, Lord Harnesh, if they are evil, they are insignificant when compared to the Dark One.”

Well… alright, sure, at this stage I guess if that’s how you have to look at it to make this work, then fine. We don’t have time to solve everyone’s problems with everyone else before they all need to at least act as allies, so if uneasy ‘enemy of my enemy’ trust is what it takes…

Then, as Bashere said, there’s always another battle. Or as Rand said, they can all go back to killing one another once it’s done. A sad way to look at it, but for all that Rand has come a long way and is no longer looking at this in quite the same way, I think some of those things are still true. The great battle done, but the world not done with battle.

Tarmon Gai’don’s alliances won’t solve all of that, even led by a Dragon Reborn who truly has a purpose now. It may be enough to see them through, but after…?

The Wheel of Time turns.

“We need allies. Look around you, Lord Harnesh. How many Children do we have? Even with recent recruits, we are under twenty thousand. Our fortress has been taken. We are without succour or allegiance, and the great nations of the world revile us.”

Wow, I WONDER WHY.

I mean, good on Galad for taking on the task of redeeming the Whitecloaks but… it sure is going to be a Task.

“The Questioners are at fault,” Harnesh muttered.

“Part of the blame is theirs,” Galad agreed. “But it is also because those who would do evil look with disgust and resentment upon those who stand for what is right.”

Uh.

Sorry, Galad, but you’re leaving out a very large slice of the blame pie, which is: maybe the Questioners were the worst of the lot (or at the very least they make a convenient set of scapegoats), but the rest of you didn’t exactly object, or do anything about it. And plenty of you went right along (Two Rivers, anyone?) – or, sorry, were you Just Following Orders?

I mean morality is a grey area and all that but trying to pass off widespread hatred of your borderline-fanatic organisation with an unfortunate habit of killing innocent people as ‘evil people hate the righteous’ is maybe a bit of a stretch.

“In the past, the boldness – and perhaps overeagerness – of the Children has alienated those who should have been our allies.”

Euphemistic but…not wrong, I suppose. And to be fair to him (if I must), he does have a rather difficult line to walk, as the leader of this organisation. He maybe can’t just denounce them completely, but he also has to get through to them that some thing are going to have to change. And that this isn’t going to be an easy path ahead.

He's trying to enforce what they should be fighting for, underlining their stated principles and trying to get them to shift direction and also preparing them for what they’re going to face, without… undermining their foundations, or challenging them in a way that might break them.

And I suppose he actually believes some of this as well. Which is still just… sure, Galad. Okay.

I do love that he’s quoting Morgase to them. So much of her legacy has been tarnished that it’s nice to see these moments of… recognition, I guess.

“We follow no queen or king.”

“Yes,” Galad said, “and that frightens monarchs. I grew up in the court of Andor. I know how my mother regarded the Children.”

And yet! Look where you ended up! Quoting Morgase’s own thoughts on leadership to the Children, whom she hated.

See, the problem with Galad in this chapter is that he’s neither being a deadly-graceful swordsman nor defiantly enduring torture, which means we’re back to plain old annoyance with him on my part.

“Darkfriends,” Harnesh muttered.

“My mother was no Darkfriend,” Galad said quietly.

Yeah, Harnesh? If you value your life, do not insult Morgase Trakand in front of Galad. He can and will end you.

“You speak like a Questioner,” Galad said. “Suspecting everyone who opposes us of being a Darkfriend. Many of them are influenced by the Shadow, but I doubt that it is conscious.”

Oh, not just them, Galad. As Egwene said, “I think we all are serving the interests of the Shadow, so long as we allow ourselves to remain divided.” Or, for another and more recent example: “I think he almost had me, Egwene.”

But Galad does know his audience here. The Questioners do provide a convenient scapegoat, and a way to sort of… point out all the problems with the Whitecloaks, but slantwise. Deflected just slightly so that they do not sound like accusations, but rather like a very pointed ‘we are better than them, right?’ A kind of oblique warning, and a reminder of all that they must no longer allow themselves to be. A way of criticising indirectly, and allowing them to maintain their pride and convictions and certainty.

Which is also interesting in contrast to Egwene’s approach with the Aes Sedai, of being incredibly direct in her criticism of both the rebels and the Tower Aes Sedai. It’s interesting, because both approaches work. Because these are two very different organisations and situations, despite their occasional parallels.

“We cannot become lapdogs to kings and queens. And yet, think of what we could achieve inside of a nation’s boundaries if we could act without needing an entire legion to intimidate that nation’s ruler.”

Whitecloaks: ‘we’re a paramilitary organisation answerable to no monarch or nation!’

Galad, son of a literal royal house: ‘sounds good’

Then again, I suppose you could say much the same of the Dragonsworn and the Band of the Red Hand (leaving aside the fact that Rand rules or has ruled at least four nations in fact if not always in name), and in terms of facing Tarmon Gai’don as unified forces of the Light, that’s fair enough. But that’s the sort of thing that tends to cause, er, problems domestically.

A group of travellers on the road! I wonder who this could possibly be!

Galad sighed. Nobody could deny Byar’s dedication – he’d ridden with Galad to face Valda when it could have meant the end of his career. And yet there was such a thing as being too zealous.

Let it not be said that Galad doesn’t have his work cut out for him. That much is for sure.

Though Galad calling anyone else too zealous is, of course, mildly entertaining.

“Peace,” Galad said, “you did no wrong, Child Byar.”

Depends on the timeframe…

There was talk of a gigantic stone from the sky having struck the earth far to the north in Andor, destroying an entire city and leaving a crater.

…Shadar Logoth? Not quite a meteorite, no, but I can see how someone might arrive at that explanation. Especially if all the forces at play there were enough to leave traces of stishovite or coesite.

The talk among the men revealed their worries. They should have understood that worry served no useful function. None could know the weaving of the Wheel.

In which Galad Damodred discovers the cure for anxiety. Seriously, Galad, that’s all well and good for you, and I personally see where you’re coming from, but not everyone is going to just logic away their fear; it doesn’t always work like that.

Yeah this sounds like Perrin’s group. Well this should be fun.

Wait a second.

Morgase is with Perrin.

Oh man.

The man in the cart gave a start upon seeing Galad. Ah, Galad thought, so he knows enough to recognise Morgase’s stepson.

The man in the cart is Basel Gill and definitely knows enough to recognise Morgase’s stepson given that he’s currently travelling with Morgase, yes.

Basel Gill also really, really needs to work on his poker face. Though I don’t think even Mat’s ability to tell a lie would get Perrin’s entire caravan past Galad without arousing some kind of suspicion.

So Galad’s giving him the airport security treatment, Gill is trying his best to lie like a rug, and there’s only one way this is going to end.

“Anything else I will sell, but the food I have promised by messenger to someone in Lugard.”

“I will pay more.”

“I made a promise, my good Lord,” the man said. “ could not break it, regardless of the price.”

“I see.”

I have to laugh here because yes, Gill is lying through is teeth and Galad knows it, but he’s also chosen the one lie that Galadedrid ‘do the right thing no matter the cost’ Damodred can’t actually directly challenge.

So instead he’s just going to separate the group and see if they all tell the same story.

“After all, what it seems like to me is that you are the camp followers of a large army. If that is the case, then I would very much like to know whose army it is, not to mention where it is.”

WOULDN’T YOU JUST.

It occurs to me that Perrin is the only one of the ta’veren boys – and, actually, the only one of the original Emond’s Field crew – who Galad hasn’t met.

And while it might be kind of funny if it were Mat’s army and he and Galad had a ‘….you?’ moment, given their last meeting, it’s all kinds of appropriate in terms of actual story and characters that Galad, new leader of the possibly-soon-to-be-reformed Whitecloaks, is the one meeting up with Perrin ‘Whitecloaks were my first kill’ Aybara.

Because Perrin is the one with the most… messy history with the Whitecloaks, and so it is fitting that if there really is to be a shift, and if they really are to move forwards, it would be by turning that, somehow, into alliance.

“We may have a situation here,” Bornhald said. His face was flushed with anger.

Uh oh.

Speaking of Perrin’s history with the Whitecloaks. Bornhald (mistakenly) thinks Perrin killed his father, Perrin (somewhat less mistakenly) thinks Bornhald let his home be ravaged by Trollocs and betrayed him when he had promised to help… you know, just a few disagreements between friends.

“Have you ever heard of a man called Perrin Goldeneyes?”

“No. Should I have?”

“Yes,” Bornhald said. “He killed my father.”

Prepare to die.

Well THIS should be fun!

Next (ToM ch 5) Previous (ToM ch 3)

#FINALLY #wheel of time #neuxue liveblogs WoT #Towers of Midnight

38 notes · View notes

neuxue · 5 years

Text

Wheel of Time liveblogging: The Gathering Storm ch 43

I get the argument I’ve been waiting for, and Egwene wins (in absentia) the battle she’s preparing for

Chapter 43: Sealed to the Flame

Egwene sat quietly in her tent, hands in her lap. She controlled her shock, her burning anger and her incredulity.

YES. THANK YOU. This is precisely the reaction I was hoping for and I’m so very glad we’re continuing almost exactly where we left off, because I want to watch this.

Now let just a little of that control go and break up with Gawyn, please.

Egwene had allowed no attendants besides Chesa this morning. She had even turned away Siuan, who had undoubtedly come to offer some kind of apology.

Less dramatic than throwing an inkwell at her, but really I’m just here for the ‘Egwene being furious at being “rescued” against her will’ and will be content with more or less any form it takes.

Egwene needed time to think, to prepare, to deal with her failure. And it was a failure. Yes, it had been forced on her by others, but those others were her followers and friends.

Ah, Egwene. This was not your fault. You did everything you could.

And as I was typing that it occurred to me…this is right after the chapter where Rand absolves himself of responsibility for what is happening in Arad Doman, tells himself he’s done everything he can and there’s nothing else he can do, and walks away. And so of course we immediately get Egwene doing almost the opposite. Taking a situation where she really has done just about everything she could, and still looking at it critically for places where she could have done better.

She was carried away via gateway, just like Rand, but unlike Rand she looks back.

Perhaps she had been too secretive. It was a danger—secrecy.

3.5 MILLION WORDS BUT WE FINALLY GOT THERE.

Okay, fine, other characters have occasionally expressed similar sentiments. Still. For the effective Amyrlin Seat of all people to even consider that there are dangers to secrecy, that secrecy could be a failure is…quite something. Round of applause for Egwene.

Egwene ran her fingers along the smooth, tightly woven pouch she wore tied to her belt. Inside was a long, thin item, retrieved secretly from the White Tower earlier in the morning.

Vora’s sa’angreal? Or…the Oath Rod? And by ‘earlier in the morning’ does she mean she went back into the Tower? I suppose the game is kind of up at this point in terms of her being a captive of any sort, so she could in theory come and go as she pleases…

Yes, Egwene had made mistakes. She could not lay all the blame on Siuan, Bryne, and Gawyn.

It’s fine; if you don’t, I will. Egwene’s probably in the right here but do I care? Not particularly. (Oh wait, that was Gawyn’s mistake. Damn it, now I’m conflicted. FINE, Egwene, be the voice of reason).

She had likely made other mistakes as well; she would need to look at her own action sin more detail later.

I like this, because it’s honest self-criticism and self-examination without self-loathing or self-flagellation. (‘Self’ no longer looks like a word). It’s a more difficult balance than it seems, sometimes, and this is such a calmly rational example. She has made mistakes, and she can accept that and know that she needs to learn from them, without dwelling needlessly on them and berating herself for them. She can’t change what has happened, after all, but she can try to learn from it and do better next time. What a weirdly healthy and productive way of dealing with things!

She’d been pulled from the White Tower on the brink of success. What was to be done?

That’s a difficult question, especially given the huge blind spot she has in terms of: what is happening in the Tower right now? Also, how close to success was she? Narratively speaking, it feels like she was PRETTY DAMN CLOSE, and also there was that whole paragraph of ‘surprise! Elaida’s out of the picture’ but Egwene doesn’t even know that. So will those in the Tower decide that she is Amyrlin in truth, or will they look for another solution? And what can she do to push that the right way, without fucking everything up completely? It’s such a fine balance, and there are so many unknowns, and anything she does risks disaster.

So, no pressure or anything, Egwene.

So she remained seated, arms on the hand rests, wearing a fine silken gown of green with yellow patterns on the bodice.

Green and Yellow, for battle and healing. Battle or healing? Either way, both represent the conflict with the Tower right now.

Yeah, she definitely can’t just go back and resume her old role—she knows full well that only worked because they thought she was actually a captive. And in a way, the realisation that she wasn’t, that she could have left anytime she wanted and spared herself all that pain, might be another thing for those still in the Tower to think over. How many would willingly subject themselves to that, all for the sake of the Tower? It could certainly add to her…legend, I suppose. Or it could undermine her. It just depends on who’s looking at it and how they want to spin things. So many unknowns…

She was realising more and more that being the Amyrlin wasn’t different. Life was a tempest, whether you were a milkmaid or a queen. The queens were simply better at projecting control in the middle of that storm. If Egwene looked like a statue unaffected by the winds, it was actually because she saw how to bend with those winds. That gave the illusion of control. No. It was not just an illusion.

Surrender to control. Accept that she is as subject to the whims of the Pattern as anyone, and instead of fighting that, use it. Power is an illusion of perception, so creat the image of control, of power, of calm, and you’re halfway there.

It’s not the first time she’s had to think along these lines, but it feels like a…closing bookend, in a sense, where the opening one was Moiraine telling her ‘because I remembered how to control saidar’ and Egwene being faced with that notion, and what it truly means, for the first time.

She had to be as logical as a White, as thoughtful as a Brown, as passionate as a Blue, as decisive as a Green, as merciful as a Yellow, as diplomatic as a Grey. And yes, as vengeful as a Red, when necessary.

Of all Ajahs and of none, in truth. It’s what the Tower as a whole needs to be; the Ajahs must work together to make the Tower an entity unto itself, rather than a collection of disparate fragments. And so, in Egwene, that unity and diversity is embodied. And it’s not just empty words; she understands what it means to be of all Ajahs and none, and the importance of it.

That left her with a difficult decision. She had a fresh army of fifty thousand troops, and the White Tower had suffered an incredible blow. The Aes Sedai would be exhausted, the Tower Guard broken and wounded.

Ah. That’s…I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that this is her conclusion, given the information she has and the position she’s in. Because she’s right; if she’s going to do this, she has a very small window of time, and she could maybe succeed with minimal casualties, if the Tower is weakened enough to surrender rather than fight.

But…she just protected the Tower in battle. To bring another battle against it feels…

She hoped that history would eventually forgive her.

Oh, Egwene.

(Forgive me, for calling this mercy as well).

It just feels like a mistake, though from where she’s standing it’s entirely reasonable, and maybe the best option. She can’t wait for the Aes Sedai in the Tower to call her back as Amyrlin, because she has absolutely no guarantees that they would do so. She can’t wait here, because then the Tower will regain its strength and an attack would only be worse. She’s tried the diplomatic route, such as it is. She doesn’t know Elaida is gone. What choice does that leave her?

And she hates it; she is not approaching this unfeeling. But what else can she do?

It still feels like the wrong choice.

Seriously, Gawyn? You slept outside her tent? Someone needs to teach this boy the difference between ‘romantic’ and ‘excessive’.

But I am ready for this confrontation. For this to be a confrontation, that is, because if it is ANYTHING ELSE, I will probably just lose my shit. And not in a good way.

It was not the time to be a lovesick girl. It was time to be Amyrlin.

I like the way she consistently recognises the separation, and can shift between those roles without…losing herself, I suppose. Being the Amyrlin doesn’t mean killing the girl entirely, it just means knowing when to set her aside. And, fair, these days that’s most of the time. But she still allows that girl to be a part of who she is.

“Gawyn,” she said, raising a hand, stopping him as he stepped toward her. “I haven’t begun to think about what to do with you. Other matters demand my attention.”

THIS IS WHAT I WANTED. Well, honestly, I was up for just about anything that involved a confrontation, but Egwene opening with this not-mad-just-disappointed-don’t-talk-to-me-right-now calm yet exasperated and so very this-is-not-my-priority-go-wait-in-the-corner, only-adult-in-the-situation is DELIGHTFUL.

“No,” Gawyn said, stepping up in front of her. “Egwene, we need to talk.”

“Later.”

“No, not later, burn it! I’ve waited months.”

Oh, poor you. You know who else has waited months? Egwene. To deal with the Tower. Not just waited, but has been actively working towards this. This has been her job, Gawyn, and she needs to deal with it right now because it’s sort of non-trivial in case you haven’t noticed, and your ego can take a damn number and wait. You are not the most important thing here. It’s time you recognised that there is more going on than the things affecting you.

But that’s Gawyn’s whole…thing, isn’t it? He self-deprecates like no other, but he still sees himself as the centre of this story. He is the perfect heroic archetype, the golden prince who knows exactly how his story is meant to go, who knows the script and still cannot understand why it’s not…working. Cannot understand what story he’s actually in, and hasn’t yet worked out how to look past that and see the truth of what’s actually happening, unclouded by the lens of his own perception that tells him to look at everything through the eyes of the Hero Of The Story. That was who he was raised to be, after all, until the Pattern decided to deal him a hand of ‘fuck you’.

I’ve said it before; it’s a fascinating thing to do with a character—to basically have him read out, say, Romeo’s lines while everyone around him is doing Twelfth Night—but right now, when it’s getting in the way of Egwene being awesome and making him into every stereotype of That Guy, I’m just fed up with it.

Telling her ‘no, you need to talk to me because I’ve been waiting’ when she’s about to go do her job is just. No. Don’t be that guy, Gawyn.

“I said that I hadn’t sorted through my feelings yet,” she said coolly, “and I meant it.”

He set his jaw. “I don’t believe that Aes Sedai calmness, Egwene.”

Oh man I’ve heard this conversation. Hell, I’ve had this conversation. LISTEN. TO. WHAT. SHE’S. TELLING. YOU. When she says she’s not sure, or that she needs to think about something, especially when she’s angry at you, it’s probably a terrible idea to just…say that you know better. That you know what she’s thinking better than she does.

“I’ve sacrificed—”

“You’ve sacrificed?” Egwene interrupted, letting a little anger show. “What about what I sacrificed to rebuild the White Tower? Sacrifices that you undermined by acting against my express wishes? Did Siuan not tell you that I had forbidden a rescue?”

“She did,” he said stiffly. “But we were worried about you!”

“Well, that worry was the sacrifice I demanded, Gawyn,” she said, exasperated.

YOU TELL HIM, EGWENE.

When I said I wanted to be a fly on the wall when Egwene wakes up, this is exactly what I meant.

Because someone needs to get it through Gawyn’s head that he is not the only agent in this story. That yes, he has made sacrifices and yes, he was worried, but that doesn’t give him any sort of priority over other people who have done the exact same. It doesn’t give him priority over Egwene’s responsibilities to the Tower and her role, and it sure as hell doesn’t give him authority to override her decisions.

Do you even know what she’s been through, Gawyn? What she’s accomplished? What she’s working for even now? Has it ever occurred to you to ask?

Or did you never think beyond what you’ve been through and what you’ve done in order to be with her. Because obviously only your actions and thoughts matter in that regard, right? Because once you’re together she’ll just…exist exactly as you want and everything will go according to your plans and you’re the only one who could possibly make it so and what business could she possibly have of her own outside of that?

Am I being a little unfair to Gawyn? Maybe. But wow does this push all of my buttons regarding a specific pattern of behaviour a lot of guys show with regards to their female love interests, both in fiction and in reality.

So watching Egwene tear him a new one over it is wonderfully cathartic, I must say.

“Don’t you see what a distrust you have shown me?”

YES. THIS. EXACTLY.

He decided to rescue her against her express orders because…well, of course he has to rescue her! Of course he knows better than she does! And there is absolutely no trust in that. Even if Egwene were wrong, even if she did need to be rescued—and that’s certainly a possibility; there’s no way of knowing what would happen if she were still in the Tower—going against her wishes like this, without even asking her or trying to find a way to communicate with her or persuade her or explain your view of the situation to see if it matches hers is a massive display of…not even distrust but of failing to even consider her competence. It’s patronising.

Anyway I just love watching Egwene articulate all of this. She’s not just angry; she’s very clear about why she’s angry. And she gets pretty quickly to the heart of it: that he didn’t trust her. Or consider that her opinion and her read on the situation should be trusted. He just came in with barely any knowledge of the situation and assumed, immediately, that he knew better than she did.

Gawyn didn’t look ashamed; he just looked perturbed.

Yeah, well, he should. I’ll give him some credit if he actually takes to heart what she’s saying, but that remains to be seen.

“You love me, Egwene,” he said stubbornly. “I can see it.”

*flings book across the room*

Guys? Friendly piece of advice. Telling a woman how she feels, while ignoring what she is telling you regarding how she feels? Not attractive.

Anyway Egwene is doing a rather excellent job here.

“Egwene the woman loves you,” she said. “But Egwene the Amyrlin is furious with you. Gawyn, if you’d be with me, you have to be with both the woman and the Amyrlin. I would expect you—man who was trained to be First Prince of the Sword—to understand that distinction.”

Gawyn looked away.

DRAG HIM.

That was beautiful. Calm, cool, entirely justified, and right on target.

She has to walk that line so carefully herself, between Egwene the woman and Egwene the Amyrlin, and she’s absolutely right that if he is to be with her, he has to understand and—perhaps more importantly—accept that. Accept that she has a role and a duty that exists entirely outside of him, no matter what he might want, and that she can’t toss it aside for him. Nor does she want to.

And…yeah, he should understand that, raised as he was to be First Prince of the Sword to a sister who would be Queen. He should, but he doesn’t, because he was also raised to be the hero of his story, and Egwene is…not playing the role he thought she would, and he’s confused.

And being a dick about it.

“You don’t believe it, do you?” she asked.

“What?”

“That I’m Amyrlin,” she said. “You don’t accept my title.”

“I’m trying to,” he said as he looked back at her.

Yeah sorry but that only gets you a very, very small amount of partial credit. I get that it’s a surprise, and he’s hardly the first to react with disbelief, but…even if he doesn’t fully believe it, and even if it’s a struggle to get his mind around it, he needs to not let that affect his trust in her.

The appropriate response would be something like ‘yeah it’s a surprise, and honestly kind of hard to believe—how did it happen? Is there anything I can help with?’

Even Mat looks better in comparison—he acted like a complete arse when he first heard that Egwene was Amyrlin, but what he did just before he left for The Worst Plotline Ebou Dar, bowing to her and calling her ‘Mother’ to make a point in front of the Aes Sedai who saw her as nothing more than a puppet, was far more the right thing to do. He still doubted, but outwardly he did what he could to support her, and to let her know he supported her.

“But bloody ashes, Egwene. When we parted you were just an Accepted, and that wasn’t so long ago. Now they’ve named you Amyrlin? I don’t know what to think.”

‘But Egwene, it doesn’t make sense to me with my incomplete knowledge of the situation, so you must be wrong’.

Oh, sorry Gawyn, am I putting words into your mouth? Telling you how you really feel? Wonder what that feels like.

“And you can’t see how your uncertainty undermines anything we could have together?”

FUCKING YES.

DO NOT LET HIM OFF EASY.

ASSUMING SOMEONE’S INCOMPETENCE IS NOT ATTRACTIVE.

Every bit of this conversation—no, that’s a lie, every bit of Egwene’s side of this conversation—is exactly what I was hoping it would be and more.

And finally he’s like okay fine I’ll try to change but you need to guide me because I can’t seem to work it out for myself and need someone to hold my hand every step of the way.

I’m paraphrasing, but he deserves it.

“Fine,” Egwene said, passing him. “I can’t think about that now. I have to go order people I care about to slaughter another group of people I care about.”

What a beautiful dismissal. What a beautiful assertion of priorities. Sorry, Gawyn, go wait in the corner with your confusion and your feelings because the grown-ups have some tough decisions to make about, you know, the fate of the world and stuff.

On another note entirely…it’s again a contrast in the making of those harsh decisions between Egwene and Rand. For her, the caring is inextricably tied to it. This is a hard decision and people will die and she has to make it anyway, knowing that.

Gawyn’s like ‘but won’t that make you sad’ and yeah, Gawyn, it will. Better that it would than that it wouldn’t, because we’ve seen what happens when the latter state of mind is reached. (I mean, it was one hell of a beautiful scene, but it wasn’t exactly uh. A good thing).

“I will do what must be done, Gawyn,” she said, meeting his eyes. “For the good of the Aes Sedai and the White Tower. Even if it is painful. Even if it tears me apart inside. I will do it if it needs to be done. Always.”

And she will accept that pain as she has accepted so much pain already, accept it and let it tear her apart inside and go on anyway. She doesn’t spend time hating herself for it, or trying to wall it off; there’s no point. And so she accepts what she must do, and the pain as part of it, because she believes in her reasons for doing it. Because she’s fighting for something. She’ll make these decisions, but she will weigh them against those costs and against that pain and she will not take the harshest route simply because it is the easiest.

But she will take it, if she has to. She has the capacity to be ruthless, and if she needs to, she will be. She will order death today, unless something happens to prevent it. Like Rand, she will do what she believes is necessary, even if there is a cost.

‘This was your fault’ is always a good way to start a scene. No futile arguments here, definitely not.

We’re with the Ajah heads—that much was obvious from the opening dialogue, really. Who else would sit in a circle discussing whom among them is to blame? Get it together, please.

I’m pretty sure we’re in Jesse Bilal’s POV but it’s a little hard to tell. Okay, yes, we are. And she’s not exactly singing this group’s praises. That at least is promising; maybe Egwene’s not the only one capable of learning from her mistakes.

Ferane Neheran—First Reasoner of the White—was a small, stout woman who, oddly for a White, often seemed more temper than logic. Today was one of those times: she sat scowling, her arms folded. She’d refused a cup of tea.

What is wrong with you?

(I’ll take that tea, if you’re not having it.)

(And I no longer trust Ferane.)

Jesse, Adelorna, Ferane, Suana, and Serancha. Pretty sure we knew most of those, but it’s good to have a solid list.

“There is little use in assigning blame.” Suana attempted to be soothing

And, more importantly, the rational adult in the room, it would seem.

Meanwhile Adelorna’s still spoiling for a fight. Save it for Tarmon Gai’don.

“and the Dragon Reborn still walks the earth unfettered.”

In more ways than you know.

At least now they’ve moved on to ‘our’ fault, rather than ‘your’ fault. Accepting responsibility is helpful. Trying to pass it off to the next person like a hot potato is less so.

The first [opportunity] had been the easiest to take hold of: send Sitters to the rebels to steer them and hasten a reconciliation. The most youthful of Sitters had been chosen, their replacements in the Tower intended to serve only a short time. The Ajah heads had been certain this ripple of a rebellion could be easily smoothed over.

And so Siuan’s strange ‘pattern’ has an explanation at last. That’s…not too far off what I was thinking, though I certainly didn’t put together the whole of it. It makes sense—or at least, it makes sense that they would at least try something like this.

They hadn’t taken it seriously enough. That had been their first mistake.

Yours, and so many others’.

The didn’t take it seriously enough, and they vastly overestimated their own ability to control their agents. And vastly underestimated Elaida’s capacity to fuck shit up.

“And then there were the rebels. Far more difficult to control than presumed.”

Thanks in very large part to Siuan, Leane, and Egwene. Without those three, the Ajah heads’ plan may well have worked.

We never should have let Elaida disband the Blue Ajah, Jesse thought. The Blues might have been willing to come back, had it not happened. But it was such a dishonour that they dug in. Light only knew how dangerous that was; the histories were filled with accounts of how dogged the Blues could be at getting their way, particularly when they were forced into a corner.

Or trapped in another dimension?

“I think it is time to admit that there is no hope to save our plans,” Suana said. “Are we agreed?”

“Agreed,” Adelorna said.

One by one, the sisters nodded their heads, and so did Jesse herself. Even in this room, it was difficult to admit fault. But it was time to cut their losses and begin rebuilding.

Jesse’s not understating it—that’s a hard thing for anyone to admit, much less leaders of a group known for pride and stubbornness. For them to agree to move past it, to focus on rebuilding rather than on clinging to a plan and to power they’ve lost, is a major step.

Now make the right decision, you five.

So far so good: they’re pretty much immediately unanimous in the decision to abandon Elaida to her fate.

“The Amyrlin is buried somewhere in a mass of Seanchan captives”

An experience both Amyrlin claimants now share.

Of course, this means the days of keeping Travelling from the Seanchan are over, but that always felt like an inevitability. Too many people know it at this point; eventually, something was going to go wrong. You can’t keep a secret with that many.

“Then we need a replacement,” Serancha said. “But who?”

Three guesses how this ends.

But this is what Egwene has been driving towards. Not Elaida’s fall so much as the Aes Sedai’s choice. Her battle wasn’t truly against Elaida; it was a fight to unite the Tower around her, to heal the cracks with it and give them a leader they could trust and rely on and look to. And for that to work, they have to choose her.

So in that sense, it doesn’t matter than Elaida is out of the picture so much as it matters that they choose Egwene. It is about the choice, not about the fight.

“What about Saerin Asnobar?” Jesse asked. “She has shown uncanny wisdom of late, and she is well liked.”

“Of course you’d choose a Brown,” Adelorna said.

And that, right there, is why Egwene is going to win this. Because the divisions between the Ajahs still run too deep for any sister who wears the shawl to gain support. No matter the Ajah, it would be seen as unfairness.

Maybe a Blue would have a chance, as the Blue was disbanded within the Tower and therefore wasn’t really able to become as much a part of the inter-Ajah enmity. But that would mean choosing one of the rebels, and choosing someone who none of them have seen or interacted with for almost a year, and people don’t work that way.

So of course they all start advocating members of their own Ajah, and defending their own Ajah’s virtues as the best for the situation, and you’re all missing the point. All of those things are needed. That’s why the Amyrlin is meant to be of all Ajahs and none; because no one virtue or goal is sufficient on its own, or better than the others. But they can’t look past the Ajah traits and stereotypes to accept that a woman chosen from one Ajah could indeed embody all.

“Are we just going to squabble as the Hall has been doing all morning? Each Ajah offering its own members, and the others summarily rejecting them?”

I mean…yes. That’s exactly what’s happening, and it doesn’t take the Foretelling to have predicted it.

Which only leaves one eligible candidate, really. Who has, coincidentally, spent the past weeks running a rather effective campaign.

Of course, they still don’t jump to the obvious conclusion, but first have a go at choosing one amongst themselves. Before rejecting that idea, too, as it would upset the delicate balance here.

Any day now, ladies.

“They’re so divided they can’t agree on what colour the sky is.”

Yeah, well, neither could the clouds in the Prologue, so at least they’re in keeping with the Pattern.

Suana really is the only adult in this room, and her patience is truly that of a saint. How many times has she had to say something along the lines of ‘okay, but we still need to deal with the actual issues here’?

Serancha shook her head. “I honestly can’t think of a single woman that a sufficient number of Sitters would support.”

“I can,” Adelorna said softly.

And so here we are. Finally. It seems inevitable…but the way it’s played out also feels very true to who the Aes Sedai are.

“She was mentioned in the Hall several times today. You know of whom I speak. She is young, and her circumstances are unusual, but everything is unusual at the moment.”

And more importantly, she is the one person among them all who has put more effort into uniting than dividing. The others have accepted that they must work together, but it is still a fragile acceptance, and as this conversation shows, difficult to maintain when things get complicated. It’s too easy to retreat behind the walls they’ve built around their Ajahs, too easy to cast blame and judgements. Too easy to fall apart. But Egwene has been working tirelessly to unite them despite that; Egwene, who never chose an Ajah, and who fought for a Tower even as it tried to reject her.

Who else could they choose?

The others still aren’t so sure, but they’re very quickly talking themselves into it. That’s what happens when there isn’t much choice. And when she has made quite the case for herself.

“You’ve heard the reports of her actions during the attack,” Adelorna said. “I can confirm that they are true. I was there with her for most of it.”

And called her Mother, as I recall.

“Surely some of what was said is exaggeration.”

Adelorna shook her head grimly. “No. It isn’t. It sounds incredible…but it…well, it happened. All of it.”

This is almost as good as the outsider POV realisations of what—or rather who—was happening during that battle. The part of me that reads fantasy for good old-fashioned wish-fulfilment loves these moments where characters realise, or point out, or are faced with, just how incredible another character is.

And this is what Egwene has worked for, and bled for. She deserves this, and they’re recognising it, and Gawyn should be taking notes.

“If the Sitters will not stand for someone of another Ajah, what of a woman who never picked an Ajah? A woman who has some experience—however unjustified—in holding the very position we are discussing?”

Never underestimate the value of previous job experience in a candidate for a leadership position. Ahem. I am absolutely not in any way speaking of a real-life political situation here, whatever gave you that idea?

As for the rest…it fits rather nicely with Egwene’s thoughts about the virtues of each of the Ajahs earlier in this chapter, and of how the Tower requires all of them; how she must be able to embody all of them.

But how had the young rebel gained such respect from Ferane and Adelorna?

Good old-fashioned sweat, blood, and tears, mostly.

Also some well-timed fireballs and a killer Heroic Silhouette.

“Didn’t you yourself say that we had to heal the Tower, no matter what the cost?” Adelorna asked. “Can you honestly think of a better way to bring the rebels ack to us?”

That is also a very, very good point. It goes a long way towards allowing the rebels to rejoin the Tower and still save face; this way, both sides capitulate to a certain extent. The Tower accepts Egwene as Amyrlin, and the rebels accept the Tower, and Egwene can take care of the rest.

“You aren’t foolish enough to assume this woman will be led by the nose, are you?”

Good. Because the last…everyone…who tried that learned the hard way that no, she will not.

And so it is done.

Now we just have to hope they get word to Egwene before she orders an attack on the Tower, because that would ruin everything. After all she’s done…

Over to Siuan, who is watching Sheriam enter an apparently secret meeting with Egwene. Interesting.

At least she and Bryne understand that Egwene is Not Entirely Pleased with them and why.

“Nobody likes being disobeyed, least of all the Amyrlin. I will pay for last night, Bryne. You’re right that it probably won’t be in a public way, but I worry that I’ve lost the girl’s trust.”

Siuan, you are bonded to the man—I think you can call him by his first name.

As for the rest…Siuan still thinks she made the right choice, but the difference between her and Gawyn is that she also accepts the consequences of it. She knows she has likely damaged the trust between herself and Egwene, and she knows why, and doesn’t go on about how unfair it is.

“And what of the other costs?” Bryne added.

She could feel his hesitation, his worry. She turned to him, smiling in amusement. “You’re a fool, Gareth Bryne.”

He frowned.

“Bonding you was never a cost,” She said.

*Shakes head* what are we going to do with you two. Just kiss, damn it.

And coming from me, that’s saying something.

“I think I actually understand you now, Siuan Sanche. You are a woman of honour. It’s just that nobody else’s requirements of you can ever be more harsh or more demanding than your own requirements of yourself. You owe such a self-imposed debt to your own sense of duty that I doubt any mortal being could pay it back.”

That’s…a high compliment, from Bryne. And kind of sweet, I suppose. Either way, it’s a good contrast to Gawyn’s conversation with Egwene, in that this one is based on actual mutual understanding rather than on ‘I know half the situation and so I will Tell You How You Feel’.

Siuan’s still not entirely here for it, though.

“Are you going to tell me that other demand, or are you going to make me wait?”

He studied her stone face thoughtfully. “Well, frankly, I’m planning to demand that you marry me.”

And that’s…well, not the weirdest marriage proposal in these books, because Mat and Tuon exist, but it’s an entertainingly odd one. And fitting, for the two of them. Their entire relationship is like that—kind of adorably exasperating.

“But only after you feel the world can care for itself. I won’t agree to it before then, Siuan. You’ve given your life to something. I’ll see that you survive through it; I hope that once you’re done, you’ll be willing to give your life to something else instead.”

Aw. He gets it. He knows what this cause means to her, and he’s not going to ask her to decide between it and him; he’ll stand by her through this and then they can deal with what comes after. It really is a lovely contrast to Gawyn at the moment, who is…intentionally or otherwise demanding almost the opposite.

I think what makes this relationship relatively tolerable to me is more or less exactly this—it doesn’t really interfere with their plotlines. I mean, okay, it kind of does in the sense that it’s what brought Bryne to the rebels in the first place, but for the most part the two of them do their jobs first, and each other second. (Actually, I don’t think they do do each other; last we heard, Siuan was thinking about how he never even tried to kiss her, but my point is…)

I hope they do live through this. Mostly I hope Siuan lives through this, because the woman deserves some happiness in her life, and deserves to get to have a life, and I still need her reunion with Moiraine.

He replaced his hand on her shoulder. Soft, not forceful. Willing to wait. He did understand her.

TAKE. NOTES. GAWYN.

All right, Egwene, let’s see what this secret meeting of yours is all about.

Sheriam had seemed troubled as she entered. Did she realise what Egwene knew? She couldn’t. If she had, she’d never have come to the meeting.

Ah, is that what she’s called all the Sitters here for? A secret meeting, to do away with a very large secret, perhaps?

After what Egwene had been through in the White Tower, this squabbling felt ridiculously petty.

No shit. It’s all about perspective, isn’t it? Even the battle against the Seanchan begins to look almost petty when weighed against the imminent Last Battle…

“You said that there were important revelations to make,” Varilin added. “Is this regarding the Seanchan attack?”

Somehow I don’t think so. After Egwene’s thoughts earlier this chapter about secrecy, and the dangers of keeping secrets…

So it was the Oath Rod she took from the Tower this morning. Which means…

Huh. Of course. First, it means Egwene finally takes the Three Oaths. Here, with all the rebel Sitters to stand witness. A final step, in some ways; they’ve long since had to get over any hangups regarding her status as Aes Sedai, but those in the Tower still don’t all see it that way, and even amongst the rebels it was something that set her apart. If she is to unify them, she must be one of them.

However she may feel, or may once have felt, about the Oaths themselves, the point isn’t in them so much as it is in the indication of unity and community. They have these literally bone-deep oaths in common, and it’s been part of the Aes Sedai identity for so long that to question them, especially at a time when the Tower is already falling apart, could mean breaking the Aes Sedai completely. She has to swear, and have them witness her swearing, to demonstrate her commitment to that unity, that identity. To reaffirm it, almost, because in so many other ways they have lost sight of who they are.

None of them said anything about her not having taken the test to gain the shawl. She would see to that another day.

That almost does seem absurd, given everything they’ve seen her do, but again it’s more symbolic than anything.

“And now that you’ve seen me use the Oath Rod and know that I cannot lie, I will tell you something. During my time in the White Tower, a sister came to me and confided that she was Black Ajah.”

Oh, wow, we really are going for full transparency here.

Then again, this is one of those cases where the truth is more shocking and compelling than any evasion or truncation she could present them with. And Egwene does have something of a tradition of shocking the Hall.

“It is shameful, but it is a truth that we—as the leaders of our people—must admit. Not in public; but among ourselves there is no avoiding it. I have seen firsthand what distrust and quiet politicking can do to a people. I will not see the same disease infect us here. We are of different Ajahs, but we are single in purpose. We need to know that we can trust one another implicitly, because there is very little else in this world that can be trusted.”

But what colour is that trust, Egwene? Surely not any of the Ajah colours.

It’s such an important statement, though; and even more important that she’s backing it up by example. So much of this series has been focused around the consequences of not trusting, of keeping secrets, of operating on only partial information. And on those rare occasions when characters have truly trusted one another, it has almost always been rewarded.

They will have to trust one another if they are to face the Last Battle united. They will have to learn to work together, learn to be united, because otherwise they play into the Shadow’s hands.

Egwene looked up. “I am not a Darkfriend,” she announced to the room. “And you know it cannot be a lie.”

She demands trust and transparency, and so she begins by showing herself to be worthy of it. By telling them of that secret, and swearing in a way they know must be true that she does not serve the Shadow. Maybe they never doubted, but as with so much, it’s the symbolic act that counts here. She asks nothing of them that she will not do herself, and she proves herself trustworthy even as she demands that trust of them.

And now she’s going to use the same trick Seaine and the others used. Which might work in this sealed tent, but how is she planning to do that with all of the Aes Sedai, without word getting out or some of them running—or just attacking? Careful, Egwene.

Sheriam embraced the Source.

Ah. Well, there’s one. Subtle, Sheriam.

“Are you Black Ajah, Sheriam?” “What? Of course not!” “Do you consort with the Forsaken?”

(I’d have phrased that one a little differently, just saying…)

“No!” Sheriam said, glancing to the sides. “Do you serve the Dark One?” “No!” “Have you been released from your oaths?” “No!” “Do you have red hair?” “Of course not, I never—” She froze.

Does that actually work? If so, this is why you listen before you agree, and read the fine print before you sign. It’s well played on Egwene’s part, certainly, though it seems like Sheriam had already implicated herself enough by acting exactly like a child who’s just been caught with a hand in the cookie jar for the other Sitters to have restrained her and demanded that she swear on the Oath Rod, just as Saerin and that lot did with Talene.

But that would be less dramatic, wouldn’t it?

Or maybe Sheriam’s real secret is that she actually dyes her hair that colour.

“Ah, then,” the woman said softly, eyes mournful. “Who was it, now, who came to you?”

That’s…strangely accepting. I would have expected more fight from Sheriam, but in a way I suppose this also fits. There’s nowhere for her to go now, after all. And she only ever joined as a way to get ahead; I think she’s been regretting aspects of that choice for a long time now.

“Verin Mathwin.”

“Well, well,” Sheriam said, settling back on her chair. “Never expected it of her, I’ll say. How did she get past the oaths to the Great Lord?”

“She drank poison,” Egwene said, heart twisting.

“Very clever.” The flame-haired woman nodded. “I could never bring myself to do such a thing. Never indeed…”

It’s a quiet sort of testament to Verin’s strength, that she alone could exploit that loophole. That even someone like Sheriam might, in her way, admire her for it. Verin found a way out.

And Egwene isn’t hiding that. She promised Verin she would make sure the others knew she was never truly Black Ajah, not in her loyalties. And so Egwene tells what she knows, and doesn’t hide what Verin was and what she did, and what she sacrificed for it. She makes sure they know Verin for the hero she was, that her name is not tainted by the Ajah she had to claim.

Nice try, Moria. I’m still kind of bummed about that one, I’ll admit. She was such a critical voice in the vote to reach out to the Black Tower, and an important supporter for Egwene.

Egwene is not even remotely here for Romanda or Lelaine trying to start shit right now. Just…don’t even try it, you two. Not today. Or ever, really, but now is just so very not the time.

But they both submit to her request to re-swear the oaths, which in a way is almost a sign of respect.

Huh, none besides Sheriam and Moria, it seems. I’m a little surprised.

“From now on, we continue as one. No more squabbling. No more fighting. We each have the best interests of the White Tower—and the world itself—at heart.”

Clever of her, to tie those things together this way. The beginning of a…cleansing of the Black Ajah, and the need for unity and trust. She makes this into something that binds them, into a symbol of that trust she so desperately needs them to find, makes this as much a shared part of their identity as the oaths themselves, and directs it at the Tower and the world, aims it at a purpose. She binds them with this, and it works. Because she’s not just asking them to trust each other; she’s showing them why they should—showing them what they share, and proving the reasons for that trust, by also showing them who the enemy really is and forcing them to share in facing that truth.

It's very, very well done.

Now if she can do the same in the Tower…Seaine and Saerin and their group have made a good start, but part of their problem was the need to do it in secret, because they weren’t sure where they stood with Elaida, and also it was dangerous as all hell.

It still is, but if Egwene can work out a way to force this into the open, to make it a binding not just of these Sitters here but of all the Aes Sedai, to make it a point of shared trust and unity, and force them to recognise and look upon their true enemies—not each other, but the Shadow and those who serve it—it could go a long way towards closing those rifts.

She saw something of this, in her Accepted test. She remembered something about a ‘Great Purge’. So much from that test has come true, if often in a different way than how she saw it…

“It will be difficult, as we will have to seize all of them as simultaneously as possible.”

Their greatest advantage, beyond surprise, was going to be the inherently distrusting nature of the Black Ajah.

I mean, it’s not just the Black Ajah who are inherently distrusting, but I like your optimism.

Then again this is Egwene; she will make the rest of them trust each other through sheer force of will if she has to. She’s already made a good start.

Ah, so she does have a plan for how to accomplish that simultaneous arrest. IT could work.

“Light, what a mess,” Romanda muttered.

You’re not alone, Romanda. That’s a common sentiment these days.

“And what of the White Tower?” Lelaine said.

“Once we have cleansed ourselves,” Egwene said, “then we can do what must be done to reunify the Aes Sedai.”

“You mean—”

“Yes, Lelaine,” Egwene said. “I mean to begin an assault on Tar Valon by this evening.”

That’s…not a lot of time, for the Tower to get word to her. If the Ajah heads can even convince the Hall in time.

Could Egwene not make it an assault on the Black Ajah specifically, instead? Turn up in the Tower with the Oath Rod and find Sitters she can trust and tell them what Verin told her, and get them to swear? Even as I’m typing this I suppose there are so many ways that could go wrong. But there are also so many ways a battle against the Tower could go wrong, so…

“Light preserve us,” Lelaine whispered. “And forgive us for what we are about to do.”

My thoughts exactly, Egwene added.

A perfect echo of her thoughts. And a warped echo of another plea for forgiveness… This is not right. This could so easily break everything she has tried to build, and right as it’s about to pay off…

Next (TGS ch 44) Previous (TGS ch 42)

#now would be a very good time to invent the telephone #Wheel of Time #neuxue liveblogs WoT #The Gathering Storm

42 notes · View notes

neuxue · 5 years

Text

Wheel of Time liveblogging: The Gathering Storm ch 38

Egwene faces some important questions and understands some important things and it’s all lovely and then the last page BLOWS IT ALL AWAY HOLY SHIT THAT’S A THING THAT JUST HAPPENED

Chapter 38: News in Tel’aran’rhiod

Egwene! This seems like an appropriate POV shift after the last chapter(s). Chapter, mostly. It fits, because of course Rand and Egwene parallel each other in many ways, as I have no doubt already bored you to death with on multiple occasions, but an Egwene chapter seems like perhaps the only way to follow…*waves nervously in the direction of the previous chapter* that, because while there are many many parallels between these two, the difference – as I have also no doubt bored you to death with on multiple occasions – is in their mindsets, and in how they approach those parallel events and issues and obstacles. And so to go from one to the other is (probably) a good way to transition in a way that provides a smooth continuity as well as a marked contrast.

I say all of this having read exactly one word of this chapter, so maybe I should not be getting ahead of myself.

So Egwene is locked in a cell, which means this is definitely not a perfect awful things to happy delightful things tone shift, but then, I wasn’t really expecting it to be. I’m expecting more of a ‘this is what I must do and so I will do it even as it damns me’ burning of hundreds of people from existence to a ‘this is my situation and I will do all that is in my power to bring something good from it because that is the choice I have made’ resistance-but-also-healing from within tone shift.

The conversation thus far looks something like this:

Siuan: “Let’s stage a prison break.” Egwene: “No.” Siuan: “Aw, come on, you’re no fun anymore.”

Lightly paraphrased, of course.

Siuan: “Also they might kill you.” Egwene: “…point.”

So at least Siuan gets to plan a prison break. She should get Gawyn on board; it might keep him occupied. Or at least keep him from fucking everything up (again).

“If Elaida cows them, she will act quickly. The woman’s punishments can be swift as a stormwind, take you unaware. I know that for certain.”

“If that happens,” Egwene said pointedly, “my death would be a victory. Elaida would be the one who gave up, not I.”

And so here we have another of those not-quite-parallels not-quite-inversions between Egwene and Rand. It’s the way they both currently view the possibility of their death. Neither sees it as a defeat, or as something to fear. Both see it, to some extent, as a form of victory. But while Rand arrives at that thought through despair and self-loathing and pain he has had to endure for too long, and sees it as something he deserves and as the best he can hope for – an ending – Egwene sees it as an affirmation of agency. If she dies, she dies in power. If she dies it is because she has chosen not to give up her fight, not to put down the burdens she has taken on. If she dies it is a victory, not because she seeks death or an ending, but because it would ensure that her goals are furthered and hopefully achieved. Rand wants to die because he no longer looks to a future; Egwene will willingly die if it means saving the future she works towards. Rand sees it as his fate; Egwene sees it as her choice.

“An old acquaintance of yours recently arrived in camp.”

“Really?” Egwene asked absently. “Who?”

“Gawyn Trakand.”

Sigh. Please just break up with him; you deserve so much better.

On the other hand, at least she knows he’s there – given how communication in this series usually goes, I’m almost surprised. And if she knows he’s there, she can take that into account. Or send a message to him to mind his own business for a little while. Or something.

She managed to keep her form locked into that of the Amyrlin, however, and forced her thoughts back to the moment, driving herself to be casual as she responded. “Gawyn?” she asked. “How odd. I wouldn’t have thought to find him there.”

Siuan smiled. “That was nicely handled,” she said. “Though you paused too long, and when you did ask for him, you were overly uninterested. That made you easy to read.”

“Light blind you,” Egwene said. “Another test?”

A good test, though. Or maybe that’s just me – I like these sorts of things, even if this feels more Sanderson than Jordan to me. Still, it’s absolutely the sort of thing Siuan would ensure Egwene knew: how to mask her true reactions one way or another, and deceive the messenger without truly lying.

I suppose it’s also good that Egwene still has reactions and emotions, unlike SOME PEOPLE I COULD NAME. It’s one thing to hide them; it’s another to rm -rf the whole damn system.

“I should think that the time for testing me has passed.”

“Everyone you meet will always be testing you, Mother,” Siuan said. “You must be prepared for surprises; at any moment someone could throw one at you just to see how you respond.”

That is very, very good advice. Harsh, perhaps, but true. Hers is not a role or position that allows her to take her guard down. Ever, really.

Also that reeks of foreshadowing.

“Gawyn hasn’t said much that I could hear. I think he’s here because he heard that you were captured. He arrived with a spectacular flurry, but now he stays in Bryne’s command post, visiting the Aes Sedai regularly. He’s mulling over something; keeps going to speak to Romanda and Lelaine.”

“That’s troubling.”

That’s an understatement.

For Egwene’s reasons too, I suppose. I was thinking more about the extraordinary potential Gawyn carries in his pocket to make a mess of things, but it’s true that the implication here of divisions in the camp is…a problem.

Not a new problem, but a growing one.

Romanda on one side, Lelaine on the other, with a shrinking slice that doesn’t want to take sides.

Hey it’s a fractal! The Aes Sedai split in rough thirds between Elaida, Egwene, and Option C; then one of those groups split into rough thirds between Romanda and Lelaine…okay sorry I’ll stop.

*definitely does not start drawing out the Fractal of Aes Sedai Uncooperation*

The Tower may be fracturing along Ajah lines, but the rebels are not free from division and discord themselves. And truly healing the Tower means finding a way to bring allof those together.

“Factions and breaks,” Egwene said, getting up. “Infighting and squabbling. We are better than this, Siuan.”

Or she’ll make them be better than this, by sheer force of will.

It’s hard for any group to remain truly unified towards a single purpose, though, especially when there’s power involved. Just look at…uh…literally anywhere in the entire world.

And in this particular world, Rand’s trying to hold nations together but has just failed to establish a truce with the Seanchan. Egwene’s trying to bring the Tower together, but even her own faction is threatening to splinter apart. There is a greater threat, and they all need to be united to face it, but that’s countered by all the forces of division, all the disagreements and differences of opinion and outright hostilities. So this is where people like Egwene and Rand come in, or should, but that is far from an easy task.

For now, Egwene’s about to lay down the law for the Hall. They should know by now that this rarely ends with anything other than Egwene getting her way, so we could just skip the whole ordeal and go straight to that end result, no? No. Alright. Fine.

“I worry about how hard you’re pushing yourself. The Amyrlin needs to learn to ration her strength; some in your place have failed not because they lacked the capacity for greatness, but because they stretched that capacity too thin, sprinting when they should have walked.”

It’s like a version of or variation on Nynaeve’s talk with Rand in A Conversation with the Dragon. A softer version, perhaps, because Egwene isn’t tearing away her own humanity piece by piece, but she is in her way giving everything she has and sparing very little for herself. It is how she has always been; Egwene does not do things halfway. She throws herself in wholeheartedly, even when there is a risk. She does not let herself rest, does not pace herself.

And yet…well, we all know how I think this ends. One of the things I’ve suspected for a long time about this series is that Egwene will not survive it. And in a way, if I’m right, it would be yet another parallel/inversion between her and Rand. I think Rand, who thinks he must sacrifice everything he is, and who longs for the ending of death, will find a way to live, and perhaps to find himself again. Because death is something he seeks out of despair and fatigue and self-hatred. Whereas Egwene…this is who she is.

There are some lines she has to draw between Egwene al’Vere and the Amyrlin Seat, and she’s had to change to fill that role, but she hasn’t torn away parts of herself to do that. She’s grown, and become more herself. She has made these choices and embraced what they require. It’s not a rejection but rather an affirmation of self, and while as a result she may feel pain, she does not inflict it upon herself, nor does she see it as something she deserves. Egwene does not hold back or fragment herself to try to preserve some part of herself. And so it would be true to her character to give everything, including her life, and to do so willingly. It would be fitting for her, because it would be a choice, and true to everything she is, whereas for Rand it would be…not defeat, precisely, but certainly not triumph. Because for him it would not be a choice so much as it would be the only way out of something he never truly chose. Victory – or maybe fulfilment? I can’t think of quite the right word – for him would be getting to be himself in the end; getting to have a life he chooses, getting to live free of this fate that was set upon him. Whereas victory – or fulfilment – for Egwene may well be to be absolutely herself at the end, to hold nothing back and to give her life for the world.

So…yeah, I worry about her pushing herself too hard as well. I just don’t think she’s going to stop doing that. I think it will very likely mean her death. But if that’s the case, I also don’t think it would be a…meaningless death. It would be one of those sad-but-not-tragic sorts of deaths. Where it’s sad but in its own way it’s a kind of fulfilment of character.

Or I could be wrong.

That’s always a very strong possibility.

“My days are spent in solitude, with the occasional beating to provide spice. These meetings at night help me survive.”

“Is it difficult to endure?” Siuan asked softly.

‘Well, I’m kept in a cell that is essentially a box and beaten regularly but nah, this is fine’.

(Egwene does a better This Is Fine than I do).

Then again, it’s hardly her first captivity. But where Rand’s subsequent captivities only made his fear of confinement worse and dragged him even deeper into distrust and hardening himself, Egwene has – unsurprisingly, given how these two characters’ arcs relate – gone in almost the opposite direction.

Egwene’s response to being collared – and the way she reacted when freed from it – was similar to Rand’s response to the box. Different in scale, because one happened in book 2, when Egwene was still just coming into her power an done happened in book 6, when…well…They will pay. I am the Lord of the Morning. But while Egwene definitely still carries some of that trauma and resulting fear of being collared, this doesn’t compound that. In part, it helps that it’s not the same kind of captivity. But it also helps that she sees a purpose in it; this is a part of the war she’s fighting, and she does it for the White Tower. She embraces pain because there is a reason for it – not because on some level she believes she deserves it. She embraces it so that she can endure it, but does not use it as a form of self-flagellation in order to harden herself. She instead learns to accept it. And she doesn’t tell herself ‘this is what comes of trusting’ or ‘this is what comes of not being strong enough’. She doesn’t internalise it, even as she embraces it.

Because she has chosen this.

“It just occurred to me. This is what it must have been like for Rand. No, worse. The stories say he was locked in a box smaller than my cell. At least I can spend part of the evenings chatting with you. He had nobody. He was without the belief that his beatings meant something.”

Oh Egwene. There’s something so…almost cathartic about seeing her say this, seeing her understand. Because that puts her in a group of maybe…one or two other people? And she gets to the heart of it in a way, but understanding that fundamental difference between their situations: he was alone, and without the reassurance that this served a purpose. Whereas she can hold to that, and she can reach out to some of her support base, and know that there is a reason for her pain.

It’s a rather perfect illustration of the whole ‘parallels but inversions’ pattern of their storylines – there’s a very obvious point of similarity in that they’re both held in a box and beaten (at Elaida’s direction, no less)…but that’s where the similarities end. And that’s how so much of their stories have been: points of similarity in terms of the situation, and then nearly opposite approaches or responses to it.

Also this is lovely because it shows so clearly how she still cares about Rand, even if the Dragon Reborn is a problem to be dealt with.

“Each day I endure is another proof that Elaida’s will is notlaw. She cannot break me. Her support from the others is eroding. Trust me.”

Siuan nodded. “Very well,” she said, rising. “You are Amyrlin.”

And here we have the value of strength rather than hardness. Rand smiled when he was taken out of the box and beaten, but it was the hardest thing he had ever done; it was a brittle sort of defiance, because he was being broken. He had no one but Lews Therin and nothing to hold on to except the belief that this is what comes of trusting Aes Sedai and so he tried to endure but it was such a brittle endurance. Whereas Egwene can draw strength from those she trusts, because she still has those connections. Egwene can embrace pain knowing it serves her purpose. And so Egwene cannot be broken this way. She’s not grimacing in defiance and desperately holding on; she’s suffering but her belief and determination and sense of self are intact.

“I always believed you had potential,” Siuan corrected. “Well, you’ve fulfilled it. Some of it at least. Enough of it. However this storm blows through, you’ve proven one thing. You deservedthe place you hold.”

It’s a nice moment, and yet another sense of a character’s growth completed or all but completed, a readying for the ending. They’re all coming into who they are, who they have been becoming for the last eleven books.

Well.

Rand is something of a special case. He’s also reaching what feels like the culmination of a path he’s been on since almost the beginning, but in his case it’s a nadir rather than an apex. And yet, I think that’s a necessary step in his case, the darkest hour before the dawn.

Egwene is, rather understandably, reluctant to leave Tel’aran’rhiod because embracing pain is all well and good but there’s no reason to hurry back to it if you don’t have to.

I feel the same way waking up on Monday mornings.

Egwene had long since stopped being unnerved by the eerie lack of people in Tel’aran’rhiod. But this camp was different somehow. It looked as a war camp might after all the soldiers had been slaughtered on the battlefield. Deserted, yet still a banner to proclaim the lives of those who had occupied it. Egwene felt as if she could see the division that Siuan had talked about, tents clumped together like bunches of sprouting flowers.

The strength of the rebel camp is waning, with Egwene no longer there to hold the centre. Deserted but with a banner to proclaim those who occupied it is pretty much right on the nose. They’re still ostensibly holding to their position, but without the impetus or heart she provided. It’s a brittle thing, now, a hollow rebellion. She doesn’t have much time.

Because this is a part of the division of the Tower – it is divided within itself and against itself, and so long as there is division, there will be weakness. If she is to unite it, she must unite the whole Tower; she held the rebels together for a time, but that’s not enough when there’s a greater division still unhealed.

It was healthy to have the women planning and preparing; the trouble was when they began to regard others of their kind as enemies, rather than just rivals.

You could expand that to all of humanity at this point, Egwene.

And this is where I sort of wonder if maybe…could Egwene be the one to finally achieve a treaty or some kind of peace with the Seanchan? They’re moving on the Tower and she’s trying to unite the Tower from within and she very much has a history with the Seanchan – she’s the first of the main characters to have such a history – and it would be a way of bringing a sort of closure to that part of her arc. A way of healing or moving on from what was done to her, and laying the foundations for something better.

So what if their attack on the Tower is a way for her to unite the Aes Sedai, but then a chance to perhaps offer the Seanchan a truce rather than defeat? What if Elaida’s Foretelling about Rand facing the Amyrlin and knowing her anger is tied in some way to the dual but opposite prophecies of Rand binding the nine moons to serve him and the Dragon Reborn kneeling before the Crystal Throne?

And if that’s how the attack is thwarted, if she ends it by forging some kind of truce between them, it would be a rallying point for the Tower around her as well, because she would be the one who not only foretold this attack but saved them from it and future ones…

Rand failed to make peace with the Seanchan, and his and Egwene’s arcs have so long been this series of parallels and opposites, so it would be fitting for this to be another one. Rand to walk calmly to peace talks and everything to fall apart as both sides immediately turn to their own attacks afterwards, and Egwene to face a battle and come out with a peace treaty. There would be a very nice symmetry to something like that.

What if the White Tower didn’t unseat Elaida? What if, despite Egwene’s progress, the rifts between the Ajahs never healed? What then? Go to war?

There was another option, one that none of them had brought up: that of giving up on reconciliation permanently. Setting up a second White Tower. It would mean leaving the Aes Sedai broken, perhaps forever. Egwene shuddered at the prospect, and her skin itched, rebelling against the thought.

But what if she had no other choice? She had to consider the ramifications, and she found them daunting.

Yeah that’s about as much a solution as balefiring a fortress is mercy. But it’s a sign of how much she’s grown and matured that Egwene forces herself to consider the possibility of failure, and to actually think through what it would mean. What the other options are. What she’s committing herself to, and what will happen if she doesn’t succeed. Because she could fail. She’s about as determined as it’s possible for a person to be, but she’s not infallible, and there are things she cannot control, and it could all still go wrong. So she forces herself to face what that would look like. Even here, locked in a cell. Even as she has to hold fast to the belief that her pain means something. Because she also has to look at the possibility that it won’t.

Also…the Aes Sedai have been broken since the Breaking of the World, really. Ever since the male Aes Sedai went mad and saidar was left unbalanced by tainted saidin. And there is a second tower already: the Black Tower. The Asha’man, separate from the Aes Sedai.

She would bring the White Tower Aes Sedai to her side. Elaida wouldfall. But if not…then Egwene would do what was necessary in order to preserve the people, and the world, in the face of Tarmon Gai’don.

Determination and conviction, but that undercurrent now of pragmatism and realism. It’s not an easy duality to hold. She’s come a long way.

Ah, good old need. Possibly the closest this series comes to deus ex machina on the regular but hey, sometimes you…uh…need that. I suppose it’s really just letting any character be temporarily ta’veren in the World of Dreams. Of course, ta’veren is that wonderfully paradoxical way of circumventing deus ex machina by turning it into a part of your worldbuilding, so…fair play. Surrender to control?

What did she need to know, what did she need to see?

Wise questions to ask, all things considered.

It’s something else I like about how Egwene has grown: she hasn’t lost that core of stubborn determination that has seen her through so much, but she has gained an openness to advice and an acceptance of the fact that she does not and cannot ever know everything, that she might be wrong or might be missing something. And the corresponding ability to seek out and be open to whatever that might be. It reminds me of what Lan said to Rand, about a portion of wisdom being the understanding that you can’t know everything, and that sometimes what you’re missing is the most important piece. And a portion of courage being to go on anyway.

She presses on, but she also looks for guidance and advice when she knows there’s more. She uses need here not to find a solution to her problems, but to see what the Pattern thinks she should know or see, to see what she might be missing, because she’s willing to be shown it, and to take it into account.

(It would be nice if more people did that in real life from time to time).

Need takes her to a fire, apparently. How…*looks at last chapter again*…ironic.

In the middle of a camp of the Tuatha’an. I think maybe I see where this is going.

She could almost hear the flutes and drums, could almost imagine those flickers from the firepit to be the shadows of dancing men and women. Did the Tuatha’an still dance, with that sky still full of gloom, the winds so full of ill news? What place was there for them in a world preparing for war?

But what place is there for war, in a world that has no place for dancing? What purpose is there to that war, if not to allow for life? Without that, you end up where Rand is: looking only to the war and its victory, and not to the reason, or to anything that comes after. And at that point, the only purpose is war itself, and what future is that?

If I were a slightly more cynical person than I am, I might respond with ‘the one we live in’ but apparently in this, the year of our lord two thousand and nineteen, I still retain some semblance of optimism.

Maybe that’s just because it’s my favourite season and I have an excellent playlist of classical music on in the background a full mug of the world’s best green tea sitting right next to me, so nothing can look too bad.

(I am absolutely a caricature of myself in this moment).

For a moment, she let her gown change to that of a simple, woollen Two Rivers dress of green, much like the one she’d worn during her time visiting the Travelling People. She stared into those non-existent flames, remembering and pondering.

…In a moment, she would step out of Tel’aran’rhiod and return to her wounds. In a moment she would face the Aes Sedai outside, and become the Amyrlin again. But for now, she only wanted to sit, and remember an innkeeper’s daughter named Egwene al’Vere.

Couldn’t help myself, sorry.

Best not to wonder what has become of Aram, Egwene. That way lies madness, pretty much literally.

Yes, this group would still dance. They would dance right up until the day when the Pattern burned away, whether or not they found their song, whether or not Trollocs ravaged the world or the Dragon Reborn destroyed it.

And that’s what they’re fighting for. This gets into Sanderson’s ‘journey before destination’ a little bit, but is also absolutely consistent with the way Jordan has painted the conflict: it’s not just about winning the war. It’s about how, and why, and what you do with the life you have even when the apocalypse is hanging over you.

It’s what Rand has forgotten, and what Egwene has held on to. Neither of them can truly control the Pattern – well, okay, Rand’s certainly been making a go at it lately, and I suppose almost tearing it to pieces would sort of count in a way maybe I guess – but while Rand has been pulled into the view that this means he has no choices, Egwene takes the opposite view and claims what agency she can. It’s not just about what’s coming; it’s about how they face it.

Had she let herself lose sight of those things which were most precious? Why did she fight so hard to secure the White Tower? For power? For pride? Or because she felt it really was best for the world?

Was she going to suck herself dry as she fought this battle?

Well…in answer to that last question, I think very likely yes. But the whole point is that she’s asking herself these questions, asking herself why. What is she fighting for. What purpose does this serve. If she chooses to give herself to this – the key word there being chooses – what is she doing it for?

They’re the questions Rand cannot ask himself, because that would mean holding on to some form of hope, and that’s too painful. And because he does not believe he has any choices, so it would hurt too much to taunt himself with the notion that he could choose to fight for something, that he could choose how and why to fight at all, that he could choose what has already been chosen for him.

They’re facing the same vital questions, these two, and yet they again end up on opposite sides. Because Egwene sees choice, where Rand sees only necessity.

Yet I think this is exactly where Rand needs to end up – just as need has brought Egwene here, to remind her.

She had chosen – or, would have chosen – the Green and not the Blue. The difference wasn’t just that she liked the way the Greens stood up and fought; she thought that the Blues were too focused. Life was more complicated than a single cause. Life was about living. About dreaming, laughing and dancing.

I have very little to add to this, because…yes. She gets it. It’s not just about getting to the Last Battle at any cost, or even about winning the Last Battle at any cost. It’s about what that cost is paid for; it’s about the future a victory would enable. And in looking past that single cause, there’s a way to find choice again, rather than simply duty. Duty is ‘I must win this battle’. Choice is ‘I will fight this battle so that there will be a future in which people can live a life beyond this war’.

This is also probably the first explanation of Egwene’s Ajah preference that makes sense to me. Even if it is a little ironic that Egwene al’Vere, who throws herself completely and entirely into everything she does, thinks the Blues are too focused. But this is part of that realisation, I suppose – that she needs to remember why she’s doing this in the first place. That it can’t just be about the cause, the way it could for someone like Moiraine, who took that as her own way of accepting and choosing fate.

It reminds me of what Vandene said to Moiraine: “Blues. Always so ready to save the world that you lose yourselves.” And a character like Moiraine…part of her strength is that she can do that, and somehow still remain herself. They need someone like her, who can do that, but that’s…not something that works for every character.

Blah Gawyn blah.

She loved him. She would bond him. Those desires of her heart were less important than the fate of the world, true, but they were still important.

This, precisely. Ignoring the fact that it’s Gawyn, but aside from that, she getsit. She is allowed to want things. She is allowed to care, allowed to make choices. She can prioritise her duty and the needs of the world – and that prioritisation is pretty key here – but that doesn’t have to exclude her ability to be a person with wants and desires and choices. She doesn’t have to deny herself those things that make her who she is. Because at that point, what is there to hold on to? What point is there to fighting at all?

And Rand has, at this point, decided the opposite. “I don’t know how human the Dragon Reborn can afford to be.” He cannot want anything, because he is a force and a tool and a weapon, not a person. He cannot choose anything, because he is the Dragon Reborn, a piece of the Pattern and nothing else. And so he has torn away or suppressed anything that makes him Rand, and in doing so has lost that source of strength that he views as a weakness. He has lost that surrender-to-control ability to face his fate and yet choose it, because there is a reason and a purpose for him to do so, beyond it being required of the Dragon Reborn. And that makes it so much harder to endure, and takes him closer to this cliff edge of ‘it would be easier, it would be merciful, to just end it all’.

That’s not strength; that’s shattering.

Though the sky bubbled in black turmoil, something cast a shadow from the Tower, and it fell directly on Egwene. Was this a vision of some sort? The Tower dwarfed her, and she felt its weight, as if she were holding it up herself. Pushing on those walls, keeping them from cracking and tumbling.

Rand shadowed by a mountain, Egwene shadowed by the Tower. Dragon and Amyrlin; Dragonmount and the White Tower. And some small light atop each, casting that shadow onto them.

She stood for a long while there, sky boiling, the Tower’s perfect spire throwing its shadow down onto Egwene. She stared up at its peak, trying to decide if it was time to just let it fall.

No, she thought again.

Again it comes down to such a simple and yet monumental difference in the assertion of agency. Both Egwene and Rand, Dragon and Amyrlin, are shadowed by the symbol of their role. Both feel its weight, both struggle to hold it up.

Yet in Rand’s case, he sees that mountain as something he must carry, until the time comes when he can die and be free of it, because that is the only way. For Egwene…she looks at it, and wonders if she should just let it go, and decides not to. She chooses this. And that makes it more bearable.

I Rand’s case the mountain is a…pressure, a weight on him, seeking to crush him. In Egwene’s case it’s still a weight, but she sees her role as supporting it, holding it together rather than struggling underneath it.

Anyway I love the way they are so similar and yet so opposite; I know you probably couldn’t tell from the last several thousand words.

It’s just such a good way of highlighting those differences, and in doing so showing indirectly where the core of Rand’s own struggle is. And also showing the importance of Egwene’s choices and mindset, as we’ve seen where the opposite leads. Both storylines and arcs play off of and complement each other, so that together you get something slightly more than the sum of their parts.

And back to the waking world and pain.

She did not complain. No yells, no cries, no begging. She forced herself to sit up despite the pain, smiling to herself at how it felt.

Her refusal to cry out or beg or show them discomfort is not a strain on her in the same way as it would be if she were resisting this pain, or if she had no belief that it was for a purpose. But because she embraces that, there’s a much greater depth and strength to her endurance and defiance. It feels less brittle, more sustainable.

She sat back down, cross-legged, and took deep breaths, repeating to herself that she wantedto be locked in this room.

That deliberate assertion of agency, to remind herself of the strength it brings. Of course it helps that she actually could escape if she decided to – that this is actually in many ways a choice – but it’s the recognition of it as such, the decision to cast her situation in such a light, that makes the crucial difference, I think. That’s what so much of her story is based in: the hero-by-choice rather than necessity. The importance of choosing, even when it just means choosing what is necessary, or choosing to follow what is asked of her.

The words, repeated in her head, helped stave off the panic at considering yet another day within this cell.

While locked in a box, her mantra becomes an assertion of agency and choice, while Rand’s became a litany of self-flagellating anger and admonishments to never trust again, to be harder.

What would she have done without the nightly dreams to keep her sane? Again, she thought of poor Rand, locked away. She and he shared something now. A kinship beyond a common childhood in the Two Rivers. They had both suffered Elaida’s punishments. And it hadn’t broken either of them.

That last part is somewhat debatable, but what I really like here is the depth of compassion and respect she shows. She doesn’t equate their situations and claim superiority. She’s also already acknowledged the differences in the specifics of their situations, and thinks she has an advantage here by being able to reach out in dreams, and by having the comfort of knowing this means something. And given that she is currently imprisoned and in pain and suffering, that kind of compassionate understanding is…impressive.

I’ve spent a lot of this chapter contrasting the way she and Rand deal with situations that on the surface are similar, but I want to reiterate that my point isn’t to say Egwene is superior because of the way she looks at and handles this, nor is it to try to quantify their relative degrees of suffering. But there’s a reason we’re presented with these two similar yet different situations, and a lot of it is to highlight those aspects that are different, and to let us begin to understand why. It’s easier to see how they each end up where they are when you have something to contrast it with.

And Egwene, also, doesn’t make the comparison as a way of claiming superiority, or as a value judgement of any sort. It’s a source of similarity to her, when so much has pulled them apart. They shared a childhood, and now they share this, horrible as it is. But in that, she chooses to focus on shared strength. There’s a great deal of implicit respect in that; that and this empathy are going to be important, I think, in holding them together and allowing them to face the Last Battle as allies, even when so much of their roles puts them at odds. It won’t be easy, but they have these underlying threads to help them (in a way that Latra Posae and Lews Therin perhaps did not…)

Also, Egwene? This is definitley not the first or only thing you two share beyond the Two Rivers. You two should compare notes sometime, when you uh…have a break from saving the world.

She would not break, particularly not while she could spend the nights in Tel’aran’rhiod. In fact, in many ways, those were her days – spent free and active – while these were her nights, in inactive darkness. She told herself that.

She tells herself that, because so much is about perception. Perceiving it as her choice, believing it to be. And perception is so much of the difference between her and Rand, as we see over and over when they face these parallel events and moments in their respective stories. She sees herself as choosing while he sees himself as chosen, and so much of the differences spiral from there.

Time for her regularly scheduled torture except wait no it’s a change in the routine. Probably not for the better, given that this is Katerine.

Ah. Elaida’s given up on imprisoning Egwene, probably because it’s having no effect whatsoever, and has decided to shift the blame to Silviana.

And Katerine is the new Mistress of Novices. That makes her the third confirmed member of the Black Ajah to hold the position in the series (if we count New Spring). This is some Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor level curse.

Elaida was more competent than Egwene had assumed.

Unfortunately.

That’s part of the problem: Elaida’s just competent enough to maintain a position that allows her incompetence to ruin everything. She’s like those people you run into at almost any company who have clearly been promoted just a little too high, but they’re not quite incompetent enough to be removed from their role, so instead it’s just a mess.

After spending so long locked up, it felt wonderful simply to be able to walk.

I’m reminded so strongly here of that part of Rand’s imprisonment where he hallucinates just…walking. You could extend that to his entire role, really; all he wanted at one point was to be able to just…be. Something as simple as just walking, free of chains or responsibilities or a destiny.

But she’d won. The realisation was just beginning to dawn on her. She’d won! She’d resisted the worst punishment Elaida could contrive, and had come out victorious!

This freedom is a victory to Egwene, in a way Dumai’s Wells was…er…not, for Rand. She’s not completely free, and she hasn’t completely won, but it is a victory nonetheless. Whereas Dumai’s Wells was far more decisive, and yet significantly less triumphant.

And everything looks brighter, even as she knows she still has more to do. (As after Dumai’s Wells everything looked darker, even though it was a very thorough ‘win’). It’s all about perception.

Why does Egwene keep referring to Elaida as ‘the Amyrlin’? Why does she give Elaida that title, when she claims it for herself? Is that just a Sanderson slip?

Saerin wants to talk to Egwene and is going to put up with exactly zero (0) bullshit from Egwene’s Red minders in her efforts to do so.

“Being seen in your company can be rather worth that risk, these days. I wanted to determine something.”

“What?” Egwene asked, curious.

“Well, I actually wanted to see if they could be pushed around.”

Ha. I like her. It’s just the right level of petty. And on a less petty note, tides have definitely shifted in the Tower. Still not enough for Egwene to claim a full victory yet, but what was begun in Honey in the Tea has continued and gained momentum, it would seem.

“[Reds] see it as a major failing on Elaida’s part.”

“She should have killed me,” Egwene said with a nod. “Days ago.”

“That would have been seen as a failure.”

She’s so matter-of-fact in discussing the possibility of her own execution, in terms of its strategic merit. Perhaps again because she has made her choice, and will see it through. She accepted the possibility of execution early on; she has contingency plans around it now, of course, but when she said she would be willing to die for the Tower, she was not lying. And so, once she’s accepted that and made it just another part of her choice – not something to be sought out but also not something to be fought if it could serve a purpose – she can look at it clearly.

Ah, so there’s more to the story of Silviana’s removal.

Oh damn.

“Silviana demanded to be heard by the full Hall while it was sitting,” Saerin explained. “She stood before the lot of us, before Elaida herself, and insisted that your treatment was unlawful. Which, likely, it was. Even if you aren’t an Aes Sedai, you shouldn’t have been placed in such terrible conditions." Saerin glanced at Egwene. “Silviana demanded your release. She seemed to respect you a great deal, I should say.”

Slow clap for Silviana. Wow. That’s quite a move to make, given Elaida’s entire reign as Amyrlin and what she’s done to those who have defied her. But this is where Egwene’s strength pays off: she gave Silviana, and perhaps has given others, the impetus and reason to find theirs. Silviana watched firsthand as Egwene held to her convictions day after day, despite being beaten and punished for them, despite Elaida and everyone else. And so Silviana has now done the same. She has faced the Hall and refused to back down or bow to Elaida’s demands, despite the consequences. Egwene has given her, and given the others, an example of that core of strength and conviction, even if it means defiance. And now that has taken root.

“She denounced Elaida, calling for her to be removed as Amyrlin. It was…quite extraordinary.”

Yeah, Silviana’s kind of awesome.

This could be another turning point; the other Aes Sedai have seen Egwene’s example, and perhaps been swayed by it in some cases, but now it’s not just the novices who have been won over. Now, Silviana has taken up Egwene’s example and made it plain for all the rest to see, and where one has gone, others may follow. It’s not about whispered hints or veiled requests for advice anymore. Now the call has been made not just by a rebel Amyrlin dressed as a novice, but by a member of Elaida’s own Ajah, from within the Tower, in front of the Hall. That’s harder to ignore, and once that first step has been taken, once that particular threshold has been crossed, it’s much easier to carry momentum.

“What did Elaida do to her?”

“Ordered her to take up the dress of a novice,” Saerin said. “Just about caused an uproar in the Hall itself.” Saerin paused. “Silviana refused, of course. Elaida has declared that she is to be stilled and executed. The Hall doesn’t know whatto do.”

And so Elaida has done exactly what Egwene tried to hint or warn the others she might: carry her power too far. If she demoted Shemerin, what is to stop her from demoting any who disagree with her? If the Aes Sedai let her get away with these things early on, it will only enable her to push them further…and now she has. And so it comes to a head, because now Silviana, unlike Shemerin, refuses to accept that from Elaida. While Elaida has now ordered execution for someone who stands up to her and dares to defy her in something she should never have had the power to do anyway. It’s forcing the Hall to actually make a choice now, to take a side.

I want credit for making it through that entire paragraph without a single reference to real-world politics.

“Light! She mustn’t be punished! We must prevent this.”

There’s a certain amusing irony to hearing this from Egwene, who adamantly refused rescue or aid from her own faction when she was captured and subjected to Elaida’s punishments.

“Prevent it?” Saerin asked. “Child, the Red Ajah is crumbling! Its members are turning against one another, wolves attacking their own pack. If Elaida is allowed to go through with killing one of her own Ajah, whatever support she had from within the ranks will evaporate. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised, when the dust settles, to see that the Ajah has undermined itself to the point that you could simply disband it and be done with them.”

“I don’t want to disband them,” Egwene said. “Saerin, that’s one of the problems with Elaida’s way of thinking in the first place! The White Tower needs all of the Ajahs, even the red, to face what is coming. We certainly can’t afford to lose a woman like Silviana just to make a point.”

There’s so much division, and so much anger between the Ajahs and the Aes Sedai in general, that it’s hard to put aside some desire for revenge or even just to see the ‘other side’ get what they ‘deserve’. But this is where Egwene’s ability to see past that, to seek a true unification of the Tower, becomes so important. Because someone has to be able to look past that.

Yes, this could undermine Elaida. But it’s not really about undermining Elaida anymore; as Egwene realised earlier, it’s about uniting the Tower, which is a similar fight in some ways but a very different one in others. It means she can’t let this continue as another step in the conflict. She can’t let the Red Ajah dissolve just to make a point, to get some kind of payback for the dissolution of the Blue, because all that does is serve more discord.

But to be able to keep so strongly to that conviction after being mistreated and held prisoner and beaten because of them is…impressive, to say the least.

“Do you really think you’re in control here, child?”

Egwene met her eyes. “Do you want to be?”

Saerin’s response is, appropriately (translated to modern English): Fuck no.

It’s a good response, not just because it’s a clever retort but because it’s genuinely a good question. And a good way to make someone stop and think for a second. Who would want to inherit this mess, and be held responsible for almost inevitable failure? (Sometimes I feel just a little bit sorry for Theresa May).

It’s another strength of Egwene’s; or rather, another complexity of the situation she’s come to fully understand. This isn’t about power, or about who gets to be Amyrlin, or even who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s not about winning. It’s about preserving the Tower, however that can be done.

So Saerin’s off to stage something of a prison break of her own, and Egwene’s turning this into an object lesson for the Reds watching her.

Barasine doesn’t want to go watch one of the tenser moments of Tower history because she promised to hold Egwene’s shield, Egwene realises she might actually be the only adult in the room and pinky-swears not to touch saidar, Barasine’s not biting, so Egwene just sends a novice for some nice hot forkroot tea because she is so beyond done with everyone’s shit.

Egwene actually drinks the forkroot, too. It’s like when she started laughing while Silviana was beating her. She’s reached this level of both commitment and understanding to the actual cause and the actual problems that need to be addressed, that from this perspective everything else looks so ridiculous. She’ll have to drink forkroot to get the two Reds to try to prevent the collapse of their own Ajah? Fine, just put some honey in it had have done. There’s a sense of urgency to everything, but all the individual pieces just look so…small. So unnecessary, so petty and ridiculous and why would she even pause for half a second if she can easily find a way past it? What does a little forkroot matter, compared to the fact that the Tower is falling apart from within?

“Hello, Egwene,” Verin said, taking a sip from a steaming cup of tea.

Probably not forkroot this time. But more importantly, um, what? Verin what are you doing here and how did you get here and why?

“I have work to be about.”

“Hmm, yes,” Verin said, taking a calm sip of her tea. “I suspect that you do. By the way, that dress you are wearing is green.”

DID SHE JUST.

DID WE JUST FIND OUT.

DID VERIN JUST PLAY HER HAND.

Verin just played her hand.

She just.

That.

What.

It’s not even the fact that she can lie that’s so surprising; that much, I sort of suspected though I’ve never been sure (and even now, there are at least two options).

But first giving that letter to Mat, and now saying this straight out, to Egwene. Dropping the cover she’s kept for…the entire series and based on her thoughts, a very long time before that…

This is her endgame, somehow. So what is it? And why? Why here and why now and AL;FSLEKAJRS VERIN OH MAN.

“Yes, I thought that might get your attention,” Verin said, smiling.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Next (TGS ch 39) Previous (TGS ch 37)

#NO KIDDING THAT GOT MY ATTENTION #VERINNNNNNN #Wheel of Time #neuxue liveblogs WoT #The Gathering Storm

66 notes · View notes

neuxue · 5 years

Text

Wheel of Time liveblogging: The Gathering Storm ch 33

You know that feeling. When you read a particular line and it just. Makes you feel a lot of emotions simultaneously and it’s almost too much and you don’t so much want to say something about it as you want to immerse yourself in it completely and make high-pitched keening noises?

Chapter 33: A Conversation with the Dragon

Well at least this one’s upfront about the fact that it’s probably going to hurt. Because any conversation with Rand is going to hurt, at this point.

Or…Dragon? Could also be referring to Lews Therin, I suppose. Which doesn’t actually lessen the probability that it’s going to hurt, so.

Even Rand’s pyjamas are red and black. Going to start dyeing your hair black again too, Rand? Better hope you and Moridin don’t turn up at the same fireplace anytime soon or it’ll be a major fashion faux-pas. Tabloids all over Tel’aran’rhiod will be sneering at you. You won’t be able to set foot outside for a week.

I’m stalling again, aren’t I?

It was getting harder and harder to see in him the boy Nynaeve had known in the Two Rivers. Had his jaw always been set with those lines of determination? When had his step grown so sure, his posture so demanding? This man almost seemed an…interpretation of the Rand she’d once known. Like a statue, carved from rock to look like him, but exaggerated in heroic lines.

Memory becomes legend…

This is an interesting description from Nynaeve, because it gets to the heart of what so much of his path has been: leaving Rand al’Thor behind to become the Dragon Reborn. Trading humanity for destiny, self for role. We see it early on as a struggle, as he only wanted to sit, and remember a shepherd named Rand al’Thor and then a little later as ‘I don’t know how human the Dragon Reborn can afford to be’ and it just escalates from there. He becomes the role, the Dragon, but the only way he sees to do that is by letting go of pieces of himself until there’s almost nothing left, until what remains what he believes he must be; what he believes prophecy and the world and the Last Battle demand. And strong enough – hard enough – to withstand it. Stone rather than human, statue rather than flesh, figure rather than human. A legend in the shape of the memory of a man.

But unlike most, Nynaeve still looks for the boy she knew; she sees the changes because she holds on to the memory of what was there. He’s still human to her, and that’s why the changes even register.

“Last I checked, I didn’t need your permission to channel. You’ve grown high and mighty, Rand al’Thor, but don’t forget that I paddled your backside when you were barely as tall as a man’s shins.”

And, being Nynaeve, she shows that recognition of his humanity, and her care for him, in her own…special way. Some things never change.

Rand’s very much not thrilled to be awoken in the middle of the night for a ‘spindly, terrified youth’ but is very slightly less not thrilled when Nynaeve tells him why.

That got Rand’s attention, and Min’s as well. She’d poured herself a cup of tea and was leaning against a wall. Why weren’t they married?

That’s…honestly so far down the list of important questions I don’t think it has a number. But Nynaeve is Nynaeve; this would have been her responsibility, once, back in Emond’s Field. And it’s part and parcel of the fact that she still sees the person he was in him; this wouldn’t even come close to registering in most people’s minds, because he’s the Dragon Reborn and one doesn’t wonder such things about the Dragon Reborn. I mean, not that it’s actually anyone’s business whether two people are married or not, but the fact that Nynaeve immediately thinks about it shows how much she does still see him as that boy she knew. And herself as his Wisdom.

“At the dungeon where you sent Milisair Chadmar,” Nynaeve said, eyeing him. “It is terrible, Rand al’Thor. You have no right to treat a person in such a manner.”

He didn’t rise to that comment either.

This puts me very much in mind of a doctor hitting your knee with one of those little rubber hammers to make sure your reflexes are working. She’s testing his ‘reflexes’ here, tapping at the buttons she knows were once there, scoping out the shape of what’s wrong. I mean, she knows what’s wrong, I think. But she’s trying to understand it, trying to draw more of Rand out if she can, trying to better understand what’s wrong so she can help make it well. But he’s not responding like he used to, and that in itself is an indication.

“I think he killed the messenger.”

Does no one remember you’re not supposed to do that? There’s a saying about it and everything!

Rand glanced at Nynaeve, and she could almost feelhim connecting the comments to figure out what she had been doing. “You Aes Sedai,” he finally said, “share much with rats, I have come to realise. You are always in places where you are not wanted.”

Nynaeve snorted. “If I’d stayed away, then Milisair would be dying and Kerb would be free.”

She’s not rising to his bait, either.

Also, that particular comparison makes me think of Moridin again, I have to say.

Ah, so Nynaeve does recognise that the kid is blocked by Compulsion. I guess we’ll get to find out whether ta’veren can out-do Compulsion after all.

“Stop,” Rand said softly. “Do you believe that I can kill you?”

The boy fell silent and – though Nynaeve wouldn’t have thought it possible – his blue eyes opened wider.

“Do you believe that if I simply said the word,” Rand continued in his eerie, quiet voice, “your heart would stop beating? I am the Dragon Reborn. Do you believe that I can take your life, or your soul itself, if I so much as will it to happen?”

So that’s…um…

A new favourite trick of his, certainly, it would seem. He tried it on Cadsuane, and we’re seeing it again here, and it’s the softness of it that makes it so terrifying.

That, and the fact that – maybe just because his choice of colour scheme and the comparison of Aes Sedai to rats has me thinking of Moridin – he sounds rather like Ishamael/Ba’alzamon here. Your soul is mine, death is mine, I can claim your life and your soul…

It’s very, verydifferent from how Nynaeve intimidated and threatened the prison guards. Soft and gentle and dangerous and utterly without feeling.

Nynaeve saw it again, the patina of darkness around Rand, that aura that she couldn’t quite be certain was there. She raised her tea to her lips – and found that it had suddenly grown bitter and stale

Okay, that’s it. The rest, I could forgive. But this? Making tea go bad? Ruining tea? That is truly irredeemable. You have gone too far.

“You will have to unravel the web of Compulsion, wipe it from his mind, before he can tell us what he knows.”

So it is a conversation with Lews Therin, at least in flashes.

Also, um, what?

No pressure, Nynaeve! Then again, if anyone can figure out how to heal Compulsion, it would be her.

“I have little skill with this kind of weaving,” Rand said with a wave of his hand. “I suspect that you can remove Compulsion, if you try. It is similar to Healing, in a way. Use the same weave that creates Compulsion, but reverse it.”

Does that mean Rand has, or would have, little skill at Compulsion as well? He’s never actually tried to use it, that I know of. Maybe some things are still too far, even for him as he is now. Or maybe he simply isn’t good enough at it to make it an option.

Can any weave be countered this way, or its effects healed? By using the same weave that creates it, but…reversed? Because there’s another forbidden weave, you see, that causes irreparable damage…

“I can’t tell you how it is done specifically, not for a woman, but you are clever. I’m certain you can manage.”

His unintentionally patronising tone sent her back into a rage.

Yeah, I mean, he shouts at her not to patronise him, and then turns around and basically pats her on the head and calls her a clever girl. She’s an Aes Sedai, not a raptor.

But then, she’s always done her best healing when she’s angry.

How had Rand known? She shivered, thinking of what Semirhage had said about him. Memories from another life, memories he had no right to. There was a reason the Creator allowed them to forget their past lives. No man should have to remember the failures of Lews Therin Telamon.

Allowed them to forget. Not made them forget. Others might see madness, but she just sees the pain it causes. Sorrows and his own suicide. Is it any wonder he tried so hard to push those memories away, to distance himself from them, terrified of sharing that fate? Is it any wonder he’s done what he has to try to insulate himself from the pain of not just this life but last? It’s not enough to carry the weight of the world; he has to remember letting it shatter.

And yet, those memories are almost certainly necessary. The knowledge in them, for one, but also…I feel like there’s still something to the fact that he’s fighting against himself, and that he has reached a point where he’s effectively lost all hope of surviving what is to come, and any desire to do so. Where he believes he’s already damned. But I feel like there’s something to be learned there about…the Wheel of Time turns and each victory might only lead to another battle and sometimes there are failures and sometimes they hurt but at least there’s still a chance to keep trying.

And okay, he’s pretty much on the other side of the galaxy from anything even remotely resembling that kind of take on it, but. It feels like the lighter side of the fight Rand’s been fighting against himself – insisting that he will not be Lews Therin, that Lews Therin failed but he won’t, that Lews Therin Kinslayer killed everyone he loved but Rand will not kill where he doesn’t have to…but it’s the wrong fight. It’s the difference between rejecting failure and learning from it. And it’s the difference, I think, between fighting just for an end, and fighting for a reason, fighting to give the world another lease on the future and if not certainty then at least hope.

It’s why I’ve been shouting at him for several books now to stop fighting himself, to accept who he is but also who he was, because then it’s not about fighting against the past but instead moving on from it.

Still, easier said than done when, as Nynaeve acknowledges here, no one should have to remember that. But he does, and if he can accept it, that itself is a victory of sorts.

And just like that, Nynaeve heals Compulsion. Round of applause.

Rand lowered himself to one knee, cradling the youth’s chin in his hand, staring into his eyes. “Where?” he asked softly. “Where is she?”

It’s the gentleness of this that absolutely kills me. There’s something almost…sorrowful to it, or mournful (Morr-nful? I’ll see myself out), except there is no sorrow, no feeling at all. It’s soft and lovely and terrifying.

So it turns out there wasn’t much left to this kid’s mind than the Compulsion, which…might have been a good thing to tell Nynaeve before she removed it?

“Instructions cleverly designed to wipe whatever personality this poor wretch had and replace it with a creature who would act exactly as Graendal wished. I’ve seen it dozens of times.”

Dozens of times? Nynaeve thought with a shiver. You’ve seen it, or Lews Therin saw it? Which memories rule you right now?

There are a few layers to that question. Nynaeve is framing it as a question of whose memories dominate at the moment, but Rand has been hugely affected by the very existence of those memories as much as he ever is by the memories themselves.

Which…well, see above, I suppose. Trying to deny those memories, trying to deny who he was, doesn’t make them go away. And doesn’t make them any easier to cope with, no matter how many layers of ice and steel he tries to wrap himself in. Because at the end of the day, it’s still denial, and the truth is still there weighing on him. So he fights it, even in moments like these where he acknowledges the memories that are useful to him, lets them come to the forefront and shape his words. He still doesn’t accept their entirety, because he still, I think, believes that would mean condemning himself to that same end, that same failure. He does not surrender to them, so he cannot control them. He doesn’t embrace them, so he cannot move past them.

Rand spoke to Kerb again. “I need a location,” Rand said. “Something. If there is any vestige within you that resisted, any scrap that fought her, I promise you revenge. A location. Where is she?”

It’s almost a kindness, almost a mercy.

I guess he would know all about a vestige within you that resisted, any scrap that fought, even when the rest is gone, replaced, torn away. (He named you friend. Do not abandon him…)

“Natrin’s Barrow.”

Rand exhaled softly, then released Kerb with an almost reverent motion.

This is just so lovely. The way motion and gesture are done in this chapter, these soft, gentle, almost reverent movements against the gravity and pain and horror of it all, lightness against weight frozen in a moment and a gesture. There’s a shift here, in that exhalation – an end to a waiting, or a decision that comes with an answer. It’s the sort of scene where you’d have a single mournful violin and soft lighting and the whole thing is overlaid with an almost desperate sadness but all you see is simplicity.

It’s not a Big Dramatic Moment, but it’s very clearly a moment. Even if it’s not clear precisely how or why. It gives him a focus, a direction, and you can feel that shift.

What right did he have to look as exhausted as she felt? He had done barely anything!

And yet. He cannot let himself care, but somewhere on some level it weighs on him. And I also get the sense that it’s not a presentexhaustion so much as a…future one, if that makes sense. He’s been waiting for this for a long time, for evidence that Graendal is here, for a location. And he means to kill her. And now the waiting is ended, in two words, and so you get a soft exhalation and a look of exhaustion because it never ends; there’s never enough time to rest, and even rest isn’t restful.

“I did nothing, Nynaeve. I suspect that once you removed that Compulsion, the only thing keeping him alive was his anger at Graendal, buried deeply. Whatever bit of himself remained, it knew the only help it could give were those two words. After that, he just let go. There was nothing more we could do for him.”

Nothing left but anger, and a single purpose or intention, and after that he just let go. Sound familiar, Rand? You don’t think there’s anything more that can be done to for you, either.

“I don’t accept that,” Nynaeve said, frustrated.

Yeah, somehow I feel like we’re not just talking about Kerb the chandler’s apprentice here. Just a feeling, you know?

“Don’t you feel any guilt at all?” she demanded.

They locked eyes, Nynaeve frustrated and helpless, Rand…who could guess what Rand felt these days?

Certainly not Rand.

“Should I suffer for them all, Nynaeve?” he asked quietly, rising, face still half in the darkness.

Oh okay so we’re doing pain now. Alright. Sure. Why not.

It’s still so…soft.

Also, I see what you’re doing there with the face still half in the darkness.

“Lay this death at my feet, if you wish. It will just be one of many. How many stones can you pile on a man’s body before the weight stops mattering? How far can you burn a lump of flesh until further heat is irrelevant? If I let myself feel guilty for this boy, then I would need to feel guilt for the others. And it would crush me.”

It’s just too much. (Am I talking about the quote or about what Rand has to endure? We may never know).

It’s too much, and it would break him. He knows what he’s doing, and the simplicity of it, the willingness to just explain it, explain his pain and what he’s been through so simply as if the magnitude isn’t overwhelming, and say so matter-of-factly that it would crush him, is…

Perhaps strangely, it reminds me of Lan telling Nynaeve what had happened to him, in Mashiara. Telling her simply ‘you would not want me bonded to you’ and calling it his last gift.

It’s not self-pity; it’s just fact, plainly stated and devastating.

“Oh, Rand,” she said, turning away. “This thing you have become, the heart without any emotion but anger. It will destroy you.”

“Yes,” he said softly.

She looked back at him, shocked.

“I continue to wonder,” he said, glancing down at Min, “why you all assume that I am too dense to see what you find so obvious. Yes, Nynaeve. Yes, this hardness will destroy me. I know.”

He knows. He knowswhat he’s doing. And he knows why; he has all along, as he’s fought to make himself harder and then harder still, patiently forging his soul in the fires of pain, bringing up the list of names, all so that he could harden himself enough to do what must be done. It’s always been deliberate. It’s just that at one point he thought he could stop short of that last line, could hold on to enough of himself to be worth saving. But now…now he knows better, or thinks he does. And here we see this softness of resignation and resolution; this is all there is for him now, this is how it must be, and he will not survive it much longer, so it doesn’t matter now. All that’s left is the doing, and the dying. He’s accepted it, stopped fighting, so there’s nothing but this calm, this clarity and the softness of finality.

They think he can’t see it, because who would willingly do this to themselves? They think he can’t see it, because he is supposed to be salvation even alongside destruction, hope and Light against despair and shadow and oblivion.

But that hurts too much.

I just. The self-awareness, and the gentle fatalism of it, is…oh, Rand.

(‘Your logic destroyed you, didn’t it?’)

“When I was much younger,” he said, voice soft “Tam told me of a story he’d heard while travelling the world. […] Tam’s stories claimed no man had ever climbed to Dragonmount’s peak. Not because it was impossible – but because reaching the top would take every last ounce of strength a man had. So tall was the mountain that besting it would be a struggle that drained a man completely.”

Leaving nothing left for the journey home. Yeah. Also, two things. First of all, the fact that he calls Tam by his name rather than saying ‘my father’ is just one more soft and sad thing in a chapter already overflowing with soft sadness. He resolved that inner conflict a long time ago; Tam is his father in all the ways that matter, so I don’t think that’s what this is. I think it’s just another measure of detachment, of relinquishing any last vestiges of emotion or humanity or hope. He is the Dragon Reborn, nothing else, and if the Dragon Reborn cannot be human then he certainly cannot have a father he loves, or a home he is bound to, or anyone he might want to stay alive for.

Second…yeah, about climbing Dragonmount. I joke a lot about Rand’s penchant for climbing on top of and then falling off of things, but Dragonmount has been both foreshadowed and honestly kind of inevitable more or less since the Prologue, I feel like. I just can’t see it remaining purely metaphorical, though I can’t see what purpose it would actually serve, except as a full-circle kind of thing.

“So they never climbed it. They always wanted to, but they waited, reserving that trip for another day. For they knew it would be their last.”

“But that’s just a story,” Nynaeve said. “A legend.”

“That’s what I am,” Rand said. “A story. A legend.”

YES THIS IS EVERYTHING I WANTED AND IT’S DEVASTATING.

He knows. It’s part of what makes this so painful, is that he walks into it eyes open. He knows the role he must fulfil, knows he must shoulder this duty or the world dies, knows it will be all but unendurable, knows what it will cost him. Always, at each step, each time he tore away another part of himself, he knew what he was doing, even knew, I think, where it would lead if taken too far.

“I don’t know how human the Dragon Reborn can afford to be,” he told Nynaeve in essentially the precursor to this conversation (and I think there’s a reason we see both through Nynaeve’s eyes, rather than his). When he truly didn’t know, but had begun to suspect. When he knew he would need to let go of at least some of himself, some of his humanity.

Because the Dragon Reborn is a legend, a story. “He belongs to the Pattern now, and to history.” He saw Rhuidean, saw the threads of the Pattern that wove him. He knows the prophecies, knows what they demand. And for a long time he fought to find some balance there, some way to be both himself – even if just to die as himself – and to be what prophecy and story and history demanded. But now he’s stopped fighting that, because it’s too much for anyone or anything but a legend and a story to carry, so that is what he will be. No longer a shepherd named Rand al’Thor, but the Dragon Reborn. And that’s all. The rest is gone.

But he…stopped fighting the wrong thing. Instead of surrendering the fight against himself, he surrendered the fight to live, to salvage anything of himself. And it’s the wrong surrender.

And the whole mood of this is almost like that of the time Rand wandered into Moridin’s dreams and the two of them sat quietly by the fire; that sense of inevitability and of being pulled into these roles and of ‘your logic destroyed you, didn’t it’ except this time Rand doesn’t bring any hope or balance with him. Just the gentle calm of accepting his own destruction. Welcoming it. As Moridin himself seemed to welcome the concept of a true ending.

But it’s all overlaid with this gentleness, this sadness that comes through even if Rand can’t feel it, and so it’s harder to see the horror beneath it. The wrongness of it all. Because that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? There’s less pain this way. Easier, softer, to just…let go.

“You all claim that I have grown too hard, that I will inevitably shatter and break if I continue on. But you assume that there needs to be something left of me to continue on. That I need to climb back down the mountain once I’ve reached the top.”

I still just cannot get past the honesty and clarity with which he recognises exactly what he is doing. It’s one thing to know he knows, and another thing to sit here and watch him state it like this, holding nothing back, not trying to disguise or mitigate it, but also not…caring anymore.

And it hurts because again, he’s done this to himself so that he can endure agony long enough to do what needs to be done, to fulfil his duty in the world’s salvation, and then die.

Just.

He didn’t want to. It’s not out of anger or malevolence or even temptation. Its done out of determination, because he didn’t know what else to do. Because he didn’t know how else to hold on long enough.

And now the only answer he sees is to not hold on anymore. To give up that last part of himself. It’s a sacrifice, and it just hurts more because it’s the wrong one.

It’s watching the slow death of hope in someone who has been forced to withstand too much in its name. It’s a lot.

“That’s the key, Nynaeve. I see it now. I will not live through this, and so I don’t need to worry about what might happen to me after the Last Battle. I don’t need to hold back, don’t need to salvage anything of this beaten up soul of mine.”

Except it doesn’t work that way.

He cannot go to the Last Battle like this, devoid of hope or care for what comes after, with no reason to fight except that it’s the last thing he must do before he can die. That’s too close to what Moridin is coming to it with, and what is the point of the Light’s victory if it isn’t to sustain and renew hope? The whole pointis that it means they get a future, a chance to salvage something from a broken soul or a broken world, and keep going. There are neither beginnings nor endings, and that means either an endless cycle of despair and pain, or a continued cycle of hope and renewal, and I think when you’re the champion of the Light, it matters which one you choose to see.

The Dragon is one with the land, and the land is one with the Dragon. He cannot succumb to despair, because to do so would damn the world. No one ever said it was fair.

“We can find a way, Rand,” Nynaeve said. “Surely there is a way to win but also let you live.”

Again, it’s like what she said to Lan, only…slightly higher stakes, perhaps. But this is who she is; Nynaeve doesn’t believe anything is impossible, doesn’t believe anything can’t be healed. She’s very much a creature of hope, in that sense, hope and determination and sheer force of will. She’s not going to stand by and let him die any more than she will Lan, no matter what either of them says must happen or will happen.

“No,” he growled softly. “Do not tempt me down that path again. It only leads to pain”

YEAH NO KIDDING IT DOES. I’M IN PAIN RIGHT NOW.

This is fine.

It’s the first break in that gentle, soft calm, as well. Because there isa temptation there, a part of him that still wants to keep fighting, and he has to fight notto. Once again she can almost get through to him, and he can’t let her. But it is a vulnerability in that armour. There is still a temptation there. And the fact that he sees it as a temptation, rather than as a lifeline…oh, Rand.

It just hurts too much. To hold on to any hope that maybe he can survive this, to let himself want anything at all anymore. It hurts to feel. Apathy is easier. But it’s a false sense of…absolution, almost, except its exact opposite. Absolute certainty of destruction and damnation. But through the lens of apathy they look almost the same, because they grant illusion that nothing else matters. That you don’t have to think about it anymore. Don’t have to weigh those choices or that pain or that action or inaction. It’s all the same, now. There’s no changing your path, so no need to try, so no need to struggle, so no need to hurt. It’s a powerful illusion.

But he can’t let go of it, because of the sheer magnitude of pain. And no guarantee that it would bring him anything but more suffering in the end.

So that’s…yeah. It’s just hard to condemn him for choosing the path he has, because at every turn it seemed like the only option, and he tried so hard.

“I…I used to think about leaving something behind to help the world survive once I died, but that was a struggle to keep living. I can’t indulge myself.”

He can’t let himself want, because wanting would be selfish and human and he doesn’t get to have that. He’s a legend and a story and a piece in the Pattern; he doesn’t get to have things like wants, or choices. Those are for humans and he’s the Dragon Reborn.

It’s irony bordering on paradox that to be the Dragon Reborn, he has to accept his place in prophecy and give everything he has to the world’s salvation…but in order for that to have any meaning, he has to see it as a choice, and retain his humanity and capacity to hope and also to want. He has to be willing to die, but has to want to live.

“I’ll climb this bloody mountain and face the sun.”

As if the sun, light and warmth and life, is something to be faced, something to be endured, rather than something to strive for.

“You all will deal with what comes next.”

There’s some truth to that, perhaps; I have a hard time seeing a place for the Dragon Reborn after Tarmon Gai’don, should Rand find a way to live by dying. If that is an immediate sort of thing rather than an eventual rebirth sort of thing. I think it is, but I’m far from certain. Anyway, I still don’t see him being the one to actually shape that future; his role is to enable it.

But he has to care about what comes next, because that’s what he’s doing all of this for.

“You did well tonight,” Rand said. “You have saved us all a lot of trouble.” “I did it because I want you to trust me,” Nynaeve said, then immediately cursed herself. Why had she said that?

Because he’s ta’veren, and because it’s true.

Rand just nodded. “I do trust you, Nynaeve. As much as I trust anyone; more than I trust most. You think you know what is best for me, even against my wishes, but that is something I can accept. The difference between you and Cadsuane is that you actually care about me. She only cares about my place in her plans. She wants me to be part of the Last Battle. You want me to live. For that, you have my thanks.”

WHAT. AM I. SUPPOSED. TO DO. WITH THIS.

HELP ME.

To have him just say all of that, so simply. To see that he knows, that he understands how much she cares about him and that it means something to him even if he can’t let himself feel it.

“You want me to live. For that, you have my thanks.”

Even if he doesn’t want to live, doesn’t believe he canlive, doesn’t want her to even tempt him into wanting it. Despite that, he thanks her for it. Because it matters.

And it’s kind of fascinating to see this through Nynaeve’s POV because from the outside it almost looks like he cares, like he’s touched by this. But we know from his previous chapters that it’s just…like when he said ‘I’m sorry’ after she told him about Lan. There’s no true feeling behind it, because he can’t permit that in himself.

And yet he thanks her anyway, because still it matters. Even unfeeling, even cuendillar, it matters that she wants him to live.

…….oh.

“Dream on my behalf, Nynaeve. Dream for things I no longer can.”

………

…………………

I’m just. Going to lie here, on the floor, forever.

What a line.

What a beautiful, perfect, absolutely devastating statement that is.

It’s as if the entire chapter has built towards this, with its gentle gestures and quiet sadness and stark acceptance of self-destruction and surrender to legend and story. With its calm and the knowledge that he feels nothing and yet somehow this means something to him despite that. The knowledge itself that he has gone beyond feeling, but that it shouldn’t be that way, and so he leaves the dreaming to someone else, because someone should.

That’s one of those lines I need to read several times over just to try to feel it.

Dream for things I no longer can.

The acknowledgment in that. The acceptance, the sadness felt as much through its absence as anything else, the secondhand hope alongside perfect calm despair.

Why is this HAPPENING WHAT DID I DO.

The gentleness of all of this just ruins me and the way it contrasts with and yet follows perfectly on from Rand’s own chapters just before, and how it all feels so final and almost at ease and yet is wrong but is still so beautiful and

Akfsleaksjralekjrljelsatea

Help.

Why couldn’t she come up with an argument against what he’d said? Why couldn’t she make herself yell at him that he was wrong? There was always hope. By surrendering that most important emotion, he might make himself strong – but risked losing all reason he might have to care about the outcome of his battles.

That says in about thirty words what I’ve been trying to say for about thirty thousand.

And she’s right, but it is hard to argue with his logic not because she’s wrong but because it means causing him pain. It means asking him to shatter this peace he’s found – dark and illusory and cold as it is – and and go back to the pain and the struggle and the guilt and self-hatred and anger and fear. She’s a healer; she doesn’t want him to be hurting, doesn’t want to ask that of him because it’s too much to ask. What right do they have to demand that of him? And yet he can’t go on like this.

But it’s part of why I think he needs to come to that realisation himself; it has to be his choice, not something he feels he is forced to do, or required to do.

And I would maybe have more to say but Dream on my behalf, Nynaeve. Dream for things I no longer can has effectively destroyed me so I’m just going to stop now, and maybe eventually pick myself up off of the floor, and go make a cup of tea, and stare at a wall.

Next (TGS ch 34) Previous (TGS ch 32)

#h e l p #wheel of time #neuxue liveblogs WoT #The Gathering Storm

58 notes · View notes

neuxue · 5 years

Text

Wheel of Time liveblogging: The Gathering Storm ch 36

It’s all in the nuances

Chapter 36: The Death of Tuon

Somehow I don’t think that title means what it looks like it means.

We’re back with Mat, but Verin is here so hopefully that should make things interesting.

“My goal was to make my way to Tar Valon.” “Then how did you end up here?” Mat asked

That’s an entirely fair question, but the first thing my mind went to, when Verin said that, was that you know who else’s goal was initially to make their way to Tar Valon?

Rand.

And so far, he has yet to even set foot in the city. I just find that kind of fun to think about, because I hadn’t really given it much thought before. But that was his entire goal pretty much all through EotW.

In comparison to that, Verin getting sidetracked for half a book somewhere in the middle of…is Mat in Murandy still?...is small potatoes.

Bloody [bench] must have been designed by insane, cross-eyed Trollocs and built from the bones of the damned. That was the only reasonable explanation.

Somewhat cringing at this because it is so very not Mat, and feels like it’s trying too hard. Meh. Anyway.

“You can Travel. So if you intended to go to the White Tower, then why not just bloody Travel there and be done with it?”

“Good questions,” Verin said. “Indeed. Might I have some tea?”

What, you thought you were going to get answers?

Good luck. I’ve been trying for ten books now and still all I have are suspicions. And one of those suspicions is that Verin is just a massive troll and enjoys fucking with people.

Because of the holes in his memory, Mat’s first meeting with Verin was fuzzy to him. In fact, his memory of her at all was fuzzy.

I’m not actually sure having your memories intact would help much with that, honestly.

Studying her, her mannerisms seemed too exaggerated to him. As if she were leaning on the preconceptions about Browns, using them. Fooling people, like a street performer taking in country boys with a clever game of three-card shuffle.

She eyed him. That smile on the corner of her lips? That was the smile of a jackleg who didn’t care that you were on to her con. Now that you understood, you could both enjoy the game, and perhaps together you could dupe someone else.

One trickster to another.

I like little moments of recognition like this between characters. Neither says anything, but they both know, and each one knows that the other knows, and so the rest of the scene can proceed with this undercurrent of understanding.

Two characters who recognise something similar in each other – or who recognise each other’s talents, at any rate – and who just look at each other across the board and say ‘shall we play a game?’

And as the reader you’re invited in as well, because it’s not so much adversarial as almost-but-not-quite-competitive, a test of skill almost, a game in many ways. So it’s an open invitation to play, because as the reader you also have that little extra bit of insight…but not enough to know everything that’s going on. So, like Mat, we get to try to spot the aforementioned con.

Also, I just love that Verin and Mat are set side by side here because at first glance they’re total opposites, but by positioning them this way we see Verin as being…perhaps not quite trickster but certainly trickster-adjacent, herself. She’s not the roguish yet honourable young man with a jaunty hat and a cool spear; she’s a plump middle-aged woman with probably an inkstain or two on her clothes and an almost grandmotherly manner. And yet here she is.

I mean, not that we didn’t already kind of know that. But I love these moments where Verin is revealed again to be not entirely what she seems, yet in a way that suits her. It’s some good character development for Mat, as well. Everyone wins here, really.

Good luck getting Mat to admit outright to being ta’veren, Verin.

(Good luck getting Verin to say anything at all outright, Mat).

“But you can’t hide your light in [Rand’s] shadow, Matrim Cauthon.”

That sounds like what Melindhra used to say to him.

Also, I don’t know; Tuon described Rand as having a shadow like a mountain last chapter, and it’s all rather dark there these days, so if you’re going to try, now’s the time.

Casual mention of Verin having just been with Rand, which I think is anything but casual.

“How…did he seem?” Mat said. “Is he…you know…”

“Mad?” Verin asked.

Mat nodded.

“I’m afraid so,” Verin said, lips downturning slightly. “I think he’s still in control of himself, however.”

There’s very little…softening of the truth with Verin, either to herself or to others. Obfuscating of it to serve her purposes, sure. But denial or wishful thinking or gentle presentation of facts? Not so much. She deals with the world as she finds it, because wishing it otherwise won’t make it so (unless, perhaps, you’re the Dragon Reborn and a Fisher King analogue, in which case all bets are off). So she’s not going to soft-pedal her perceptions of Rand, even for a friend of his. Whether or not she’s completely correct is another question, but she’s not going to waste time trying to ignore what she sees.

I like Mat’s hesitant concern for Rand, here. He tried to break off their friendship as far back as TGH, but it never quite snapped completely. And I think he cares more about Rand than he might admit.

“I’m not convinced young al’Thor’s problems are completely due to the Power, Matrim. Many would like to blame his temperament on saidin, but to do that is to ignore the incredible stresses that we’ve settled on that poor boy’s shoulders.

There’s something about the way she says this, so matter-of-fact but at the same time so clearly aware and even sympathetic of something that very few characters even begin to acknowledge, much less understand, that lends a great deal of poignancy to this statement.

I think it’s maybe because it’s so matter-of-fact. It’s not sentimental, and Verin knew Rand earlier on but doesn’t have any particular attachment to him the way, say, Min or Nynaeve or even Egwene or Mat do. She’s not saying this out of sympathy or sorrow. And yet that gives it more weight, in a way; it’s a way of showing how clear that is to her, that she sees it as just a statement of fact. His humanity and youth, so easily forgotten by most, are just simple fact to her.

And that means so much, when so few in the world see the Dragon Reborn anymore as anything but a force, a power, a monster, a legend. Rand is a man who can channel. Men who can channel are driven mad by the taint on saidin. Therefore Rand must be mad. Therefore the things Rand does must be madness. The root of this must be the taint. And thus they can ignore everything else involved that might be harder to accept, everything that might cause an uncomfortable conflict of conscience.

Easier to see the Dragon Reborn as a necessary monster on the verge of madness, perhaps, than to see a tortured young man carrying far too heavy a task for a world that fears and even reviles him. Because the first option doesn’t ask you to do anything. It’s terrifying, certainly, but in a distant ‘nothing I can do’ kind of way. Or, for those who want to manipulate him, it gives them a very reasonable basis for doing so.

But Verin…Verin just looks at the situation and sees truth, apparently unclouded by sentiment or self-interest or fear or denial. And thus, perhaps ironically, ends up with a view of Rand that is far more sympathetic than almost any other character aside from those very closest to him.

He is only human. He is young. He is tired and desperate and in pain. And Verin sees that, and understands its effects. Even as she is ostensibly working to keep him alive until it is ‘time for him to die’. She does not allow herself to soften that necessity, to take the easy way out by blaming saidin or by looking at him as anything other than what he is.

Oh and by the way saidin is clean now.

Once again, Verin has this way of getting straight to the heart of things, and making these sorts of statements that are almost uncomfortable in their truth or insightfulness or just in what they force people to think about. But she does it with this mask of being just a typical Brown, lost in her own thoughts, unaware of the full effect of what she’s saying, drifting off on a tangent that just so happens to make everyone else uncomfortable. et there’s nothing vague or accidental or even truly tactless about it. She knows that this is the best way to get her thoughts heard, but in such a way as to not bring any sort of…suspicion? scrutiny? unwanted attention? upon herself.

And also in a way that doesn’t leave people a lot of room to evade the truth, even if just for a few seconds. It’s why her words often result in brief uncomfortable silences. Because she doesn’t leave an easy way out…until she decides herself to provide one, to bring things back to comfortable topics.

“I would argue that the cleansing itself is more like a pebble thrown into a pond. The ripples will take some time to reach the shore.”

“A pebble?” Mat asked. “A pebble?”

“Well, perhaps more of a boulder.”

“A bloody mountain if you ask me”

Again with the mountains. Yes, Mat, a mountain. An almost literally bloody mountain, you could say.

Flaming Aes Sedai. Did they have to be like that? It was probably another oath they took and told nobody about, something to do with acting mysterious.

Hey, that sounded almost like Mat! The ‘it was probably another oath’ part, I mean.

And now back to alien body-snatcher Mat. Ah well.

That’s okay, because it’s storytime with Verin! Who seems to have experienced the fantasy, ta’veren-induced equivalent of the classic and truly infurating ‘this flight has been delayed for approximately thirty minutes’ announcement happening every hour on the hour for eight hours while you remain stuck in the airport waiting area, unable to actually go anywhere, even though you really could have, because every time you consider going a bit further away the announcement promises that you’ll be boarding soon. (It lies).

No I’m not speaking from personal experience what are you talking about.

Except in Verin’s case it involves a truly absurd number of coincidences such as leaks and inn fires to prevent her from ever learning a place well enough to Travel from it.

“So? Mat said. “Still sounds like a coincidence.”

You’d think Matrim ‘I’m leaving now, Rand, for real this ti—oh look a battle!’ Cauthon would have a little more sympathy.

“I soon started to feel a tugging on me. Something pulling me, yanking at me. As if…”

Mat shifted again. “As if somebody’s got a bloody fishhook inside of you?”

As if the Pattern is exasperatedly trying to fix a chessboard that was set up by six-year-olds? “No, that piece goes here…oh just let me do it.”

“I was quite fatigued from my days staying up all hours because of fires, crying babies, and constant moves from one inn room to another.”

Oh the joys of business travel.

“It was then that I kenw for certain that I was being directed. Most wouldn’t have noticed it, I suspect, but I have made a study of the nature of ta’veren.”

Is there anything you haven’tmade a study of, Verin?

“I spoke with Tomas, and we determined to avoid gong where we were being pulled. […] I opened a gateway, but when we reached the end of our journey, we stepped not into Tar Valon, but a small village in northern Murandy!”

I’m laughing at how hard the Pattern has to work to get anyone to go to Murandy, I guess. Maybe it’s not actually ta’veren; it’s just a lot of money spent on a tourism campaign. Part of Roedran’s plans for economic development, no doubt.

“One thing bothers me, however,” Verin said. “Was there no other person who could have happened into your path?”

You’re just that special, Verin.

Now the question is why?

“First, we should negotiate my price for taking you to Andor.”

Okay no, apparently the question now, as far as Verin is concerned, is just the classic ‘how much?’

I can respect that.

Ah, so she wasn’t the one distributing the drawings of him, she just found one.

I’m pretty sure saidarisn’t a verb, but then, Mat used ‘Aes Sedai’ as a verb when he was still being written by Robert Jordan, so…whatever. It’s probably the least out-of-character part of the sentence, which might be saying something.

“I received this paper, Matrim, from a Darkfriend,” she said, “who told me – thinking me a servant of the Shadow – that one of the Forsaken had commanded that the men in these pictures be killed.”

Oh, so it was about that after all.

More importantly though…*squints at Verin* any particular reason he thought you were a servant of the Shadow? That’s some extremely Aes Sedai phrasing right there…

She thinks Mat should go into hiding? That’s…extreme. Though it’s kind of what he’s been doing for the last several books, in a way, if not necessarily always by design.

“I’m always careful,” Mat said.

Presented without further comment.

She slipped a small folded piece of paper out from under the picture. It was sealed with a drop of blood-red wax.

Mat took it hesitantly. “It is?”

“Instructions,” Verin said. “Which you will follow on the tenth day after I leave you in Caemlyn.”

He scratched his neck, fronwing, then moved to break the seal.

“You aren’t to open them until that day,” Verin said.

NOW WHAT DOES THIS REMIND YOU OF?

Mysterious envelopes from an Aes Sedai, that must not be opened just yet, not while she’s here watching…

This has always boded well before. As Mat has every reason to know, having read another of them and seen a third handed over.

Mat wants no part of this agreement, though. Really? You’d rather walk twenty days to Caemlyn than wait ten days there?

Then again, promising to follow mysterious instructions given to you by an Aes Sedai you recognise as being not entirely what she seems, is…well, I suppose I can’t completely fault him for being wary. So here we are, at a question of whether or not to trust an Aes Sedai.

Is this her game, here? Which choice does she actually want him to make? Could it be that she knows he distrusts Aes Sedai and the One Power and also hates being told what to do, and so is presenting this to him in such a way that she knows he won’t open it? Though in that case, why? It reminds me a little, perhaps, of her giving Egwene the dream ter’angreal but not Corianin’s notes. Yet it also seems a little too convoluted; there would have to be some reason why she had no choice but to give him whatever instructions are in that envelope, and yet also not want him to follow them. Occam’s Razor would certainly suggest the simpler answer: she does want him to read them. But…I just don’t know.

“I might not need you to go through with the contents. I hope to be able to return to you and relieve you of the letter and send you on your way. But if I cannot…”

So there is a scenario in which she doesn’t want the instructions followed. Which means it’s possible she doesn’t want them followed at all, but has to give them to him for some reason…and nothing she’s said has narrowed it down even if we trust that she is bound by the first Oath. Which at this point I wouldn’t put any money on. On either side of that bet.

What instructions could she have for him, that are so conditional? And on what? WHAT ARE YOU PLANNING, VERIN?

What might you not be able to return from?

Who are you?

“The compromise, then?” Mat said.

“You may choose not to open the letter,” Verin said. “Burn it. But if you do so, you wait fifty days in Caemlyn”

A choice between knowledge but being bound, and ignorance but freedom. How…perfect a dilemma, really, for one who so embodies Odin and the trickster archetype.

But what does Verin know? What is going to happen in Caemlyn between ten and fifty days after she leaves? She has to know something; otherwise the waiting seems too arbitrary.

“Twenty days,” he said.

“Thirty days,” she said, rising, then raised a finger to cut off his objection.

She had to have known he would try to bargain with her. So, between ten and thirty days after she leaves him…what? What instructions would be relevant after ten days, but irrelevant before ten and after thirty? What is going to happen? All I can think of is something to do with Elayne being crowned as Queen, maybe, because just about everything else from that storyline was more or less wrapped up when we left Caemlyn at the end of the last book. Or something to do with the Borderlanders?

I can’t figure it out, and I also can’t work out what angle Verin is playing here, what she even wants Mat to do, which side of the compromise she wants him to take. So I can’t figure out which one he should take.

Verin’s pretty damn good at this.

Verin eyed him, a hint of worry on her face. He couldn’t let her know how pleased he was.

But we also know, from their brief moment of mutual recognition at the start of this scene, that she might know anyway. Or that she might be letting worry show deliberately. Or…

She folded up the picture of him, then took a small leather-bound satchel from her pocket. She opened it, sliding the picture inside, and as she did, he noticed that she had a small stack of folded, sealed pieces of paper inside just like the one he was holding.

What are you up to, Verin Sedai? Because this feels very like what Moiraine did when she knew she was about to…go away.

A stack full of mysterious letters? Instructions not to open them until after she leaves? A very vaguely worded statement about hoping she’ll be able to return to collect them?

She hasn’t told him ‘you will do well’, but other than that, this sure looks like a…not a farewell so much as a final play of some kind.

Also she can’t have let him see those letters by accident. So does she want him to wonder? Why?

Why was Verin being so cryptic?

GOOD. FUCKING. QUESTION.

Though it’s hardly a remarkable occurrence; she’s been cryptic for ten damn books already.

Tuon was dead. Gone, cast aside, forgotten.

That’s a fun way to start a POV. A statement not of identity, but of nonexistence. Of the relinquishing of an identity, the death of one.

Fortuona was empress.

MY FUCKING GOD

FORTUONA.

Fortune rides like the sun on high, with the fox that makes the ravens fly…

Fortune. Fortuona. She’s Lady Luck.

I can’t decide if that’s brilliant or over the top. Maybe a little bit of both. It does give a rather excellent double meaning to that line of the Prophecies.

Either way, she’s standing in front of the forces she has assembled for, presumably, an attack on Tar Valon. So…we’re doing this.

Fifty sul’dam and damane pairs, including Dali and her sul’dam Malahavana, whom Fortuona had given to the cause. She had felt the need to sacrifice something personal to this most important of missions.

Um, Tuon? Those are people. So yes, you are sacrificing something personalin that you are sacrificing a person. Who herself has no choice in whether or not to be your own personal sacrifice so that you feel like you’re truly invested in this.

Though for some reason Rand’s thought a few chapters ago about Min, that if she died, he would add her name to the list and suffer for it comes to mind. These are people, and their lives have meaning beyond the pain their deaths would cause you.

But of course, to the Seanchan, Malahavana is simply property. So the greatest cost, if she dies, is not to her or her family, but to Tuon. Which is fucked up. Hot take: slavery is bad!

Fortuona looked down at the soldier before her, laying her fingers on his forehead, where she had kissed him. “May your death bring victory,” she said softly, speaking the ritual words. “May your knife draw blood. May your children sing your praises until the final dawn.”

That doesn’t sound like a blessing you give to someone who has any hope of returning. This soldier is one of five, so maybe it’s a special suicide mission? To do…what?

Their assault would begin in darkness

How…appropriate. It was made possible – or made certain – by the darkness surrounding Rand, and such an attack serves the Shadow far better than it serves the Light, by bringing even greater strife and division amongst those that should be united.

They really needed that treaty.

It speaks to why Rand suppressing his ability to feel, deciding there are no limits left to him, losing sight of what he’s fighting for, and pushing only for the Last Battle itself and nothing beyond that, is disastrous on more than just a metaphysical/teleological standpoint. It’s not just an issue because this is a fight between Good and Evil and so the champion of Good must embody that ideal. I do think there’s an element of that, of course – it’s where the Fisher King imagery comes in, and the notion of the land being one with the Dragon and vice versa – but there’s also the practical fact that if you’re terrifying and cold and surrounded by an aura of darkness, people aren’t going to want to make peace treaties with you. Or be motivated to fight for your cause. Or listen to you at all. Or have any hope themselves of what might come after, because the examples and expectations being set are so dark.

It all blurs together at some point, the practical and more philosophical reasons, but there’s definitely a practical aspect there. It’s hard to win a fight you no longer have any reason to want to win. And it’s hard to win a fight when you look more like the thing you’re fighting than the thing you’re fighting for, because other people will see that. People who should be on your side will see that. And they, like Tuon, will draw their own conclusions and act accordingly.

Oh hey one of these special five is a woman. At least one. I like that this is specifically shown, in addition to the more general statement that over half the Fists of Heaven here are women. General statements are a lot easier to make, and are sometimes used as a bit of an excuse, or a halfhearted ‘see, look, we gave you what you wanted’. Specifics help bolster that. Even if in this case the specific in question is a woman being sent on a suicide mission to fight for the enslavement of women who can wield Power. You can’t have everything.

(I should clarify I’m being facetious there; I don’t think the Seanchan staging an assault on the White Tower is specifically gender-coded in that way. And I do genuinely appreciate seeing women amongst the elite forces, because that’s cool, all other issues with the Seanchan aside).

Oh. Bloodknives. They’ve been mentioned before, but only in the most offhand of comments.

The pure black stone ring each one wore was a specialised ter’angrealthat would grant them strength and speed, and would shroud them in darkness

That sounds quite a lot like the benefits of the Warder bond.

The incredible abilities came at a cost, however, for the rings leeched life from their hosts, killing them in a matter of days.

That also sounds a little like the costs of the Warder bond. Of a bond that is broken, anyway.

The whole thing also smells of a secondary purpose, introduced like this so late in the game. Not sure how, precisely, but I’ll be keeping an eye on these ter’angrealthat have now been placed on the mantle.

These five would not return. They would stay behind, whatever the results of the raid, to kill as many marath’damane as they could

Oh.

Was this what Min foresaw, when she visited the Tower in TSR and saw death and blood on so many faces? And knew it would all happen within the same day? The fact that Elaida’s coup took place so soon after made it seem like that was what Min had seen, but what if it was actually a viewing of this attack? If so, that’s truly impressive use of foreshadowing and misdirection. Well played. *slow clap*

Fortuona kissed the last of the five Bloodknives, speaking the words condemning them to death, but also to heroism.

I love this sentence, because the structure of it implies that heroism is also a condemnation. They’re presented as illusory opposites, but the same verb applies to each. Condemned to heroism. It’s a concept and a way of looking at things that I love, and actually it’s not at all out of place in this series. Just look at Rand.

That whole sentence reminds me of Rand, really. Condemned to death and heroism. Destruction and salvation. Condemned to be the saviour of the world, and reaching a point where it’s hard to tell, between death and heroism, which is the cost and which is the reward.

And the soldiers are off. No turning back now. I hope you’re ready, Egwene. It might be your last and best chance to pull the Tower together. A common enemy…

As the final light of the sunset died, they struck northward.

There’s something very appropriate about that. The final death of the light, the vanishing of that last chance for reconciliation as Rand walked away; it felt like a victory for the Shadow, a fracturing of the Light.

Also, even striking northward has something of a double meaning. The Blight lies north, but still they fight each other. They should be heading there, as the Shadow stretches across the land and the last battle comes. As the sunset dies they should look north. But not like this.

It could be the beginning of a bold new tactic. Or it could lead to a disaster.

Travelling, gunpowder, aerial assaults. They’ve changed war, and that isn’t something that they can just…step back from, once the Last Battle has been fought.

“We have changed everything,” Fortuona said softly. “General Galgan is wrong; this will not give the Dragon Reborn a worse bargaining position. It will turn him against us.”

She sees. She understands what that negotiation was, and what its failure has cost them. She does not see any other decision she can make – and given what she saw of Rand, it’s hard to see how she could think otherwise, and hard even to disagree with the underlying thought there, that he is dangerous and cannot be allowed to claim more power, as he is – but Tuon is very good at what she does. She understands nuances of politics and power and strategy, and she knows what this will do. But she also does not see an alternative.

Or should I be calling her Fortuona, now? It’s hard when fictional characters change names mid-story; I like it, as a storytelling device, because it’s such a good way to convey a sense or change of identity, but I never then know how to refer to the character, especially in something like this liveblog. And I’m not at all consistent – I call Moridin by his new name but I’m still referring to Tuon as Tuon rather than Fortuona, and I’m not even sure what I do with Egeanin/Leilwin.

“And was he not against us before?” Selucia asked.

“No,” Fortuona said. “We were against him.”

This is excellent. The subtle but at the same time vast difference between those two. The fact that Tuon can so clearly understand this, and what it means. They were his enemy. Now, because of what they do today, they will make him theirs.

Tuon isn’t always the most sympathetic character, largely because she came to the story late, is from a completely foreign culture to the rest of the narrative, and holds some views that are…difficult to reconcile, for a modern reader. But it’s moments like these that make her work, I think. This ability to see beyond what most do – not to change her mind, necessarily, but to be so perceptive and to understand the way people think and work. To be able to look at and judge her own actions and decisions, and to understand the implications.

She’s not going to war against the Tower – and making an enemy of the Dragon Reborn – just for shits and giggles, or even because of a clash of ideologies. That plays into it, because she believes her view to be the right one, but it goes deeper than that. And she understands consequences and tradeoffs and costs. She can recognise that yes, they were against him. And that this will not fix that, but will instead likely exacerbate it. And also that she has no other choice.

But we can sympathise with her more, because we believe that thought process, even if ours might be different. She doesn’t simply press blindly ahead with a single agenda; she looks at the whole situation and understands what her options are and what the results will likely be of each. And because she’s so perceptive, and so strategically capable, we can then trust her more, in a sense, when she does make a decision that sets her against most of the other sympathetic characters. So instead of being a villain by default, she gains much more depth and a certain level of sympathy.

Anyway, this is of course going to end well. To make an enemy of Rand, as he is now?

Though perhaps the more interesting question is, what will Egwene do in the face of her dream coming true? It seems like she could use this to unite the Tower around her. But I also wonder if maybe, just maybe, she could do here what Rand could not. There would be a certain poetry in that, for her own arc.

Next (TGS ch 37) Previous (TGS ch 35)

#nothing is as it seems #unless it seems like disaster #Wheel of Time #neuxue liveblogs WoT #The Gathering Storm

35 notes · View notes

neuxue · 5 years

Text

Wheel of Time liveblogging: The Gathering Storm ch 32

In which ghosts have funerals and Nynaeve plays detective.

Chapter 32: Rivers of Shadow

That’s a lovely chapter title. And interesting, if a little ominous, combined with the snake-and-wheel icon that’s basically shorthand for ‘this chapter has implications for the entire story and world’.

And we’re with Nynaeve. Standing on top of a wall. Not you, too, Nynaeve!

I’m not going to quote the whole thing but the opening description is very atmospheric and lovely.

She can still feel a storm in the north, only it’s not really a storm, it’s a metaphor, and when the wind starts blowing it’s also a metaphor, and actually it’s another point of parallel between her and Mat. Her weather-sense is quite a lot like his dice. Both basically just say ‘PLOT COMETH AHEAD’.

There would never again be a place for her in the Two Rivers. She knew this, though it hurt her. She was Aes Sedai now; it had become who she was, more important to her now than being Wisdom had once been.

That’s quite an admission from Nynaeve, Queen of Denial, Self-Deception and Malkier.

It’s also a nice continuation of her thoughts from way back in TFoH, when she and Elayne were on the wagon away from Tanchico and Nynaeve had a moment to think about what she wanted and who she was becoming. How this started out as her wanting to protect the people from her village, but then shifted more into a desire to learn how to Heal, and set her on the path towards becoming Aes Sedai – something she once utterly denied ever wanting to be, but has been becoming ever since.

And it’s one thing for Egwene to leave the Two Rivers behind; she wanted a bigger world, and while she’s occasionally expressed some nostalgia, she came of age elsewhere. The Two Rivers was a childhood home, but she is no longer a child, and her life has taken her beyond that village.

Nynaeve, though, came into adulthood in the Two Rivers. She was Wisdom; it was her place in the world, her identity, not just her childhood. And when she left, so much of that was taken from her, and so much of her journey since then has been about re-establishing who she is, both to herself and to those around her. She is no longer the Wisdom, but along the way she has gained wisdom.

And now, she’s almost finished with that journey. They all are. The time for character development is past; it’s time to take their places, as who they have become, for an ending.

That simple life – once all she had been able to imagine – would now seem dull and unfulfilling.

How far she has come, to be able to acknowledge that and admit it to herself without fighting it. She knows herself, now. She’s faced so many of her fears and insecurities – has actually faced one of her worst fears twice: once in her Accepted test and then again at World’s End – broken her block, become and embraced being Aes Sedai, and in the process she’s learned to accept and be herself. She’s still Nynaeve, so she’d still probably want to box your ears if you said that to her, but she can be so much more honest with herself now. She can see and understand things like this, even if it runs counter to who she once thought she was meant to be.

Have I mentioned that I love Nynaeve’s character arc?

The nearby fields were barren. Ploughed, seeded, yet still barren. Light! Why didn’t crops grow anymore? Where would they find food this winter?

I don’t know, maybe ask some Aiel to come sing to them? They might not mind a break from kidnapping rulers. Loial would probably join in.

So they’re up here to look at…ghosts?

Like a wisp of the ocean fog, a tiny patch of glowing light was blowing across the ground. It grew, bulging like a tiny storm cloud, glowing with a pearly light not unlike that of the clouds above. It resolved into the shape of a man, walking. Then that luminescent fog sprouted more figures. Within moments, an entire glowing procession strode across the ground, moving at a mournful pace. […] They were composed of a strange, otherworldly light. Several figures in the group – which was now about two hundred strong – were carrying a large object. Some kind of palanquin? Or…no. It was a coffin. Was this a funeral procession from long ago, then? What had happened to these people, and why had they been drawn back to the world of the living?

This is lovely. I didn’t mean to quote so much of it, but it’s just a very cool image. Soft and light and a little bit eerie and a little bit mournful but also strangely beautiful. Then again, Sanderson has practice at writing ghosts among mist…

I suppose it’s fitting that a ghostly funeral procession turned up the day after Rand did. The Pattern’s fraying, and right now he carries a feeling of darkness and death…and yet, this doesn’t seem dark in the same way. Sad, perhaps. Wistful. But it puts me in mind of the whole no beginnings or endings notion. This has been, and perhaps soon will be again, and the Wheel turns.

A guy turning to charcoal, on the other hand, is just fucking creepy.

But also kind of cool.

Mostly creepy, though.

“You’ve heard that he is proclaiming that the Last Battle will begin soon.” Nynaeve felt a stab of worry for Lan, then anger towards Rand. He still thought that if he could stage his assault at the same time as Lan’s attack on Tarwin’s Gap, he could confuse his enemies. Lan’s attack could very well be the beginning of the Last Battle.

Which seems very fitting, to me. Maybe it’s because Malkier feels almost like a prelude to Tarmon Gai’don, if you zoom out a little. Or maybe because of the parallels between Lan and Rand, and the way Lan feels like a…version of Rand on a smaller scale and different timeline. Tied to Malkier as Rand is tied to the land as a whole, an embodiment almost of a nation or world. Fated, or believing himself fated, to give his life to that cause.

And it would be fitting, too, for Lan’s personal war in the Blight to finally come to fulfilment not as a waste, not as a distraction from his and Moiraine’s and the world’s greater cause, but as the true beginning of its culmination. As if Lan has been held back until now, held back by other duties and other bonds but always looking northwards, until it becomes time for those things to intersect and so he is released.

Also it would be a fitting nod to part of Aragorn’s role in Return of the King, so there’s that.

“Yes,” Cadsuane said, musingly, “he is probably right.” Why did she keep that hood up? Rand obviously wasn’t around.

Because it adds to her aura of wisdom and mystery, obviously. She’s almost three hundred years old; she can do it for the aesthetic if she wants to.

The other Aes Sedai resumed their conversation, Merise and Corele taking further opportunity to voice their displeasure with Rand in their separate ways – one dour, the other congenial.

It made Nynaeve want to defend him.

Ah, Nynaeve. That’s just like her – she can chew out her people until the cows (sheep?) come home, but if someone else so much as looks at them crosswise, she will be boxing ears before you can say ‘hypocrite’. I love her.

And honestly, that’s not even a particularly unusual trait, as much as it’s fun to laugh about in Nynaeve. Anyone here have siblings? Yeah.

Nynaeve started to leave, and as she did so she noticed that Cadsuane was watching her. Nynaeve hesitated, turning toward the cloaked woman. Cadsuane’s face was barely visible by torchlight, but Nynaeve caught a grimace in the shadows, as if Cadsuane were displeased with Merise’s and Corele’s complaints. Nynaeve and Cadsuane stared at each other for a moment; then Cadsuane nodded curtly. The aged Aes Sedai turned and began to walk away, right in the middle of one of Merise’s tirades about Rand.

One of the subtle things I’ve enjoyed is watching the relationship between these two change, especially Cadsuane’s growing respect for Nynaeve. In Winter’s Heart, she thinks she will not acknowledge Nynaeve as Aes Sedai until Nynaeve has been tested and has held the Oath Rod. Then, in Crossroads of Twilight, we get this: The child would need to flash her Great Serpent ring under people’s noses to be taken for Aes Sedai, which she was, if just technically. It’s a small shift, but definitely a shift. And now this – a nod of seeming respect, of agreement, even, as if between equals or allies. It’s just one of those on-the-sidelines relationship shifts that can be fun to see in subtle snippets like these.

That nod of Cadsuane’s couldn’t possibly have been given out of respect. Cadsuane was far too self-righteous and arrogant for that.

Well, she’d hardly be the first Aes Sedai you’ve judged that way, Nynaeve. Moiraine?

What to do about Rand, then? He didn’t want Nynaeve’s help – or anyone’s help – but that was nothing new.

It’s hard, when there’s so much else at stake. Because it’s not just about him – it’s about the entire world.

And ‘I don’t want anyone’s help’ is fine when it’s, say, your maths homework. Or a struggle between friends that people keep meddling with. Or when work sucks and you’re tired and your flat’s a mess and you just want to not have to deal with any of it for a bit. But there’s a point where it stops being a thing people actually need to listen to – where help becomes necessary whether you want it or not – and I’m pretty sure that point is somewhere slightly before ‘I carry a nuke in my pocket just in case’.

Now, it’s also true that a lot of the people ostensibly trying to help Rand are actually just trying to push him in one direction or another, and are not in fact helping at all.

And there are others who are trying to help, but are going about it in a way that is absolutely not going to work.

And there are some who are perhaps trying to help him, but are mostly trying to help keep the world from breaking apart around him. That’s where it gets a bit…tricky.

But as threatening and as intimidating as Lan could be, he’d sooner chop off his own hand than raise it to harm her.

Too soon, Nynaeve. Too soon.

Rand. Once, she’d thought him as gentle as Lan.

Once, he was gentle. But then…*waves at entirety of series up to this point* thathappened.

That Rand was gone. Nynaeve saw again the moment when he had exiled Cadsuane. She’d believed that he wouldkill Cadsuane if he saw her face again, and thinking of the moment still gave her shivers. Surely it had been her imagination, but the room had seemed to darkendistinctly at that moment, as if a cloud had passed over the sun.

Yeah um…not just your imagination, sorry.

And this is where Nynaeve sees more than perhaps most of the people around Rand, including some of the other Aes Sedai. Cadsuane sees it as well, but the others, I think, don’t realise quite how significantly he’s changed. Nynaeve, though…she knew him when he was gentle. And she knew him when he was becoming the Dragon Reborn, Healed him when he said he wasn’t sure how human the Dragon Reborn could afford to be, stood by his side and protected him when she could, however she could. She can see that something has changed, that the boy she knew is…hopefully not gone forever but certainly on a very extended, forced holiday.

Still, she won’t turn away from him. Nynaeve doesn’t give up on people like that. And anything can be healed.

But first, a coughing child. I suppose it’s the sort of thing Rand might once have paid attention to – refugees and starving children – as he did in Tear with the two steamwagon boys for whom Min foresaw tragedy. Now, though, he can’t take the time or the energy to care. And so it falls to Nynaeve.

I suppose it’s a way to show her in a role that’s not actually unlike Wisdom. Just for the world in general and with greater power and knowledge. But that doesn’t mean she’s left this behind: her care for those who need help or Healing, her sense of responsibility for those who find themselves in her care or purview. And also her low tolerance for bullshit, as evidenced by her dealings with this kid’s father.

“He should live, if you do as I say. […] If the fever starts again, bring him to me at the Dragon’s palace.”

“Yes, my Lady,” the woman said as the husband knelt, taking the boy and smiling.

Nynaeve picked up her lantern and rose.

“Lady,” the woman said. “Thank you.”

Nynaeve turned back. “You should have brought him to me days ago. I don’t care what foolish superstitions people are spreading, the Aes Sedai are not your enemies. If you know any who are sick, encourage them to visit us.”

She’s still blunt and a bit abrasive, of course, but even so I think she’s just done more for the reputation of and sentiment towards Aes Sedai with one Healing than any of the others have in the city thus far.

Because, while she has become Aes Sedai, Nynaeve isn’t one to hold herself aloof and apart from the world, not when there are people who need her help or healing. She can’t help everyone – like Rand, she can’t solve everyone’s problems – but when she can, she’ll always try. She doesn’t ignore the refugees as not worth her time; she just tells them to bring their sick to her. Because they’re suffering, and she can help, so she will. She’s practical that way. Practical and caring – it was one of her early conflicts with Moiraine, that Moiraine could look away when people were suffering, in the name of a greater cause.

Both kinds of people are needed, and this helps highlight Nynaeve’s own strengths. She knows Tarmon Gai’don is coming, and is certainly focused on that, but she doesn’t let that stop her from taking the time to help a random child who needs it, because that’s who she is. She’s still Wisdom in many ways, just of more than Emond’s Field, and it doesn’t much matter to her if the people who need her help are refugees or royalty.

But I think it definitely surprises the family, to see an Aes Sedai so…human, I suppose. Human, and straightforward, and helping them while asking nothing in return except that they not keep anyone else who needs help away.

How did one handle a creature like the Dragon Reborn?

Ask Min. Or Elayne. Or Aviendha.

Look, it was just lying there…

Nynaeve knew that the old Rand was there, within him somewhere.

Oddly enough, she seems to be one of the every few to actually…see that. To remember that he’s human.

He had simply been beaten and kicked so many times that he’d gone into hiding, letting this harsher version rule.

He’s human, and he’s hurting, and he’s been hurting so much for so long. It’s amazing, in a way, that so few are able to understand that, seeing instead a monster or a legend or a weapon or an obstacle, but rarely seeing the broken, bleeding boy. Amazing, and yet at the same time not surprising at all. That’s how this works. And he’s done too good a job of pushing that humanity away – though it becomes a vicious cycle at some point; how long can you retain humanity when no one expects it of you?

It’s one of the most important things about Nynaeve, especially in terms of her role in Rand’s story: she doesn’t stop seeing that. She can see what he has become, can see what he’s done to himself, but she can also still see the boy from her village. And that’s no small thing. He needs that now as much as – perhaps more than – he ever has; he needs those anchor points, those people who know him and love him and see him, otherwise how could he find his way back even if he decided he wanted to? This at least gives him the choice. To know he is loved, to know he is seen, to know that he is still human in the eyes of those who know him.

As much as it galled her to admit it, bullying him was just not going to work. But how was she to get him to do what he should, since he was too bullheaded to respond to ordinary prodding?

Ah, Nynaeve. Bless her. *shakes head fondly*

It’s a good realisation, but I also like it because even her thinking here shows clearly that she’s seeing him like just another problem from her village, rather than as some cosmic gamepiece she needs to position and control. Yes, she’s trying to get him to ‘do what he should’, but it’s the sort of tone she might have used in thinking about how to get young Matrim Cauthon to milk his father’s cows when he’s supposed to.

So in that sense she’s not really…treating him any differently, just because he’s the Dragon Reborn and could incinerate her where she stands. And there’s great value in that – it’s honest, it’s straightforward, and it’s very much Nynaeve. This is just how she shows her love.

There was one person who hadmanaged to work with Rand while at the same time teaching and training him. It hadn’t been Cadsuane, nor had it been any of the Aes Sedai who tried to capture him, trick him or bully him. It had been Moiraine.

So much growth from Nynaeve, to be able to understand and acknowledge this.

Her grudge against or hatred for Moiraine is another thing I’ve enjoyed watching the progress of over time because it does what so many hate-at-first-sight reflexive yet largely irrational hatreds and grudges do in reality: it fades, gradually and often subtly, until it’s just not there anymore but you can’t put a finger on when exactly it vanished, or why. It just takes lesser and lesser importance in the face of other things, other points of focus.

Of course, her apparent death, and Nynaeve’s shame at her own response to it, certainly helped – I think that ‘death’ shifted the perception of her in the eyes of quite a lot of characters and even readers towards the more positive. Because memory turns to legend, and things are altered in that changing. It does set her up well for an eleventh-hour return.

But a lot of it is just that Nynaeve hated Moiraine because Moiraine represented the changes she resented – leaving Emond’s Field, the boys and Egwene changing and sometimes suffering, Nynaeve losing her sense of place and purpose and authority – more than because of Moiraine herself. And so as she’s grown – as she’s accepted some of those changes, and found a place in this larger world for herself, and learned to embrace her own power, and understood the necessity or inevitability of some of what has happened, and focused on her true passion for healing – that sharp hatred faded to wariness and then to something more like a stubborn and even petty attempt at holding on to that grudge, and eventually even that faded to…respect. Understanding, perhaps.

Well, Nynaeve wasn’t about to act the same way for Rand al’Thor, no matter how many fancy titles he had.

I’m not sure that method would work now, anyway. It worked for Moiraine because she understood what he needed and would accept and respond to at the time. When he was being pushed and chased and tormented into a power he feared, when he was fighting to prove his claim to a destiny he didn’t want, when he was unsure and afraid and trying desperately to mask it, fighting for control and authority and so, so afraid of being outplayed, taken, used by those who knew this game he was only beginning to understand but was thrown in the middle of.

That was a mindset in which he could accept some guidance and advice because on some level he could admit he very much needed it, so long as he could be sure it was free of manipulation – the thing he so greatly feared, because at the time he was far more susceptible to it, new as he was to the game and to power, and with barely even the Aiel at his back.

Now…subservience, obedience, obequieousness are commonplace to him. Aes Sedai have sworn fealty to him. He doesn’t fear manipulation as he once did, because the scales of power have shifted so drastically, and doesn’t acknowledge his need for advice the way he once might have. So it will have to be a different approach.

Perhaps Nynaeve is well-suited to that; perhaps meeting his eyes and letting the fact that he is the Dragon Reborn and could kill her on a whim just…pass her by, seeing him and treating him instead as human, is in itself a form of surrendering in order to control. Not fighting against what he is, yet also not being cowed by it; just letting it exist, and accepting it, and focusing on him instead of on that.

Maybe I’m forcing the metaphor too far. But it’s a nice metaphor, so…*shoves*

Or maybe the solution is just appearing to die in a way almost perfectly designed to fuck with the guy’s head, and then reappearing dramatically at an opportune moment.

She needed to show him that they were working for the same goals. She didn’t want to tell him what to do; she just wanted him to stop acting like a fool. And, beyond that, she just wanted him to be safe.

It’s that last part that makes her so different from the others she disdains as petty manipulators. The simple fact that she cares about him.

She’d also like him to be a leader that people respected, not one that people feared. He seemed incapable of seeing that the path he was on was that of a tyrant.

No, Nynaeve, he sees it. He just can’t bring himself to care. After all, what does a tyrant’s rule matter if it is destined to be short-lived?

(A somewhat related but largely tangential question: does anyone know if there’s any etymological link between ‘tyrant’ and Tyr, Norse god of justice/law/war who sacrificed his hand to bind a wolf? It feels like there shouldbe, though I can’t find anything that says so, but as I’m neither linguist nor Norse mythology/language/history expert, I’m really not qualified to answer.)

Anyway, Nynaeve, like Cadsuane, has a plan. Lots of mysterious plans showing up here recently. Knowing Sanderson, they’re likely to collide around the 85% mark somewhere.

Though I don’t know how much of the pacing he’s directly responsible for and how much of it would be contingent on whatever was already outlined, so who knows?

Nynaeve’s lantern cast strange shadows on the grass as its light shone through the trees trained and trimmed in the shapes of fanciful animals. The shadows moved in concert with her lantern, the phantom shapes lengthening and merging with the greater blackness of the night around her. Like rivers of shadow.

Subtle as a hammer. But it works, because it’s not meant to be subtle at this point. It’s meant to be a drumbeat that says Tarmon Gai’don, that doesn’t let you forget for a moment where we’re heading, because it’s close, now. It’s close, and it’s everywhere, and it’s inescapable.

There’s also a bit of a circling back to the opening of the chapter here, in the image of phantom shapes moving with her lantern – with the light – but merging with the darkness around as well…and a glowing funeral procession of the dead, a haunting yet beautiful reminder that the world is coming apart at the seams, as Light and Shadow take to the field.

The whitewashed walls were as immaculate here as they were in other sections of the mansion, but they were unornamented.

Not unlike— actually, no. I am not going to sit here and write a paragraph on the symbolism of undecorated walls. I am not. You can’t make me. I have dignity.

Turns out Nynaeve doesn’t need grey hair or an Aes Sedai face to get people to do as she tells them when she has her mind set on something. Especially when it relates in any way to helping or protecting her people. Which includes just about anyone she says it does.

Do they not know she’s Aes Sedai? Or is she ‘my Lady’ because she’s married to a king? Or is the hat she made fun of on that random worker actually a fedora?

Rand had determined that his hunt for the Domani king had hit a wall with the death of the messenger.

But you know how to deal with walls, Rand! Just climb on top of them and then fall off.

Nynaeve wasn’t so certain. There were others involved, and a few well-placed questions might be very illuminating.

Ah, so that’s the plan. Find out some information that will be useful to Rand – that he definitely wants – as a sort of…not peace offering exactly, but indication that she’s on his side and willing to help.

I’m not sure that’s really the secret to getting him to listen, but I suppose it can’t hurt.

…that’s probably a stupid thing to say, given, you know, everything about this book so far.

When in doubt, ask the housekeeper. And she’s seen the messenger, who definitely sounds beautiful enough to have come from Graendal. Probably the one we saw, briefly.

“Had one of the most beautiful faces I rightly think I’ve ever seen on a man.”

Unless of course he’s Galad.

“He was sent for questioning,” Nynaeve said shortly. “I have little time for foolishness, Loral. I am not here looking for evidence against your mistress, and I don’t really care what your loyalties are. There are much larger issues at stake. Answer my question.”

But what a different sort of not-caring it is than Rand’s. She’s direct and to the point, and not particularly delicate about it, and anything that isn’t relevant is not her concern because there are bigger issues…but it’s not an all-consuming attitude; it’s just pragmatism. It’s not nice, and she’s definitely using her power and position to intimidate and to get people to do what she wants, but she also has very clear, definite limits. And a clear, definite purpose. And also the capacity to feel emotion, which is probably a plus.

Excellent, looks like we’re in for some good old midnight skulduggery. Elayne would be so proud.

So would Cadsuane, probably, at how Nynaeve is handling this. But I’ll try not to let Nynaeve hear me say that.

True, Rand might grow angry at her for appropriating soldiers and stirring up trouble.

But Nynaeve is one of the very few people left who doesn’t fear his anger. She does a little, on something of an instinctive level where if he looks at her with the full force of his I-have-stared-into-the-True-Power-and-the-True-Power-stared-back act she’ll recoil, but it doesn’t…take. It doesn’t last. It’s not enough to make her turn away, or run. It’s unnerving, but there’s too much caring and concern and sheer stubbornness to her where he’s concerned for fear to truly take root.

Moiraine said something to this effect once, that he would need people around him who could face or quell his rages, who could, in essence, continue to look him in the eyes. She was talking to Egwene, but Nynaeve has taken on that role in many ways.

And I think it’s important that she’s there as someone who doesn’t love him the same way Min and Aviendha and Elayne do. It’s a different kind of love, a different kind of bond, and therefore a different kind of…anchor, or reminder.

Such a lovely evening stroll, through the rotting fish gut district to the prison.

She wished she had news from the White Tower.

Yeah, huh, it’s been a hot second since she’s actually heard anything from…anyone, really. It seems like Egwene could pay her a dream-visit, but I suppose Egwene has quite a lot of other things demanding her immediate focus, last we saw she was bleeding and about to be imprisoned, and I think she might not want to bring her problems to Nynaeve’s attention because she knows there’s nothing Nynaeve can do about it right now. There’s too much else that needs to be done, and all she can do is focus on her part of it, on doing what she can to heal the Tower.

Still, a brief message would be…far too much communication to expect, in this series.

Ha, a prison disguised as a chandlery. A place of walls and dark and cold, disguised as a place that sells candles for illumination. Cute.

Sanderson, we need to have a talk about your obsession with hawk-faced men. It’s gotten out of control. An intervention is required.

The writing here also feels much more Sanderson than some of the other parts have, but I don’t actually mind it as much because the shape of the characters and ideas feel mostly how they should. Maybe Nynaeve’s a little more direct in some of her thoughts, but it still feels like her, so it bothers me less that the phrasing is off. Sanderson said in his introduction that he wasn’t going to try to perfectly imitate Jordan’s style, and he hasn’t, and I can live with that because it’s certainly preferable to the alternative. It’s noticeable, but that’s okay. It’s only when the actual content – characterisation, particularly – feels wrong that it becomes frustrating.

But any good secret operation would have a working front.

Always another secret, right, Sanderson?

See, that’s the sort of line that definitely doesn’t feel like Jordan, but…oh well. It’s fine. It does the job. And this doesn’t feel like a scene where note-perfect prose is important, the way, say, The Last That Could Be Done was. And that, Sanderson got right. So I’ll take it.

(I may be less sanguine next time a Mat chapter rolls around, but again that’s because the changes start to actually interfere with the character and the story.)

Fight! Fight! Fight!

Pacing-wise, I suppose it’s about time this particular storyline was punctuated by a random fistfight. Not that I’m complaining about the fact that it’s been mostly talking and thinking since Chapter 22, because it’s deliciously painful talking and thinking, but sometimes you’ve just got to break some noses I guess.

“Which one do you think I should ungag,” she asked casually, “and which one should I kill?”

Okay she can be pretty terrifying when she wants to be. This almost reminds me of…Semirhage, actually, in that scene where she had Cabriana and her Warder held suspended in flows of Air much like Nynaeve has these two not-chandlers. I mean, that’s just about the only similarity, but it’s what came to mind.

Of course, she’s not going to kill either of them. They just don’t know that.

Which makes this interesting to compare to Rand; as a reader it’s incredibly obvious that there is a difference, because we can see their thoughts. But just as it seems many outside observers don’t fully realise just how far Rand has gone, it’s possible they also wouldn’t see as much of a difference between his threats and Nynaeve’s, here. So much is dependent on perception, and on what you know and don’t know.

But there is a difference, whether or not it’s clearly visible to an outside observer, and in this series that’s important. It’s important that Nynaeve does not intend to kill, here, and almost certainly would not even if it would make this task easier. It’s important that she’s doing this for a clear purpose, and for a cause she cares about. It’s important that she can feel.

Private jailers like these riled her anger.

Guess we know where she stands on the privatisation of prisons, then…

“I will do whatever you say! Please, don’t fill my stomach with insects! I haven’t done anything wrong, I promise you, I—”

She stuffed the gag of Air back in.

But you’re missing the best part, which is where you pause and then take the gag back out and he’s still talking, so it’s like pressing ‘mute’ off and on. Come on, if we’re doing a midnight prison raid there are tropes that must be observed!

[The other] looked sick, but he had probably already guessed that she’d want the dungeon. It was unlikely that an Aes Sedai would burst into the shop after midnight because she’d been sold a bad candle.

I mean, I wouldn’t put money on it. We’ve been taught well: Aes Sedai do the things they do for their own reasons.

A youth sat on the floor in front of him, and Nynaeve’s globe of light illuminated his face, a frightened Domani one with uncharacteristically light hair and hands spotted with burns.

“Now, that’s a chandler’s apprentice,” Triben said

Is he now? I feel like he wouldn’t be mentioned if he weren’t relevant – and I especially feel like he wouldn’t be mentioned in such a disarming, ‘nothing to see here’ way. I’ve read murder mysteries and whodunits. I know what I’m about.

She raised her globe of light and surveyed the cellar. The walls were stone, which made her feel much less nervous about the weight of the building above.

If you’d spent any time in the Tower recently, you might feel differently…

Or if you’ve spent any time with a mad Asha’man in the basement of a palace…

‘Hawk-faced’ count this chapter: 3. Sanderson. Please.

“Keys?” she asked.

Okay now I want a story about a wilder thief in one of the bigger cities whose main ‘trick’ is picking locks with weaves of Air.

And hello there, Lady Chadmar. Not enjoying your stay here, I see.

Nynaeve inhaled sharply at seeing how the woman was being treated. How could Rand allow this?

Because he dismissed her, and put her out of his mind completely. Because he can’t afford to care about her anymore, so she is none of his concern. Because nothing matters anymore, beside the Last Battle. If she lives, she lifes. If she dies, well, he’s already damned; what’s one more name?

Again, Semirhage was treated better. But that’s because Rand still cared, then.

“Now,” she said to the three, “I am going to ask some questions. You are going to answer. I’m not certain what I’m going to do with you yet, so realise it’s best to be veryhonest with me.”

Cadsuane really would be proud. She’s sticking to the truth here, but still conveying a…well, it’s more of a figs-and-mice kind of threat than anything else, really. And it’s certainly effective.

Nynaeve sighed. “Look,” she said to him. “I am Aes Sedai, and am bound by my word. If you tell me what I want to know, I will see that you are not suspected in the death. The Dragon doesn’t care about you three, otherwise you wouldn’t still be here”

But she also gives them this. She doesn’t sit there speculating on whether or not she could simply will their hearts to stop beating. She threatens them, yes. She’s harsh. But she also offers…fairness, amnesty, pardon. It’s a question of lines in the sand again, I suppose, in determining the relative morality of this compared to Rand, but it still seems to me there’s a very marked difference. One is bound, still, by her word and her station and her general sense of what is and is not acceptable. The other…isn’t. It’s a question of limits.

The interesting part, again, is in the difference or similarity of perception by those who don’t have the privileged access we do into Rand’s and Nynaeve’s heads. Do these jailers feel any less threatened by Nynaeve than they would by Rand? She seems to be more human, offering them a chance to leave with their names clear, and reassurances that she will hold to her word, but she’s also Aes Sedai, appearing at midnight. Would they see the darkness around Rand? Would they react differently? To what extent does it matter whether or not the person threatening you has limits, if you don’t know where those limits are?

It’s part of the whole thing that I find so interesting about outsider POV – a chance to see how these characters are perceived by someone who can’t see their thoughts, and therefore a glimpse at them from a different angle, which can sometimes reveal surprising things. And then its close cousin, the view of outsiders from within a known character’s mind, but in such a way as to make you wonder what exactly it is they’re seeing. To see that character in a different way even while you’re in their head, through the reactions of those around them.

It’s something Jordan was particularly good at, and it’s being done rather well in these recent chapters as well, with the change in Rand’s mindset, and the way it’s so clear in his POV but not necessarily to all of those around him. And here, to see complete outsiders react to Nynaeve in such a way that makes it clear they see her very differently than those of us who have been in her head since the first book.

Anyway, it’s something I always find intriguing. Perception is such a fun thing to play with, and you can do so much with it when you have these lovely long character arcs.

“If we talk, we go free?” the fat man said, eyeing her. “Your word?”

Nynaeve glanced about the tiny room with a dissatisfied eye. They had left Lady Chadmar in the dark, and the door was packed with cloth to muffle screams. The cell would be dark, stuffy and cramped. Men wo would work a place like this barely deserved life, let alone freedom.

But there was a much larger sickness to deal with. “Yes,” Nynaeve said, the word bitter in her mouth.

Because there are things she will not do. And things she needs more; things that matter more.

And I do think there’s a difference in how they see her to how they would see Rand, because they’re willing to ask for that promise, for her word, and to take her up on it.

So the jailer is holding firm to the story that the messenger just dropped dead one day. Some aspect of Compulsion, perhaps?

“The man remained for months in your possession, presumably healthy all that time. Then, the daybefore he is to be brought before the Dragon Reborn, he suddenly dies?”

Nynaeve, too, has read her murder mysteries.

“I don’t know how he did it, Lady. Burn me, but I don’t! It’s like some…force had ahold of his tongue. It was like he couldn’t talk. Even if he wanted to.”

Yeah there was definitely some element of Compulsion involved, at least in keeping the messenger from talking. I wonder what happens when you put a Forsaken’s Compulsion against a dark ta’veren’s pull?

I’m kind of surprised that, for all Nynaeve’s experience with Compulsion at Moghedien’s hands, she doesn’t seem to pick up on this.

But she can’t seem to get much else out of any of them, and like so many ideas that seem excellent around or just after midnight, this one is starting to lose its shine a little.

Aha!

As soon as Nynaeve began the Delving, Nynaeve froze. She had expected to find Milisair’s body taxed by exhaustion. She had expected to find disease, perhaps hunger.

She had not expected to find poison.

A slow poison administered in several doses through food. And who makes the food?

Any guesses?

Yes indeed, it’s the ‘chandler’s apprentice’. Well done, Nynaeve, you’ve solved the case!

Next (TGS ch 33) Previous (TGS ch 31)

#this chapter almost passes for light but only by comparison #Wheel of Time #neuxue liveblogs WoT #The Gathering Storm

32 notes · View notes

neuxue · 6 years

Text

Wheel of Time liveblogging: The Gathering Storm ch 25

The apocalypse? In your lifetime? (It’s more common than you might think! Click here to find out why)

Er. I mean. I return, featuring Sheriam and Egwene.

Chapter 25: In Darkness

That title, the Black Ajah chapter icon, and the first word is ‘Sheriam’. Hmmmmmmmmmmm.

Things were going quite well for once.

Uh huh. Sure. You really should know better than to say things like that. Or even think them. Especially when you’re a secondary-at-best character in epic fantasy and have very probably sold your soul. There’s tempting fate, and then there’s flinging yourself off a thousand-foot cliff in the form of a goldfish.

Confirmation, in case any was needed, that Halima/Aran’gar was the one from that brief scene of Sheriam being punished.

Well, so long as Egwene was away, that tent was functionally Sheriam’s for all but sleeping. After all, an Amyrlin’s Keeper was expected to look after her affairs.

Sheriam smiled again.

If she had a moustache, she’d be twirling it right now.

Pain would come again. There was always agony and punishment involved in the service she gave.

Not sure I’d put that on the recruitment posters – I’m still partial to ‘Immorality for Immortality’ myself – but points for honesty.

But she had learned to take the times of peace and cherish them.

Oh, the irony. Swear yourself to a force of chaos and destruction and only then learn the value of peace. That is bitter.

At times, she wished she’d kept her mouth closed, not asked questions. But she had, and here she was.

Now who does that sound like? Hmmm…

And, separately, I want a story sometime where asking questions isn’t punished. Not that it doesn’t make for good stories when they are – seeking out truth need not necessarily be painless, and it’s certainly not unrealistic to have negative consequences of digging too far, or asking the wrong questions of the wrong people – but it also seems to be one of those story elements that so often goes unquestioned (if you’ll pardon the slight pun). As someone who comes from a scientific background, where the entire purpose is to ask questions of the world and see any answer at all as a reward, I’d like to see someone at some point take a different angle on this trope. Mostly just because I think it’d be interesting, and as a reader I’d be curious to see how that kind of premise would work, and what would result from it. One for the wishlist…

Not infrequently she wished she’d chosen the Brown

NOW WHO DOES THAT SOUND LIKE? HMMM.

and hidden herself away in a library somewhere, never to see others.

I mean sure, that’s one way of being Brown, but.

There was no use wondering about what could have happened.

NOW. WHO. DOES. THAT. SOUND. LIKE?

She wasn’t so naïve as to feel guilty about the things she’d done. Every sister in the White Tower tried to get ahead; that’s what life was about! There wasn’t an Aes Sedai who wouldn’t stab her sisters in the back if she thought it would give her advantage. Sheriam’s friends were just a little more…practiced at it.

Hey, I’m not judging; as a Slytherin I can appreciate some honest, pragmatic, amoral ambition.

But why had the end of days had to come now of all times?

But I am laughing. If you’re going to sell your soul, you’d better read the fine print and make absolutely sure the deal is worth it, even when the price is called in in full. Sheriam seems to be more of a realist than some, but not quite realistic enough. Area Woman Never Expected To Actually Pay Her Mortgage.

And there’s the actual confirmation of Black Ajah. So…what does it say about the Aes Sedai that at one point, both women claiming the title of Keeper were Black Ajah?

It’s ‘blood and ashes’ or ‘blood and bloody ashes’ never has it been just ‘bloody ashes’ yes this is a nitpick no I shouldn’t care yes I care anyway because of Who I Am As A Person.

Sheriam opened her eyes to find a jet-black figure standing above her cot; slivers of moonlight passing through the fluttering tent flaps were just enough to outline the figure’s form. It was clothed in an unnatural darkness, ribbons of black cloth fluttering behind it, the face obscured by a deep blackness.

#aesthetic but why do I get the sudden feeling we’re in a 2006 music video?

Also, Halima had never come in such a…dramatic way.

Embrace the emo, Sheriam. Just go with it. Don’t question. Only ‘90s children will understand, etc.

(I feel like I should be posting this on myspace or something. How did we end up here? I have no idea and I’m so sorry).

“Egwene al’Vere. She must be deposed.”

Good fucking luck. That girl has as much ambition as all of you and she serves a Righteous Cause. You may as well just give up now. Accept it. Write a song about it and move on.

(Look I don’t even know. It’s been a while, okay?)

“It was by orders from one of the Chosen that I helped raise her as Amyrlin in the first place!”

“Yes, but we’ve done a companywide reorg and sometimes that just means reversing every single thing anyone has accomplished in the last six months; also she doesn’t work here anymore so I’m your boss now.”

“Yes, but she has proven to have been a…poor choice.”

That’s one way of putting it. It’s almost too bad you didn’t try to recruit her; that would have been hilarious.

Sheriam hesitated. Her first instinct was to lie or hedge—this seemed like information she could hold over the figure. But lying to one of the Chosen? A poor choice.

(Somewhere in a distant universe, Marisa Coulter is laughing at you).

But that’s the value of having legend and 3000 years on your side; The Forsaken may be only human but so much has been built up around their names and image that most don’t even dare to challenge them. Useful, that.

Stealing the ter’angreal could be a nuisance for Egwene, though. Not an insurmountable one, because this is Egwene al’Vere we’re talking about, but more and more things are drawing to a point where it all has to come to a head soon. Egwene imprisoned having forced Elaida’s hand, the sisters in the Tower just starting to listen to her, the rebels growing less and less certain of Egwene’s return, some beginning to talk about moving someone else into her tent, Lelaine setting herself up to be the next Amyrlin, and now Sheriam about to try preventing the dream-meetings. Something has to happen and soon to break the deadlock and prevent a slide back into inertia.

Oh, speak of the Amyrlin and she doth appear. Hi Egwene.

Her two days of imprisonment had not been pleasant, but she would suffer them with dignity. Even if they locked her away in a tiny room with a door that wouldn’t let in light. Even if they refused to let her change from the bloodied novice dress. Even if they beat her each day for how she had treated Elaida.

Because that worked out so well for you last time, Elaida. Anyway, at least now I know who to call next time I need to move house; Elaida’s very good at boxing things up.

Of course, as with everything else about the theme-and-variation of the parallels between Rand and Egwene, this is presented in an entirely different tone and through a very different lens than Rand’s imprisonment. I know I talk about this a lot but it’s because playing with the possibilities narrative symmetry offers is one of my favourite things, and this is such a well-done example over such a long stretch of series now; give two different characters situations or arc elements or paths that on the very surface are similar, and use these to highlight all the variations. It’s like controlling your variables; you can take two similar characters and throw them at entirely different problems, or you can take similar problems and throw them at two very different characters. You can also just write two completely different stories without the thread of similarity but this way feels so much more satisfying. It gives a unifying theme or undercurrent to two characters who spend almost the entire series thus far diverging. Same yet opposite; allies yet adversaries; Dragon and Amyrlin, saidin and saidar, Rand and Egwene.

Egwene was surprised she had visitors, but Seaine wasn’t the only one who had come to her. Several had been Sitters. Curious.

The tipping point approacheth. And so her imprisonment carries with it the note of rising, of moving towards something victorious, whereas Rand’s carried little more than a sense of spiralling impending disaster. A victory in the end, sort of, but.

Egwene may find it surprising that Sitters are visiting her, but she’s also no doubt been more effective in fighting her war than she perhaps thought. Also, rumours have a tendency to spike curiosity when something this dramatic happens; the Amyrlin losing her shit and lashing out at a novice who then stands there calm and bleeding and lectures her, and then is locked away out of sight? It’s as if Elaida wanted to draw everyone’s attention to Egwene. (Or no, it’s like Elaida wanted to do exactly the opposite of that, because Elaida has a talent for accomplishing the opposite of what she wants. A Talent, even).

Seaine at least seems to be on Egwene’s side, and I doubt she’s the only one.

“Proving that accusation is difficult by Tower standards,” Seaine said. “And so I suspect that she will not try to prove it in trial—”

Couldn’t they use the Oath Rod in trials to verify claims like the one Elaida is trying to make – that she expelled Egwene from the Tower before beating her, for being a Darkfriend? Even if Elaida genuinely believed the Darkfriend accusation, she’d struggle to state the rest outright because that’s…not what happened. Also the other Sitters who were there could go under Oath (literally) and testify as to what happened. Seems like a pretty damn effective tool in a trial…

Also, if she’s not going to try to prove in trial something she’s using as a justification for her actions, what the hell is she going to do? Hello yes I would like to speak to the Aes Sedai’s legal adviser…

“partially because doing so would require her to let you speak for yourself, and I suspect that she’ll want to keep you hidden.”

How To Make A Martyr (in 8 Easy Steps) by Elaida do Avriny a’Roihan

“But if she can’t prove I’m a Darkfriend and she couldn’t stop this from going to trial…”

“It is not an offence worthy of deposing her,” Seaine said. “The maximum punishment is a formal censure from the Hall and penance for a month. She would retain the shawl.”

But would lose a great deal of credibility, Egwene thought.

That would require her having credibility to begin with…

But now I’m still stuck on the notion of the Oath Rod being involved in trials. Mostly because it seems like a perfect solution at first glance and then has the potential to be absolutely terrible depending on how those involved chose to use it, how skilled those questioning or testifying are at either bending the truth or forcing a desired narrative using nothing but true confessions put together into exactly the story they want told, thus forcing someone to condemn themselves with their own words…

Anyway.

I like Seaine still; she’s a Tower Aes Sedai, secluded and not particularly revolutionary, but she’s also very…honest, I suppose. She even seems to have a degree of humility, and deals more in facts and evidence than in ambition and denial.

Things are getting worse, the Pattern is still trying its hand at interior design by randomly moving rooms in the Tower and all things considered should probably not quit its day job.

“You have to bring these things up, Seaine,” Egwene said softly. “Keep reminding the sisters that the Dark One stirs and that the Last Battle approaches. Keep their attention on working together, not dividing.”

It’s not just Sheriam who is less than thrilled with the fact that this is happening during her lifetime. You see that sort of thing with evil characters fairly regularly—it’s the Faustian story, or variations thereof; characters who sell their soul or commit themselves to an evil cause because of the perks (power, immortality, a great healthcare package…) and don’t really expect it to be called due in quite the way it is—but I don’t think it applies solely to villains.

People who actually want to or are willing to be heroes, to give their life and maybe their death to a cause, to face the ultimate crisis point of something they’ve committed to, are rare. It’s one thing to commit yourself to something in peacetime, or to commit to something when it’s an abstract or low-level issue. It’s another thing to realise that the tipping point or catastrophe will come in your lifetime, or is happening right now. It’s why we tell stories about heroes; they’re extraordinary. It doesn’t mean ‘ordinary’ people are lazy or not really committed or cowardly; it just means we’re human. How many people, faced with Achilles’s choice (to die a hero and be remembered forever, or to live a long and peaceful life and die forgotten) would choose the ‘heroic’ path? Some, certainly. Most? Probably not.

We’re human; we’re not good at dealing with The Actual End Of The World, and we’re very good at denial when it comes to potential large-scale all-out disaster. A character can swear away their soul and never really expect that the Forces of Evil will actually call upon them to fight in the last battle, and a character can commit themselves to the cause of good or Light and never expect to actually have to stand in that final catastrophe. And I feel like if I take this much further I’m going to end up solidly in current events so I’ll just…stop there. The point is, this sense of ‘oh shit you mean this is actually happening now and I’m a part of it? I didn’t mean to sign up for this take it away’ doesn’t belong solely to villains.

So it’s a nice place to put this particular conversation, right after we see Sheriam thinking in explicit terms that she never really wanted to be a part of this, seems fitting and nicely balancing.

“You must work hard, Seaine,” Egwene said, rising as the Reds approached. “Do what I cannot. Ask the other sto do so as well.” […] “The Last Battle comes, Seaine. Remember.”

Also, Egwene is one of those people absolutely willing to be a hero in the ‘give your life to a cause’ sense. She was not chosen; she chose. And she continues to choose this path, even as it becomes difficult, even as it is painful, even as it seems too much. It’s why she’s such an effective rallying point; she has committed absolutely to the cause they are all sworn to, and she faces the impending apocalypse with determination and dignity and grace, and doesn’t try to turn away or deny it. It makes her a source of inspiration to those who are more…human about facing this reality and their upcoming role in it. Which I supposes you could argue is part of what heroes are for.

(In case you can’t tell, another thing I’m generally fascinated by is the entire notion and spectrum and variants of Heroes and Villains and the ways in which they exist and interact with their stories and worlds).

Even if Elaida was punished, what would be done with Egwene? Elaida would try to have her executed. And she still hand grounds, as Egwene had—by the White Tower’s definition—impersonated the Amyrlin Seat.

I must stay firm, Egwene told herself in the darkness. I warmed this pot myself, and now I must boil in it, if that is what will protect the Tower. They knew she continued to resist. That was all she could give them.

And she will give them everything she can, willingly. She is not having to pay the dues on a debt she never thought would be called in; she is not being dragged into a fate she has no choice but to accept. That’s not her story. She is the one who faces what is coming with eyes open, even when it turns out to be bigger and more difficult and worse and more painful than she expected. She understands what might be…I hesitate to even say ‘asked of her’ because that’s the point, isn’t it; she looks at the situation and she simply asks this of herself, because that is the only way to win.

It is part of why I’m still relatively certain she will not survive this series. I don’t think Elaida will execute her, but I do think she will give her life for the world. Because she’s one of those who would not choose to die needlessly, but could do so willingly and thus powerfully.

Next (TGS ch 26) Previous (TGS ch 24)

#I have been informed that I have ~130 chapters left #and I am DETERMINED to finish this year so uh #wheel of time #neuxue liveblogs WoT #The Gathering Storm

37 notes · View notes

neuxue · 6 years

Text

Wheel of Time live blogging: The Gathering Storm ch 24

In which I have less patience for Gawyn than I thought I did. Also I wrote this on a 12 hour flight and am posting now after 5 more hours or transit and no sleep so I have absolutley no idea how coherent it is. Enjoy?

Chapter 24: A New Commitment

Oh it’s Gawyn.

I don’t think I realised until just now how thin my patience for Gawyn has become.

You know that feeling, when you’re reading a book that has multiple viewpoints or plotlines and it changes from one to the next and your immediate response is ‘ugh, do we have to?’ Yeah.

To be fair, I suppose those last two chapters are a hard act for any change in viewpoint to follow. But still.

Gawyn yawned

Even he’s bored of his character.

Okay, sorry, give me a minute and I’ll see if I can dredge up some last few fucks to give about Gawyn Trakand.

Surprise surprise, he’s gone to Bryne’s camp. And by that I mean this is not the least bit surprising. Gawyn’s still seeking authority and command; he chafed under Elaida’s, but for all that he acted as a commander of his own forces, he was never truly autonomous. And now he’s left her, but he doesn’t know what to do and he’s still lost, so he goes to find a different authority. Someone he knows, someone he trusts – or at least, trusted. Someone who can give him answers, tell him what to do or – perhaps more importantly – tell him he’s doing the right thing.

What it comes down to, I think, is that Gawyn hasn’t grown up the way so many other characters have. He hasn’t, but he thinks he has. So he thinks he’s playing one role when really he’s playing another.

I think I’ve said this before but it’s as if he’s in the wrong story. Not narratively, but in the sense that he’s vastly out of his depth. This isn’t the story he was prepared for – he was raised to be First Prince of the Sword, to be a hero of sorts, but within a particular structure. And none of that applies here, when everything is chaos and nothing is as he expected, and the lines are blurred and there aren’t always clear-cut answers or easy ways to tell what the right thing to do is. And he doesn’t know how to cope with that. And instead of learning how, he runs away, he avoids making decisions, avoids truly acting, truly committing, even when he tells himself he is. It’s all very, very human and in that regard understandable, but the frustrating part is that Gawyn himself doesn’t see it, doesn’t acknowledge it. It’s as if he’s still trying to force the framework he thinks should apply onto reality instead of looking around and letting himself see the truth of the situation.

So for all that he is – or I suppose was – in a position of command, he’s ultimately still letting others call the shots. As if, subconsciously, he’s looking for a way to avoid making those decisions that threaten to overwhelm him because he doesn’t know what to choose or what to do. Following orders, even when he chafes at them, gives him…something of an out. Except now he has finally made a decision and acted on it – he’s left Elaida and the Tower, rather than simply ruminating on it and being frustrated. Still, though, his first instinct is to go to Gareth Bryne. A different figure of authority.

All things considered, though, Bryne is definitely a better choice than Elaida. And maybe Bryne can either slap some sense into him or help him find his feet and sort some of his shit out. Or both.

Not to mention the fact that it’s probably no bad thing Gawyn is seeking out someone like Bryne rather than just running off on his own. Because he is lost, and well out of his depth. He just needs to be made to actually recognise that and either do something about it or step back.

No, a single man approaching the army was not a danger. A single man riding away from it, however, was cause for alarm. A man coming to the camp could be friend, foe or neither. A man who inspected the camp then rode away was almost certainly a spy. So long as Gawyn didn’t leave before making his intentions known, Bryne’s outriders would be unlikely to bother him.

I’m not sure why this paragraph in particular made me think this but: Gawyn seems like a classic example of someone who is very skilled at tactics but has absolutely no aptitude whatsoever for strategy. Or perhaps no understanding of the fact that the two are not synonymous.

This paragraph also highlights what I was thinking earlier – Gawyn understand things within a certain framework, and when he’s operating within that framework he’s good at what he does. The problem is, that framework doesn’t always apply, and he doesn’t know what to do when it breaks down.

By now, the Younglings knew of their leader’s betrayal

Clearly I have Star Wars on the brain because all I can think of here is Anakin.

Yet leaving had been the right thing to do. For the first time in months, his actions matched his heart.

There’s a kind of irony in the fact that my patience with Gawyn has run out at precisely the time he’s finally showing some positive growth.

Maybe I just liked him more when he was suffering. That would be like me.

Saving Egwene. That was something he could believe in.

I just rolled my eyes so hard I think I severed the optic nerve. Seriously, Gawyn? It’s a good thing he and Mat haven’t spent much time together. But it fits right in with Gawyn’s whole…concept of who and what he’s supposed to be. It’s a simplistic concept, and one that doesn’t really work in practice, and he just has absolutely no idea. He sees this as a perfectly realistic and sensible thing to think. Go save Egwene, because clearly she needs him to save her.

But really. Not helping Egwene, or even ‘Egwene was someone he could believe in’, but straight to I Must Save Egwene. Maybe take ten minutes to get your own shit together, Gawyn, before you run off trying to save someone when you know precisely nothing about the situation. Maybe try not jumping to conclusions for once. Shall we give that a try?

They were the ones who had propped Egwene up as an Amyrlin, as a target. Egwene! A mere Accepted. A pawn. If they failed in their bid for the Tower, they themselves might be able to escape punishment. Egwene would be executed.

On the one hand, he’s not wrong. On the other hand, you’d think he would have enough confidence in Egwene to trust her to see the truth of the situation as well. It reminds me of when Mat tried to mansplain Egwene’s situation to her. SHE KNOWS, GUYS.

It’s easy to see why Egwene is consistenty underestimated by various characters. That’s not the issue so much as the fact that supposedly Gawyn loves her and you’d think that if he knew her, he’d at least think ‘okay Egwene’s not stupid, maybe I should find out more about what’s going on and see if she needs my help’ rather than MUST SAVE THE DAMSEL FROM HER DISTRESS.

I’ll save her somehow. Then I’ll talk some sense into her and bring her away from all of the Aes Sedai. Perhaps even talk sense into Bryne. We can all get back to Andor, to help Elayne.

What.

I just…what. I don’t even know where to start. Every single word of that was absurd. Every phoneme.

Let’s start with I’ll save her somehow. Who needs a plan? Not Gawyn Trakand! Because running into things with only a vague understanding of what’s going on always works out so well! Also just the brash arrogance of it – that he, with no thought and no plan, can just somehow do what he doesn’t even consider she could ever do for herself.

And then there’s I’ll talk some sense into her and even talk sense into Bryne and at this point I just give up.

And then they can all go back to Andor and help Elayne and everything will be all fine and dandy, just like a little storybook, nothing to worry about. PLANS, GAWYN. STRATEGY. BASIC KNOWLEDGE OF THE SITUATION. MAYBE EVEN A TOUCH LESS HUBRIS. You are not the only person alive capable of accomplishing things.

This next bit is a very Sanderson description.

A random Aes Sedai amongst the washwomen…I can’t think who this would be. Are we supposed to know? The rebels don’t have any spies from the Tower, do they, the way the Tower had Beonin and maybe others with the rebels? Or have Aes Sedai from the tower begun defecting from Elaida’s travesty of a regime?

“I’m not a recruit,” Gawyn said, turning Challenge to get a better look at the men. “My name is Gawyn Trakand. I need to speak with Gareth Bryne immediately about a matter of some urgency.”

The soldier raised an eyebrow. Then he chuckled to himself.

I can’t help but compare this to Rand walking alone into Ituralde’s camp, and the way Ituralde immediately took him seriously just because of his bearing, his look, the way he spoke. Gawyn…doesn’t have that, it would seem. Then again, I’m not sure how fair a comparison that is. Not to mention Rand isn’t exactly a role model at this point in time.

So Gawyn is entirely failing at gravitas, and while this seems entirely perfect for his character, there’s a small part of me that’s at least a little bit sympathetic; there really is very little more purely frustrating than not being taken seriously, or being taken for a liar or braggart when you’re actually telling the truth.

(Yes, I am a Slytherin, how could you tell?)

Gawyn met the man’s eyes. “Very well. We can do it this way. It will probably be faster anyway.”

The sergeant laid a hand on his sword.

Gawyn kicked his feet free of the stirrups and pushed himself out of the saddle.

And proceeds to win without killing, against several opponents. The fight scene also feels rather Sanderson – especially with the frequency of ‘fell into [stance]’ phrasing, which Sanderson has a slight tendency to overuse, and which I don’t recall Jordan using as often; he tended to go more with ‘Parting the Silk met Hummingbird Kisses the Honeyrose’ and constructions along those lines – but it’s well executed. (Ironically, that sentence I just wrote is a classically Jordan construction in terms of construction…)

“I am unarmed,” he said over the sounds of the wounded. “And none of these four will die this ay. Go and tell your general that a lone blademaster just felled a squad of his guards in under ten heartbeats. I’m an old student of his. He’ll want to see me.”

Gawyn is, by the rules of the title, a blademaster. He earned the title, and he is certainly skilled in a fight, and he knows it. And this takes me back to what I was toying with just a few pages ago, the sense that Gawyn is a good tactician but a terrible strategist, and doesn’t seem to recognise that there’s a difference.

He can plan a battle or a raid, and if you put an enemy or five in front of him he can win the fight. But he could never win a war.

He doesn’t think through cause and effect and consequence, doesn’t consider the entirety of the situation before focusing in on a single piece of it, doesn’t look at the bigger picture or the longer term. He gets lost in the middle, and there are parts of that middle in which he excels, and he sometimes mistakes that for a different ability altogether, and it just leads him further astray.

Perhaps it had been a mistake to fight the men, but he had already wasted too much time. Egwene could be dead by now!

She’s been Amyrlin for months and a prisoner for weeks. Five minutes one way or another probably isn’t going to make much difference now, Gawyn. I mean, maybe it will, but the fact that you only found out about this a few days ago doesn’t mean it didn’t exist before then, or that it’s suddenly become more immediate a problem just because you’re now aware of it. But again, that’s…not really how Gawyn looks at things. Or rather, that’s the kind of thing Gawyn doesn’t look at. He’s aware of it now, so it’s the centre of his focus, so it’s immediate and urgent and there’s no time to waste on things like…figuring out what the hell he’s actually going to do.

It’s like my never-ending frustration with people who run red lights, or the equivalent. Is that thirty seconds really so urgent? And is it worth the risk of being stopped for far longer than it would have taken you to just wait for the damn light to turn in the first place? Sometimes running headlong into a situation without stopping to consider the bigger picture or plan just means making a bigger mess of things. Sure, there are times when snap decisions are necessary and where there really is only a matter of seconds in which to act, but more often than not it just feels that way, when actually taking a few seconds to make sure what you’re doing isn’t going to fuck everything up is worth it.

Hi Bryne. Please slap Gawyn in the face. Just once.

“You, come with me.”

Gawyn clenched his jaw. He hadn’t received such an address from Gareth Bryne since before he’d started shaving. Still, he couldn’t really expect the man to be pleased.

No shit.

“Gareth,” Gawyn said, catching up, “I—”

“Hold your tongue, young man,” Bryne said, not turning towards him. “I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do with you.”

Gawyn snapped his mouth closed. That was uncalled for! Gawyn was still brother to the rightful Queen of Andor, and would be First Prince of the Sword should Elayne take and hold the throne!

Through no help from Gawyn, as it turns out. This is where Gawyn in many ways is still something of a sheltered boy, who hasn’t really grown past that. Hasn’t really learned that the world – or at least the apocalypse – isn’t so simple, while so many of the other characters have. It’s as if Gawyn has been left behind while the rest have developed as people – as leaders, as politicians, as heroes, as whatever else – which I think is part of the whole point.

Bryne should show him respect.

He should earn it. This is an interesting comparison to Bryne’s interactions with Egwene. The one Gawyn wants to run and save because she’s just an Accepted and a pawn. But in truth she is the Amyrlin, and while she’s still young she has earned Bryne’s respect. He doesn’t give it out based on rank or training or ‘should’. He respects those he has deemed worthy of his respect, those who have proven themselves. Egwene has. Gawyn hasn’t. Not yet, at least.

“All right. Explain what you’re doing here.”

Gawyn drew himself up. “General,” he said, “I think you mistake yourself. I’m no longer your student.”

Then, with respect, you’re an idiot. Because if you think that at the age of twenty-something, with a short time in command of a group of soldiers – yet still under the command of Elaida – you have nothing more to learn from Gareth Bryne, you’re kidding yourself.

Well, or you’re lost and uncertain and full of self-doubt and trying desperately to be the person you think you should be, and seeking someone who can help you do that while at the same time wanting to prove to yourself and those around you that you’re worthy, that you’re not just a pawn in the game.

So, okay. It’s not ego, precisely. Or it’s not just ego. It’s…a sheltered upbringing and a duty and an oath to give his life for queen and country, to be a leader and a hero and a sacrifice if necessary, it’s a great deal of skill combined with not a great deal of experience, it’s a need to be good enough combined with doubt that he is good enough combined with always feeling second-best to his brother yet unable to resent that and so instead pushing himself, it’s feeling lost and uncertain and so in desperation overcompensating and trying to do something, but not having the experience or information to match his ability.

“I know,” Bryne said curtly. “The boy I trained would never have pulled a childish stunt like that one to get my attention.”

I think that counts as a slap in the face. Gawyn needs this, though.

“Look,” Gawyn said, “perhaps I was hasty, but I have an important task. You need to listen to me.”

Why does he need to listen to you, Gawyn? Also, do you really think he’s leading the rebels’ armies and yet is somehow ignorant of Egwene’s situation? Do you not think, maybe, that he might actually know more about it than you do? There’s a time and a place for a ‘you need to listen to me’, but right now is more a situation for ‘I’ve heard some worrying things about Egwene; what do you know and can I help?’

It’s the sort of arrogance that isn’t conscious or even based in a sense of superiority but more is based in completely failing to take a second to think. Or to realise that you aren’t the centre of the universe. In other words, it’s the arrogance of immaturity.

Here’s the thing. Gawyn’s irritating me right now, and I’m obviously being critical of him here, but I still find him such an interesting narrative choice, and an interesting character and character arc to have included in this story full of people who grow into their roles as heroes of one kind or another. Because Gawyn provides something of a foil to that – a character who really should have been a hero, who was trained for it and positioned for it, and who tries so hard to do the right thing and save and protect those he loves, but so often makes the wrong choices. Sometimes through misinterpretation or failure to understand the situation, and sometimes through lack of information more than any fault of his own, but who nonetheless ends up adrift, while so many other characters are moving in the opposite direction. From confused and uncertain and young to more and more capable.

“If I instead throw you out of my camp for being a spoiled princeling with too much pride and not enough sense?”

More or less, yeah. Please sit him down and explain the concept of strategy to him, Bryne.

Gawyn frowned. “Be careful, Gareth. I’ve learned a great deal since we last met. I think you’ll find that your sword can no longer best mine as easily as it once did.”

And just like that, he proves Bryne’s point. And mine: that he thinks he has learned and grown, but he fails to see all the ways in which he hasn’t. He’s learned, but he’s learned the wrong lessons – or rather, there are so many more things he hasn’t learned. One of the greatest being that it isn’t about being able to stab his way through all of his problems.

It’s an issue of self-awareness, and of awareness of the rest of the world outside of himself. It’s being able to take honest stock of his abilities and his shortcomings. It’s recognising that he’s good at hitting things with a sharp stick but he has by no means learned everything there is to learn.

That’s kind of the tragedy of the Younglings (aside from their name); they’re…okay so the description that comes to mind is one of my favourite poems: “the lads that will die in their glory and never be old.” Those skilled enough and just experienced enough to think themselves wise and knowledgeable and ready, but too young and too caught up in the glory or the honour or even the sense of duty to see beyond that, to see that they are condemning themselves to being used by powers they aren’t truly equipped to contend with, to fighting to no purpose, to dying for nothing in the end. It’s a child’s sense of honour, and Gawyn can’t afford that anymore.

“I have no doubt of that,” Bryne said. “Light, boy! You always were a talented one. But you think that just because you’re skilled with the sword, your words hold more weight? I should listen because you’ll kill me if I don’t? I thought I taught you far better than that.”

Subtle as a hammer, but that’s what Gawyn needs right now. Especially since he killed his last Hammar.

Bryne held his gaze, calm. Solid. As a general should be. As Gawyn should be.

Gawyn looked away, suddenly feeling ashamed of himself.

The thing is, while Gawyn is in many ways still far too young and too immature, it’s…not all meant as a criticism of him. Some of it, sure. But it’s also an aspect of his character and his position – he did have a relatively sheltered upbringing, and while he was trained for some of these kinds of things, a) there’s not a whole lot of training you can do for an apocalypse you don’t know is coming and b) he was thrown pretty immediately into ‘reality’ before actually learning how to apply his training to it. The Tower coup was a baptism by fire when it comes to chaos and impossible choices. He wasn’t ready, and he got thrown into the middle of it, and because of his name and his title (and his skill) he ended up in a position of authority when he was in no way prepared for it.

And he had no guidance, from that point onwards. Even Rand had Moiraine and Lan and Verin in the early days, and then Rhuarc and Bashere and arguably Cadsuane. He was thrown into the deep end and it hasn’t exactly gone well for him, but he has had people along the way trying to teach him and guide him and occasionally serve as role models. Gawyn had that, when it was all still training. But from the moment it became reality, he’s been alone.

Which is, I think, another part of the reason he almost instinctively seeks out Gareth Bryne.

Bryne doesn’t like tea? Okay forget it, Gareth, you’re dead to me.

“Gareth. It’s Egwene. They have her.”

“The White Tower Aes Sedai?”

Gawyn nodded urgently.

“I know.” Bryne took another drink, then grimaced again.

Perfect.

I mean really, Gawyn, did you honestly think hadn’t noticed? What did you expect? “Oh, shit, you’re right, we’ve misplaced the Amyrlin! Thank the Light you’ve come to inform us of this! Hey, anyone seen Egwene in the last month or so? You know, dark-haired girl, wears a stole? Hall freezes in terror every time she walks past? No? Weird, could have sworn she was right there…”

“We have to go for her!” Gawyn said. “I came to ask you for help. I intend to mount a rescue.”

Bryne snorted softly. “A rescue? And how do you intend to get into the White Tower?”

“Oh, you came for help? Alright, let’s see the plan. You do have a plan, don’t you? No? Okay so maybe let’s start there.” Thank you Gareth Bryne. And to Gawyn’s credit, at least he went to the one person who probably stands a chance of getting something through his head.

“But tell me this, lad. How are you going to get her to come out with you?” Gawyn started. “Why, she’ll be happy to come. Why wouldn’t she?” “Because she’s forbidden us to rescue her,” Bryne said

Ah this is glorious. The value of information. Gawyn hasn’t the slightest clue what’s actually going on and he wants to run headlong into it with a half-baked plan and a whole lot of determination. Which is admirable and all, but it’s also probably the best way to turn a shit situation into an absolute catastrophe, so, you know, maybe let’s not.

And Bryne does this well; he doesn’t just refuse Gawyn outright and tell him he’s an idiot. He actually doesn’t tell Gawyn anything at the start. He leads with questions, and lets Gawyn see the extent of his own ignorance. “Okay, sure, so we do that. What next?” is a great way to get someone to poke holes in their own idea, rather than poking them yourself. This way, Gawyn’s more likely to actually learn something, and to understand what he’s learned, because he can see for himself that he’s already worked his way into a corner, and that’s only in the hypothetical.

“Bryne, she’s imprisoned! The Aes Sedai I heard talking said that she’s being beaten daily. They’ll execute her!”

“I don’t know,” Bryne said. “She’s been with them for weeks now and they haven’t killed her yet.”

“They’ll kill her,” Gawyn said urgently, “You know they will.”

I’m on a plane so it’s a little hard to hit my head against a hard surface but you can trust that I’m giving it my best effort.

It’s not that Gawyn doesn’t have a point in theory – there’s something to be said for his ‘eventually you mount your enemy’s head on a pike to make a point’ logic – but he still doesn’t have anything close to all the information. Even that isn’t an insurmountable obstacle, but he still doesn’t realise the pitfalls of not having the information. I’m reminded of what Lan said to Rand: “You can never know everything, and part of what you know is always wrong. Perhaps even the most important part. A portion of wisdom lies in knowing that. A portion of courage lies in going on anyway.”

Gawyn’s got the ‘going on anyway’ part down more or less, but it’s the rest of it that he’s lacking. He trusts too much in the little information he has, and doesn’t think about where the holes are, or what he might be missing, or what might have been altered in the telling. He doesn’t think about all the ways in which what he knows may not actually be correct in a particular situation, because it’s different from what he’s been taught or what he’s seen. He doesn’t think about the uncertainties, and the way they can compound into catastrophic errors.

Which is central to the series in so many ways, and Gawyn is yet another variation on the theme of information and the lack of information, on truth and rumour and supposition, on the way fact and story and rumour can all be warped by time and distance, on how it’s virtually impossible to know everything, but it’s important to work with what you have in the best way you can.

“I’ll try to get you an audience with some of the Aes Sedai I serve,” Bryne said. “Perhaps they can do something. If you persuade them that a rescue is needed, and that the Amuyrlin would want it, then we’ll see.”

I can’t decide if I’m annoyed at this or not. On the one hand, why should they take Gawyn’s word for what is in Egwene’s best interests, when Egwene herself says otherwise? On the other hand…it’s not a bad idea to have a Plan B if you need one. Also, this is perhaps a good way for Bryne to basically encourage Gawyn to actually think everything through, and consider more of the situation, and make a genuine plan – because there’s no way he’ll be able to persuade the Aes Sedai without more than he has right now. And even then, it’s a ‘we’ll see’. It’s a test, of sorts.

So the Aes Sedai with the washwomen was definitely not a random aside, and I still can’t think who she might be, except a defector from Elaida. I suppose it would be the right time in the arc for that – Egwene’s last chapter was, as she saw it, the end of her own war within the Tower, and now it’s up to the Tower to take up the…fight? Non-fight? Struggle? Anyway, she provided the impetus, so now it’s time to see if she’s managed to break through the inertia, if it will be enough to start a cascading effect.

Meanwhile Bryne is finally like okay so Gawyn what the fuck were you even here for in the first place. Pretty sure he knows, he just wants Gawyn to say it.

“Why aren’t you back in Caemlyn, helping your sister?”

GOOD DAMN QUESTION.

“Well, rumours are unreliable,” Bryne said.

You might need to make more of a point of that, Bryne. Though Gawyn’s issue isn’t precisely gullibility so much as something almost along the lines of confirmation bias.

“Your sister holds the Lion Throne. It seems that she’s undone much of the mess your mother left for her.”

With no help from you, Gawyn.

It serves to highlight how lost and adrift Gawyn has been, how futilely he’s been running around trying to help, trying to do the right thing, but ultimately getting nowhere. His sister has become Queen of Andor. His girlfriend has become the Amyrlin Seat. They’ve claimed two of the most powerful stations in the world, and Gawyn is with neither of them, has helped neither of them, though everything he’s done has been in an attempt to do right by both of them. Also he still thnks they need his help – that Egwene needs him to rescue her, that Elayne needs him to help her. But they’ve achieved this without him, and it puts the spotlight back on the question of what are you doing, Gawyn?

“Your place is at your sister’s side.”

“Egwene first.”

“You made an oath,” Bryne said sternly, “Before me. Have you forgotten?”

In fairness to Gawyn, he was what, four? There’s an argument to be made there about oaths made well before what anyone would reasonably call age of consent. And about what that does to the one who makes the oath before they’re truly old enough to understand.

“But if Elayne has the throne, then she’s safe for now. I’ll get Egwene and tow her back to Caemlyn where I can keep an eye on her. Where I can keep an eye on both of them.”

Now you sound like Mat again, and not in a good way. Tow her back? Keep an eye on her? Gawyn you can barely keep an eye on yourself. You mean well but…you have also never seen Egwene take on the Hall. Or Elayne take on Andor. Give them a little bit of credit; they’re doing better than you are right now.

Bryne snorted. “I think I’d like to watch you trying that first part,” he noted. “But regardless, why weren’t you there when Elayne was trying to take the throne? What have you been doing that is more important than that?”

Gareth Bryne, asking the real questions. This is what Gawyn has needed for about eight books now. Someone to sit him down and say, calmly and clearly, what the fuck.

Especially because Gawyn’s reasons – ‘I grew entangled’ – are going to sound so much more feeble when said aloud than during all those long hours agonising to himself over what to do, and how to choose, and what is right. Don’t get me wrong; I rather liked a lot of those moments. It’s just that this plays so well; we’re so good at lying to ourselves, at justifying things to ourselves, and it’s so easy to get caught up in something and it all makes sense at the time, and it doesn’t seem like there’s any other choice…and then when faced with a conversation like this that cuts to the heart of it, and you have to explain those choices, and really look closely at them, it all…falls apart.

“Blood and bloody ashes!” Bryne exclaimed. The general rarely cursed. “I knew that the person leading those raids against me was too well informed. And here I was, looking for a leak among my officers!”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

Um? Sorry, Gawyn, I believe the correct response is “I have toh.” Or just a simple “Yeah I fucked up.” But to dismiss it like that? Really?

I had so much patience for Gawyn, you guys. I was so interested in him as a character concept, in the notion of a character who doesn’t grow the same way as the rest, who tries to do the right thing and should be a hero and instead makes the wrong choices, through poor decisions or poor luck. I was so interested in seeing the effects of that on him, on those around him. Plus I liked him at the start.

And he’s really done as much as he can to THROW IT ALL AWAY. I WAS PATIENT WITH YOU, GAWYN, AND THIS IS HOW YOU REPAY ME. *scowls*

“I’ll judge that,” Bryne said.

Gareth Bryne, singlehandedly ensuring that this chapter doesn’t actually drive me insane.

“But you still haven’t explained why you didn’t return to Caemlyn.”

Gareth Bryne, singlehandedly ensuring that this chapter doesn’t actually drive me insane.

“Regardless, once I get you a meeting with the Aes Sedai, I want your word that you’ll go back to Caemlyn. Leave Egwene to us. You need to help Elayne. It’s your place to be in Andor.”

“I could say the same of you.”

Touché. One point to Gawyn. Several hundred behind Bryne, still, but hey.

It’s hard to blame Bryne for being angry and upset and even disillusioned with Morgase after what she did and said to him. Because…well, back to information people have, and information they don’t. But…ouch.

“It must have been part of some scheme,” Gawyn said. “You know Mother. If she did hurt you, there was a reason.”

Bryne shook his head. “No reason other than foolish love for that fop Gaebril. She nearly let her clouded head ruin Andor.”

“She’d never!” Gawyn snapped. “Gareth, you of all people should know that!”

“I should,” Bryne said, lowering his voice. “And I wish I did.”

The interesting thing here is the reversal. Gawyn is still trusting to what he thinks he knows, what he believes, and Bryne is still trusting to observation and reason. But this time, Gawyn’s actually…well, he’s not completely right but he’s closer. But how on earth would anyone who saw Morgase, and saw Andor at that point in time, believe that? In this case, no one alive knows the full truth of what was happening. Not even Morgase. She herself would likely agree with Bryne. Which…yeah. That’s just so many kinds of horrific.

“Curse al’Thor! The day can’t come soon enough when I can run him through.” Bryne looked at Gawyn sharply. “Al’Thor saved Andor, son. Or as near to it as a man could.”

Well…at least Rand’s got Gareth Bryne on his side? (~It must be nice, it must be nice…)

This conversation is so well done in terms of showing how complicated the ‘who has what information and what does that mean for them’ game can get.

“How could you speak well of that monster? He killed my mother!”

Actually he was trying to avenge her, but why would you listen to literally anyone except that one rumour you hate and therefore cling to?

“I don’t know if I believe those rumours or not,” Bryne said, rubbing his chin. “But if I do, lad, then perhaps he did Andor a favour. You don’t know how bad it got, there at the end.”

Rahvin’s treatment of Morgase is one of the cruellest things done to an individual in WoT, possibly with the exception of…uh…Semirhage two chapters ago. It’s not just what he did to her directly in the form of physical and mental rape, but what he did to her as Queen, what he did through her to Andor, and what that did to an entire nation’s perception of her. To how those who loved and trusted her now see her. To her own perception of herself. And also to Andor as a whole; he nearly destroyed a country. And not only is she blamed for it, but she herself shoulders that responsibility, and she has no way of knowing that it’s not her fault. That’s…frighteningly thorough and perfect destruction of a person. Not just Morgase individually, but the very memory of her in the minds of thousands. The destruction of her, her memory, her legacy.

And you see it in moments like this, when someone like Gareth Bryne, who loved her and whom she loved, believes that maybe her death was the best thing for Andor. Believes the worst of her, because what else is he supposed to believe?

Anyway, Morgase’s story hurts, news at 11.

“I’ll always speak truth, Gawyn. No matter who challenges me on it. It’s hard to hear? Well, it was harder to live.”

Ow, stop it, this is NOT OKAY. Because he’s right. He’s right to speak the truth, despite how hard it may be to face. That’s so desperately needed…but in this case it isn’t truth. There’s just absolutely no reasonable way for him to believe that, because who looks at a situation like that and goes “ah. Of course. This must be a classic case of manipulation via a largely forgotten magical ability that no man should be able to wield anyway so he must have been one of the legendary monsters from millennia ago, disguised as the lover of the Queen of Andor. Also the earth is flat.” Occam’s Razor would be crying in a corner, shortly accompanied by all principles of logic and reason.

“In the end, Gawyn, your mother turned against Andor by embracing Gaebril. She needed to be removed. If al’Thor did that for us, then we have need to thank him.”

And every word of that is wrong. It was her loyalty to Andor that saved Morgase in the end, and it was out of loyalty to Andor that Morgase fled. It was out of loyalty to Andor that Queen Morgase, for all intents and purposes, died.

“Yes, Morgase the woman I can forgive. But Morgase the Queen? She gave the kingdom to that snake. She sent her allies to be beaten and imprisoned. She wasn’t right in her mind.”

No, she wasn’t, and it’s so much worse than you can imagine and this is FINE, everything is FINE. She herself was imprisoned, and now she has to live with the memories of doing all of this.

All that aside, I of course love the separation between Morgase the person and Morgase the Queen. It’s something we see and are seeing with so many characters, this conflict between who they are and what they are. How that plays out in their own mind and sense of self, but also how it combines with the way they are seen and treated by others. Who can still separate the person from the title, and who conflates them. Whether an individual can take on some of those roles and still hold onto themselves.

“But you have to bury that hatred of al’Thor.”

And Gawyn’s response, of course, is ‘nah’. HOW MANY TIMES DO YOU NEED TO BE TOLD THIS, GAWYN. BY HOW MANY PEOPLE YOU SUPPOSEDLY TRUST? He even saw Rand, at and before Dumai’s Wells. And yet, he holds to the thing first believed.

And in an abrupt change of subject…hi, Shemerin.

Interesting. So…kind of a defector from the Tower. And, actually, an altogether fitting one, to be the first one we see. The beginning, perhaps.

(Side note: the woman sitting next to me on the plane just asked if I’m writing my thesis).

Next (TGS ch 25) Previous (TGS ch 23)

#grow up Gawyn #Lia liveblogs on airplanes: the saga #Wheel of Time #The Gathering Storm #neuxue liveblogs WoT

49 notes · View notes