Nynaeve strode through the city gates, dressed in black. "A wilder?" she asked. "Undiscovered? How did he survive this long? You have done well, Dannil. I give you back your life. Do not fail again".
Dannil wept for joy, then scrambled past Nynaeve into the city.
"It isn’t real", Rand said as Nynaeve tied him in weaves of Air, then dragged him into the Dark One's version of Emond's Field, the two Myrddraal rushing in ahead of her. It was a large city now. The houses had the feel of mice clustered together before a cat, each one of the same, uniform dullness. People scuttled through alleyways, eyes down.
People scattered before Nynaeve, sometimes calling her "mistress". Others named her Chosen. The two Myrddraal sped through the city, like shadows. When Rand and Nynaeve reached the fortress, a small group had gathered in the courtyard. Twelve people—Rand could sense that the four men in the group held saidin, though he only recognized Damer Flinn from among them. A couple of the women were girls he had known in the Two Rivers.
Thirteen of them. And thirteen Myrddraal, gathering beneath that clouded sky. For the first time since the start of the vision, Rand felt fear. Not this. Anything but this.
What if they Turned him? This wasn’t real, but it was a version of reality. A mirror world, created by the Dark One. What would it do to Rand if they Turned him here? Had he been trapped that easily?
He began to struggle, panicked, against the bonds of Air. It was useless, of course.
"You are an interesting one", Nynaeve said, turning to him. She didn’t look a day older than when he had left her in the cavern, but there were other differences. She wore her hair in a braid again, but her face was leaner, more . . . harsh. And those eyes.
The eyes were all wrong.
"How did you survive out there?" she asked him. "How did you go undiscovered so long?"
"I come from a place where the Dark One does not rule".
Nynaeve laughed. "Ridiculous. A tale for children. The Great Lord has always ruled".
Rand could see it. His connection to the Pattern, the glimmering of halftruths and shadowed ways. This possibility . . . it could happen. It was one path the world could take. The Dark One, here, had won the Last Battle and broken the Wheel of Time.
That had allowed him to remake it, to spin the pattern in a new way. Everyone alive had forgotten the past, and now knew only what the Dark One had inserted in their minds. Rand could read the truth, the history of this place, in the threads of the Pattern he had touched earlier.
Nynaeve, Egwene, Logain and Cadsuane were now members of the Forsaken, Turned to the Shadow against their will. Moiraine had been executed for being too weak.
Elayne, Min, Aviendha . . . they had been given over to torture, endlessly, at Shayol Ghul.
The world was a living nightmare. Each member of the Forsaken ruled as a despot over their own little section of the world. An endless autumn played out as they threw armies, Dreadlords, and factions against one another. An eternal battle.
The Blight had extended to every ocean. Seanchan was no more, ruined and scorched until not even rats and crows could survive there. Anyone who could channel was discovered as a youth and Turned. The Dark One did not like the risk that someone would bring hope back to the world.
And nobody ever would.
Rand screamed as the thirteen began to channel.
"This is your worst?" Rand yelled.
They pressed their wills against his own. He felt them, like nails being pounded into his skull, parting his flesh. He pushed back with everything he had, but the others started a thrumming pressure. Each thump, like the chop of an axe, came closer and closer to boring into him.
AND SO I WIN.
The failure hit Rand hard—the knowledge that what happened here was his fault. Nynaeve, Egwene, Turned to the Shadow because of him. Those he loved, becoming playthings for the Shadow.
Rand should have protected them.
I WIN. AGAIN.
"You think I am the same youth that Ishamael tried so hard to frighten?" Rand shouted, fighting down his terror and shame.
THE FIGHT IS OVER.
"IT HAS NOT YET BEGUN!" Rand screamed.
The reality around him shattered again into ribbons of light. Nynaeve’s face shredded, coming apart like lace with a loose thread. The ground disintegrated, and the fortress ceased to exist.
Rand dropped from bands of Air that had never been completely there. The reality the Dark One had created, fragile, unwove into its component parts. Threads of light spiraled out, quivering like the strings of a harp.
They waited to be woven.
Rand drew breath, deeply, through his teeth and looked up at the darkness beyond the threads. "I will not sit passively and suffer it this time, Shaitan. I will not be captive to your nightmares. I have become something greater than I once was".
Rand seized those threads spinning about him, taking them—hundreds upon hundreds of them. There was no Fire, Air, Earth, Water or Spirit here, these were somehow more base, somehow more varied. Each one was individual, unique. Instead of Five Powers, there were thousands.
Rand took them, gathered them and in his hand held the fabric of creation itself Then he channeled it, spinning it into a different possibility.
"Now", Rand said, breathing deeply, trying to banish the horror of what he had seen. "Now I will show you what is going to happen".
Bryne bowed. "The men are in position, Mother".
Egwene took a deep breath. Mat had sent the White Towers forces across the dry riverbed below the ford and around the western side of the bogs; it was time for Egwene to join them. She hesitated for a moment, looking through the gateway to Mats command post. Egwene met the eyes of the Seanchan woman across the table, where she sat imperiously on her throne.
I have not finished with you, Egwene thought.
"Lets go", she said, turning, waving for Yukiri to close the gateway to Mats building. She fingered Vora’s sa’angreal, held in one hand as she strode out of her tent.
She hesitated when she saw something there. Something slight, on the ground. Tiny spiderweb cracks in the rocks. She bent down.
"There are more and more of those around, Mother", Yukiri said, stooping down beside her. "We think that when Dreadlords channel, the cracks can spread. Particularly if balefire is used . . "
Egwene felt them. Though they seemed like ordinary cracks to the touch, they looked down into pure nothing. Blackness, far too deep for simple cracks to have caused thro
