Crossroads Of Twilight
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And it shall come to pass, in the days when the Dark Hunt rides, when the right hand falters and the left hand strays, that mankind shall come to the Crossroads of Twilight and all that is, all that was, and all that will be shall balance on the point of a sword, while the winds of the Shadow grow.
—From The Prophecies of the Dragon,
translation believed done by Jain
Charin, known as Jain Farstrider,
shortly before his disappearance __________________________________________
The sun stood halfway to its peak, and gave no warmth.
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Let whoever may think of violence search his heart, and consider his soul.
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Woodland surrounded them, small dense thickets dotted among more widely spaced trees. Great oaks and towering pines and firs had killed off most of the undergrowth, though here and there the thick brown remains of a hardy vine, waiting for a still distant spring, clung to a boulder or a low gray ledge of stone.
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They must succeed. Fail, and the world was doomed.
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"May you always find water and shade, Davram Bashere."
"At the moment, I'd rather have dry feet and a warm fire," Bashere muttered without thinking, then wished he had not. Step on a man's formality and he might try to kill you, and the Aiel were formal and strange besides.
But Bael threw back his head and laughed. "The wetlands turn everything on its head, Davram Bashere." A curious gesture of his right hand brought the other Aiel to their feet, and they loped off eastward in long, easy strides. The snow did not seem to give them any difficulty.
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No one except Tumad was close enough to hear him, but he spoke softly anyway, and chose his words cautiously. Sometimes, the price of carelessness was death, too. "You know where to find the man who came to me yesterday? Find him, and tell him I agree, but there will be a few more than we talked about."
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The falling snow beyond her window swirled in a gust of wind like a white kaleidoscope.
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Light, how the horror of yesterday became merely the uneasiness of today, once you grew accustomed.
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That might be an overstatement, though Merise was making an effort with Jahar—that was Merise's way—yet it seemed the horror of yesterday could become the complacency of today after long enough exposure.
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The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Rhannon Hills. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
Born among the groves and vineyards that covered much of the rugged hills, the olive trees in evergreen rows, the ordered vines leafless till spring, the cold wind blew west and north across the prosperous farms dotting the land between the hills and the great harbor of Ebou Dar. The land lay winter fallow still, but men and women were already oiling plowshares and tending harnesses, preparing for the planting to come.
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The innocent died along with the guilty. And if you did nothing, then only the innocent died.
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Tuon's big dark eyes crackled, heat lightning in a night sky, but she said, "It seems I will see what your promises are worth, Toy."
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Being ta'veren made you stand out in the Pattern, and some of the Forsaken could use that to find you at times, or so he had been told.
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The sun had finally peeked above the horizon and begun to send sharply slanted shafts of light through the forest canopy, reflecting off the snow and lessening the gloom a little, though deep, dappled shadows remained between the sun's slender fingers. Some of those shadows enveloped him.
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"We are supposed to deal with people's fears and soothe them, not spread senseless gossip and panic."
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Despite the hot bathwater, she shivered, thinking of all the webs the White Tower had spun through the centuries, so fine that none could see them except the sisters who did the spinning, so convoluted that none but those sisters could have unraveled them. The Tower spun webs, the Ajahs spun webs, even individual sisters spun webs. Sometimes those schemes blended into one another as though guided by a single hand. Other times they had pulled one another apart. That was how the world had been shaped for three thousand years.
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The evening sun was a ball of blood on the treetops, casting a lurid light across the camp, a widely spaced sprawl of horselines and canvas-covered wagons and high-wheeled carts and tents in every size and sort with the snow between trampled to slush.
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Change came so slowly you never noticed it creeping up on you, or far too fast for comfort, but it came. Nothing stayed the same, even when you thought it did.
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Truth almost always did come out in the end, but by the end, truth was often so wrapped around with rumors and speculation and absolute lies that most people never did believe it.
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Every barrel of meat, every sack of grain or flour or meal, had been surrounded by a Keeping as soon as bought, and whatever was woven into a Keeping could not change until the weave was removed. But still the meat rotted and the insects multiplied. It was as though saidar itself was failing.
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The world saw Aes Sedai as a monolith, towering and solid, or it had before the current division in the Tower became common knowledge, yet the pure fact was that the Ajahs stood apart in all but name, the Hall their only true meeting point, and the sisters themselves were little more than a convocation of hermits, speaking three words beyond what was absolutely required only with a few friends. Or with another sister they had joined in some design. Whatever else changed about the Tower, Egwene was sure that never would. There was no point pretending that Aes Sedai had ever been anything but Aes Sedai or ever would be, a great river rolling onward, all its powerful currents hidden deep, altering its course with imperceptible slowness. She had built a few hasty dams in that river, diverting a stream here and a stream there for her own purposes, yet she knew they were temporary structures. Sooner or later those deep currents would undercut her dams. She could only pray they lasted long enough. Pray, and shore up as hard as she could.
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"What we saw, Mother, was a roughly circular hole in the ground," she said, nodding for emphasis at nearly every other word. She seemed to choose those words carefully, as if to make sure she was absolutely clear to everyone. "It may have been a precise circle, originally, shaped like half of a ball, but the sides have collapsed in some places. The hole is approximately three miles across and perhaps a mile and a half deep." Someone gasped loudly, and Akarrin frowned as though whoever it was had tried to interrupt. She went on without pausing, however. "We could not be entirely certain of the depth. The bottom is covered with water and ice. We believe it may become a lake, eventually. In any event, we were able to ascertain our exact location without too much difficulty, and we are prepared to say that the hole is located where the city called Shadar Logoth once stood."
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Egwene stood once more, long enough to ask the required question. Even when the unthinkable was proposed, the rituals must be followed. Perhaps more so then than ever.
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"The Dragon Reborn is ta'veren, so I have heard," Tarna said finally, still staring at Georg's picture. "Do you think he alters chance everywhere? Or do we change the future by ourselves, one step following another until we find ourselves somewhere we never expected?"
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People never really changed, yet the world did, with disturbing regularity. You just had to live with it, or at least live through it. Now and then, with luck, you could affect the direction of the changes, but even if you stopped one, you only set another in motion.
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Fire flooded into him, hotter than the sun, and cold to make the worst blizzard seem spring, all a swirling rage that dwarfed the storm outside, threatening to scour him away for a moment's inattention. Seizing saidin was a war for survival. But the green of the cornices was suddenly greener, the black of his coat blacker, the gold of its embroidery more golden. He could see the grain of the vine-carved bedposts, see faint marks left by the craftsman's sanding all those years ago. Saidin made him feel as if he had been half-blind and numb without it. That was a part of what he felt.
Clean, Lews Therin whispered. Pure and clean again.
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[Graendal had Ayyad as servants]
"Noal has been telling us about Co'dansin, Mat," he exclaimed. "That's another name for Shara. Did you know the Ayyad tattoo their faces? That's what they call women who can channel, in Shara."
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Sometimes, pain is all that lets you know you're alive, Lews Therin whispered, but Rand ignored the voice in his head.
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We rode on the winds of the rising storm,
We ran to the sounds of the thunder.
We danced among the lightning bolts,
and tore the world asunder.
—Anonymous fragment of a poem believed
written near the end of the previous Age,
known by some as the Third Age.
Sometimes attributed to the Dragon Reborn.
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