Chapter 1

Rand was walking home with a cartload of stuff when he suddenly turned around and noticed a black man standing behind him. As is usually the case when small-town, uneducated hick farmers encounter a black man, he was terrified. He did, however, notice the man had no eyes, which made him think the dude was just lost or something.

So he kept going home, and when he got there, he saw Tam, his father, standing there. "Oh," said Tam, "I totally spaced on getting you a birthday present, so I went up in the attic and found a sword I don't use anymore. Here ya go."

"Gee… um… thanks," Rand said while scratching his head and wondering what the hell he was supposed to do with a sword. He already had his own "blade" he could use out in the sheep fields when he got lonely or bored. He noticed the blade had a heron etched into it, which was really weird because Rand, until then, had no idea what the hell a heron was.

It proved to be a good thing that he got the sword, though, because just then a large thing that had a ram's head, wolf's claws, and eagle's feet jumped out of the forest. What is that guy doing this far from Hollywood? thought Rand. But he didn't have time to ponder the question because the weird guy was trying to attack him.

"There can be only one!" Rand yelled as he cut the beast's head off. He then turned to see another of the beasts trying to kill Tam, so he ran up and killed that one, too.

But Tam was already really badly hurt, so Rand did the best thing he could and shoved Tam into a wheelbarrow and started running toward Emond's Field. On the way, Tam started mumbling incoherently from his injuries, occasionally shouting out strange things. "SARAH PALIN FOR PRESIDENT!" yelled Tam during a particularly feverish moment.

Wow, he must really be delirious, Rand thought.

When he was close to arriving at Emond's Field, Tam sat up in the wheelchair, looked straight at Rand, and with a strange, bass-baritone voice slowly said, "Rand, I am not your father!" Tam then passed out, and Rand could hear him breathing loudly.

"NO! IT'S NOT TRUE! IT'S NOT TRUE!" Rand yelled, but he kept running toward the village.

When he got there, everything was in complete disarray. All of the people were scrambling around and shouting like a bunch of pre-teen girls at a Justin Bieber concert. Rand found Nynaeve and ran up to her with his cart. "Can you heal him, Nynaeve?" Rand pleaded.

"Sorry, Rand, but I don't accept your insurance plan anymore," Nynaeve said, then walked away.

Rand looked around and saw someone else tending to sick people, so he strode over to her. Next to her was a guy whose cloak kept changing colors. Rand immediately took his hand-rolled joint out of his pocket and tossed it into the trash. That shit was seriously making him see weird things.

He neared the woman and she turned to face him, upon looking at her face, he could tell that she was an older woman who had a lot of plastic surgery done. "Can you help my dad? He's really sick."

"How sick is he?" She asked.

"He was muttering a lot on the way here. He said something about how Queen Morgase should extend tax cuts to the wealthy because it would help us poor folk."

Morgase leaped to her feet and rushed over to Tam. "Yes, this man is clearly as sick as any I've ever seen." She waved a tricorder over him, said a magic chant, and then said, "he should be all right after a few days' rest. Wheel him over to the inn, won't you? And try to be gentle with it, I saw how much you were weaving that thing on the way over here."

"Well," Rand said, "It's an old wheelbarrow and it has a busted wheel in the front. The wheelbarrow weaves as the wheelbarrow wills."

When Rand and Tam got to the Winespring Inn, Egwene rushed out and threw her arms around Rand, putting her hands on his butt cheeks. "Oh, Rand, I thought you had been killed!"

"What happened here?" asked Rand.

"Oh, it was terrible!" cried Egwene. "There were Trollocs and Myrddraal… and lions and tigers and bears!"

"Oh, my!"

"Yeah, and they burned a bunch of farms. Samel Crawe over there got his whole farm burned to the ground by Trollocs."

Rand turned and saw Samel. "You lost all of your tabac?"

Samel looked up. "What? Ohhh, yeah, tabac. That's it." He looked away from Rand.

"What did the Trollocs do after they burned it?"

"Oh, mostly just sat around listening to Pink Floyd. Hey, listen, I gotta go."

Rand rolled Tam into the inn and Marin carried him off to bed. As Marin carted him off, Moiraine walked in with Lan looking all badass beside her. "I have to leave and take you, Mat, and Perrin with me to Tar Valon. Don't ask why. I'm Aes Sedai, you know, and if you ask us anything, we just look at you real stern-like and use the One Power to make you feel like Lindsay Lohan in a courtroom."

"I'm coming, too!" cried Egwene.

"What for?" asked Moiraine.

"Because I wanna be part of this story, too, ya know."

"Fine," said Moiraine. "We leave immediately."