A/N: All the quotes used in this story are taken from 'The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time' by Robert Jordan and Teresa Patterson. I don't own the Wheel of Time or anything to do with it, although it'd be totally awesome if I did.
So, I was reading 'Endless Nights' by Neil Gaiman, where he writes a short story for each of his seven Endless characters, and thought it would be neat to do something similar for the Forsaken. This will (when it's finished) basically consists for 13 (very) short stories, one for each of the Forsaken, set in the Age of Legends, plus a prologue and epilogue. The sub-plot about top secret documents being found in the White Tower is just idle speculation on my part as to what would happen if bits of the Guide ever turned up in Randland. Read if you want, review if you have to.
Prologue: The Way to the Forsaken People
From the War of Power to this day their names have been invoked to frighten children, though the bleakest of the tales told of the Chosen are but pale shadows of the atrocities they actually committed.
- excerpt from 'The Forsaken'
Wherever there is power, there will always be those who want more of it. Three thousand years ago, a chance coincidence accidentally opened a hole in the Dark One's prison, allowing him to once again exert influence upon the world. Within a few years his presence was being felt again. Evil returned to the land. War, violence, all the wrong that had been purged from the land became commonplace once more. Humanity, in its ignorance, called what was happening the Collapse. But for some, it was a release.
For those with enough ambition, anything can be achieved with enough power. For those condemned forever to languish in the mediocrity assigned to them, there can be no alternative. They were born, they grew up, they got jobs, they lived uneventful lives, and they died uneventful deaths, just like their parents before them, their peers with them, and their children after them. They would never be heroes. Who could be, when there were no villains? Even if the idea to break the cycle had occurred to them, they would have seen no way to make it happen. But for some, the opportunity came.
The Dark One gave these people the opportunity they had been waiting for their whole lives, even if they failed to realise it. The Shadow attracted all those willing to serve the Great Lord of the Dark. The ambitious, the misfits, the greedy, the angry, shunned and outcast from society. They forsook all previous allegiance, swearing to serve only the Shadow. They were given the power they lusted for, beyond that which any had ever seen, before or since. That was all they had wanted. After that, they simply had a job to do.
For millennia, nothing was known about them except their names. Now, with the discovery of a large document titled simply 'The Forsaken', which is believed to have been hidden in secrecy in the White Tower since the Breaking, the lives of these thirteen men and women can be told. Among themselves they were called Those Chosen to Rule the World Forever, or more simply, the Chosen. A fitting title for who they had become. To all others, however, to the people who reviled them, who renamed them in hatred, who they had sold their souls to one day rule, they would forever be known as the Forsaken.
This, then, is their story.