Chapter 21: Down at the Bottom of the Well

Darkness was an old friend.

It came intermittently between white-hot jolts of searing pain. Between the endless, repetitive questions that wore away at him like rainfall upon exposed bedrock. Sleep without dreams, without consciousness. What tenuous grasp on the passage of time Rand al'Thor once had was long gone. He might have been here days, weeks. An Age, for all he knew.

In one of his brief lucid periods, he heard his captors moving a prisoner into the cell adjoining his own. The jailors addressed his new neighbour as "High Lord."

Whatever this fellow's supposed crimes, they were treating him much better than Rand, that was for sure! No visits by the Seekers, for one thing. And it seemed they provided him with a liberal supply of alcohol, judging by the man's incoherent and drunken ramblings interspersed with snatches of ribald song that Rand overheard. His repertoire ranged from the picaresque to the downright bawdy, sung in a cracked tenor.

Mostly, though, the poor fellow just wept, hopeless, racking sobs, monotonous. Wrapped up in his own plight, Rand just wished the luckless royal next door would just do them both a favour and shut his face. He had enough troubles of his own.

Awake, his body shivered with fever, an ague burning him up like tabac in his clay pipe, wreathing him with a phantasmagoria of images and impressions, a cloud of smoke overlaying reality.

Rand was back on the slopes of Shayol Ghul, scrabbling like an insect up the treacherous slag-heap of shifting shale, clambering over jagged shards of igneous rock: On the heights, the paths are paved with daggers.

The wound in his side had broken open once more, and his blood soiled the finery of the red silk coat overlaid by the writhing sinuous form of the twin Dragons that marked him true, rendered in sunburst gold. He looked to his right, then his left for Moraine and for Nynaeve, but there was nobody there for him. He was alone.

Above him, pressing down upon him was the raw stuff of Chaos itself – a sky of boiling pitch struck through with silver, fell blades of steel, a cyclonic thunderhead that consumed itself. The Dark One himself, the World Serpent. An ouroboros, coiling sinuous and thick-thewed about the Wheel of Time itself, consuming his own tail in his endless insatiable hunger.

On the top of the spoil heap, as Rand craned his head to look up, a lone figure waited for him, uncaring of the magnitude of the forces that swirled around him as he capered under that madding sky. There was a clothyard of Power-wrought steel in his right fist, raised defiantly at that torment of uncreation roiling overhead that could buckle mountains, boil oceans. Moridin.

His face was set in a familiar, prideful sneer. "Come up!" he bade the Dragon Reborn. His face was eager. "Come and see! All the little kings, their conceits laid bare. All the patchwork lands laid out like a gleeman's coat. Come up, and look upon it for the last time!"

The Dragon's breath laboured in his lungs. Sweat slicked the copper of his hair as it hung in front of his eyes. With an effort, he turned, and looked down, at the blood-spattered path he had dragged up the mountain, but he could not see what Moridin saw. Instead, the foothills of Shayol Ghul far below were banked in a shadow his eye could not pierce and for an instant, his heart quailed within him. How could he fight when he could not even see the things he laboured to protect?

Then Rand gritted his teeth and turned once again to his task. One step, then another. The strake of the mountain he climbed was dizzying, impossibly steep. His left foot slipped, suddenly, a spray of small stones he dislodged falling, clattering endlessly, and Rand felt a lurch of vertigo, wanting only to press himself to the ground until the dizziness passed. He fought the craven urge, knowing that if he gave in to it, he would never climb to the top, but would huddle here until the World broke and was riven under him.

There is one rule, above all others for being a man. Whatever comes, face it upon your feet. Lan had taught him that.

Suddenly, he was astride the world, on a roughly circular patch of ground on the summit, under the eye of the storm. There was enough room for a duel on the precipitous roof of the world, and Moridin watched him carefully, despite his disdain for the forces of obliteration that coiled about them, above them. He wants to die forever, but not to lose, the Dragon thought.

There was steel in Rand's one good hand, the sword of Artur Hawkwing, the ivory of its hilt pressing gently against the heron-mark print on his palm. As a youth, with Mat, he'd gone wranning, shinning up trees to rob bird's nests. He'd found an early-born baby wren, once, cupping it in the hollow of his hand as it fidgeted and chattered quietly for its mother. Now he held the sword with the same delicacy and precision.

With only one arm, he could not be Moridin's equal in strength. That did not matter. He would bend like a Two Rivers longbow, but he would not break.

They circled, counterclockwise, Rand's blood tracing the arc of his movement, a Rohrsach picture drawn by a delicate hand as their motion compassed the gyre of the storm. Moridin smiled coldly in greeting. An old friend, an old adversary.

Moridin attacked! Pent stillness to flowing motion in an instant. The waveform collapsing into quanta of light and dark. Hawk Spots the Hare. Rand blocked, allowing the weight of Moridin's strike to brush his blade aside and he flowed with it. Cat on Hot Sand, and he extended his own as to threaten Moridin's throat, a deceptively slow riposte that Moridin barely avoided. Kingfisher Strikes in the Nettles.

Rand tracked Moridin with the extended blade. Hummingbird Kisses the Honeyrose, and the Betrayer of Hope desperately struck the blade from him. Why was Moridin so poor an adversary? Before, Ishamael had been his match, and with only one hand, Rand should be easy meat. Instead, the Dragon drove Moridin before him. Leaf on the Breeze. The Viper's Kiss.

Plucking the Low Hanging Apple became Leopard's Caress, Rand's blade viciously twisting Moridin's sword from his hands. Putting the tip of his blade to the Forsaken's neck, Rand backed him up, simultaneously kicking Moridin's fallen sword away from him. It spun clattering away, falling over the edge of the precipice. Moridin stood with his back to the cliff's edge, with nowhere to go.

Ishamael was still smiling that mordant smile. As if he didn't much care much about the outcome. Ignoring the imperative of Rand's sword at his gullet, he contemptuously turned his back, opening his arms wide as if to girdle the whole world.

Down below, Rand saw the Earth as Moridin had. There was the Stone of Tear, Tar Valon, and the Towers of Midnight. The fastnesses and strongholds of Man mere castles made of sand against the tsunami wave of aven'kal cresting above their heads, ready to fall on that shoreline and eradicate even their memories. The inevitability of the Dark One's victory. The Wheel broken at last, and hope ended. All petty concerns unravelling, lives now arrested, as all eyes were drawn to Shayol Ghul and the impending apocalypse.

"Your plans fail because you want to live, madman" said Moridin. His voice was choked with some strong emotion, but his gaze was hooded like a hawk's. "For my part, I am content. The Great Lord said he would let me die. Forever."

Rand shook his head. "He is the Father of Lies. And you are a fool to believe him."

Ishamael turned back to Rand. There was something unutterably destitute in his eyes, and for an instant, Rand saw Elan Morin once again, a sensitive, yearning soul. One who had mourned for every sparrow that fell. Then Moridin drew his comforting madness back around him once again, and Elan Morin was banished. There was no weapon in the Forsaken's hand, nor did he hold the One Power, and yet he laughed in scorn, and his words were prideful.

"What I love, I destroy. What I destroy, I love."

With a shiver of foreknowledge, Rand found himself speaking the familiar words along with Moridin, words that Lews Therin Telamon, the Lord of the Morning once uttered, as if it was a catechism they both observed.

For Lews Therin, they were words steeped in despair. He saw again Ilyena Sunhair, dead at his hand, the nimbus of her hair's glory sullied by the dirt of the ground she sprawled upon. Plaster dust had fallen on her where she lay, her elfin features etched with an agony of denial, horror and fear.

He had broken her with the Power like a porcelain doll, her spine snapped by wrist-thick flows of Air he himself had wielded. She had soiled herself. Death had stolen from her every dignity. With revulsion, Lews Therin saw her grey eyes were sere, filmed with the dust that coated everything already, as the ground undulated underfoot, the aftershocks of the earthquake that was inexorably shaking the palace to pieces about them, turning it into a morgue.

It was her blood staining the hem of the long grey cloak he wore, where it had dragged upon the ground. The walls cracked, gilt flaking from the soot-streaked murals on the walls, chunks of stucco falling from the ceiling.

He had seen all that Ishamael had intended him to see, as the Betrayer of Hope ripped from him the madness that had blinded him.

The Healing with the True Power had been a torment, but sanity's curse as he looked upon what he had wrought was worse, far worse, as he gathered his wife's broken body into his arms, as if the warmth of his own body, the immediacy of his terror and sorrow could make her live again. He smoothed the hair back from her brow, moaning in horror as he saw his grimy hand dragged a filthy residue of half-dried blood and dust across her alabaster skin. What had he done? Her glassy eyes stared back at him, frozen forever in terror.

Ishamael looked down upon him with ineffable contempt, an elegant figure robed in sable, his neck ruffled with a fall of white lace. With a frown, the Forsaken used his white-gloved left hand to brush at a speck of dust that had marred the sleeve of his garment.

The Nae'blis had taunted Lews Therin in his extremity, not for Ilyena and his children, but with the loss of his power and authority. "Once you stood first among the Servants. Once you wore the Ring of Tamyrlin, and sat in the High Seat. Once you summoned the Nine Rods of Dominion."

Had Lews Therin really cared for those things? What were they to him now? Dross. Nothing, and less than nothing.

In his overweening pride, Lews Therin and his Hundred Companions had tried to seal the Bore with saidin alone, and the Dark One's counterstrike had corrupted saidin utterly. He and the Hundred at the Bore were the first to be affected, and the worst-contaminated by the Dark One's viscid essence. Driven insane by the pestilence coursing through them as they channelled the corrupted Power. They hadn't stood a chance.

And Lews Therin? In terrible anguish of spirit, his mind unhinged, he had done the worst thing imaginable. He had retained enough semblance of who he had once been to crawl his way home to die, like a dog crushed under the wheel of a cart. A rabid hound, with poison in his foam-flecked jaws.

The memory was etched like acid upon the shattered soul of Lews Therin. Ishamael, the Betrayer of Hope was no longer a man in his eyes but a terrible revenant stalking his thoughts, his waking dreams. The words of Ishamael ignited an awful, killing rage in his mind. An all-encompassing balefire that saw the whole world only as kindling for Ilyena's pyre. And his own soul as the torch to light it.

But he was Rand al'Thor as well as Lews Therin Telamon, and it was not Ishamael – spoiled, prideful and lost – that he addressed but Elan Morin Tedronai. As if compelled, Moridin echoed him and their voices together rose young, strong and clear, ringing out over the whole world. Lews Therin's words, but imbued with a different meaning:

I killed the whole world, and you can, too, if you try hard.

Dreadful words. Words of prophecy and doom. Rand al'Thor saw something unlooked-for rise in Moridin's eyes. Something monomaniacal in its intensity. It imbued the Forsaken with a titanic force, and for the first time in their confrontation, Rand took a backward step before him, suddenly mortally afraid.

To the Dragon Reborn, it felt like Moridin's strong hands had wrested from him both authority and power. The mountaintop shuddered beneath their feet, the ground pitching, heaving like the Sea of Storms, and Rand was cast down from the heights. The last thing he saw was Moridin's seraph smile, imbued with a terrible majesty.

The Dragon fell, and far.

Darkness ruled.

The Seekers After Truth were patient men. Compassionate. They didn't get angry, no matter what Rand said to provoke them in the extremity of his pain. They implacably asked their questions, Seanchan voices that were both soft and slurred but clearly intelligible at all times. The questions themselves never varied: Where is the Forsaken, Moghedien? Where is the Darkbox that she stole? How do you unlock the crystal ter'angreal? What is its purpose?

The Seekers were almost solicitous in their care. After all, he was of the Blood, as they accounted it, Ishamael having been Artur Hawkwing's advisor upon a time. They referred to him as High Lord, couched their questions delicately, bowing and observing sei'mosiev, refusing to meet his eyes out of respect for his elevated rank. They were, after all, so'jhin, even if they were the property of the Emperor himself. Their courtesy was impeccable, and their professionalism exemplary. And they hurt him. Light, and how.

There were many ways to put a man to the question without drawing his blood, and these Seekers, with their half-shaved heads and raven-tattooed shoulders knew most of them that did not require the use of the One Power. They had shocked him with electric eels. Broken and mangled his fingers with thumbscrews so he could never draw a bow nor wield a sword again. They had chained his arms behind his back, suspending him from the ceiling for hours at a time until he thought his arms would tear from their sockets, his own body weight slowly suffocating him, compressing his lungs. So many ways. And always Healing available, to enable them to continue their mistreatment unabated, provided by cold-eyed sul'dam and obedient damane.

Thus far, they withheld the worst from him, knowing that the fear of it would work on him, rendering it more efficacious. Branding irons. Hot coals placed on a man's bare belly. Somehow, he held out. In this, he was helped by the fact he wasn't Moridin, and therefore couldn't answer many of their questions. So giving up Elayne and the secrets of the cour'souvra would not end his torment.

Thankfully, the Seekers hadn't known of the one thing that would have broken him quicker than anything else. The box, where he'd been imprisoned by Galina Casban and the rest of Elaida's Aes Sedai. But as he huddled in the corner of his cell, shivering, clutching his knees to his chest and nursing his shattered, splintered fingers, Rand knew that he couldn't hold out any longer. He would have to flee into Tel'aran'rhiod, if he still had the strength, hoping that in his absence, the Seanchan would not break the mindtrap and thereby kill Elayne.

Now, the bugger next door was singing. Slurring his words. Drunk as a weasel once again.

"I'm down at the bottom of the well,

It's night, and the rain's falling down,

The sides are falling in, and there's no rope to climb,

I'm down at the bottom of the well…."

This was followed by a hollow, excoriating laugh, and then a report, as glazed pottery met the side of the cell wall with a crash. "Hey!" the disembodied voice next door yelled stridently. "More bloody wine in here you lily-livered goat-botherers, you!"

Rand sat bolt upright with a start. He recognised that voice. Mat?

What in the Light was Mat doing here?