Chapter 36: The Ring of Tamyrlin

The sun, inexorable, seared its preordained path in the ecliptic as Shaiel huddled, knees drawn up to her chest in reflexive self-comfort. The young Maiden remained sitting motionless where Sorilea had left her, at the base of the shattered Tree of Life, the finger of shadow she cast describing a sundial.

Lost in thought as she was, she was still dimly aware of the passage of time. In the Three-Fold Land, the sun was an imperative that could not be ignored. Now it plunged westward sharply, banking towards landfall, and the air it had stilled with its heavy hand was beginning to stir, a whisper of wind beginning the task of infilling Sorilea's footprints. It plucked at Shaiel's cadin'sor, a clutching child's hand.

The swollen belly of a goat-hide waterskin sat stoppered on her hip, but not unused. She had rationed out water in a careful libation for the green shoots of Avendesora. Enough to nourish, but not an excess to drown the young chora.

Shaiel felt a yearning protectiveness for the fragile sapling, a tenderness she had not believed herself capable of. How coarse her callused hands felt, roughened by spear-shaft and knife-haft, and the endless abrading sands of the desert! How unsuited to the delicacy of what she felt. Yet she had not drunk from the skin herself.

It was foolishness to fast so, Shaiel knew, a juvenile, self-imposed penance. Toh unmet makes the heart heavy. It was a weight upon the shoulders, bowing her chin upon her chest. Even the sight of the new life she had brought forth was powerless to alleviate her burden.

Ji and toh. Simple syllables in the Old Tongue, the lodestones of an Aiel heart. Honour and obligation. The one ending where the other began, a snake consuming its tail, like the ring the Aes Sedai wore.

A mordant smile, the more plaintive for the youth of its wearer, traced Shaiel's lips. To her, Sorilea had been neither friend nor mentor. She was stern and hard and dry, with a heavy hand, and in truth, overbearing and not a little frightening.

Shaiel had only had occasion to speak with her a handful of times – 'speak with' would be an overstatement. Sorilea spoke, and you answered, "Yes, Wise One!" Sorilea said "frog", and a woman hopped! Yet she felt she knew something of her, just the same. Her mother spoke of her often, and to Shaiel's surprise, with great fondness.

A favourite tale was of the day when in punishment for some long-forgotten offense, (toh, once met, was not to be spoken of), Aviendha had been made to sift a heap of sand in search of one red grain. Telling the tale, her mother's eye had shaded with tenderness for one who had helped mold her into the woman she had become.

As with all tales from the days when the word of prophecy became flesh, it began or ended with the Car'a'carn. Her father, Rand al'Thor. Had the clans not crossed the Spine of the World in their search for He Who Comes with the Dawn – the man the Wetlanders called the Dragon Reborn and the Lord of the Morning – it would have been unlikely the old woman and Aviendha would have shared water and shade. They were from different clans.

It was a reflection on her melancholy that the bent of her thoughts turned to the man Rand al'Thor. Among her people, there was no stigma attached to illegitimacy. And yet his absence was an old injury.

Shaiel felt it in the spaces between people. The days where her mother drew from a well of silence. She felt it in the barbs jealous people cast, thorns that snagged in her flesh. Taunts often repaid by her quick fists and sharp tongue. She had toughened up. Grown lean and hard and confident. The vulnerable places were covered by callus. Only sometimes – in times of disappointment and doubt – did she allow herself to think of her father.

She had seen a picture of him, once, when she was a small child. A pencil sketch. In a book that a pedlar had tried to sell to her mother. A picture that was a true likeness, judging by the pang of longing and pain in her mother's green eyes.

Aviendha had sent the wetlander on his way with angry and scornful words. But Shaiel had followed him to where he made his camp, and had crept into his tent, stealing the page from the book as the man slept. She had kept her prize, creased with refolding, until the soft graphite the artist had used to mark the paper had smeared into illegibility.

Once, Shaiel had seen her mother drunk on oosquai – once only, in a life defined by temperance and duty. Aviendha had been full of a baffled, directionless anger that had made Shaiel walk wide around her. It was only when her mother had wept that Shaiel had dared go to her, to comfort her in her grief. Aviendha had told her that night that she believed that Rand al'Thor was still alive.

For her part, Shaiel hoped that he was numbered among the honoured dead. What kind of a man abandoned his family? That night, Shaiel had destroyed the picture, tossing it into the glowing white embers of a fire, watching with dry eyes as the flames chased the margins of the parchment, curling them back upon themselves like the Fall leaves of the Wetlands.

Shaiel had understood then that the picture was an idolatry, the accuracy of the image notwithstanding, in the same way that holding on to the memories of a departed loved one was. The semblance of form did not hide that the image was a projection of her mind. Wish-fulfilment. Having the picture did not mean she knew her father. A hard lesson. Cleansing. The best lessons often were.

And now here she was again, like a dog returning to its vomit. Enough with the self pity already, Shaiel scolded herself. Did she not have a wonderful mother as inspiration? Two strapping brothers in Alarch and Janduin – the one dark-haired as an Andorman, the other sun-haired and rangy, and a sister in Marinna, small and sweet-natured, as placid as she, Shaiel, was fiery.

So surprisingly dissimilar in looks and temperament the siblings were, and yet their bond was close. As if they were different parts of the same body. How could it not be so? The four of them had shared a womb. Many among the people went through life alone. And she had her sisters among the society. The Maidens. What of those who had neither the comfort of clan or society? The so-called Mera'din, the 'Brotherless.'

Idly, Shaiel traced a long-fingered hand though the broken ground. The loam was dark and dank around where the Tree of Life grew, distinct from the sterile sands of the deep desert. It broke apart, crumbling under the pressure of her fingers. Shaiel's knuckles rapped a solid, regular protrusion in the dirt, the contact hard enough to sting. She frowned. A stone? More likely to be a root of the fallen tree.

Curious now, her hand gouged the soil. The surface was smooth, glass-slick. This was no natural object. Further examination revealed a convex surface, which tingled at her touch. Her eyes widened. Whatever it was, it was warded. She jerked her hand back as if she had been stung by a scorpion, her mother's warning alive in her mind. Such things were usually traps, sprung by human touch or channelling. She could not see the flows, but she could feel the web clinging to her fingers as she snatched them away. An inverted weave, then. Or male-wrought saidin.

Her hand tingled, charged with invisible power, and she tensed, bracing herself. Was this the moment she awoke from the dream? Shaiel stayed very still, hardly daring to breathe as she felt the flows encircle her arms, invisible tendrils of the Power that probed. Their touch on her bare skin was silk-soft, but she could feel the massive, coiling power of the flows. Like a great serpent, swallowing her arm. The hairs on her arms rose, her flesh pebbled with goosebumps as the invisible jaws closed around her shoulder. This was the moment of truth.

Shaiel closed her eyes. Her lips moved, as if in prayer.

Wash the spears..

Who fears to die?

(To spit in Sightblinder's eye)

..No-one I know!...

(On the last day!)

The serpent's jaws broke her skin.

(Blood of the Dragon! Body of the Great Serpent!)

Shaiel's eyes opened, and she surged to her feet, expelling all the air in her lungs in an inchoate howl.

The young Maiden looked down, expecting her last sight to be her severed arm, her lifeblood spilling on the ground. Her body's water seeping into the soil. Her life given to nourish Avendesora reborn. For an Aiel, there were worse ends.

Instead, she saw her upper arm encircled with a gossamer-fine tracing of crimson. A bead of blood welled, marring the symmetry of the annulus. What had just happened to her? The words, unbidden, rose in her mind. Words that were not her own.

The Great Serpent has spared you, leaving you unharmed. The Dragon had passed over you, knowing his own.

Shaiel shook her head, in dazed incomprehension. She moved her arm, tentatively, half-expecting a severed limb to fall from her shoulder. Nothing untoward happened. It seemed the voice she had heard in her mind – a voice like her own, but weathered with age, chastened with experience – had spoken true. She had been passed over. She had been spared.

(Body of the Great Serpent)

A thought, a fleeting, vestigial echo. Then she felt the alien, yet strangely familiar, presence recede from her consciousness. She was alone once again.

She looked up into the twilight that had come up upon her in stealth, and down again to the object she had unearthed. It was an opaque cylinder of some vitreous material, a pace in length, and a hand's span in diameter. Under the cobalt sky, it gleamed a dark olive, a seamless receptacle. What was it? Nothing about its dimensions or form gave any indication as to its purpose. It wasn't an angreal, or yet a ter'angreal. She would have felt it at this proximity.

Shaiel squatted on her haunches, her powerful legs coiling like an antelope ready to spring, as she cautiously picked up the receptacle. The tube was null. Most objects could be discerned with the Power. This artefact was a blank to her through the eyes of Spirit. As if it was designed to shield the existence of its contents. Could it be opened?

An ancient object, guarded for three thousand years, hidden by design at the foot of Avendesora. Protected by the last of the great chora. It had lain here since the day the Aiel came to the Three-Fold Land, guarded unknowingly by the Aiel in a warded and secret city at the heart of the desert. Was it by chance, or design that it had fallen into her hand, here and now?

With an anticlimactic pop, the cylinder in her cupped hands broke apart longitudinally. Reflexively, Shaiel grabbed for the halves of the falling cylinder. Her left hand snagged one portion, just as her right-hand fumbled the other piece, the segment slipping from her grasp to smash on the ground with a sharp report. Her heart bolted like a frightened hare. Stupid, hapless, clumsy child! She had found such a wondrous thing, and handled it as clumsily as a Stone Dog serving tea on a Sea Folk raker, with the same unfortunate results for the crockery!

There was something in the half she had caught, and with greater care, she reached into the receptacle. There was a cylinder of tightly-rolled paper, the paper conforming to the shape of the container, and a small object, wrapped in layers of folded cloth.

The cloth was fine, dense, and gleamed in the dusk, seeming to imbibe the colours from Shaiel's flesh and from her surroundings. Her breath caught. This was streith. A fabric rare beyond price, the art of whose making was lost in the Age of Legends. Save from a handful of items found among the possession of the Forsaken, it was all but unknown.

At the heart of the fabric was something small and hard. Shaiel handled the possession reverently. After fumbling the container, she didn't trust herself to unwrap the parcel just yet. Instead, she placed it carefully out of harm's way upon a smooth section of fire-blackened timber. Her attention turned to the manuscript, which she unrolled gently, with a reverence truly Aiel. Paper remained a rare commodity in the Waste.

It was a letter. Written in the Old Tongue, which Shaiel could read, if hesitantly. The dialect and phrasing were odd, almost stilted to her ear, which was only to be expected. Language changed quickly, and the Old Tongue had ceased to be a lingua franca a thousand years ago. No original documents now remained from the Age of Legends – only copies of copies – and the few examples of the Old Tongue still extant from the time of the Breaking or before were to be found carved in stone, wrought into metal. And even granite was worn smooth in time, weathered by wind and rain.

Yet this document was crisp, the ink as fresh as if it had been placed into the tube but yesterday. Shaiel could only wonder at the arts that had preserved the parchment intact for so many centuries. Perhaps it was the container. Had it been a nullentropy tube? No matter. The missive was more important than the means of its preservation. Shaiel read with growing amazement as its import became clear.

Blood of my blood, blood of the Dragon, hile and witness the true words of your ancestor, Latra Posae Decumae, Aes Sedai, given into record sixty and three years after the Cataclysm that some call the Breaking.

The world I knew is overthrown, buried behind me. It may be that my name is reviled, or worse yet, forgotten. In my own time, I was known as the Artisan, and Shadar Nor, the Cutter of Shadows, and again as the False Steward, and finally as Mother, the name I bore with most fondness, given to me by your people and mine.

I will not seek to justify the deeds of my life. We were an arrogant people, great in knowledge and small in wisdom, and in hubris, we left the door ajar for Shai'tan to breach the world of flesh. And we all bear the bloodguilt for the Apocalypse, and a world cast under the Shadow.

My words are a message in a bottle, cast into the ocean that is Time, where they will wash up upon a foreign shore for you to read. Unless the Dark Foe overthrows the Wheel and all is extinguished.

Know this: I never foreswore the Light. Everything I did, every act of valour and every betrayal, was part of the great conflict, of which every faithful soldier knows only his small part in the greater design. Even one such as myself, the Cutter of Shadows, and even He Who Comes with the Dawn. We were rivals, he and I, then companions in arms, but never friends. I honour his memory as a great warrior for the Light, but I loved him not. I admit it frankly.

I struggled with this man all the days of my life. We were reluctant comrades, at best, and ever we contended with each other, the more so when we were yoked together to fight Caisen Hob and his acolytes. At times, I hated him, and he me. And yet we would each have given our life for the other. You know whereof I speak, you who are Far Dareis Mai. The bonds forged by battle are stronger even than the call of blood.

As the War of Power raged, I held his life in my hands many times, and never played him false. Until, at last, in his moment of greatest need, I deserted him. Indeed, I dared even more. He was my captain, and I stole from him the greatest weapon he possessed.

It was necessary. With that weapon, he could have compelled us all to aid him against our will – all the female Aes Sedai. And he would have done it. His need was great, as was his fear. If he had done such a dark deed, he would not have prevailed when he faced the Lord of the Grave, even though he had the might of arms. He would have fallen, and become as Ishamael instead. And if we women had given him succour, the Dark One would have tainted both halves of the One Power, and the world and the Wheel itself would have been broken asunder. Irrevocably destroyed.

The necessity of it does not mitigate our actions. What we did was unforgivable. We women betrayed the men, sacrificed them to madness and ruin to preserve the world. I betrayed my brother to spare my sisters.

Despite our perfidy, they chose to go to the Bore anyway, to make their stand. Chose to fight and die for us. Just as the menfolk of the Aiel who discover they can channel have done for three thousand years after, taking their spears, leaving sept and society to travel alone into the Blight to fight the Lord of the Grave.

Make no mistake, Lews Therin was a great man, whatever our differences, whatever his flaws. He might have been a product of his time and his class, but he had the heart of an Aiel. I give him honour.

The great calling of my life was to fight the Shadow. To that end, I would betray even my kin, and bring great dishonour and shame upon a once-honoured name. It was for that hallowed purpose that I did betray your sire, the Dragon, Lews Therin Telamon.

Know then, I did not my treason from jealousy, nor yet for hope of gain, but only under the duress that is Prophecy. I swear it by my hope of salvation and rebirth, and you yourself are witness to the truth of my words. The ward by which I protect both words and legacy is keyed only to my being. If you are reading this missive, you are my soul, once again quickened in the world of flesh. Your very life is the proof that I did what I must.

You stand upon the cusp of something. A profound blackness lies before you, nameless and vast, that the eyes of spirit cannot penetrate. I have walked the tracts of future lives, through the glass columns of the ter'angreal, and again through the prophecy of Foretelling, yet I cannot see past this moment. I see you, and my heart swells with pride, for you are fair and fell, blood of my blood. Yet, I grieve. I feel your shame, and I know its cause.

It is ever the curse of my house and line, the nexus of power and need. To reach out in pride, glorying in the strength of your hand, decisive, overweening in your competence, even deigning to manipulate the lives of others. Strength like yours, talents like yours – like ours – demand to be used. Why then should we make way for lesser men and women, humouring their petty jealousies and conceits, when we can see clearly to the heart of great designs, and our hand is strong and sure? Why indeed?

It was my way for many years. It was also the way of Mierin Eronaille, who became Lanfear the Forsaken, and the way of many others. They were once the best and brightest stars among us, yet they brought a ruin which almost overturned the world, when they fell upon the Earth in their wrath and pride. And I tell you true that I was only spared such a fate – to serve the Shadow in might and from my own free will – by the grace of the Light. As it was, I occasioned much grief to others, and much rue unto myself.

I could staunch your wound by telling you that which you already know, that you acted without knowledge, unwitting. For you did not not intend to harm Sorilea. You did not, in fact, even know she was there. And yet you have already intuited that somehow, even this truth does not exonerate you, and that you have toh to Sorilea regardless of your intent. Child, I let you burn your hand now, so that in the future, you will treat the flame with more regard. Because I must.

I give you a perilous trust. The imperative of your heritage sings in your veins, the commingling of my blood and that of the Dragon. It falls to you, as it has fallen to me in my time.

The gift I bestow should frighten and appal you. The artefact is the great angreal known as the Ring of Tamyrlin. It will augment your power exponentially. The creation of such devices – or at least their existence – must be known among the Aiel – many such artefacts did I leave here in Rhuidean, including the access keys to the Choedan Kal.

And yet, the Ring of Tamyrlin is greater. Potentially, far more dangerous. It is also a ter'angreal whose true function is a jealously-guarded secret. It allows the wielder to wrest control of any other angreal or sa'angreal whatsoever, whether they are flawed like Callandor or no.

By the same means, they allow the bearer to seize control of another channeller, as if they were themselves no more than an inert object, allowing you to link with them against their will. A terrible and forbidden thing. To draw upon a person as if they were a mere angreal or a Well.

And yet, you must know in your heart of hearts that this purpose is mandated by the paradigm. Proof of concept is extant. Objects of the Power have been created – requiring flesh-to-flesh contact – that enable forced linking. If you do not know of such objects, I shall not tell you how they are fashioned. They are an abomination. An affront to the dignity and autonomy of the person. One which I co-authored with Lews Therin, to our shame, and yet for our edification.

Despite this, I give you something far worse, that allows you to co-opt whole Circles, without apparent limit. I give it to you because I believe that your need – the need of your people, and perhaps the Wheel itself – is that great. Perhaps it will fall to you, or to another, to use it. To become da'tsang so that the world might live. For myself, it was a price I was willing to pay a hundred-fold, and I accounted it a bargain. If that moment is yours, do not balk at the cost.

For you have unwittingly stumbled upon another forbidden truth. Rarest among the wild Talents, there are those who can 'crack' another channeller. To a limited extent, they can replicate what the Ring of Tamyrlin allows any channeller to accomplish.

They can seize control of another person, break through the resistance of that person's will, and draw the One Power through them, effectively allowing them to control a Circle of two persons. I myself had this Talent, and together with Lews Therin, I mapped its limitations. A person's ability to resist is dependent upon their strength of will coupled with their strength in the Power. One person is the limit – at least for myself.

I am no theosophist, but I believe that the ability to channel is part of the Creator, made manifest in humanity – a portion of His ineffable spirit – and that likewise, the Dragon is, however unwitting, part of His body. And so it must surely be that the Talents – even the Talent to Force, must be part of his design, and not of the Adversary. Shai'tan can only unmake and mar, perverting the design of what is. So, I have come to believe that the Creator intends this ability to be used. But only at the greatest of need.

I only found but one other with the ability in many years of study. A man once called Elan Morin Tedronai, who was once friend to Lews Therin Telamon, but who in latter years fell into the Shadow and became the Betrayer of Hope. We wiped his mind of the knowledge of his Talent against his will, the Dragon and I. We deemed it a knowledge too dangerous for another to bear.

Another grievous sin. Oh, Light, my daughter, I carry so many! I shall be glad to lay them down and rest when my watch is done.

I want to tell you more. All that I have seen, all I have experienced. To guide you. I dare not. Indeed, I already fear I have already said too much. Who can say what will be remembered, and what forgotten as the Wheel turns?

The future is a pool of still water. Actions, even knowledge, are like a stone dropped in the water. The ripples propagate, creating consequences beyond imagining. Harmonies and dissonances, with only the fundamental frequencies known – the periodicity of the Ages, and the central cast of the greater and lesser ta'veren.

Do not speak of what you have learned in this letter to another. Not even to your mother, nor yet your siblings. Instead, seek out your father. Despite what you may have been told, he lives still. You will find him among the old blood of Aramaelle. A man I took to be their liege knows him. I saw them together in a Foretelling. The Dragon's face was different – dark of hair and cold of mien – but I still knew him. I would know him anywhere.

The other man in my vision – the Aramaellin – wears the hadori of his people, and he is cast in the stamp of the mighty men of his race. He is a tall man, with chilling blue eyes and a face of weathered granite, and he carries himself like a warrior and a knight. An old man, with hair grey as iron, but perilous, I deem. In my time, I knew many such men.

I took him to be their King because of his noble bearing, and because he bears the sigil of his house. A golden ring, insigned with a flying crane over a lance and coronet. Find him, and you will find the Lord of the Morning. The Dragon Reborn. And for the Light's sake, be quick about it, my girl! There is very little time.

The Creator is full of mercy, Shaiel. He allows us to sleep, and awake with no recollection of what we have done, of what has gone before. We get to try again. To rise in youth like eagles, with the wind under our wings. We get to learn to live, to love, afresh. And at the end of the path, we find the forgiveness of the grave.

May you be strong where I was weak. May you be true where I was false. And may you lead by example, not by bending others to your will, as I all too often did.

There is always time for love.

May your life be a spear, aimed at Sightblinder's heart.

Mother.