Disclaimer: The Wheel of Time series belongs to Robert Jordan, as do the specific couplets I'm quoting, whichare located at the beginning of Lord of Chaos. No money is being made from this. Obviously.
Author Notes: I've always been fascinated by the LoC couplets. This is what you could call my interpretation of them, or at least my interpretation ofthe setting that frames them. I'm basingthis particularFourth Age on my idea that since the Second Age was the Age of Legends, the Third Age is the Age of Myths.
Oh, and you'll want to keep an eye out for a) all the things mentioned in the couplets, b) restatements of the beginning words of each book (although they're just a beginning, doncha know) and c) a few Third Age cameos.
The lions sing and the hills take flight.
The moon by day and the sun by night.
Blind woman, deaf man, jackdaw fool.
Let the Lord of Chaos rule.
- Chant from a children's game heard in Great Arvalon, the Fourth Age
The orange rays of the setting sun laid an intricate latticework of light and shadow across the cobbled streets of Great Arvalon. Dust motes from the flaking pavement stones hung in the air, kicked up perhaps by some passing cart or pedestrian crossing the ancient city. Great Arvalon had stood here in the middle of the river for at least an Age, though beyond that, no one was sure how many years it had accumulated. One could almost feel them, though, the heavy weight of time pressing upon the buildings and alleyways. Time hung silently in the air and mingled with the dust.
Nowhere was that more evident than in the slow decay of the city's architectural wonders. The great wave-shaped buildings, which must once have crested majestically against the sky, had long since crashed to the ground. People walked through the rubble, now, and they could only know the former shape of the structure by the faded colors and gracefully curling boulders. Signs remained of other amazing creations, like the delicate spires and arching bridges, now tarnished and riddled with hairline cracks. Not from vandalism- no human force had made them, surely, and thus no human force could destroy them- but from the relentless force known in one Age as entropy. Even the huge tower at the center of the city, still shining as brightly as the sun even at night, cast an imperfect shadow in the light of day. A crescent-shaped section at the top of the tower was missing, caved in during some long-ago time.
With such a state of affairs, perhaps it was not unlikely that a few people wondered cynically why exactly "Great Arvalon" deserved the honorific. Even its most amazing marvel, the soaring white tower, was broken and cracked, and the state of its people was not much better at times. Anyone who lived in the city could point out the ragged old beggars, reduced to singing for their supper, who claimed that they had been nobility long ago. It might even have been true, said the more fortunate, which just made the sight that much more pathetic.
They traveled in raggedy packs of two or three, usually singing folk songs or telling stories in exchange for a crust of bread. One such band garnered even more attention than the rest, though. It was the unlikely duo of an old blind woman and a middle-aged deaf man. The man would guide the woman around the city, making sure to keep her path clear of the ever-present rubble. The woman would tell the stories and sing the songs. Often, she made up her own myths and ditties, adding them to her considerable repertoire of fiction and fact. The children sat with wide-eyed attention as they listened to the stories spun by the blind crone. Stories such as the one of the mysterious Morrin, trapped in a silver spire until her lover Merril came to the rescue, or the Great Randall, half lizard and half man, with eyes of ice and the power of the heavens at his command. The children noticed that even the deaf man seemed to listen when the blind womantold the story about the explosion of the huge black mountain. She could almost make her listener see the chunks of stone taking flight amid dramatic lances of fire.
Such bits of history made the adults uneasy, though. They couldn't quite explain why. Maybe it was because the blind woman often gazed at the children's parents in a way reminiscent of a crow or raven- too much intelligence lurked in that milky white gaze. Perhaps they felt she was laughing at them, her and her ever-silent sidekick. Whatever the reason, they warned the children that the nice blind lady was very old and perhaps it was best not to believe everything she said. The children nodded, of course, of course, and continued to exchange a bite of meat or cheese for a story.
However, the adults got their way in the end, as the children grew older and the blind woman succumbed to the passage of time at last. The deaf man had not heard any of the stories, and probably would not have told them as well as the woman if he had, so the children made do without. They did immortalize her in a way, though, the way that many truths and untruths of that day were remembered. The soon-garbled nonsense they chanted at the beginning of a simple game was their fitting memorial...
But over time, the couplets and the story behind them were forgotten, as all myths are.