Desandra Morelin gazed serenely out over the desks in front of her and the students sitting, listening avidly to her lecture. As a Teacher, her job – her calling – was to instruct younglings in the history of the One Power; as a Scholar of only middling strength, she had made the choice to teach at a fairly young age, and today's lecture was about Aes Sedai of old, the Three Oaths, and the last four Amyrlin's of the White Tower and their legacy in history.
"Alright, class, who can tell me the average lifespan of a female Aes Sedai when bound by the Oath Rod?" she asked, and almost immediately a young boy of maybe 16 years piped up with the answer; "Approximately 300 years, Scholar Morelin; in the early days of Egwene Aes Sedai's tenure over the Amyrlin Seat, it was discovered that the binding enforced on the Aes Sedai of that time greatly reduced their natural lifespan; only in the years following the end of Tar'mon Gaidon did the female channelers of what was then referred to as Tar Valon make an effort to increase their longevity, allowing the women in their ranks to be released of the "Oaths" when they wished to retire, offering them perhaps another century or two of life."
"Thank you, child. That is exactly the right answer. As you all know, the average lifespan of a channel for the One Power is measured in centuries, and is affected by many different things, not the least of which is linked to their bloodlines and the longevity of their ancestors. Today, with medical treatments being many, many orders of magnitude more advanced than they were in that Age, it is not uncommon for a man or woman to live to be a century old, and for a Scholar to live close to a millennia. Now, who can tell me who it was that discovered that relative strength in the One Power is not governed by recent ancestry, but by how far back the lineage of channelers goes in one's family?"
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As she settled into her office in the Administrator's wing of the Scholar's University, Desandra mulled over some thoughts she'd been having recently concerning the lecture material she was teaching and its impact on young Scholars. It was a well-known fact that something in the last millennia had caused a distinct drop in the birth of those with the spark and with the teachable ability inborn; in the century after the Last Battle, men and women had come together to eliminate their dissension and develop a system of traditions that in that time ensured they found every person who could be taught to channel before their spark killed them, or before the ability was inaccessible for some other reason. Over further decades, tradition had become a cultural point, where each year young children were tested, and if they were found to be able to channel, or if they were incredibly gifted in some other way, they were offered admission to one of the Academies of learning that the Dragon's Peace had built over all the land. This caused a huge upsurge in channelers that were tied to the Westland Alliance of Nations, as it was known of back then, and when the Seanchan rose up, it was these new generations of Aes Sedai and Asha'man that eventually forced a surrender on the part of the Empress of Seanchan, and a folding in of that great nation into the Westland Nation.
This is all ancient history, Desandra thought bitterly. In the years following the Last Battle, the traditions allowed for the addition of nearly one thousand women and close to two thousand male channelers, every year! Those numbers had flagged eventually of course, but there was always a positive birth rate! The decision to do away with separate monikers came after the channeler population reached one-tenth of the so-called 'normal' population; at that point, it was deemed necessary to create a new system of rule and of classification; and so the Board of Scholars was born, with the Administrators overseeing legislation and regulation of Scholars worldwide, and then eventually, taking over leadership of the populace as well. It was decided that those with longer lifespans were better suited to politics; they tended to keep cooler heads and let thought, instead of emotion, prevail. When this happened, the world population had reached two billion, and Scholars numbered in the millions. Many were elected politicians, either in their local prefectures, or on the world political stage, but it wasn't until the Rhuidean Tragedy and the destruction of the Aiel Nation that the government itself was centralized completely. Rahien'Aldazar, what was then known as Carhien, was chosen as the seat of the centralized government, and the same medical and technological advancements that made it possible to live longer made it possible for a truly gigantic city to be built, only the second such city to be built since the Age of Legends, and the only one still standing to this day.
Wool-gathering! She berated herself sharply. Thinking of the past instead of looking toward the future! Fool. The problem now, though, was that there were almost no new Scholars being born. Something had happened, and the birthrate had dropped from about one in twenty to about one in four hundred, and then to one in seven hundred according to most recent census reports. With an average age of three hundred, the Scholars would be unable to manage governance of the nation within two generations, unless the cause could be uncovered and the solution discovered. Not only were there fewer channelers being born, but those that were born were born with noticeably weaker abilities. The Melloy-Genhald scale for strength measurements had been put in place in the sixth century following the Last Battle; it provided a way to accurately and consistently measure a channelers strength and Talents, in order to ensure that the right person could be assigned for a given task. In the centuries following the creation of the Scholars, that need had been lessened, but the scale still stood to this day as a test of relative strength.
Desandra herself, a Scholar for some ten years, had an evaluation score of eleven out of twenty two on the female scale, with an outlier score in Spirit, meaning she was especially suited to the task of Teaching, as well as psychology-based Scholarly pursuits; not a poor score, not even allowing for any Talent she possessed, but just one century before, the average score for a female was fifteen, and today, a female Scholar could expect to be scored anywhere between eight and ten. Enough for the lesser trades, but not enough for Great Works and Creation, two trades that were vital to the society they lived in. Men fared a bit better, with an average score today of fourteen out of twenty two, only a two point drop from sixteen in the previous century; that was one reason why there were more men than women in both Great Works and Creation; the extra strength was a benefit when it came to circle work, and for some reason, more men than women always seemed to have the predilection toward Talents of Making, whether it be in engineering and construction or One Power-related pursuits. One Scholar in particular, Arjai Traemane, was noted for his incredible strength as well as his Maker status – his score of nineteen was one of the few truly strong births in the last 50 years, with only one Aes Sedai initiate coming close, his personal assistant and patner, Setekagan Moresan. With a score of seventeen, Setekagan was just 18 years old, and would likely one day be the last of the Scholars to command real strength and ability with the One Power.
Not surprisingly, those two were also the ones most devoted to solving the problem of the dying channeler race; many groups had theories, ranging from plausible to wildly far-fetched, but Arjai and Setekagan were the only pair to have a working premise to build from – shortly after graduating the University, Arjai had made a pilgrimage to the World Sea and had come back with a theory: what if the dying out of the ability to channel wasn't something environmental, but was actually caused by something humanity had done. Since then, other than taking Setekagan as his assistant once he had a decent command of Saidin, Arjai had been studying events in history that would have had a large impact on the ecosystem; his first theory had been that the Rhuidean Tragedy had caused something, but when that hadn't worked out, he moved on to studying the Ogier and their Translation event. Currently he believed that the key to understanding what was happening was hidden in the stedding, and had undertaken to search each of the stedding for clues. So while other groups vainly studied their connection to the One Power and what might've changed in a channeler's senses or genetic predilection, he and Setekagan had searched each stedding, and were expected to return from the last stedding, Sherandu, next week. She could only hope, and pray to the Light, that when they came back they'd have the clues they needed to move on to the next step in their search.
