It became a place. A reality. Rand pushed himself to his feet, and could feel the soil. He could smell smoke in the air. Could hear . . . moans of sorrow. Rand turned, and found that he was on a mostly barren slope above a dark city with black stone walls. Buildings huddled inside, squat and dull, like bunkers.
"What is this?" Rand whispered. Something about the place felt familiar. He looked up, but could not see the sun for the clouds that dominated the sky.
IT IS WHAT WILL BE.
Rand felt for the One Power, but drew back in revulsion. The taint had returned, but it was worse—far worse. Where it had once been a dark film on the molten light of saidin, it was now a sludge so thick that he could not pierce it. He would have to drink in the darkness, envelop himself in it, to seek out the One Power beneath—if, indeed, it was even still there. The mere thought made bile rise in his throat, and he had to fight to keep his stomach from emptying.
He was drawn toward that fortress nearby. Why did he feel he knew this place? He was in the Blight; the plants made that clear. If that wasn’t enough, he could smell rot in the air. The heat was like that of a bog in the summer—sweltering, oppressive despite the clouds.
He walked down the shallow hillside, and caught sight of some figures working nearby. Men with axes, hacking at trees. There were maybe a dozen of them. As Rand approached, he glanced to the side, and saw the nothing that was the Dark One in the distance, consuming part of the landscape, like a pit on the horizon. A reminder that what Rand was seeing wasn’t real?
He passed stumps of cut trees. Were the men gathering firewood? The thock, thock of axes—and the postures of the workers—had none of the steadfast strength Rand associated with woodsmen. The beats were lethargic, the men working with slumped shoulders.
That man on the left . . . As Rand grew closer, he recognized him, despite the bent posture and wrinkled skin. Light. Tam had to be at least seventy, perhaps eighty. Why was he out working so hard?
It’s a vision, Rand thought. A nightmare. The Dark One’s own creation. Not
real.
Yet, while standing within it, Rand found it difficult not to react as if this were indeed real. And it was, after a fashion. The Dark One used shadowed threads of the pattern—the possibilities that rippled from creation like waves from a dropped pebble in a pond—to create this.
"Father?" Rand asked.
Tam turned, but his eyes didn’t focus on Rand.
Rand took Tam by the shoulder. "Father!"
Tam stood dully for a moment, then went back to his work, raising his axe. Nearby, Dannil and Jori hacked at a stump. They had aged as well, and were now men well into their middle years. Dannil seemed sick with something awful, his face pale, his skin having broken out in some kind of sores.
Jori’s axe bit deep into the bitter earth, and a black flood seeped from the soil—insects that had been hiding at the base of the stump. The blade had pierced their lair.
The insects swarmed out and sped up the handle to cover Jori. He screamed, batting at them, but his open mouth let them climb inside. Rand had heard of such a thing, a deathswarm, one of the many dangers of the Blight. He raised a hand toward Jori, but the man slumped to the side, dead as quickly as a man could draw breath.
Tam yelled in horror and broke away, running. Rand spun as his father crashed into a thicket of brush nearby, trying to flee the deathswarm. Something jumped from a branch, quick as a snapping whip, and wrapped around Tams neck, jerking him to a halt.
"No!" Rand said. It wasn’t real. He still couldn’t watch his father die. He seized the Source, punching through the sickly darkness of the taint. It seemed to suffocate him, and Rand spent an excruciating time trying to find saidin. When he did grasp it, only a trickle came through.
He wove anyway, roaring, sending a ribbon of flame to kill the vine that had grabbed his father. Tam dropped from its grip as the vines writhed, dying.
Tam didn’t move. His eyes stared upward, dead.
"No!" Rand turned on the deathswarm. He destroyed it with a weave of Fire. Only seconds had passed, but all that remained of Jori was bones.
The insects popped as he burned them.
"A channeler", Dannil breathed, cowering nearby, eyes wide as he looked at Rand. Others of the woodsmen had fled into the wilderness. Rand heard several scream.
Rand could not stop himself from retching. The taint . . . it was so awful, so putrid. He could not hold to the Source any longer.
"Come", Dannil said, and grabbed Rand’s arm. "Come, I need you!"
"Dannil", Rand croaked, standing up. "You don’t recognize me?"
"Come", Dannil repeated, towing Rand toward the fortress.
"I’m Rand. Rand, Dannil. The Dragon Reborn".
No understanding shone in Dannil’s eyes.
"What has he done to you?" Rand whispered.
THEY DO NOT KNOW YOU, ADVERSARY. I HAVE REMADE THEM. ALL THINGS ARE MINE. THEY WILL NOT KNOW THAT THEY LOST. THEY WILL KNOW NOTHING BUT ME.
"I deny you", Rand whispered. "I deny you".
DENYING THE SUN DOES NOT MAKE IT SET. DENYING ME DOES NOT PREVENT MY VICTORY.
"Come", Dannil said, towing Rand. "Please. You must save me!"
"End this", Rand said.
END IT? THERE ARE NO ENDINGS, ADVERSARY. IT IS. I HAVE CREATED IT.
"You imagine it".
"Please", Dannil said.
Rand allowed himself to be pulled along toward the dark fortress. "What were you doing out there, Dannil?" Rand demanded. "Why gather wood in the Blight itself? It isn’t safe".
"It was our punishment", Dannil whispered. "Those who fail our master are sent out and told to bring back a tree they have cut down with their own hands. If the deathswarms or the twigs don’t get you, the sound of cutting wood draws other things . . ".
Rand frowned as they stepped onto a road leading to the town and its dark fortress. Yes, this place was familiar. The Quarry Road, Rand thought with surprise. And that ahead . . . The fortress dominated what had once been the Green at the center of Emond’s Field.
The Blight had consumed the Two Rivers.
The clouds overhead seemed to push down on Rand, and he heard Jori’s screams in his head. He again saw Tam struggling as he was strangled.
It isn’t real.
This was what would happen if Rand failed. So many people depended on him . . . so many. Some, he had already failed. He had to fight to keep from going over in his head the list of those who had died in his service. Even if he saved others, he had failed to protect these.
It was an attack of a different kind from the one that had tried to destroy his essence. Rand felt it, the Dark One forcing his tendrils into Rand, infecting his mind with worry, doubt, fear.
Dannil led him to the walls of the village where a pair of Myrddraal in unmoving cloaks guarded the gates. They slid forward. "You were sent to gather wood", one whispered with too-white lips.
"I . . . I brought this one!" Dannil said, stumbling away. "A gift for our master! He can channel. I found him for you!"
Rand growled, then plunged toward the One Power again, swimming in filth. He reached the trickle of saidin, seizing it.
It was immediately knocked from his grasp. A shield slid between him and the Source.
"It isn’t real", he whispered as he turned to see who had channeled.
Nynaeve strode through the city gates, dressed in black. "A wilder?" she asked. "Undiscovered? How did he survive this long? You have done well, Dannil. I give you back your life. Do not fail again".
Dannil wept for joy, then scrambled past Nynaeve into the city.
"It isn’t real", Rand said as Nynaeve tied him in weaves of Air, then dragged him into the Dark One's version of Emond's Field, the two Myrddraal rushing in ahead of her. It was a large city now. The houses had the feel of mice clustered together before a cat, each one of the same, uniform dullness. People scuttled through alleyways, eyes down.
People scattered before Nynaeve, sometimes calling her "mistress". Others named her Chosen. The two Myrddraal sped through the city, like shadows. When Rand and Nynaeve reached the fortress, a small group had gathered in the courtyard. Twelve people—Rand could sense that the four men in the group held saidin, though he only recognized Damer Flinn from among them. A couple of the women were girls he had known in the Two Rivers.
Thirteen of them. And thirteen Myrddraal, gathering beneath that clouded sky. For the first time since the start of the vision, Rand felt fear. Not this. Anything but this.
What if they Turned him? This wasn’t real, but it was a version of reality. A mirror world, created by the Dark One. What would it do to Rand if they Turned him here? Had he been trapped that easily?
He began to struggle, panicked, against the bonds of Air. It was useless, of course.
"You are an interesting one", Nynaeve said, turning to him. She didn’t look a day older than when he had left her in the cavern, but there were other differences. She wore her hair in a braid again, but her face was leaner, more . . . harsh. And those eyes.
The eyes were all wrong.
"How did you survive out there?" she asked him. "How did you go undiscovered so long?"
"I come from a place where the Dark One does not rule".
Nynaeve laughed. "Ridiculous. A tale for children. The Great Lord has always ruled".
Rand could see it. His connection to the Pattern, the glimmering of halftruths and shadowed ways. This possibility . . . it could happen. It was one path the world could take. The Dark One, here, had won the Last Battle and broken the Wheel of Time.
That had allowed him to remake it, to spin the pattern in a new way. Everyone alive had forgotten the past, and now knew only what the Dark One had inserted in their minds. Rand could read the truth, the history of this place, in the threads of the Pattern he had touched earlier.
Nynaeve, Egwene, Logain and Cadsuane were now members of the Forsaken, Turned to the Shadow against their will. Moiraine had been executed for being too weak.
Elayne, Min, Aviendha . . . they had been given over to torture, endlessly, at Shayol Ghul.
The world was a living nightmare. Each member of the Forsaken ruled as a despot over their own little section of the world. An endless autumn played out as they threw armies, Dreadlords, and factions against one another. An eternal battle.
The Blight had extended to every ocean. Seanchan was no more, ruined and scorched until not even rats and crows could survive there. Anyone who could channel was discovered as a youth and Turned. The Dark One did not like the risk that someone would bring hope back to the world.
And nobody ever would.
Rand screamed as the thirteen began to channel.
"This is your worst?" Rand yelled.
They pressed their wills against his own. He felt them, like nails being pounded into his skull, parting his flesh. He pushed back with everything he had, but the others started a thrumming pressure. Each thump, like the chop of an axe, came closer and closer to boring into him.
AND SO I WIN.
The failure hit Rand hard—the knowledge that what happened here was his fault. Nynaeve, Egwene, Turned to the Shadow because of him. Those he loved, becoming playthings for the Shadow.