The Eye of the World, chapter 49 to the end, in which the best and the worst of this book are on display

Here we are at last.  I could have split this across two posts, but I decided to power on ahead to the end.  Book One of the Wheel of Time comes at last to its end and we find out what passes for a climax in this unnecessary marathon of a pagecount.  Goggles on, dear readers.

The Eye of the World: p. 732--782

Chapter Forty-Nine: The Dark One Stirs

Rand wakes up and, top priority now that they are way deep in the noxious hellscape of Satan County, takes stock of how Nynaeve is feeling about getting rejected by a man.  If I thought this had anything to do with Rand thinking their group might be weakened by inner strife, I'd be less judgey.  Because Egwene is a better person in every way (and praise depersonified Light Jesus that she doesn't end up with Rand, by the way) she doesn't just stare, and instead goes to chat with Nynaeve until she manages to provoke a laugh and a hug from her wounded friend.  Rand just thinks about how "all women are Aes Sedai" because he thinks they have secret methods to read male minds, and I just can't even with this guy.  I mean, I absolutely think it's narratively stupid that Nynaeve is suddenly in love with Lan, but accepting that as our premise, we can presumably agree that Rand is contemptible for just staring at her, hurt, and thinking how freaky women are with their witch-feelings and seeeecrets.

Best possible plot twist at this point: Rand tries to stop the Dark One, instead falls to temptation, and Egwene leaps in to save the day because she is the Dragon Reborn.  Yes, after eight hundred pages it might be questionable to be all 'Hah, that protagonist was a decoy!', but there are literally ten thousand more pages still to go in this series and it's not like it stopped GRR Martin.

But let's move on or we'll never find out how disappointed I'll be.  They are once again riding towards--honest to Hotei--the Mountains of Dhoom.  Dhoom, people.  No editor stopped Jordan from doing this, and we all bear the weight of that sin.  Moiraine is taking them to the last place she found the Eye of the World, and if it moves, they'll count on the Green Man to help, because he "senses need", though why he hasn't come to them already in that case I don't know.

There's more description of the Blight, which is honestly the best part of this story right now, and when I'm this enthusiastic about description near the climax of a book you know it's dire.  The trees shed wet, decaying leaves constantly, ooze from cracks in their bark, and tremble from their footfalls as if they're turning to liquid entirely.  One of them flails around and grabs a furry creature off the ground.  Love it; A-plus evil landscape.  Lan wanders into the undergrowth to slaughter something evil, and upon his return gets jumped by some kind of murderous spider-bear, but Mat of all people takes it down with a single arrow.  That's a prelude to a mass monsters-and-monster-trees ambush, but the farm kids once again go into that ancestral battle-fugue where they shout about Manetheren and Ellisande a lot, and Moiraine elects to spam fireballs, because she definitely hasn't been saying this whole time that subtlety is paramount and we definitely don't have in-text evidence that wielding Fire weakens her more than anything else.  For reasons deeply unclear to me, Lan keeps leaving the group, diving into the trees, slaughtering things, coming back for Moiraine to cast Lay On Hands, and leaving again.  What's he getting done out there that is more valuable than directly protecting the party?  Does the forest have Strategy Bushes that direct and coordinate its malevolent intent?  Give me something, Jordan, don't just have him 'disappear' because it's supposed to be mysterious and cool.

The assault stops at the sound of some other creature's cry chasing them, which Lan identifies as Worms.  I mention this only because, to my endless delight, Jordan asserts that you can hear dramatic capitalisation:

"They were scared off by worms?" Mat said incredulously [...] 

"A Worm"--there was a sharp difference in the way the Warder said it from the way Mat had--"can kill a Fade, if the Fade hasn't the Dark One's own luck with it."

I mean, yes, Terry Pratchett also had audible capitalisation, but Discworld is an intentionally absurd place.  And well-written.  Lan volunteers to make a heroic sacrifice, but Moiraine forbids it, and Rand braces himself and thinks about how scared he is (less than relatable prose, way too tell-don't-show) when they clear a foothill and burst into a mass of healthy greenery that she declares safe.

The Green Man appears, made of nuts and leaves and butterflies, greets Loial and names Perrin a Wolfbrother, then straight up calls Rand 'Child of the Dragon', but no one thinks that might be a big deal.  He agrees instantly to take them to the Eye, and I wonder again if we've ever actually been told what it is, apart from 'plot relevant'.

Chapter Fifty: Meetings at the Eye

They wander deeper into the greenery, the Green Man weaving flower crowns for the women as they go.  Not sure why even he thinks that flowers are only for girls.  Dude is, by chance or choice, a dude, and he's partly made of flowers.  Maybe Lan is just sensitive about crowns.

(At this point, I decided to search the web for some good art of a manly man wearing a flower crown, but after the third photoshopped Benedict Cumberbatch I gave up.  On everything.  Forever.  I am a pointless meat husk screaming towards the void.)

The Eye is inside a hill, entrance marked by a stone arch, and I had thought the Green Man was hella old because he talked as if he had seen entire past turns of the Wheel, but then he says that he was made to guard it when it was first made, during the Breaking, by a hundred male and female Aes Sedai who sacrificed their lives in the effort.  Well.  That's... questionable.  Is it just me or if the villains made something out of the lives of a hundred people would we not assume it was an artifact of terrible evil?

Inside the cavern, the Eye turns out to be a big oval pool of not-water with no apparent bottom.  Mat kicks in a rock (classy) and they watch said rock dissolve into nothing.  Moiraine describes it as the essence of saidin, dude magic, which can either seal the devil's prison or bust it fully open.  Loial asks why anyone would make a thing like that:

"No one living knows [....] Neither the how, nor more of the why than that it would be needed one day, and that that need would be the greatest and most desperate the world had faced to that time. Perhaps would ever face. Many in Tar Valon have attempted to find a way to use that Power, but [...] only a man could channel it [...]"

Well.  That is also questionable.  A contingency device that can either save or end the world and can only be used by male wizards who are actively hunted because magic corrupts them.  Nothing about this plan sounds like a good idea unless you have narrative information that asserts that it will all turn out okay.  That is not a kind of prophecy I favour.

They leave again and outside run into a pair of the Forsaken, the devil's favourite servants, who are apparently loose now.  One is hella old but telekinetically smites Lan; the other is bound up in a fetish-worthy amount of leather and sets about thrashing the others before the Green Man shows up to save them.  Treebeard is not to be taken lightly--they wrassle for a moment and the Green Man looks like he'll burst into flames, but not before Captain Safeword finds himself consumed by an outburst of fungus, nettles, and weeds, plants that love the dark.  Then Big Green does topple, and his collapsing body produces a single acorn that immediately erupts into an ancient towering oak.

You know, I'm actually enjoying this book right now.  It's not exactly mindblowingly original, but at least it's operatically fantastical.  If the book only consisted of events like the last few chapters, and not five hundred pages of trudging through Generic Fantasy Farmlands, I might even recommend it to others.

Moiraine tries to trap old dude--Aginor--in a fiery chasm and tells the others to run, but Egwene tries to help as well, and Rand has to pull her away.  In literally any book where Egwene was the protagonist, it would be a sign of incredible bravery that Egwene dared throw whatever magic she could wield against the villain, and it would make some minor difference that was ultimately key to their victory, but here she's being foolish and has to be rescued by a boy.

Chapter Fifty-One: Against the Shadow

So this chapter gets trippy.  Rand runs from Aginor until he reaches a sheer cliff, inescapable, and Aginor talks about killing him (the devil being okay with undead servants), but Rand is suddenly aware of... I'm not sure.  Lifelines?  He sees a glowing cord running off Aginor, which pulses ever more intensely as they mind-battle until Aginor bursts into flames.  Rand then teleports into the middle of the battle at the borderland pass, where things are going badly for humanity, but in a fit of rage he blasts the draghkars out of the sky with lightning and summons a firestorm to scythe through most of the trollocs and Fades.  There's some unclear dialogue inside his head between himself ("It has to end!") and an unknown voice ("ONLY THE CHOSEN ONE CAN DO WHAT MUST BE DONE, IF HE WILL"), and some reasonably adept prose describing the "terrible heat of the Light" in such a way that makes it sound less cuddly and more like an overwhelming implacable force.  This I also like: if your hero is going to wield supreme power of goodness and use that power to incinerate living creatures, at least make him fucking terrified of it.  (I mean, the whole 'our hero firestorms the bad guys' is an unnecessary scene on principle, but if it's going to be here, this is an okay handling.)

As the human forces rally behind him, Rand climbs a literal stairway to heaven, steps made of light in the void, until he arrives back in the stony balcony from his dreams where he faces off against Ba'alzamon.  Rand can see Ba'alzamon also has a lifeline, and you should all be proud of me for not making any of the jokes that all but tell themselves when Rand marvels at how thick and black it is.

Ba'alzamon explains (indistinctly, but intelligibly if you know Rand's Secret Backstory) that he has orchestrated the events of Rand's ancestors to bring him here, and has only sent small armies or individual Darkfriends after Rand because he'd rather have a living servant than a dead one.  At least that tries to explain why the endless armies of evil haven't made much of an appearance, but I'm still not clear why sending a hundred Darkfriends to abduct Rand would have guaranteed his death rather than his capture.

The devil conjures up Rand's dead mother next, and she pleads with Rand to save her soul.  Fades appear and start torturing her, but Rand conjures a sword of light out of nowhere, blasts them to bits, and hacks Ba'alzamon's lifeline in half, declaring "It is ended!" in what I can only assume is a Revelation reference.  Everything bursts into flames.

Chapter Fifty-Two: There Is Neither Beginning Nor End

You say that, Jordan, but I remember the naive, callow youth I was when I started this book, and I know how eagerly I await my freedom in another twenty pages.  Also, really, that chapter was our grand climax?  Rand is separated from the others and doomed but then instinctively saves himself, saves the army, saves his mother, and sets the devil on fire?  That was literally and without exaggeration the most gratuitous, least foreshadowed, least earned, and most convenient victory I have ever read.

Wait, I'm wrong.  I once read a primary school kid's short story in which a boy gets magically transported to a realm of talking animals and told by the king lion that he is the chosen one who needs to use the magic gems to destroy the villain.  At that exact moment, the villain leaps into the king's court, and the kid raises the gems and vaporises him on the spot.  Like, the lion hadn't even finished the tutorial on these things and boom, quest over, promotions all around.

That is the only other contender for the title.

Rand awakens where he started, near the pile of gross ashes that used to be Aginor.  Memories float back and he sprints back to the others, who are all unharmed, including Moiraine.  He tells them that he killed the devil, and everything else that happened, but everyone else is too plot-savvy to believe that the devil gets dropped in book one.  Moiraine explains that she's seen evidence of Rand channelling all through the book, as far back as when she was casting Refresh Horse on everyone's mounts and Bela didn't need it--because Bela was carrying Egwene and Rand instinctively wanted her safe.  (The possibility that Egwene had refreshed Bela apparently wasn't on the table.)  Moiraine promises not to drag Rand off to be "gentled" like they normally do with man-wizards, and not to tell anyone who doesn't need to know.

The Eye pool is apparent gone, consumed by Rand's victory lap of plot contrivance.  Instead there's a column of stone in the centre, with convenient steps to reach it.  The dudes of the pottery carry three relics retrieved from inside the prison.  First are ancient pottery fragments, which Moiraine fits together into a taijitu (last seen in the prologue) and identifies as heartstone, indestructible relic of a past age, one of seven seals on the devil's prison, shattered by unknown means.  Second is the Horn of Valere, namedropped much earlier in the book, to be used to call spirits of heroes back to fight the devil, and last is the banner of the Dragon, specifically a serpentine gold-maned red dragon.

Just so we're clear on this, Our Heroes are a sea of whitebread and ginger carrying a katana, the prime symbol of Taoism, and now a clearly Asian-style dragon banner.  I know Jordan said he was going for a sort of 'fantasy melange', but I have yet to see a single thing that makes me say 'ah, a reference to African mythology!' or really anything other than 'ah, another white author with a fetish for Asian myths minus all the Asian people!'  People who have read later books: does this ever get better?

Chapter Fifty-Three: The Wheel Turns

The Blight has eaten most of the greenery the next morning, but Loial refuses to let it have the Green Man's oak, and takes an hour (that feels like minutes) to sing a Tree Song that rejuvenates it, assuring the party that he couldn't have invoked so much power if Jolly Green's spirit wasn't still in there.  The Blight is still gross, but doesn't try to murder them as they leave--Moiraine explains that they "struck a mighty blow against the Dark One" and for some reason Rand still hasn't asked for an explanation of how she reconciles that with his memory of killing the devil.

At least the soldiers at Fal Dara aren't so hypermasculine as to reject a good flower crown, and everyone is wearing them to celebrate the incredible victory at the pass.  Moiraine waves off all healers and meets with Agelmar to show him the recovered horn and ask for a small army to escort it to Illian, for reasons not explained.  Montages happen for a week.  Lan starts teaching Rand how to actually use his sword, and everyone gets hyped about finally going to Tar Valon, but Rand refuses to join them, convinced that he'll get gentled if he goes, and go mad-corrupt if he ever accidentally uses magic again.  He's just going to wander off on his own, away from people he might hurt, cursing the luck that his crush has to be a wizard and thus dangerous.  In another garden, far away, Moiraine magically eavesdrops on them:

"The Prophecies will be fulfilled," the Aes Sedai whispered. "The Dragon is Reborn."

And that's it.  That's the book.

I am... thoroughly unimpressed, I have to admit.  I love a good ending.  I love the part of a story where we see how everything that has led to the climax fits together in order to create something with meaning.  I love Frodo and Gollum facing the will of the Ring at the Cracks of Doom, the way the hero's past mercy ultimately saves him from his own final weakness.  I love Katniss, broken and angry, still playing her character so well that she gets a shot at salvation instead of vengeance.  I love the Doctor and Rose up against an army of genocidal zealotry, saved because the Bad Wolf is damnfool implacable hope and she will do anything to protect those she loves.  I love Harry Potter and Narcissa Malfoy in the woods, speaking two words ("Yes."  "Dead.") that declare that love overwhelms hatred in the end.

And I get that those endings are the real endings and this is book one of eleventy, so it's not a fair comparison, but I just waded through seven hundred and ninety-two pages of this stuff and the ending was abrupt, unjustified, and most heinously of all, revealed nothing meaningful about who the characters are or what they believe.  This is an ending that falls like a soggy towel on the page: and there, there's a huge battle and the good guys win but for how long isn't this awesome?  Wasn't this totally worth reading about the four hundred identical innkeepers that populate this world like an unsettling mashup of Barliman Butterbur and Nurse Joy?  Isn't it great how a solid 60% of this book was just setting the stage for later books while somehow failing to have any real impact on the events of its own plot?

I am struggling to think of any way in which the plot might have been hampered if the party hadn't transitioned directly from, say, Baerlon to Fal Dara.  By my estimate, if they had done so, the book would have been about three hundred fifty pages long, maybe three hundred with better editing, a solid book but not a brick.  We lose the City of Mat Don't Touch That Dagger Oh My God, and Perrin being a Man-Wolf, and Rand flirting with a princess, but do we lose anything that actually impacts the plot?  Is there any reason not to consider the intervening thirty-some chapters glorified filler?  I'm really and truly asking.  Because I don't think it should be a controversial opinion to say 'if half your book isn't relevant to your book, cut it', and yet here we are.  And I actually liked the Travellers and the wolfpack, those are good story elements, but they could be in their own book where they were actually plot-relevant and not just a sideshow with no purpose.

Because I don't make good life choices, I am actually considering getting into the second book on this here blog, but I'm definitely not doing that right away.  I need a cleanser.  So, apart from your usual delightful insights and anecdotes, make your nominations, resilient readers, and come back in a week or two to see what I inflict on myself next.

The Eye of the World, chapters 43, 44, and 45, in which Our Heroes meander through the infinite void

We're close enough to the end of this book that I, ever eager, have begun to look to what we'll be investigating next.  Suffice to say it will not be Wheel of Time Book Two unless something absolutely gobsmackingly unexpected happens in the next 150 pages.  I'm currently leaning towards The Way of Kings, book one in Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive mega-series.  My reasons are manifold: I actually like Sanderson's work, but I have yet to read anything of his that didn't still have some substantial issues with women at the least, with some options on implied racism as well.  (He has identified a handful of characters as lesbian/gay, but no one's confirmed in text yet.  Apparently Ranette will be explicit about it in the next Mistborn novel.)  I've also been plagued by friends to read Way of Kings since it came out, but I haven't been able to summon the energy because the first thing that drew me to Sanderson's books was his ability to write fantasy that wasn't a ten-part doorstopper, and Stormlight Archive is his ten-part doorstopper.  So with any luck, a series on Way of Kings will be less painful than Eye of the World, will still give us some issues worth talking about, and might go a bit faster, like Ender's Shadow versus Ender's Game.

However!  I'm always open to other suggestions for reading materials that you, my dear and clever readers, think would be worth a dissection (keeping in mind that I will have to somehow acquire a copy of anything terrible that we carve up, and I have moral objections to giving money to terrible people).  The first alternative that comes to mind is H.P. Lovecraft, whose works are public domain and famously brimming with every possible kind of bigotry.  I loves me some sothothic horror, and it's best to do so with an understanding of how fucked up its great propagator was.  (I prefer instead to reference Robert Chambers' prior masterwork, The King in Yellow, which is hardly progressive but at least isn't gross.)

But before we can move on to such business, we have to finish up this rollicking epic timeless exceptional memorable adequate published book second draft.

The Eye of the World: p. 646--687

Chapter Forty-Three: Decisions and Apparitions

We left off last time with fearful discussion of the safety of the Ways, and open now with Loial and Moiraine taking a couple of pages to spit out that the Ways were a gift from not-yet-fully-broken male Aes Sedai to the ogiers that gave them sanctuary, and they let a person tunnel through time and space to hop across the world.  There's a lot of talk about aspects of ogier culture and magic--the Exile, the Long Wandering, the Longing--all of which are capitalised and none of which are explained.  You might at this point be thinking "Make up your mind, Will, do you want things to be brief or do you want them to explain what every term means?", and the answer is that if you don't have time to explain what a term means, there had better be a good excuse for dropping it into the conversation six times.  If you can use a term that much without having to explain what it means, maybe it's not actually relevant to the topic at hand and you're just bragging about how many things you've capitalised today.

Although the Ways survived the Breaking, they were still apparently tainted by Dude Magic and so began to rot a millennium ago, thus Loial's conviction that they're all going to die.  Moiraine counters, with shocking savviness, that they've heard far too many warnings about the Eye of the World and thus their best move now is to drag the ta'veren there and just let a big ol' destiny pile-up happen.

I'm trying to move at a pace now, but Rand and Egwene haven't seen each other in chapters and they've about to plunge into peril, so their brief scene together is worth a closer look, because oh my gods and monsters.  Rand tells Egwene that she's not predestined and she should take the safe route, not with them, and she tells him he's very sweet but she is plot-relevant thankyouverymuch and she's going anyway.  With her strength and importance thus duly noted, she asks again who this hot Elayne girl is.

For a minute he stared at her, then told the simple truth. "She's the Daughter-Heir to the throne of Andor." 

Her eyes seemed to catch fire. "If you can't be serious for more than a minute, Rand al'Thor, I do not want to talk to you."

Rand mentioned Elayne during his explanation about meeting the queen, but obviously meeting the princess is a heartless fiction meant only to toy with Egwene's emotions and cover up... actually, I can't even imagine what Egwene thinks he's lying about.  Some random girl Rand hooked up with at an inn along the way and decided to spontaneously namedrop in the middle of rambling about meeting their monarch?  This exchange is 100% pure not-from-concentrate Oh Those Hysterical Ladyfolk.  Faith and begorrah.

We get another (final? please?) dream sequence, which Rand recognises as a dream.  He focuses all his energy on thinking about how much he denies the devil, who takes the opportunity to exposit at us: time repeats itself, this is the jillionth time they've faced off and Rand's choices are always to die or to become the Vader to the devil's Emperor, and by the way the Black Ajah (secret devil-worshipping Aes Sedai) are totes real.  Is it just me, or do secret societies get a lot of their effectiveness from their secrecy?  Why confirm one?  If anything, this ought to be a ruse wherein the devil is trying to set the Aes Sedai on an internal witch hunt in order to weaken and distract them.

Apart from that, it's a pretty good creepy atmosphere, but it's still just a dream sequence, so wevs.  Rand awakens to find Mat is still asleep in the other bed and muttering constant devil-denials.  There's still a giant splinter in Rand's palm from the dream, which vanishes when he pulls it out, but the wound remains.  Like I said, decently creepy if we weren't supposed to be in the third act rush to the climax.  Fortunately, Moiraine arrives to insta-mend his palm and tell them to get moving already.

Chapter Forty-Four: The Dark Along The Ways

I've skimmed ahead far enough to know that it's going to take us two solid chapters to complete the 'dimensional tunnelling' adventure.  Let's keep things brisk.  Several pages detail Our Heroes acquiring their horses from the infinitely helpful innkeeper and creeping through the shadowy streets to find the Waygate, which is (all these centuries later) now part of someone's basement.  Conveniently enough, there's an external cellar door big enough to fit their horses, and Moiraine prepared knock this morning.  An intricately leaf-carved wall opens up to reveal a stargate shiny portal surface.  On the other side, everything turns out to be total darkness apart from the lantern glow and an old, broken stone path to follow.

Left to right: Rand, Lan, Egwene, and Loial bond* fraternise on their interdimensional journey.

(*I only just discovered what 'bonding' means in this series, thanks to some wiki'ing, and I'm slightly creeped out.  No, in order to consider someone an honorary sibling I don't actually need to experience a mental pseudo-womb with them, thanks.)

This chapter does not feature plot developments, and is thoroughly devoted to convincing us of how creepy the atmosphere of the darkened Ways is: they move along the road to Islands connected by bridges, where engraved stones called Guidings give directions in Ogier.  (Although according to Loial, it's not enough just to speak Ogier to understand them?)  Rand resolutely refuses to believe that they could have left one Island by a long curving upward slope and arrived on a second Island that is directly above the first one.  I truly and honestly cannot comprehend why he's convinced that's impossible, but he's quite definitive about it.

Everyone is always on horseback in here as well, apart from maybe whomever is leading their giant packhorse, which I'd like to point out is also a mistake.  Humans are vastly better endurance runners than basically any other animal.  Don't get me wrong, horses are pretty good, but the real advantage of horse-based travel is their carrying capacity and the fact that a person in a hurry can switch horses periodically to maintain top speed.  If you're just going to plod slowly along the Ways for a couple of days, there's literally no reason to ride instead of walking.  Walking is the only thing humans excel at.  Our Heroes are just lazily throwing the burden onto the horses who have done nothing wrong and frankly Bela deserves a medal for not kicking anyone to death yet.  Trollocs?  Bela didn't sign up for trollocs.

I know that the slowness of their plodding is supposed to help with the creepy atmosphere, but honestly at this point in the story we desperately need some urgency, and I especially think that racing around through interdimensional voids at top speed could tap into some readers' lingering nightmares:

For film producers' consideration, I submit "Mad Max: Rainbow Road".

The chapter ends when they come to a broken bridge.  Le gasp.

Chapter Forty-Five: What Follows in Shadow

Loial is pretty sure he can still get them to Fal Dara, but they'll have to take the scenic route.  Our Heroes take the opportunity when they stop for the evening to tease Rand and Egwene about all of the reasons they might be jealous of each other: Mat brings up psychic waif Min's crush on Rand, Perrin counters with Egwene's vigorous dancing with Aram, Mat references Else the farmers' daughter, and Rand and Egwene both pointedly and embarrassedly go to bed at each other.  This is definitely the gripping interlude we need right now to remind us that these characters are deeply in love and deserve our attention.

This chapter is also mostly boring, so I'd like to detail again: Rand and Egwene are not in love.  The book tells us they are, but they don't actually like each other.  They have a good neighbourly protective attitude at times and they both kind of want in the other's pants, and that's it.  The only conversations we've seen them have in the last, what, 400 pages have been 1) I'm glad you're not dead, 2) are girls real people, yes/no, and 3) stop being attracted to anyone but me.  That's a truly godawful foundation for a relationship.  (Out of morbid curiosity, I just wiki'd who Rand's actual love interest is.  He basically marries three different women, and by the end of the series at least one bears his children.  Twins.  What.)

Also, Moiraine informs the party that's she's pretty sure Thom Merrilin isn't dead, because he's too plot-relevant.  I am in no way exaggerating.

"And Thom is a part of the Pattern that weaves itself around you three. Too important a part, I believe, to be cut off yet."

If it's possible to survive by being plot-relevant how is anyone in danger?  The hell.  I mean, her corroborating evidence is that no one in Whitebridge had mentioned a dead gleeman--I don't remember when Moiraine passed through Whitebridge, but I question the circumstances in which she heard about a gleeman but didn't specifically get to ask 'oh, when was that and where did he go?'  Is there a good reason I'm forgetting?  I'm not even sure which chapter to check.

They realise the next day that they're being followed, but brush it off as less relevant than pressing on ahead.  Literally three minutes later they find one of the guidestones has been carved up with trolloc runes, proving that the Fades have found their way into the Ways and have been using them to transport trollocs across the country, which is how they were able to build up such a huge army around Caemlyn so stealthily.

Y'all know what?  This is the best plot development yet.  It involves characters actually taking advantage of a feature of their fantastical world and making intelligent use of it instead of just treating it like a curious museum piece.  The devil's power apparently suffuses the Ways at this point, so why wouldn't he use it as a troop transport?  Praise be to Eru Iluvatar, we now have two cases in a single post wherein people make intelligent decisions based on their knowledge of the structure of the world.

Lan investigates and finds that the closest bridge to Tar Valon is a total mess of melted stone and mutilated trollocs--Moiraine concludes that the wizard men who built the Ways also incorporated anti-monster traps, thus quickly removing the tension that the scene had accidentally started to develop.  Some hours later, a different random threat gets thrown at them instead, as Rand notices a slight breeze in the supposedly wind-free void, which Loial identifies as the Black Wind.  You can tell it's evil because it's black, as is traditional.

(One of the many story notions bouncing around in my head has to do with a universe that has largely been overrun by sothothic horrors, and the remnants of civilisation live their lives in space stations that are basically submarines permanently running silent.  For such people, 'black' means not giving off any signals, light or otherwise, that might draw the attention of monsters, and is thus also a colloquial term for 'safe and secure', and consequently for good things in general.  "Everything all black in here?"  "Yeah, we're doing fine."  Creating good slang is one of the hardest things to do in speculative fiction, but every once in a while I find something I really enjoy.)

Our Heroes make a breakneck sprint for the door, which is missing its keystone, but Moiraine turns her staff into a cutting torch, burns through a large arc, and Lan's horse shoulder-checks it out, breaking open an escape route, and Moiraine wards off the approaching wind with her flamethrower while everyone slips through.  In the last moments, Rand can hear the wind muttering, and ten points to Robert Jordan: it's creepy as hell, talking about carving flesh and braiding it back together.  Mind you, it's still just yet another random threat tossed at the protagonists to force them to end a chapter in a sprint.  Maybe in some future book it'll become relevant again?  I would prefer to read a book without feeling like I had to read a further dozen in order to get any kind of narrative payoff.  It has become eminently clear to me that this is the wrong series for that.

Next week: Lan's mysterious backstory becomes slightly less mysterious and possibly slightly Asian?  (I guess that would help explain why he's got a kabuto on the cover.  Maybe not justify it, but explain.)

The Eye of the World, chapters 41 and 42, in which questions are often raised and never answered

Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends.  This is how we live now: reading the Wheel of Time (Book One), which we are more than three-quarters of the way through and yet somehow only just finishing what feels like the prologue.  Sometimes the chapter numbers seem to change when I'm not looking, sneaking down lower, shuffling themselves around.  Did I already read this part, or are they just going into round one of recapping?  Maybe the things they're recapping haven't happened yet.  Maybe they happened a long time ago, too.  We are beyond the ideas of past and future now.  There is only this page, standing at the forefront of the legions that surround it.  There is only ever this page.

The Eye of the World: p. 619--645

Chapter Forty-One: Old Friends and New Threats

Rand returns to the inn, finds his latest plot-recruited helpful innkeeper playing a game with Loial the elf-ogre, and spends several pages recapping the spectacularly improbable events which we literally just read in the previous two chapters.  The innkeeper is at first skeptical, while Loial just mutters 'ta'veren', listens intently, and asks to join the quest.  Rand and Mat must leave the city immediately, apparently?  I'm not clear on why, but they seem pretty sure that Chief Wizard Elaida is going to send guards to hunt Rand down again imminently, despite the queen declaring him innocent and setting him free.  Does Elaida regularly ignore the queen's decisions?  Do we have a precedent?  This is an important thing to know in any circumstance, but no one says anything like 'she'll have you grabbed quietly in the night, just like that shady diplomat who vanished off his boat two days away from the city'.  Is this just part of typical anti-Aes Sedai mistrust and propaganda?  I mean, Rand is specifically running to Tar Valon, which is basically the Greater Wizardtropolitan Area, so isn't he in at least as much danger there?  For that matter, might Elaida not be very interested in helping him get there, if he explained that it was Moiraine's idea?  Does Rand have any idea what faction of wizard Elaida is from?

Only Robert Jordan could raise this many questions (and answer none of them) for no good reason in such a short period of time while mostly talking about rats and those vile vile anti-monarchists.

Rand get outright angry when Loial uses the same phrasing as Elaida, saying that "The Pattern weaves itself around you, and you stand in the heart of it".  I feel like after 600 pages Rand should have picked up enough characterisation that I would know why he's angry at the prospect of having a really dramatic fate.  Is he so intensely humble that the notion of being important offends him?  Is he scared to death of conflict and wants to believe that once he gets to Tar Valon everything will be peaceful and boring forever after?  Did he have hopes and aspirations for his life that he feels have been taken away from him?  Is he just really opposed to the notion of destiny overriding free will?  Throw me a bone, Jordan.

We have a brief and unnecessary interlude with whitecloaks in the inn's common room, who are armed and armored and angry but are inexplicably driven out by the out-of-nowhere, natural-20-intimidation-check warnings that the innkeeper gives them.  (We do get the informational tidbit that the whitecloaks "hold no writ in Caemlyn", though it's not clear to me what that means.  Are they not tax-exempt?  Do they have to obey all of the laws instead of only some of them?)

The whitecloaks are also very dismissive of the queen, which is clearly supposed to further outline how villainous they are, but to my mind it raises yet another damned question: why do we like Queen Morgase?  She's apparently abandoned substantial tracts of her queendom for generations, even as the number of monsters roaming the world increases.  She allows religious extremists to wander her cities harassing people at random.  She has no great diplomatic successes we're aware of.  She does apparently maintain some kind of substantial food security program within the capital, although the rules under which it functions aren't clear and we have no indication if it helps on other issues of health, shelter, or safety.  The two things we really know about her for certain are that she decided to let Rand go literally right after her Chief Wizard said he was super plot-relevant, and that she regularly receives prophecies from said wizard that are so mystically vague that no one has the slightest clue what they mean.  Neither of these choices reflect well on her as a protector of her realm and its inhabitants.  Near as I can tell, we're supposed to like her because she's got a crown, her family is attractive, and she was nice to the protagonist (sort of).

Just saying it's possible the white-flag revolutionaries have a point.  Of course, they don't seem to have any ideas about what they want instead of the queen, because they are evil and therefore heavily organised around the idea of taking things apart, not creating something new.  Those are the rules.

Let's get a move on, plotwise.  The moment we're done with the whitecloak interlude, someone else shows up looking for Rand and Mat, and at gorram last it's the rest of the party: Moiraine, Lan, Egwene, Nynaeve, and Perrin.  Rand hugs the girls (who of course bury themselves face-first in his chest) while also shaking Perrin's hand AS MEN DO, and the innkeeper falls all over himself for a couple of pages in subservience to Moiraine.  Rand takes them all to see Mat, and praise Buddha they immediately identify that there's something the fuck wrong with him as he hacks at them like Gollum bingeing on conspiracy theory websites and The Exorcist.

"How do you know they're really who they look like? [....] Perrin?  Is that you? You've changed, haven't you? [....] A Wisdom isn't suppose to think of herself as a woman, is she? Not a pretty woman. But you do, don't you? Now. You can't make yourself forget that you're a pretty woman, no, and it frightens you."

Nynaeve just thinks he's got a fever, but Moiraine arrives and all but leaps on him.  She quickly infodumps all the stuff we already knew about Shadar Logoth being cursed, and Mat attacks her with the knife he stole, gets stopped by Lan, and Moiraine sets about wizard medicine.  The knife is apparently a beacon of evil as well, and thus why Rand and Mat have been endlessly plagued by darkfriends and trollocs on their journey, and why (Lan informs us) the Fades are building a trolloc army outside Caemlyn in preparation to take the city.

You had one job, Rand.

Chapter Forty-Two: Remembrance of Dreams

Leaving Moiraine to exorcise Mat, Rand introduces the party to Loial in the Double Secret Parlour, where Perrin immediately starts asking Loial about steddings and whether they're really magic havens.  I have to assume at this point that Robert Jordan was badly distracted by something, or perhaps looked up from the keyboard and realised thatthe manuscript was due tomorrow, because it's only been two pages and Moiraine shows up with Mat, a bit spaced and embarrassed but otherwise completely cured of his evil possession.

Well.  That de-escalated quickly.

Moiraine quickly and quietly explains to Rand that Mat still has the knife and it's still magically bound to him, but she has purged the evil from Mat's system for now and they can get a permanent fix in Tar Valon, but Moiraine is vague about whether that's where they're going next after all.  She also warns Loial that all of the other Aes Sedai are Red Ajah, which--okay, screw it, there's a glossary in the back of this book and I am tired.

Ajah (AH-jah): Societies among the Aes Sedai, to which all Aes Sedai belong. They are designated by colours: [Blue, Red, White, Green, Brown, Yellow, and Gray]. [...] The Red Ajah bends all its energies to finding and gentling men who are attempting to wield the Power.

Well, they did just bring in the Renegade Man Wizard Logain, so maybe that's not startling, although surely Elaida isn't included in "every one but I".  I can't imagine that spending all of her time giving vague advice to the queen counts as bending all her energy to 'gentling' men.

There is yet more recapping again as Rand tells the rest about meeting the queen, and if I were running with my theory of 'the queen is actually not inherently good by right of being the queen', I would get Manchurian Candidate vibes from the way Rand spaces out as soon as he thinks of her:

"Can you imagine me meeting a Queen? She's beautiful, like the queens in stories.  So is Elayne. And Gawyn... you'd like Gawyn, Perrin."

Very nice wingmanning, Rand.  Your buddy just got into town and already you're trying to hook him up with a hot prince. (Egwene, of course, is quietly very jealous that Rand said the princess was cute, because Robert Jordan solved feminist fantasy forever.  Egwene, whom we may recall was cheerfully all up in that Traveller boy's business a few... weeks ago?  I'm fuzzy on timelines here.)  Perrin mentions the Travellers, which sets Loial talking about the Travellers who wanted to learn the tree songs from the ogiers back in his home stedding of Shangtai--

Wot.

I can cope with a lot of this nonsense, I really can.  I can roll with Mosk and Merk the warring giants, and I will roll with the cool descriptions of places and vitally important magical locations and objects that we'll apparently never see again, but when the ever-helpful non-human servitor-race guy comes from a place called Shangtai I just want to bite through someone's neck.  I desperately hope that's just a throwaway thing and not an indication that the ogiers are going to be the fantasy Asians here.  It's bad enough Rand is apparently a pasty redhead of the noble desert tribes.

Loial gets around to repeating a story that the Dark One seeks to blind the Eye of the World, and Egwene and Perrin mention hearing the same from the Travellers, and the boys finally get around to admitting to Moiraine that they've been having dreams with the devil hassling them.  Praise be to Gargamel, no more attempting to draw out tension by having people just not talk.  (For now.)

Moiraine concludes that all three boys are ta'veren (what, not Egwene and Nynaeve, previously described as potentially the most powerful wizards of the age?) and they need to leave Caemlyn immediately by unorthodox means.  She also gives us this destiny explanation:

"Sometimes being ta'veren means the Pattern is forced to bend to you, and sometimes it means the Pattern forces you to the needed path."

So... how is that different from regular free will and chance, then?  People are self-evidently bad at prophecy, so it's not like you can tell in advance whether you're making a choice because you choose to or because you've been chosen to, so what are the practical consequences of this?  It sounds like an excuse to go about your life in a normal way but make regular exclamations about how mystical it all is.  "You stole my last cupcake!" "No, I was fated to eat the last cupcake."

Actually, that could be a fun way to live.  Try it out and report back in the comments.

Speaking of which, Moiraine and Loial debate for about a page on how to leave the city, using the Ways that they can reach from a Waygate that is probably buried under the New City and will lead them to Fal Dara that was once known as Mafal Dadaranell.  (That deluge of unexplained capitalisation is a taste of what this book is like without me as your buffer.  I do actually sometimes appreciate Jordan's persistence in giving things names that change over time, like how Mafal Dadaranell's name clearly got abbreviated, but good lord, does everything on this planet have a business card the size of a surfboard?)  Loial exclaims that if they enter the ways they will all die or "be swallowed by the Shadow", and on that no-context salvo of 'dun, dun, DUNNNNNNN', the chapter abruptly ends.  The next chapter starts up immediately on the next line, no scene break or anything, which makes that a really, really odd point to choose to cut us off, but I think I can live with it.

Next time: backstory, dimension-tunnelling, and Moiraine's instincts for manipulating the narrative.

The Eye of the World, chapters 30, 31, 32, and 33, in which a montage could have done all this work in six pages

Sorry about the lack of post last week; I was apparently run ragged (I don't know how) and needed to pass out for many, many hours.  In an attempt to make up for it, I shall forge ahead through four chapters today.  Gods have mercy on our et cetera.

When last we left, I was doing my absolute damnedest to read Elyas' conversation with Perrin as "Dude, WTF" and "Yes, you are right manwolf, that was a very WTF thing for me to think", as opposed to the trainwreck I now believe it to be, in which Perrin is all "Wow, that was awful of me" and Elyas be like "Naw, dog, your plan was way better than getting eaten by ravens, don't worry that you didn't ask her if she wanted you to pre-emptively murder her".

This the first of like a fifteen-book series that is basically the icon of fantasy literature for the end of the millennium and everyone's just okay with that.  Send help.

(Content: violence, animal death, misogyny.)

The Eye of the World: p. 440--512

Perrin and Elyas are still arguing about who's got a right to kill whom when the wolves beam a warning into their heads and they rush back to obliterate their camp in a panic.  Elyas whisper-shouts for Egwene to douse the fire:

She rose to her feet, staring at him uncertainly, then stepped closer to the fire, but slowly, clearly not understanding what was happening.  Elyas pushed roughly past her and snatched up the tea kettle , cursing when it burned him.  Juggling the hot pot, he upended it over the fire just the same.

My first question: after weeks on the run and facing death that very afternoon, why are we to believe that Egwene--quick-witted, daring Egwene--would just not clue in that she needed to hurry when she spotted Perrin and Elyas sprinting toward her with hissed warnings to douse the fire?

My second question: how daft does Elyas have to be to not realise that pouring water all over a fire is going to create an enormous plume of steam towering over their campsite and marking it better than a properly-shielded flame ever could?

My answer to both these questions: Egwene understands the danger, you incompetent wannabe lycanthrope, but she knows that the safe way to kill the fire is to smother it and she's looking for the appropriate tools to do so, since you, Hairy Manly Survivalist, didn't think to prepare something in advance, no doubt because you were too busy unbending weeds behind yourself to exactly the most natural 82-degree angle?

I look back fondly on the days when I liked Elyas, but, as I might have guessed, Egwene the True Protagonist remains the only worthy person present.

With the fire doused and the girl chastised for her girly lack of initiative, Elyas immediately determines that there's no way of actually hiding their camp, and so they have to split up before the danger gets here, not that he's willing to spare a breath to say what the danger is, though he does say that it's not the ravens, which seems unnecessarily uninformative.  Finally, as they ride away, Perrin says that the wolves saw a great bunch of humans on horses, and "they smell wrong [...] the way a rabid dog smells wrong."

There's a lot wrong with that comparison, as we shall shortly see, but first they have to scamper away into the darkness where Perrin (who has already revealed he's mind-linked with the wolves) lies about his newfound night-vision to Egwene.  Egwene, literally and figuratively in the dark, proves to still be the best person by trying to reassure Perrin of their safety and get his mind off the danger (she asks if he'll dance with her if they're home by Sunday, which I take to mean the midsummer festival).  Perrin is treated to a four-camera telepathic slasher flick as the humans and horses hunt the wolves in the dark and get mauled over and over again.  Eventually, they're spotted hiding anyway, and we find out these people are Whitecloaks, though Perrin maintains there's something unusually evil about this batch.  Perrin's about to surrender at lancepoint when Hopper, the wolf who loved to jump and wished he could fly, leaps in to the rescue, begins slaughtering, dies in a heroic sacrifice, and Perrin goes into a berserker rage before blacking out.

We have now had two sympathetic characters die, Thom and Hopper, and they both got biographical retrospectives within a couple of pages of their deaths.  Is this going to be a thing?  Are we going to have a bunch of two-dimensional characters running around until it's time for them to die, at which point they abruptly get a poignant backstory stapled on?  It works much better here than it did for Thom, but that has everything to do with wolf telepathy and not with Jordan finding his groove on the whole death-by-backstory thing.

They waken, heavily bound, in a Whitecloak tent, where the inexplicably malicious Byar gives the gaunt Lord Captain their post-fight statistics, drastically overestimating the number of wolves they fought and inventing a bunch of Darkfriends as well.  The Lord Captain knows better, and introduces himself as Geofram Bornhald, which I think makes him an ancestor of the dude back in Baerlon?  There's much questioning and threatening (Perrin gets smacked with his own axe) and wild theorising by Byar before Perrin and Egwene put together a pretty solid half-true cover story, but they make the mistake of naming Shadar Logoth, which convinces the Lord Captain that they've still lied about something.  He insists no one is irredeemable, especially Egwene, but some punishment awaits Perrin, who axed a couple of whitecloaks before he passed out.  Conveniently, they're on their way to Caemlyn as well (they Must Not Be Late, though of course we're not told for what) so I'm not overly concerned that Perrin will get anywhere near his gibbet.

I realise that this point (as I should have long ago) that Egwene and Perrin have been split off from the main party to be our ripoffs of Merry and Pippin, minus the other heroes' desperate and sympathetic search for them.  Hoping against hope that Egwene is also our Gandalf the White and saves the day with sweet wizardry.

Chapter Thirty-One: Play for Your Supper

All good things come to an end, by which I mean it's a Rand chapter next.  The first several pages mostly assure us that nothing unpredictable has happened or will ever again happen: Rand and Mat are headed to Caemlyn, they hide in hedges and such whenever they see dust trails on the road ahead or behind, Mat is still ensorcelled by his evil dagger, and Thom is still dead.  Villages they pass make them homesick and there's an evil voice whispering demoralising things in Rand's head.  They can't sell their stuff for cash (no economy to take a heron sword or a ruby dagger), and they don't like thieving (mostly because of ever-present watchdogs).

Occasionally they do a few hours' work on a farm in exchange for room and board, but Rand gets nervous because this is time the Fades have to catch up with them.  One extended episode at the Grinwell farm concerns Rand's desperate efforts not to have sex with the eldest daughter.  Let me pause to note here that we're more than 460 pages in and I have no idea why Rand desperately wants to not have sex with this hot farmgirl.  He's not promised or devoted to Egwene; he's barely mentioned her in chapters, although he's had enough turned-on reactions to make me think he's not asexual.  Is he just generally nervous?  Afraid of the consequences if they get caught?  Is he a member of a religion with strict rules on sexual conduct?  (I did some googling just to check up on Jordan's religion, which he described as "High Church Episcopalian", which is a welcome change from the intense LDS theology and morality underlying so much of Orson Scott Card's works.  And Brandon Sanderson, for that matter, who finished WOT after Jordan's death.)

But my point is more that while this book's character exploration has at least been more show than tell, it still hasn't actually shown us much of anything.  I know nothing about what Rand wants in life that would explain to me why he'd do everything to subtly indicate to a farmlady that he wanted her to stop her hot daughter from getting in his pants.  I know more about the architecture of cities our characters have never been than I do about Our Hero's values.  What's up with that?  Is he meant to be a cipher, a blank slate onto which The Reader can project Himself?  IS RAND AL'THOR THE ORIGINAL BELLA SWAN?!

Anyway, Rand starts playing the flute and Mat starts juggling (as Thom taught them), and they are able to make much better time, earning rooms in inns and aboard merchants' carts:

If there was more than one inn in a village, the innkeepers would bid for them once they heard Rand's flute and saw Mat juggle. Together they still did not come close to a gleeman, but they were more than most villages saw in a year.

A year?  These poor bastards live in the worst of all possible worlds.  A few days' flute tutelage (or 'flutelage') makes Rand a better musician than anyone in the average town?  My god.  Let the Dark One win.

Chapter Thirty-Two: Four Kings in Shadow

Four Kings is mentioned at the end of chapter 31, ominously, and proves to be a small town that gets a full page of description to start with, which is more than we can say for Rand's identity.  It's dusty and barren and the women are getting catcalled so badly that "even Mat gave a start at some of them".  (I assume Mat didn't try to get naked with the farmgirl because he's in a devoted relationship with his cursed dagger, which is also a clearer explanation than we have for Rand.)  The misogyny continues with an innkeeper who slaps a barmaid for dissing the local musician, further driving home that these are terrible people, though Rand and Mat do zero to protest her treatment and 'these men hate women' does not feature on Rand's list of reasons he doesn't like the town.  The grime is much more important.  So here I guess we have another example of highlighting misogyny in order to make dudely readers feel better about themselves (they would never do such a thing) while also letting them glide past it instead of having to engage or, y'know, do anything at all ever.  (Rand does threaten the innkeeper with violence if he gives them less than the food and bedding they agree upon.  Priorities: sorted.)

There's some basic but serviceable foreshadowing with the occasional thunder and rising pressure as a storm rolls into town and finally bursts as they play.  Casual violence and sexual harassment of barmaids continues to be the order of the day.  (Rand is baffled that any of the women stay and put up with this treatment, and I'm just going to repeat what I said back in Speaker for the Dead: There are a lot of answers to that question, because people won't stop asking it, because they don't want any answer except the one they've already got, which is that if she stays, it's her own fault.)  Rand and Mat agree that the evil skinny innkeeper is definitely going to rob them, but they don't leave because they're still ravenous and they don't want to sleep in a rainstorm.  I'll spare y'all the prolonged pseudo-detective business that goes into working out that the one fancy dude who shows up at the inn and makes everyone uncomfortable is a rich merchant from Whitebridge who is definitely a Darkfriend.

The rest of the evening is unsurprising but serviceable Our Heroes Are Trapped tension-building, which I'd probably enjoy if I actually cared about anyone here.  The innkeeper and his bouncers are menacing, the inn is described in effective decrepit terms, and as Mat and Rand try to pry the bars off their room's window, they are engaged by the merchant, Howal Gode, who does not pretend even slightly to not be a nefarious villain.  The most interesting thing to get out of his monologuing is that he believes Rand and Mat are two of the new Dreadlords who will meet the devil when he awakens.  I say 'interesting' because for all the random fantasy bits thrown at us, we don't actually understand how pretty much anything is structured, and I'm inexplicably hoping that 'Dreadlord' is actually a title of some defined meaning which will shed further light on bad guy logistics if we ever get it defined.  I don't know why I think that's going to happen any time soon.  Maybe I'm just excited that the bad guys have prophecies too.

Our Heroes are saved by a bolt of lightning that happens to hit the inn at the exact moment that Rand silently wishes for "a way out", HINT HINT, and he and Mat make their getaway in the rain as Gode's lackeys smoulder on the ground.  Wow, saved at the last moment by improbability that precisely lined up with the simultaneous wishes of the character.  Again.  It's almost like there's magic in this world.

Chapter Thirty-Three: The Dark Waits

We ALL wait, Dark.  You're not special.  You're waiting for the end of all things, I'm waiting for a plot development.  Want to take bets on which of us will get what we want first?  Come on, I'll give you odds.

We cut to Rand and Mat riding into another village on a farmer's wagon, where they see uniformed Queen's Guards on patrol, and in a startling development, some worldbuilding actually answers my questions: Rand's never seen Queen's Guards before, and he reflects that he's vaguely aware his hometown is part of the kingdom of Andor, but they never have problems so big that they can't be settled with a meeting among a few villages' councils.  (He specifically mentions Village Councils, which y'all will recall are entirely made up of men, while the Women's Circles apparently aren't involved.  So feminist, y'all.)

Oh, lord.  After they hop off the farmer's wagon and keep walking for Carysford, we then cut back to the end of the last chapter so Jordan can detail for us every single that happened after the lightning strike.  I was not feeling deprived.  This turns out to be yet another dream, in which he is somehow able to confirm that the evil Gode is dead because Rand meets Ba'alzamon wearing his charred corpse like a snuggie.  Rand wakes up when he gets a fireball to the face, and Mat wakes up at the same time screaming about having lost his eyes, leading to Rand cradling Mat tenderly in the dark. (For the record, as much as I dislike most of these characters most of the time, I'm still 100% in favour of them being gay, bi, trans, or really anything other than hetero cis dudes with gender roles instead of bone marrow.

It's practically a montage: more villages and nourishing stew and gifts from farmers who would do more but always include the two-word sentence "My family" as an explanation to why they can't get more involved, more random villagers turning out to be Darkfriends, more questions raised in my mind about how and when Ba'alzamon is capable of making telepathic contact with his minions.  In another inn, Rand suddenly falls ill with chills, then fever, then hallucinations, which go on for pages and tell us nothing about anything or anyone.  The woman who arrives to try to treat him also turns out to be a Darkfriend, who tries to murder Rand with a magic burning dagger, and Rand has to give the usual they-are-evil-but-we-are-not speech in order to keep Mat from killing her before they stagger away.

The chapter ends with them getting on the wagon that we saw them getting off in the first scene of this same chapter, which is basically a metaphor for this entire series and also the Sisyphean hell in which I have trapped myself.  It's not that this chapter was badly written at all, it had solid imagery and creepy stuff and I can legitimately feel the exhaustion that Our Heroes are forcing their way through.  The problem ain't that.  The problem is that we're on page 512 and this book is made of filler.

Next week: they make it to Caemlyn, but your guess is as good as mine whether anything actually happens there.

The Eye of the World, chapters eleven, twelve, and thirteen, in which Rand's protagonism is revoked

It seriously takes them a chapter and a half to cross a ferry.  We pause for the anti-Sesame-Street moment about hating on strangers, and I see at least some indications of why this is considered a more feminist story than Tolkien--though frankly, these chapters also make it obvious that Egwene would have been a vastly better protagonist in every way.

The Eye of the World: p. 148--191

Chapter Eleven: The Road to Taren Ferry

For a couple of pages, Rand recaps where everyone is in their formation of horse-riders fleeing the monsters, and resolves to hang back to protect Egwene if her horse (his old reliable Bela) falls behind, because he is Brave and Chivalrous and suspects Moiraine and Lan don't really care if she makes it or not.  They reach Watch Hill and Mat and Perrin start talking about spending the night at the inn, and I can't decide if this is meant to be ironic.  Fellowship of the Ring, as I've noted before, basically starts with a weeks-long pub crawl as Frodo very slowly moves out of the Shire, sometimes spending months at a new place before shifting another town over.  Mat and Perrin seem to think they might be on a similar sort of journey, and Lan is all 'lol no, we keep going'.  In a welcome moment of realism, Rand points out that the horses are already run to exhaustion, but Moiraine is also all 'lol no, I cast Mass Empower Horse'. and they're instantly refreshed (though she exhausts herself).

Then they are overtaken by a flurry of similes:

A scream ripped the darkness, a sound like a man dying under sharp knives [....] The wind of the Draghkar's wings beat at Rand with a feel like the touch of slime, like chittering in the dank dimness of a nightmare.

I am 100% guilty of writing like this sometimes, I love a good simile like Haruka loves Michiru, but I like them to make sense, and I'm not sure how wind can beat at a person like chittering.  The idea of slimy wind is also weird but comprehensible, and that would have done the job.  (Also, how much does Rand know about what people sound like while being murdered with sharp knives?  Has he been hanging out with Wickerman al'Summerisle?)  The horses panic, but Lan gets everyone going again, and Rand hopes no one notices that he instinctively drew his sword like he was going to fight the draghkar.

More fleeing and monster shrieks:

Egwene's face in the moonlight was smiling in excited delight. Her braid streamed behind like the horses' manes, and the gleam in her eyes was not all from the moon, Rand was sure.

Is he implying that her eyes are literally glowing?  Because that would be suspicious.  More likely it's supposed to indicate that she's enjoying this way too much, which: Rand, I am demoting you to sidekick and giving the role of protagonist to Egwene, because so far she's way cooler than you.

Moiraine cloaks them all with thick noise-cancelling fog (Rand spends half a page angsting about the health risks of breathing in girl-magic) until they ride into Taren Ferry, a town we are told full of snobby folk who look down upon Rand's villages, and coincidentally are all thieves and cheaters themselves.  No sense of irony here, I guess, but that's what happens when your protagonists are Objectively Honest Rural Folks--other people just have to cope with their own inadequacies and jealousy.  An introspective sort of person might wonder if perhaps their own preconceived notions about strangers aren't reflected in the preconceived notions held by strangers, and whether the obvious wrongness about the slander strangers spout doesn't hint at the possibility that one has unthinkingly absorbed prejudices oneself.  There are no introspective people here.  Lan tracks down the ferryman and pours gold into his hands until he agrees to take them across immediately.

Chapter Twelve: Across the Taren

As they march to the boat, Rand overhears Moiraine talking about the ferryman remembering "too much as it is", and not wanting him to see more of her.  I don't know if there's meant to be an implication that Moiraine can erase people's memories, but I'm going to assume she can and that she doesn't want to, which is a point in her favour.

Thom, Mat, and Perrin are all muttering about food, but Egwene continues pleased:

There must be a difference in what you saw, it seemed to him, depending on whether you sought adventure or had it forced on you. The stories could no doubt make galloping through a cold fog, with a Draghkar and the Light alone knew what else chasing you, sound thrilling. Egwene might be feeling a thrill; he only felt cold and damp and glad to have a village around him again, even if it was Taren Ferry.

I love meta and all, but this just drives home the point I mentioned above, that Egwene should be the protagonist here and Rand is unnecessary.  Fantasy is already full of reluctant farmboy heroes, and I don't think Rand is breaking new narrative ground with his grumpiness.  Give me a scared but enthusiastic hero, please.

We get a full page of the menfolk making their weapons obvious to the burly ferry-pullers, including the gleeman parlour-tricking a dagger into his fingers from nowhere, eliciting claps and giggles from Egwene and smiling from Moiraine, I kid you not.  The dudes are acting tough and the gals are applauding.  That's what's happening right now.  I want to bite someone.

They cross over slowly, and--oh, really?  Rand asks Lan if he really thinks the ferry crew was thinking about robbing them, and Lan basically says 'Hey, I heard the rumours in your town; I thought you knew these guys were all thieves' and Rand feels bashful about not believing it.  That's our moral of the story: rumours about Rival Town are true and it's silly to think they might just be okay folks like us.  (None of Rand and company have ever been here before, so they have zero personal experience, just optimism to work from.)

On the far bank, Lan pays up, tips the pullers individually, and pays more when a 'freak whirlpool' obliterates the ferry they've just stepped off, such that, as Moiraine unsubtly points out, no one else will be able to cross for a while.  Mat starts to ask if she did it, but Moiraine is very 'I'm getting you to Tar Valon, don't make me justify everything I do'.  She does, however, take a minute to brag about how she extended her fog miles down the river, which will convince the Fade that they fled by boat rather than land, and she is super smart and talented.  Rand reminds us again that "He did not think the shine in [Egwene's] eyes was all from moonlight."  Girl's apparently got LCD retinas.

They stop at a tree grove where Lan apparently previously predicted they might need to rest, and so left dry wood and such.  There is much camping, angsting about the threat of having Moiraine magically re-energise them, and the dangers therein.  Moiraine is busy talking to Egwene about magic, male saidin and female saidar that make up the One Power, the evil taint on saidin, and how she sees in Egwene the potential to be a natural wielder.

"You are very close to your change, your first touching. It will be better if I guide you through it. That was you will avoid the... unpleasant effects that come to those who must find their own way."

Moiraine and Egwene practice together with a crystal, and Egwene manages to get a tiny flicker of light out of it, to Rand's deep dismay and her own exultant joy.  I'm so glad I made Egwene the protagonist, because Rand is just a twerp now.  Egwene just got told "You're a wizard, Harry" and Rand is busy anger-moping because a woman just helped his crush better understand her first touching and now it's like they don't even need men at all.  (Lan quietly contemplates telling Rand to lay off the Axe bodyspray and fedoras.  Mat quietly contemplates asking Perrin if he likes stories about gladiators.)

Chapter Thirteen: Choices

Moiraine goes to each of them in turn and gives them Magic Headrubs that purge their aches and exhaustion.  She can't do the same for herself, and she refuses food (oh my god can we have one book where wanting food sometimes isn't treated as a weakness) and curls up by the fire.  They all wake up super-rested and take off, Mat and Perrin still talking about how soon they'll get to go home, and then it's time for a week of travel montage.  Lan also starts teaching them combat; they're all already amazing archers (this is so improbable) but there's plenty to learn about the axe and sword.  Lan visibly fails to react when Rand explains that he already knows 'the flame and the void' that Lan starts explaining.  In case we forgot that Rand's adoptive dad was a super fencer.

One morning Egwene wakes up, unbraids her hair, and brushes it out a hundred times, to Rand's consternation.  (He counted the hundred strokes.)  Egwene just says that Aes Sedai don't braid their hair unless they want to, so, implicitly, screw village traditions.  Rand continues to be uncomfortable with his non-girlfriend's acceptance of her own body and attributes, and implies all non-Moiraine Aes Sedai are minions of Satan.  They end up shouting at each other until shushed by Lan.  Mat and Perrin discuss turning south up ahead to go on adventures, since they obviously ditched the monsters for good back at the ferry, but Indisputable Badass Moiraine informs them that they're still hunted by the Dark One, she opposes anything the Dark One wants, and therefore she'd rather kill them all herself than let them be captured.

Next night, Rand snoops on Egwene's magic lessons, and overhears a listing of the Five Powers, "Earth, Wind, Fire, Water, and Spirit".

But is this the true face of the Dragon... or of the Dark One?

Egwene wants Moiraine to confirm it was only male wizards who screwed up the world, and Moiraine refuses to answer, instead talking about fear and potential and unsubtly indicating that Egwene was not the only potential wizard in her village.  Egwene refuses to be thrown off, anen:

"Well, it was the men, but they were no more wicked than any men. They were insane, not evil."

LOW BAR SURPASSED!  This is the least ableism we've had since Ender's "I'm crazy but I'm okay" line, but here it's explicitly stated as a fact relevant to morality and to understanding the context of actions!  (There's no space given to the idea of degrees of culpability, the distinction between 'fully sane' and 'responsible for one's actions' or 'trustworthiness', but like I said: low bar.)

They finally arrive at the city of Baerlon, which leaves all the farmboys agape at its vastness, though Lan scoffs at calling it a city.  Moiraine says the dangers is greater here, what with magic-haters and Darkfriends about, and so they'll have to go about hidden under cloaks and using fake names.  Yes, good, everyone pull your cloaks up on this sunny day.  That will avoid attracting attention.

Just waiting for the bus, don't mind me.  Need to drop by the bakery.  For pie.  Yeah. 

The gatekeeper recognises Lan and Moiraine, already knows their fake names, and warns them that there are Children of the Light in the city (people who, Rand has heard, hate Aes Sedai and Darkfriends equally).  He's also heard that the Aes Sedai who went to fight the false Dragon have suffered casualties, and that the Dragon marches on the fortress called the Stone of Tear.  Apparently this is relevant to "the Karaethon Cycle", also called "the Prophecies of the Dragon", which says that "the Stone of Tear will never fall until the People of the Dragon come" and "the Stone will never fall till the Sword That Cannot Be Touched is wielded by the Dragon's hand".

I'm so glad this chapter is almost over.

Said untouchable sword is in found in the Heart of the Stone of Tear, and no one knows what it is or whether it's a sword at all.  Rand questions how it can be wielded by the Dragon before the city falls if he can't get at it until he's already conquered, and gets brushed off, because Rand at least continues to have his gift for genre savviness and has detected an obvious prophecy twist coming.  (My guess is that Rand will wield the sword in hopes of defending Tear from the false Dragon, but they'll lose the city anyway for some reason.)

They finally pick the lock on a gate to an inn (that seems unnecessary) and the innkeeper happily welcomes them (with their fake names) to the Stag and Lion, and the women excitedly rush for baths.  Women, with their hatred of filthiness, ugh.

Next month: I'm not sure what posting schedules will be like through December, what with weekend RPGs and visiting family and all that, but I will endeavour to keep up the usual weekly pace.

The Eye of the World, chapters five, six, and seven, in which the plot begins

I started reading The Fault in our Stars this weekend, and while I don't think I could or would want to do a full series on it (most of all because I've never been directly impacted by someone's terminal disease before), I might toss a bonus post or two up about it sometime soon, because when it's good it's pretty dang good, and when it's bad it's all OH JOHN GREEN NO.  We'll see how the rest of the book goes first.

The Eye of the World: p. 62--103

Chapter Five: Winternight

Starting us off on a light but confusing note, the first page, describing the al'Thor house, looks like it's supposed to be full of double entendres:

Tam and Rang were considered out of the ordinary as much for being two men living alone as for farming in the Westwood.

'Alone' except for all the other bachelor merchants and farmboys who stop by to keep them company, of course.  Quite out of the ordinary, yes, quite strange, quite, quite queer.

The house was still in a tidy state of repair, the thatch tightly mended and the doors and shutters well-hung and snug-fitting.

Well, I mean, who doesn't like well-hung shutters snugly fitting into their tight thatch?

Apologies; I'm twelve.  Moving on.

They scope out the unspooked animals and the untainted well and decide the Black Rider wasn't here, set about doing various chores, keeping their bow and spear close at hand, making Traditional Fantasy Stew for dinner, et cetera, et cetera, pages of this.  When they finally head inside, it is extremely cozy and all the wars and magic feel very far away.  Dad al'Thor nevertheless locks the doors, for the first time in Rand's memory, because no one ever locks their doors, which causes me to wonder why they have locks at all.  Dad also busts out the secret family sword, which, by its slight curve (stop snickering), single sharp side, and heron designs, I'm guessing is a katana or wakizashi.  Robert Jordan is giving his Quaint English Whitebread farmboy hero a katana.

How exactly did all of these tropes get associated with fanfiction when best-selling authors with endless heaps of praise to their name have been doing it for years?  (Gatekeeping and sexism, the answers are gatekeeping and sexism.)

Dad al'Thor bought it a long time ago, although Mom disapproved, and he comments grimly about how impractical it is to a farmer's life and he should have given it away.  Obviously that means he's never practised all these years and so won't know what he's doing, right?  Nope.  A minotaur bursts through the locked door, Rand throws the kettle at it, and Dad kills it in a single thrust, and then the next one that comes in after it, instant-death blows that in the real world are generally reserved for decapitation.  Dad shouts for Rand to run and hide in the cold dark woods full of monsters.  Dad has made a series of bad decisions today and this might be a winner.  Rand scrambles out a window as monsters burst in the back door, there is much scurrying and echoes of steel hitting steel (so much for that beautiful unmangled sword), and Dad busts out the front window (inexplicably immune to glass shards) and leads the monsters off on a chase as Rand stumbles fearfully through the woods.  They reunite and Dad explains that the minotaurish things are Trollocs, our signature Always Chaotic Evil race.  (I have an asexual friend who remains delighted that this forms the acronym ACE.)

Dad's weak and bleeding, so Rand takes the sword and goes back to the farmhouse (sheep all slaughtered, house all wrecked) to get geared up.  One Trolloc turns out to have faked its death to lie in wait, and haltingly tells Rand to wait and talk to the Myrdraal that's coming, which is also called a Fade, so now we have two new Capitalised Names for one being without the slightest clue what it is.  (It is apparently a very tall monster.)  It then helps Rand perform the Traditional First Farmboy Hero Kill by leaping at him, and he gets his sword up just in time for it to impale itself as it tackles him to the floor.  He loots what he can from the ruin of their home, chops up a broken cart axle with the sword (even Rand realises this is improbable) and runs with it all back to Dad al'Thor, who is feverish and having nightmares and must be taken to Rivendell Emond's Field as soon as possible.

So, quaint rural homeland, Black Rider, slightly magic sword received from father figure, Morgul wound, orcs speaking the Black Tongue, need for a druid healer to cure a cursed wound... I mean, wow.  I honest to Eru Iluvatar did not expect Wheel of Time to be this severe a knockoff of Lord of the Rings.

Chapter Six: The Westwood

Rand binds his dad's wounds, al'Guyvers a stretcher out of the axles and blankets, and starts dragging him through the woods, with much narrative emphasis on how scary this is and he's only alive by luck and his sword-and-sorcery-adventure daydreams never involved anything this grim.  How old is Rand?  Sixteen?  I like him more the younger I picture him, because this all becomes more impressive and I have less desire to tell him to just shut up and do the job already.  He drags his dad through the woods (with constant yelps of pain when they go over rocks and roots).  From Dad al'Thor's epic babbling, he's either reciting legends or he had a much more heroic unmarried life than we were led to believe.  The Black Rider shows up on the road, leading the trollocs, but they go unnoticed.  Is the town screwed?  I think the town is screwed.  Especially once Rand starts extended descriptions of what the party will be like when everything settles down and they can finally take their new yacht for a spin after that police detective finishes his last day on the job.

Dad al'Thor is muttering more 'nonsense' about cuttings from the Tree of Life, Avendesora, which Rand al'Expositions to us belongs to the Green Man, who is also just legend (like trollocs, Rand admits).  He then fever-talks his way through a story of finding a baby in the snow after a battle and how he knew Kari wanted children and Rand is a good name, and Rand is genre-savvy enough to realise on the spot that this means he was adopted, which is on the one hand implausible and on the other hand oh thank god we're not having that drawn out too much.  I mean, if you must be that blatant, let the hero clue in as soon as the reader.

Chapter Seven: Out of the Woods

Is that a pun, because they're literally and figuratively out of the woods, or ironic, because things aren't going to get any better?  I appreciate good wordplay.  Good wordplay.

As day breaks and Rand is a hungry aching golem trudging through the woods, he finally reaches Emond's Field, which is indeed half burnt-down.  However, there are plenty of survivors picking through the wreckage, and Egwene leads them to Nynaeve, who takes a look at Dad al'Thor and reports that he's beyond any help she can give.  Tough luck, Tam.  At best you were going to be Obi-Wan, but it looks like you're Uncle Owen.  (Still a better role than Mother Organa.)  There is much milling and description and encounters with sympathetic villagers.  The mayor explains that the mysterious visitors are indeed and Aes Sedai and a Warder, and they saved what's left of the village via lightning magic and deadly swordplay, and finally someone remembers that Aes Sedai have healing magic as well.  But, despite the way Everyone Knows that women are the only ones who can safely use magic, Everyone Also Knows that you never want to get mixed up with their help, either, and Rand's first instinct is intense repulsion at the thought.  Even in a world where women are the preferred mages and they charge into battle to protect random villages from monsters, the menfolk might rather watch their father die from a Not-Morgul Blade wound than ask one for help.

Light, is there a story with an Aes Sedai where she isn't a villain?

I ask you.  If literally every story about Aes Sedai casts them as villains, they should be many times more terrifying than trollocs in the common consciousness, and yet still people talk about them fighting the evil False Dragons and such.  Moiraine just saved everyone's lives, so thinking she might help makes sense, but their response to her rescue wasn't 'Holy wonderballs, there's an Aes Sedai and she's helping us, oh my god, oh my god, what is this life', it was to get back to sifting the wreckage and leave her to burn the trolloc corpses with her buddy Lan.  They should be acting like Darth Vader showed up to save them all.  And then they start talking about how she's got healing magic, which--if Aes Sedai are in the habit of healing people in extreme circumstances, how do they have such a bad rep?  Are they all satanically going around demanding people's first-born children in exchange for curing a severe case of Legs Chopped Off?  Who invented this prejudice?

Rand finds them (Lan is busy with the trolloc bodies, having found sigils from seven separate clans now) and manages to ask for help from Moiraine, regardless of the cost.  She is of course happy to help (everyone else keeps refusing her), although she moves slowly, tired from all that magicking.  Lan remarks that "Even with an angreal, what she did last night was like running around the village with a sack of stones on her back", and for those of you who spend your time doing productive things unlike myself, I'll note that 'sangreal' is an old term for the Holy Grail, so we're still flush with random Arthurian references.

This is a bit of a short post, but that tends to be how it goes when chapters are 90% descriptions of settings and the way people are running around in them.  One of the explanations I heard for WOT's length, long ago, was that Robert Jordan only planned for it to be four books, but when they started selling so well he was asked to extend the series, and did so with gusto.  But we're more than a hundred pages in now and we're at the point I would probably have called the end of chapter two if I were writing this book, so I'm skeptical of this claim.  A lot of the material isn't bad, it's just filler, and not especially brilliant filler either.  There's some poetry, there's some realism, but it's also just very forgettable text.  I feel like this is the cheese sandwich of fantasy: popular, tasty enough, but just not that much going on except that afterwards you have food inside you.  The problem so far is that the worldbuilding doesn't really make sense yet and I don't care much about what happens to the sandwich, let alone whether the sandwich's father lives or dies.

The Eye of the World, chapters 3 and 4, in which people talk more

Sorry about the delayed post.  This was a tiring weekend, and Sunday evening I finally cracked EOTW open again and the awareness that I was 35 pages in and nothing has actually happened washed over me like a pile of sodden blankets.  Okay.  Let's do this thing.

(Content: ableism, misogyny. Fun content: more Mallory Ortberg and a secret game of Trivial Pursuit.)

The Eye of the World: p. 32--61

Chapter Three: The Peddler

I really thought this book would take forever to dissect, but it saves a lot of time when I can summarise four dense pages with 'the peddler is a source of outside news and Rand has an emergency backup friend named Perrin, who is stocky'.  The peddler is all theatrical and tells the villagers that just getting eaten by wolves is tame compared to the bad stuff happening elsewhere in the world, like war in Ghealdan.  Apparently someone's popped up claiming to be the Dragon and everyone wants to murder him or murder for him.

"Just as bad as the Dark One!" 

"The Dragon broke the world, didn't he?" 

"He started it! He caused the Time of Madness!" 

"You know the prophecies! When the Dragon is reborn, your worst nightmares will seem like your fondest dreams!"

No one particularly likes hanging out with the al'Exposition family, but no one can deny they're very efficient.  (Is the Time of Madness over, or is it still supposed to be ongoing?  It seems weird to name an era with the expectation that it's going to end.  If it's indefinite, then 'the Madness' seems better, but if you're naming it in order to convince people that it will end, maybe don't call it 'the Time of Madness'?)  Apparently the peddlers and merchants are the only source of this news, since no one in the village goes travelling far, which further raises the question if there isn't just a cartel agreement that everyone will tell the bumpkins about distant atrocities in order to justify higher prices.

The peddler further reports that this one who claims to be the Dragon is the first one who can wield the One Power, opening chasms and crushing walls with words and beckoning lightning at will, though this is all third- or fourth-hand information.  Ewin starts shouting about how men who channel the Power always go mad and die, because it's only safe for women, everyone should know that.  You know what?  I take back my previous compliment about efficient exposition, because this is page flipping thirty-seven and we're still just getting people shouting world-building at each other in a panic.  Women who wield the Power are apparently called Aes Sedai, and bringing them up is Not Appropriate for unclear reasons, but they're the only ones capable of fighting Dragon Dude.  The Dudely Council decide they need to interrogate the peddler directly, over booze, and patronisingly tell everyone else to go home and be patient about buying stuff.

Once again, nothing happens for a couple of pages, so let's talk about this whole 'Time of Madness' and 'the One Power makes men go mad' thing.  I mean, the superficial ableism is obvious--generic 'madness' as a violent affliction that inevitably results in murder and destruction--although I note that they talked about male magicians 'withering away' as well, so I hold out some vague hope that this 'madness' could actually have some nuance to it, and that depression and other such conditions (eating disorders?) might also be considered worthy of note, rather than just the Cackling Maniac style.  Yes, that is how far the bar has fallen here; I'm hoping that the Fantasy Madness might be more inclusive.  Because from here to Lovecraft and beyond fantasy is full of things that are so powerful that they make people 'go mad', and while that has all sorts of problems on a conceptual level, the fact that this madness always takes exactly the same stereotypical form of vaguely making a person hallucinate and talk to themselves and 'become a danger to themselves' is a whole additional level of ableism.  At this point I would actually be pleased to see a case where someone says "No, Rand, don't use the One Power, you will get clinical depression and lose all energy and motivation and feeling and stop eating and die and we don't have comprehensive pharmaceuticals yet" instead of "You'll murder us all because you'll go CaRAYzy".

Obviously Rand will end up wielding the One Power and being the Dragon Reborn--I mean, I know this for a fact, spoilers, but even otherwise I would know it because on the next page we learn two more things:

"The Dragon may have started it, but it was Aes Sedai who actually broke the world."

Women fucked up and obviously that means it's going to take a man to fix it.  (What do they mean, 'broke the world'?  I haven't seen any big cracks yet.)  And:

 "I heard a story once," Mat said slowly, "from a wool-buyer's guard. He said the Dragon would be reborn in mankind's greatest hour of need, and save us all."

Apparently lots of people believe this, but they don't say so because it makes the Aes Sedai angry.  So, obvs, the end of this book will concern the ascension of Rand to his true mantle as the Dragon and the hero who will save everyone.  At least I figure it'll be the end, because this fake Dragon will be the Book One villain.  Place your bets.  Apparently 'the stories' vary on whether the Aes Sedai are actually villains, which just confuses me more.  They're the established trustworthy magic users of the world, but some villagers don't believe they exist and some say they're 'Darkfriends' and oh my various deities could we maybe do something before we get introduced to yet another Unexplained Capitalised Title?

Nnnnope.  As they're all talking about the bad luck that befell a neighbour who had the audacity to "name the Dark One", Nynaeve the Wisdom finally makes her appearance.  She is a Strong Female Character, and therefore angry and weirdly violent--she carries a wooden switch for lashing people who displease her, despite her age and her tininess (she's barely shoulder-height to them, of course).  Nynaeve tells them all off, and then Rand notices she's accompanied by Egwene.

Of a height with Nynaeve, and with the same dark coloring, she could at that moment have been a reflection of Nynaeve's mood, arms crossed beneath her breasts, mouth tight with disapproval. [...] Her big brown eyes held no laughter now.

This is more description than any other person has received so far and it includes a completely unnecessary reference to the existence of her breasts, in case we weren't sure she was the love interest.  (Join me in assuming/insisting that "same dark coloring" means both these women have deep brown skin, regardless of whether this lines up with cover art or future adjectives.)  Egwene is two years younger than Rand (+5 to Love Interest) and he fumbles over trying to speak to her.  Nynaeve demands to know what's been going on, and concludes that she will have to take charge:

"The Council is questioning the peddler about what's happening in Gealdan, are they? If I know them, they're asking all the wrong questions and none of the right ones. It will take the Women's Circle to find out anything useful."

So, first: confirmation that the two ruling bodies of the village are the Normal People's Council and the Lady Council.  Second: Mallory Ortberg is a gift that humanity has not earned.

Egwene and Rand don't exactly flirt once she's gone, because they were issued Belligerent Sexual Tension in which Rand asks to dance with her and she agrees and then they spend the rest of the conversation disdaining each other--Rand realises for the first time ever that they're both going to reach 'marriageable age' at the same time, and says vaguely they it's no good rushing things, and Egwene says she might never marry because she's going to become Wisdom at some other village, and anyway she thinks it's not as if Rand would care if he never saw her again.

He rubbed his head in frustration. How to explain? This was not the first time she had squeezed meanings from his words that he never knew were in them. In he present mood, a misstep would only make matters worse, and he was fairly sure that nearly anything he said would be a misstep.

In conclusion: ugh, women, right?  Bro.  Bro.  Level with me.  Bro.  Women.  There's just no reasoning with them and they're so angry all the time for no reason.

It turns out Perrin also saw the Ringwraith black rider and Moiraine also gave him a coin to serve her, though of course Egwene thinks they're all jumping at shadows.

Chapter Four: The Gleeman

The gleeman that everyone's been tripping themselves over finally appears, bursting out of the inn, and Rand mostly notices that he has grey eyes (like Rand, and unlike everyone else in town).  He complains for half a page about how badly he's been treated in town, and was just menaced by Nynaeve, whom he of course insists should be off chasing boys.  He proceeds to describe all of the protagonists for us,Rand's height and grey eyes, Perrin's stockiness,comparing them to fantastical beasts.  Literally nothing is happening for pages except pointless banter and the seasoned traveller mocking the rural hicks.  I'm on page 50 of this book and I feel like I'm reading someone's warmup dialogue exercise.  He does a backflip, and juggles as he lists the stories he'll tell, including:

"Tales of great wars and great heroes, for the men and boys. For the woman and girls, the entire Aptarigine Cycle. Tales of Artur Paendrag Tanreall [...]"

First, why is the entire Aptarigine Cycle only suitable for women?  Does it have feelings in it?  Kissing?  Second: Artur Paendrag are you fucking with me Robert Jordan.  Okay.  Deep breaths, Wildman.  Hold it together.  This can--oh.  Egwene asks for stories about Lenn and Salya who travelled to the moon and stars in eagles made of fire, and I suddenly realise that we're going to get cute with the fourth wall.

"But I have all stories, mind you now, of Ages that were and will be. [....] I have all stories, and I will tell all stories. Tales of Mosk the Giant, with his Lance of fire that could reach around the world, and his wars with Elsbet, the Queen of All. Tales of Materese the Healer, Mother of the Wondrous Ind."

Okay.  So.   The whole 'eventually everything becomes legend' thing is getting hammered home and this is apparently happening in our distant future but maybe also the past because time is a Wheel.  I get that, and I'm potentially on board, but I'm deeply, deeply skeptical that this serves any particular purpose to the story, and it's yet again more spewing wink-nudge worldbuilding notions at me instead of having anything actually happen.  This is the difference between having a clever idea and having a story.

Fancy Lady Moiraine and the gleeman spot each other, polite but obviously not pleased to see each other, and then people start pouring out of the bar again and the gleeman runs off for booze.  The Dudely Council has decided to set up patrols around the area in conjunction with the other local villages, and all the boys want to sign up, but Rand's dad says they need to head back to the farm immediately.  On the way home, dad al'Thor explains the intricate village politics and crowd-managing that made it actually a good idea to scare everyone with the prospect of war and roaming mages and then rush off to secret council before eventually announcing their patrol plan.  I remain skeptical.  Also, it turns out that lots of teenage boys have been spotting the Ringwraith black rider (creeper), and so the patrols will be watching for him now too.  The chapter ends with Rand feeling better, knowing that together the villagers have nothing to fear from the rider.  I'm deeply disappointed he hasn't blown the whole place up yet.  Robert Jordan needed to embrace in medias res a little harder.