“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass,
leaving memories that become legend.
Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that
gave it birth comes again. In one Age,
called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose
in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was
not the beginning, there are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of
the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.”
– The Dragon Reborn, p. 31.
The Wheel of Time
is no longer simply a book series. As of
writing this the first four episodes of the television adaptation have been
released and while I do have plans to cover them in essay format, I will be
waiting until after all eight episodes of the first season have been
released. In the meantime, The Dragon
Reborn is the third book of The Wheel of Time and it’s opening
chapters mark the beginning of a shift in Robert Jordan’s series. The Great Hunt ended with Rand
declaring himself the Dragon Reborn, not entirely by choice, accepting that is
who he is even if he will still be grappling with what exactly that means, but The
Dragon Reborn begins some months after that to properly deal with the
fallout of what is a farm boy declaring himself a lord who is coming to save
the world. The prologue begins our shift
by following the style of prologue for The Eye of the World and The
Great Hunt in following characters who don’t get other points of view, in
this case Pedron Niall, Lord Captain Commander of the Children of the Light,
reacting to Rand’s declaration of being the Dragon Reborn. The entire idea is that Niall wishes to use
what he thinks is a false Dragon, yet is asking Jachim Carridin to bring him in
alive, due to plans to use the political upheaval to his own ends. This is the first time the reader is able to
see the politics of the wider world moving on their own. Carridin is revealed to be a Darkfriend after
the prologue gives us a section from his head (a Fade telling him to set out
and kill Rand against orders of Niall, because why would the Dark One be
interested in what the Whitecloaks are planning? It opens up the world oh so much, and while
these Whitecloak characters will reappear, the prologue itself is continuing
the slight trend of prologues getting longer.
Eventually they will reach a length of approximately 100 pages, and this
is where that begins.
When the novel begins proper, the frameshift becomes
all the more apparent with the point of view being not our typical opening with
Rand al’Thor, but with Perrin Aybara just outside of Rand’s camp. Perrin’s point of view is the point of view
for the first eight chapters, until Rand will eventually get some of the ninth
to him, before moving to Egwene. While these
may be slight spoilers for what’s coming, it’s actually really important to show
just how much the ending of The Great Hunt changes things. The Great Hunt was a book which didn’t
explicitly say the wedge was being driven away between Rand, Mat, and Perrin,
but The Dragon Reborn makes that clear.
Mat is gone, away for healing at the White Tower, Perrin is our point of
view, Rand is described as a lord, and Jordan has implemented a timeskip into
the next year. Immediately from Perrin’s
thought process there’s something there “I am tired o all this waiting, this
sitting while Moiraine holds is tight as tongs.
Burn the Aes Sedai! When will it end?...He sniffed the wind without
thinking. The smell of horse
predominated, and of men and men’s sweat. A rabbit had gone through those trees
not long since…He realized what he was doing and stopped it.” – The Dragon
Reborn, p. 32. Perrin is already
struggling against the wolves, attempting to not give in to animalistic
instincts and is being pushed away from Rand.
It’s Moiraine and Rand who are calling the shots, Moiraine who is
waiting for something, while Perrin is just tired. When his group finds the woman they’re
waiting for, a Tinker called Leya, he thinks this “Sad? I’m not sad, just. .
. . Light, I don’t know. There ought to
be a better way, that’s all.” – The Dragon Reborn, p. 39. Perrin is tired from the violence, he’s not a
fighter, he’s a blacksmith and because this is where we can actually see an extended
period in is head that informs just what is being shifted. It’s why the Tinkers are being brought back
into the story, to look at a possible outcome of this internal conflict.
The reader doesn’t actually see Rand until the second
chapter “Saidin”. The chapter has the
air of horror looming, Min sees that the Tinker woman is going to die. Perrin thinks he might be able to work out if
that means the camp is going to be attacked, but that’s not how Min’s viewings work
on a fundamental level. It’s here where we
get to see what Rand is doing, that is cracking slowly under the pressure of
being the Dragon Reborn. There is a
repeat of the prophecy of the herons and dragons which will mark the Dragon
Reborn. Perrin cannot entirely provide the
comfort that Rand needs, but does provide someone to confide in. The reader doesn’t get to see inside Rand’s
head here for the first time, so all we have is Perrin being calm and not
immediately answering the questions. There’s
the question of if Mat is safe at Tar Valon now, and when Perrin finds the
words, this is what happens ““Lately…I find myself wishing I was still a
blacksmith. Do you. . . . Do you wish you were still just a shepherd?” “Duty,” muttered Rand. “Death is lighter than
a feather, duty heavier than a mountain.
That’s what they say in Shienar. ‘The Dark One is stirring. The Last Battle is coming. And the Drgon Reborn has to face the Dark One
in the Last Battle, or the Shadow will cover everything. The Wheel of Time is broken…There’s only me...I
have the duty, because there isn’t anybody else, now is there?”” – The Dragon
Reborn, p. 51. Rand is visibly
breaking down, not going insane quite yet, but cracking under the pressure because
that is just what he is going to have to do.
This isn’t something that he wants to do, he hates it and has barely been
keeping it together.
The break becomes physical when an earthquake occurs,
brought on by Rand grasping saidin and channeling. This is the point where Rand starts to have
the real problem of grabbing saidin as a crutch, like an addict trying to get
their next hit, “It is always there.
Calling to me. Pulling at
me. Saidin. The male half of the True Source. Sometimes I can’t stop myself from reaching
out for it…I can feel the taint even before I touch it…like a thin coat of
vileness trying to hide the Light. It
turns my stomach, but I cannot help myself. I cannot! Only sometimes, I reach
out, and it’s like trying to catch air…What if that happens when the Last
Battle comes? What if I reach out and catch nothing?...I did not mean to do
this. It was as if I tried to open a
tap, and instead pulled the whole tap out of the barrel. It . . . filled me. I had to send it somewhere before it burned me
up, but I . . . I did not mean this” – The Dragon Reborn, p. 53. This loss of control will have consequence,
Moiraine, in the next chapter which essentially recaps the prologue but for our
characters, outright states that this loss of control could bring the Dark One
upon them all. There have been deaths
which are never confirmed to be from Carridin from the prologue, but heavily
implied as the corpses resemble Rand.
This chapter is simply filling in our characters, but it doesn’t matter
as by this point the reader should be realizing just how much everything is
shifting. We are moving away from Rand
to other people and their role to play, as Rand only appears here from an
outsider’s perspective. His presence is
felt throughout these chapters obviously, and he has actions, but we don’t get
to see just what he is thinking. The
ball is rolling, things are building, and are about to burst.
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