The Waygate breathed.
Spencer had expected something dramatic — a monument, a relic, a grand structure announcing its importance. Instead, the gate was hidden beneath a warehouse near Caemlyn's outer wall, covered in dust and cobwebs, looking more like an abandoned piece of masonry than a door between worlds.
But when Loial approached and sang the Treesong, the stone moved. Leaves carved into the surface shifted, vines unwound, and the gate's center irised open like a pupil dilating in darkness.
"Through quickly," Loial said, his bass voice subdued. "And do not look back."
Spencer was third through the gate, after Moiraine and Lan. The transition was instant and disorienting — one moment he stood in a Caemlyn basement lit by morning light, the next he stood in absolute blackness, his feet on stone that seemed to absorb sound rather than reflect it.
Thread Sight activated automatically.
And then it stopped.
[WARNING: Thread Sight anomaly. External Pattern connections: ABSENT. Local signatures only. Range severely limited.]
Spencer's breath caught. Outside the gate, he'd grown accustomed to the Pattern's constant background hum — the subtle awareness of thousands of fate-threads weaving through the world, connecting everything to everything else. Here, that awareness vanished. The threads of his companions were visible, clustered tight in the darkness, but beyond them...
Nothing.
The Ways existed at the Pattern's margins. Spencer understood that intellectually — these paths had been built by Ogier in the Age of Legends, designed to connect Waygates across thousands of miles without passing through normal space. But experiencing the absence of the Pattern's weave was something else entirely.
I'm blind. Or nearly blind. Thread Sight only shows what's right next to me.
Everything else is void.
---
The group gathered in the darkness, organizing by touch and whispered voices.
Loial lit the first lantern — its glow seemed weak, swallowed by the black rather than pushing it back. The light revealed a stone platform, weathered but intact, with a path of fitted blocks stretching away into the dark.
"Stay close," Loial said. "Step where I step. The Ways... the Ways are not what they were. The paths have crumbled in places. One wrong step and you fall into the nothing between islands."
"The nothing?" Mat's voice was tight with barely controlled fear.
"The void between platforms. No one knows where it leads. No one who's fallen has ever returned to tell."
Moiraine's silver-blue thread pulsed with controlled urgency. "We move quickly but carefully. The Black Wind will sense our presence eventually. Speed is our only defense."
They walked.
---
Time became meaningless in the Ways.
There was no sun, no stars, no way to mark the passing of hours except by the ache in Spencer's legs and the growing hunger in his stomach. The stone paths stretched on and on, broken occasionally by platform-islands where guiding stones stood — massive pillars carved with Ogier script, their surfaces directing travelers toward distant Waygates.
Spencer distributed supplies from his Codex Inventory during their first rest stop. Nobody questioned where a Two Rivers carpenter had found extra provisions — they were too exhausted, too frightened, too focused on putting one foot in front of the other.
"Eat while you can," Spencer said, passing dried meat and bread to Rand. "We don't know when we'll stop again."
"How did you—" Rand started, then stopped himself. He'd stopped asking questions about Spencer's apparent preparedness somewhere around Whitebridge. "Thank you."
Mat took his portion without comment, his restored thread still pulsing with the grateful gold of someone who remembered being too paranoid to trust anyone. Perrin accepted his share with a nod, golden eyes never quite meeting Spencer's — the wolf-brother was still watching, still cataloging the wrongness he smelled.
Let him watch. I can't change what I am.
All I can do is prove I'm not the enemy.
---
Loial hummed as they walked.
The melody was Ogier — deep and slow, with harmonies that seemed to resonate with the stone paths beneath their feet. It was the first pleasant sound Spencer had heard since entering the Ways, and he found himself walking closer to the giant, grateful for the evidence that beauty could exist even in this void.
"What is that song?" Spencer asked quietly.
"An old one. From the Age of Legends, when my people still tended the great groves freely." Loial's ears twitched with something between sadness and fondness. "It is said to strengthen the heart and steady the feet. I do not know if it works for humans, but..."
"It helps."
"I am glad." Loial glanced down at Spencer, his deep eyes thoughtful. "You carry yourself differently than the others. Less fear, more... calculation. As if you are always thinking three steps ahead."
"Survival habit."
"Perhaps. Or perhaps something else." The Ogier's thread rippled with gentle curiosity. "I have read many books about many things, but I have never read about someone quite like you, Aldan Maeren."
Because there's never been anyone like me. Not in this world.
"Maybe you'll write about me someday," Spencer said.
"Maybe I will." Loial's rumbling laugh was soft but genuine. "If we survive long enough for me to find ink and paper."
---
Three hours in, Spencer felt the pressure begin.
It started as a subtle wrongness — a weight against his awareness that had nothing to do with physical sensation. The Codex registered it as a distant anomaly, something massive moving through the void beyond their lantern light.
[ALERT: Anti-Pattern disturbance detected. Vector: South-southeast. Range: Indeterminate. Approaching.]
Machin Shin. The Black Wind.
It knows we're here.
Spencer moved forward through the group, slipping past Egwene and Nynaeve until he reached Moiraine's side. The Aes Sedai walked with the quiet confidence of someone who'd faced worse than darkness, but her thread held the tension of someone who understood exactly how dangerous this place was.
"Something is hunting us," Spencer said quietly. "Moving from the south. I can feel it building."
Moiraine's eyes snapped to his face. In the lantern light, her ageless features seemed carved from ice. "You can sense Machin Shin?"
"I can sense... something. Something wrong. Something coming."
"The Black Wind." Moiraine's voice didn't waver, but her thread pulsed with sudden urgency. "How far?"
"Far enough that we can't hear it yet. Close enough that we need to move faster."
The Aes Sedai studied him for a long moment — cataloging another data point, adding another entry to the ledger of suspicions she'd been building since Winternight. Then she nodded once and raised her voice.
"We increase our pace. Do not stop unless I say. Do not look behind you."
The group moved faster, feet pounding on ancient stone, and behind them, impossibly far and impossibly close, something began to stir.
---
The darkness pressed closer as they walked.
Spencer's lantern cast a pool of light that seemed to shrink with every passing hour, as if the void itself was pushing back against their intrusion. The stone paths stretched ahead, empty and endless, and the silence was broken only by footsteps and labored breathing.
This is what it feels like to be outside the Pattern.
This is what it feels like to be truly alone.
He thought about Emond's Field — the village where Aldan Maeren had grown up, where Spencer Kessler had died and been reborn. He thought about Aunt Ela's worried face, about the workshop where carpenter's tools still waited for hands that would never return.
I left that life behind. All of it. The safety, the simplicity, the chance to just be normal.
For this. For walking through darkness toward something that might kill us all.
Was it worth it?
The question had no answer. Or the answer was the same as it always was: he hadn't had a choice. The Pattern had brought him here, given him the Codex, made him part of a story he'd once read for entertainment.
No going back. Only forward.
Into the dark.
---
The whispers started just before they stopped for their second rest.
Faint at first — barely audible, like wind through distant trees. But there was no wind in the Ways. No trees. No sound except what they made themselves.
"Do you hear that?" Egwene's voice was thin with fear.
"Don't listen," Moiraine said sharply. "It's Machin Shin. The Wind speaks to its prey. Do not give it purchase in your mind."
The whispers grew louder. Voices — thousands of voices — all speaking at once, promising things that made Spencer's stomach turn. Death. Despair. The comfortable surrender of just giving up.
[Anti-Pattern signature strengthening. Entity: Machin Shin. Distance estimate: 2 hours at current vectors. Acceleration detected.]
"It's getting faster," Spencer said. "Two hours, maybe less."
Lan's gray-green thread went taut. "How can you tell?"
"The same way I told Moiraine. I feel it." Spencer met the Warder's suspicious gaze without flinching. "We need to run."
Moiraine nodded. "Loial. The next Waygate — how far?"
The Ogier's ears were flat against his skull, his massive form trembling with barely controlled terror. "Six hours at normal pace. Four if we push."
"Then we push." Moiraine's voice carried the authority of ages. "No more rests. No more stops. We reach the gate or we die."
The group began to run, and behind them, the whispers of stolen souls grew louder with every step.
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