Aran understood before most. The moment he touched saidin again—he knew. Something was wrong. Not violently. Not immediately. But undeniably. Like oil floating over clear water. Separate. Wrong. Tainted.
The urge to draw upon the Source was a physical ache, a craving built into the core of any channeler. But the moment his mind brushed the male half of the True Source, he felt the foulness coat his consciousness. It was a slick, festering sickness that whispered of blood, paranoia, and absolute ruin. He felt the precipice of madness yawning beneath his feet.
He made his decision without hesitation. He would not embrace it again.
But cutting himself off from saidin was not a simple act. It was not a switch to be turned off—it was a bond, woven into the core of his being. To simply "not channel" was impossible; sooner or later, his control would slip, or he would reach for it in his sleep. And when he did, he would become a monster.
He sought out Latra Decuma one last time. He did not come as a hero returning from the impossible, but as a man bearing his own execution warrant.
"Shield me," Aran demanded, standing in the chaos of a collapsing command center. Outside, the sky was burning with unnatural, multicoloured fire. "Shield me permanently. Tie off the weave with a circle."
Decuma stared at him, aghast. An absolute tied-off shield on a man of his strength required a full circle of thirteen women to last a long time. It was the functional equivalent of being severed, leaving the victim with the agonizing, hollow sensation of the Source just out of reach—a torture that often drove channelers to suicide.
"Aran, you ask for a living death," she whispered.
"I ask to remain myself," he replied, his voice hard as iron. "I will not add to the Breaking. I will not burn the people I swore to protect. Do it, Latra. Before I lose the strength to ask."
With a heavy heart, Lady Decuma gathered a circle of thirteen female Aes Sedai. They brought Aran into a hardened holding cell. He knelt in the center of the room, closed his eyes, and offered no resistance.
Before the link was formed, Decuma touched his shoulder. "You must know, Aran... even a knot tied by thirteen is strong, but it is not absolute. It will last for long years, perhaps centuries, if undisturbed. But it is a weave, and weaves can be broken if struck by unimaginable power. It is a cage, not an erasure."
"Then lock the cage," he said.
The women linked, their combined power a blinding sun of saidar, and slammed a shield of Spirit down upon him. The agony was immediate and profound—a physical block on his soul's deepest connection. He gasped, collapsing to the floor, shaking uncontrollably as the weaves were knotted and tied off, locking him away from the Light.
Not severed. But contained. A barrier between him and the madness creeping through the world.
Enough to keep him safe. Enough to keep him sane.
He withdrew—not out of fear, but understanding. The world above was no longer a place he could exist in—not as he was.
With his connection to the Source bound by thirteen women, Aran travelled to his ancestral home, navigating a landscape that was rapidly tearing itself apart. He descended into the underground vault of his family estate, the hidden treasury of House Valaris near a small coastal city. The vault was an impenetrable fortress, lined with cuendillar lining and wards set long before the Shadow's touch.
He dismissed his family's retainers, ordering them to flee with the Da'shain Aiel. He stood alone before the massive, rune-etched doors. With a heavy mechanical groan, he triggered the internal locking mechanisms. The great doors sealed shut with a finality that echoed through the empty stone halls. He had buried himself alive.
And so, in the depths of the vaults—built not for wealth, but for preservation—Aran began his final work.
The heavy mechanical groan of the Valaris vault doors sealing shut was the sound of a world ending, and a new, terrible reality beginning.
Aran stood in the profound darkness of the antechamber nine floor underground, the echoes of the locking mechanisms slowly dying away against walls lined with impenetrable cuendillar pillars. Above him, the surface of the earth was tearing itself apart. He knew this with absolute, chilling certainty. The Hundred Companions—the greatest male channelers of the Age of Legends—were out there, their minds shattered by the Dark One's dying spite. They were unleashing earthquakes that swallowed cities whole, boiling oceans, and raining fire upon a populace they had sworn to protect.
Aran understood before most. The moment he had touched saidin again after the sealing of the Bore, he had known. Something was fundamentally, hideously wrong. It had not been violent at first. Not an immediate tearing of the mind. But undeniably present. It was like oil floating over clear water. Separate. Wrong. Tainted.
The urge to draw upon the Source was a physical ache, a craving built into the core of any channeler, far deeper than the need for water or air. But the moment his mind had brushed the male half of the True Source, he had felt the foulness coat his consciousness. It was a slick, festering sickness that whispered of blood, paranoia, and absolute ruin. He had felt the precipice of madness yawning beneath his feet, a dark gravity pulling at his sanity.
He had made his decision without hesitation. He would not embrace it again. He had forced Lady Decuma and a circle of thirteen to shield him, to tie off the weave and leave him with the agonising, hollow void where the Light should be. It was a living death, but it was the only way to ensure he did not add his own vast strength to the Breaking of the World.
But as he descended deeper into the ancestral vault, the cold logic of survival demanded more than just isolation.
As he could not stand beside the Dragon now… then he would prepare for the day the Pattern called him again.
He walked through the silent, dust-sheeted halls of his ancestors, his mind racing with a grim calculus. Why was he burying himself alive? Merely to die in the dark while humanity was extinguished above? No. The Wheel of Time turned. Ages came and passed. If humanity survived this cataclysm, there would still be male channelers. The Taint was not a temporary curse; it was a permanent pollution of the True Source. Any man who sparked, any boy who reached for the One Power, would inevitably succumb to the madness. They would become walking weapons of mass destruction.
And who could stop them? The female Aes Sedai would try, but they were physically weaker, and the madness made the men unpredictable, violent, and unfathomably dangerous.
Aran realized he needed to build something. As he could not, and absolutely would not, use the One Power to fight, he was effectively reduced to the physical limitations of a normal man. But a normal man with a standard sword could not parry a shaft of lightning. A normal man could not cut through a weave of balefire. If he was to be of any use to the future, if he was to hunt the madmen who would inevitably plague whatever world remained, he needed an equalizer. He needed a way to fight against channelers, specifically the madmen of his own gender, without drawing on the corrupted Source himself.
Using what remained of his peerless knowledge, his inventions, his mastery of ter'angreal—he began to build something far greater than mere survival. He began to build a legacy. But he could not rely on tainted saidin. The shield Decuma had placed upon him prevented him from touching it anyway. So he turned to something else. Deep in the lowest levels of the Valaris estate, hidden from even the Hall of the Servants, lay a secret from a forgotten epoch.
A Well.
It was a vast, glowing reservoir of pure, untainted power—stored, contained, and perfectly isolated millennia before the corruption had ever spread. It was one of the largest ever constructed, a massive crystal lattice humming with the combined resonance of saidin and saidar, trapped in perfect stasis. It was very old in his family, a treasure guarded with absolute secrecy. It would help him contain his work. It held enough raw, clean power to sustain his crafting for months, perhaps if he was meticulous, a year.
And through it, setting up a specialised forge powered by the Well's pristine light, he created. He began the gruelling, meticulous work of forging his greatest masterpiece, his long-awaited dream.
A weapon.
But this was not a weapon meant for mindless destruction. It was a weapon of absolute precision, designed specifically to cut his reliance on the True Source and bridge the gap between a mortal man and a mad demigod.
He took his previous sword—a beautiful, straight-bladed broadsword he had carried through the shadow-choked battlefields of the war—and cast it into the crucible. He melted down the power-wrought steel, treating it with rare earth elements stored in the vault, and began to fold the metal.
He did not forge the metal into a heavy, hacking shock-weapon, but into something infinitely more refined. His sword before had been a masterpiece of perfect balance, built for an era of peace where the blade was used only for the elegant, non-lethal duels of shen an do.
But the onset of the War of the Shadow changed the nature of combat entirely, forcing him to sacrifice that exquisite, centre-weighted symmetry for pure, specialised lethality.
Driven by survival, he instinctively reshaped the metal into a long, subtly curved, single-edged form designed solely for a continuous, lightning-fast draw and strike.
To survive against corrupted channelers, however, physical speed was not enough. As he worked the metal, he went beyond standard Power-wrought metallurgy. He channeled the One Power directly into the forge, anchoring standing flows of one power into the very molecular lattice of the alloy, weaving specific runes of hardening and preservation into the steel.
In doing so, he unknowingly created a ter'angreal sword—a weapon of absolute mastery that could parry weaves of fire, never lose its razor edge, and withstand the terrifying forces of a cataclysmic war. It had to be fast. Blindingly fast.
In these dark days, a fraction of a microsecond was the boundary between survival and being atomized by a weave of Fire and Earth, and this new curve allowed for a flawless, continuous draw-and-strike sequence that wasted not a single joule of momentum. Upon its hilt, he would etch the heron, marking the birth of a legendary blade.
The edge he ground into the metal was impossibly thin, so sharp it seemed to part the air itself without a sound. The blade itself was power-wrought, tempered not in water, but in the pure, liquid light of the Well. The result was a pale, glass-like metal that shimmered faintly even in the absolute darkness of the vault, as if it possessed a memory of the sun.
But this was no ordinary power-wrought weapon. It was a highly sophisticated ter'angreal.
While the steel was still glowing with heat, Aran began the most delicate phase of the forging. Using microscopic needles of Spirit drawn from the Well, he etched complex, ancient runes directly into the molecular structure of the metal. These runes were not decorative. They were geometric anchors for the weave-cutting and bond-severing effect. They dictated the physical laws of the blade, commanding the metal to reject the One Power. If a weave of Fire or Earth struck the edge, the runes would force the weave to unravel, breaking it down into harmless, ambient energy.
Next, he laid down the standing flows. These were permanent, invisible currents of pure Spirit woven seamlessly along the spine of the blade. They ran through the metal like fine, silver veins, pulsing softly. These flows were not meant for cutting; they were meant for sensing. Aran attuned these flows specifically to the resonance of the male half of the Source. With the sword in hand, the blade would act as an extension of his own nervous system. It would vibrate, a subtle thrumming in the hilt, whenever saidin was drawn nearby. It would allow him to feel the gathering of a madman's power before the weave was even fully formed, giving him the precious micro-seconds needed to evade or strike.
Finally, just above the hilt, he took a diamond-tipped engraver and painstakingly etched a single mark into the pale steel.
A heron.
He was not placing it there out of vanity. In the world above, the title of Blademaster was awarded by a council of peers, a testament to absolute martial supremacy. But that world was burning. The councils were dead or dying. Aran placed the mark himself, a solemn vow in the silent dark. He was claiming the responsibility of the blade, establishing himself as the final arbiter of his own skill. The heron was a promise that whoever wielded this weapon would need the discipline of a master, for a single mistake against a channeler meant utter erasure.
At the weapon's core, however, lay its true heart. Embedded into the hilt, just below the guard, Aran placed a bead—a construct of his own radical design he called the Atherion.
It looked like a sphere of trapped starlight, but it was, in fact, a living matrix of hyper-compressed weaves that allowed the blade to interact directly with the True Power itself. The Atherion was the engine that powered the runes. It was what gave the sword the sheer metaphysical weight required to disrupt massive flows of energy, to sever weaves mid-formation, and, if used to its absolute extreme, to sever a channeler from the Source itself. It was a weapon not designed to kill the physical body—though it could do so effortlessly—but to break the connection. A severer of bonds and strings.
But there was a flaw in the design. A terrible, unavoidable cost.
Forging the Atherion required a catalyst far beyond the Well's static, ambient energy. A machine cannot run without an ignition; a ter'angreal of this magnitude needed a living spark to act as a bridge between the physical construct of the sword and the infinite expanse of the One Power.
With no safe access to saidin and heavily shielded by the thirteen Aes Sedai, Aran had no external power to draw upon for this spark. He was left with only one option. He had to make a permanent, irrevocable sacrifice.
He had to siphon his own innate capacity to channel, transferring a massive fraction of his soul's potential directly into the matrix of the blade.
Aran sat before the cooling blade, the glow of the Well casting long, mournful shadows across his face. He hesitated, a profound, existential dread washing over him.
In his Age, Aran thought, the memories of a golden, shattered world echoing in his mind, a channeler's strength is their caste, their identity, the very measure of their soul's breadth. It defines our place in the Hall of the Servants, our capability to serve, our very worth in the eyes of the Pattern. To diminish it willingly… it is unthinkable. It is a mutilation of the spirit akin to gouging out one's own eyes or cutting off one's own hands. It is the ultimate heresy against the Creator's gift.
He looked at the blade. Yet, he realized with cold clarity, what value is sight in a world that has gone completely dark? What value is potential when the well from which we drink is poisoned?
He closed his eyes, pressed his hands over the Atherion embedded in the hilt, and initiated the transfer.
The pain was not physical. It was a tearing of the soul. As he worked the intricate weaves of Spirit using the Well to pull upon his own essence, he felt it—subtle at first, a slight numbness at the edges of his consciousness, then profound and terrifying. A deep, hollow weakening.
His individual strength in the Power, the massive reservoir of potential that had made him one of the foremost among the Aes Sedai, was slipping away. It was bleeding out of his spirit and pouring into the pale metal of the blade. He gasped, falling forward, sweat pouring from his brow as the sheer metaphysical trauma threatened to stop his heart. He dismissed the exhaustion, fighting through the spiritual hemorrhage, too intensely focused on completion to stop.
When he finally pulled his hands away, collapsing onto the stone floor of the forge, the reality was absolute. He had poured an immense, irreversible portion of his own innate strength into the blade's creation. He could feel the deep, permanent toll it had taken on his soul—a vital piece of his connection to the True Source had been sheared away to anchor the ter'angreal. He was noticeably diminished, a distinctly lesser version of the formidable channeler he once was. Yet, he was far from broken. If his shield were ever removed, he would no longer command the staggering, world-shaping torrents of his prime, but he retained enough power to be dangerous, to weave the flows needed to survive, and to wield the very weapon he had sacrificed so much to create. He had made himself weaker, but he had given himself a fighting chance
As he looked up, gasping for breath, the Atherion pulsed with a brilliant, steady light. It acted as a one-of-a-kind external soul-reservoir. The power was not gone; it was merely housed outside his body. Whenever the sword was in his grip, the circuit would close, and his original, massive power would be instantly and fully restored to him through the blade's connection. But he and the sword were now two halves of a whole. Without it, he was crippled.
When the blade was finally complete, the Atherion awoke.
It bound itself to him. Not by the clumsy grip of a hand. Not by the recitation of a spoken oath. But by soul. The matrix recognised the spiritual signature of the power that had birthed it. Aran's severed connection to the Source established itself directly through the blade, creating a symbiotic loop.
And then, the unforeseen happened. A catastrophic miscalculation born of the blade's sheer, uncompromising nature.
Aran reached out and closed his hand around the hilt his new Atherion blade for the first time.
The Atherion's first activation surged with raw, untainted resonance. It did exactly what Aran had meticulously designed it to do—it violently, automatically rejected foreign weaves that attempted to bind or suppress its master.
The immense shield of thirteen that Decuma had placed upon him—a weave of Spirit so dense and complex it was designed to endure for centuries—met the absolute severing edge of the newly forged sword. The Atherion recognized the tied-off shield as a hostile suppression of the soul it was now bound to protect.
With a soundless, spiritual shatter that dropped Aran to his knees in agony, the shield broke.
It did not unravel slowly. It snapped like brittle glass under a hammer strike. The sheer, cutting force of the Atherion ripped through the thirteen-fold knot, obliterating the containment field in a fraction of a second.
Instantly, the agonizing, hollow void that had plagued Aran for weeks was gone. It was replaced by the terrifying, deafening rush of the True Source. Saidin flooded into him, a roaring river of unimaginable power, magnified by the complete restoration of his strength through the blade. The sweetness of it, the absolute joy of life and creation, filled his veins with fire.
But with it came the oil.
The sickness.
The taint of the Dark One, lying thick and putrid across the surface of saidin, flooded back into Aran's mind. It was a physical violation, a sensation of rotting meat pushed into his mouth, of black sludge filling his lungs.
He screamed, dropping the sword. It clattered against the stone floor, its pale metal ringing sharply.
The whispers began instantly. They did not come from the dark corners of the vault; they echoed from the inside of his own skull. They spoke in the voices of his dead comrades. They whispered of blood, of terrible, necessary violence. They told him that the female Aes Sedai had betrayed him, that Decuma had meant to kill him, that the only way to be safe was to burn the vault to ash, to burn the world above to glass. A sudden, overwhelming paranoia seized his heart in an icy grip. He looked at the shadows cast by the Well, and for a terrifying second, he saw Myrddraal stepping out of the dark, their eyeless faces twisting into smiles.
The shield was gone. He was entirely, nakedly exposed to the corruption.
Panic, cold, sharp, and intensely rational, pierced through the rising tide of his exhaustion and the onset of hallucinations. He clutched his head, fighting the urge to draw the Power and blast the nonexistent shadows into oblivion. He could no longer simply wait in the dark, meditating peacefully while the world above broke. That plan was dead.
The madness was already creeping in. It was a ticking clock echoing in his own skull, and he could feel the seconds slipping away. The Well was nearly depleted from the massive drain of forging the Atherion. He could not re-shield himself—he did not have thirteen women, and even if he did, the sword would just break it again if he ever touched it. His mind would not survive long, If he didn't find a way past longing for Siadin. he would become the very monster he had forged the blade to kill. He would use his restored strength to shatter the power-inforced walls and rise to the surface, a tool of destruction for the dark one.
This immediate, desperate terror birthed his final, impossible gamble.
If he could not survive the Taint in the present—he would leave time itself.
He had to construct a stasis chamber. Not a mere physical shelter of thick walls, but a localized manipulation of the Pattern. A space between moments. A Device that would put him outside the normal flow of reality. A cage to freeze his mind and his biology before his urge to channel wins and the rot of the madness could fully take root in his brain.
He dragged himself back to his feet, ignoring the phantom scent of burning flesh that haunted his nose. He grabbed the sword, shivering as the connection re-established itself. He needed to control the sword's power, his own power, and build the chamber with the remaining power from the immense well.
Every initial attempt was a catastrophic failure.
He tried to weave a bubble of Spirit and Earth, attempting to sever a localized pocket of the vault from the turning of the Wheel. The weaves collapsed under their own paradox almost instantly. Structures of hardened air and pure energy unravelled the moment they stabilised. Time itself, a fundamental force of the Creator's design, violently rejected the intrusion.
Energy bled uncontrollably from the failed weaves. Constructs shattered, sending razor-sharp shards of solidified air, tearing through the chamber. Once, the backlash from a collapsed temporal weave nearly destroyed the entire vault. A shockwave of pure, untainted force rippled outward, cracking the ancient stone flooring and throwing Aran violently against a pillar. He tasted blood, his vision swimming, the whispers in his mind laughing at his failure. His body could handle and heal itself, but the pain was always there.
Burn it all, the voice of a long-dead friend whispered in his ear. It's so much easier to just burn it all.
It was impossible. The Pattern did not allow such things. A thread could not simply remove itself from the Tapestry without destroying the whole.
For agonizing Day, Aran worked. He barely slept, afraid of what his mind would do if his conscious control slipped. The whispers in his mind continued, more violently persuasive. He saw phantom shadowspawn skittering just at the edge of his vision. He felt sudden, overwhelming urges to turn the sword on himself, just to silence the noise.
He tried to build the chamber. He failed. Again and again. The pure energy of the ancient Well was flickering, drawing dangerously close to the bottom of its reserves.
Until—in a moment of lucid clarity amidst the creeping fog of insanity—he changed the question.
He had been trying to build a box that sat outside of time. That was the paradox. He needed to stop trying to escape from time. He needed to find a way to achieve suspension within it. Preservation through absolute stasis.
Not stepping outside the Pattern—but pausing within it. Freezing a single, localized thread so completely that the friction of time passed right over it, without actually breaking the weave of reality.
It was theoretically possible. Barely. It required a weave so delicate, so complex, that it made the forging of the Atherion look like child's play.
Fighting his own rapidly fracturing sanity, biting his own lip until it bled to ground himself in physical pain, he redesigned everything. He cleared away the shattered remains of his previous attempts. He set up a platform in the center of the vault with a Sleep pod. He redesigned the flow of the weaves, balancing Fire and Water perfectly against Spirit and Earth to create a state of absolute zero, not just of temperature, but of entropy.
He would not leave time. He would stop within it. His body and mind would be held suspended between the infinitesimally small gap between one moment and the next. Sustained by the final, dying dregs of the Well, which would power the stasis field indefinitely once sealed. He would neither age nor decay. The Taint in his mind would be frozen, unable to spread further and he would not hold tainted siadin.
Waiting. For a future he might never see—or one he would eventually awaken into, when the world had either healed, or died completely.
The power began to run out. The ambient light of the Well dimmed to a sickly, pale flicker. The vault grew cold.
His hands shook. It was no longer just from the bone-deep fatigue of his labor, but from the shadow creeping over his mind for being alone for months. The paranoia was a physical weight on his chest. He kept looking over his shoulder, convinced that the Some Forsaken had somehow breached the vault. Time was ending. The Well was dying. His mind was slipping.
It had to be now.
Aran stepped up onto the platform and stood within the invisible boundaries of the chamber. He was entirely alone. The heavy, dead silence of the vault pressed in on him, broken only by the ragged sound of his own breathing.
The Atherion sword was strapped securely to his side. Even sheathed, he could feel it humming quietly against his hip, a constant, comforting weight that tethered him to his Unique power, even as the Taint threatened to drown him.
In his hands, he held the very last pieces of his past. He had gathered them before sealing the outer doors. A picture, captured in a thin, unbreakable sheet of crystal.
Seraya. Her smile was bright, captured on a day when the sky had been blue, long before the sky had turned black, before the Bore, before the war.
And beside her picture, another crystal. His parents. Proud, aristocratic, completely unaware of the horrors the future held for their bloodline.
They were the reason he had fought so hard. They were the cost of his survival. Everything he had loved was dead, or dying on the surface above.
He stared at the images, burning them into the forefront of his mind, using the pure emotion of grief and love as a shield against the dark, whispering madness that clawed at his sanity.
He closed his eyes. The vault was so dark now, the Well barely a glowing ember in the deep earth. He felt a sudden, mad urge to laugh—a hysterical, bubbling laugh born of the Taint, urging him to draw the Power and blast the crystals to dust. He fought it down, choking on the effort, forcing his will into a single, diamond-hard point of focus.
"I leave the rest…" Aran whispered to the empty, silent dark, his voice cracking. "I leave the rest to the Wheel."
With a final, desperate exertion of his will, drawing the absolute last drops of power from the ancient Well, the weave formed around him.
It was precise. It was unimaginably delicate.
And it was final.
The stasis field snapped shut like a perfectly fitted glass dome. The ambient temperature dropped to nothing. The air stopped moving. The faint, flickering light of the Well froze mid-shimmer and there was no one drawing power from it now.
The chamber was sealed.
Time… stopped. The whispers in his mind were cut off mid-sentence, trapped in ice.
And Aran—surrounded by the ghosts of his past, armed with a weapon forged to kill Madmen, and carrying a madness he could not cure—slept.
For a long, long time.