The next night came with the scream of a dying sentry.
Aran crouched high on a concealed, forested ridge overlooking the canyon, a perfect vantage point to observe the skirmish. Captain Varek and the Imperial infantry formed a shield wall at the mouth of the canyon, expecting to break the wooden palisade. Instead, the gates were wide open.
The Seanchan marched in, their disciplined ranks moving like a single, armoured organism. But the rebels were ready. From the high ridges, massive boulders and volley-fire from heavy crossbows rained down. The enemy grolm, whipped into a frenzy by their handlers, were unleashed from the rear of the canyon, crashing into the Imperial shield wall with the force of an avalanche.
Then, the Empire unveiled its true terror.
The three sul'dam, riding safely behind the infantry lines, raised their hands. Through the silver leashes, they drove the damane forward.
It was sickening. The a'dam forced the damane to bend in Sul'dam's will. The women in grey didn't show any emotion as they channelled death, their hands weaving complex tapestries of Fire and Earth under the absolute, Sul'dam dominating control of the women holding the bracelets. The ground beneath the charging grolm erupted in geysers of flame and molten rock. The rebel crossbowmen on the cliffs were vaporised by arcs of blinding white lightning.
The Seanchan were winning. The overwhelming destructive capability of the damane was breaking the rebel trap.
But then, the geometry of the battlefield violently shifted.
From the smoke and ruin of the rebel command hut, a young man stepped forward. He was no older than nineteen, his face pale and contorted with a mixture of terror and absolute, reckless fury.
And Aran instantly felt the sickening, oily surge of saidin as the boy drew a good amount of tainted saidin.
The boy was a male channeler. He was completely untrained, wielding the male half of the Source with raw, desperate instinct. The Dark One's taint clung to his weaves—thick, chaotic torrents of Fire and Air that lacked all precision but possessed staggering, earth-shattering volume.
The boy struck without warning. A solid column of compressed fire slammed into the Imperial lines, bypassing the physical shields and engulfing the first damane. The woman and her horse-mounted sul'dam were incinerated instantly, their screams cut short in a blast of ash.
The Imperial lines shattered in panic. Men could not fight what they could not see.
The second sul'dam screamed an order, and her damane retaliated, weaving a massive net of Air to crush the boy. But the nineteen-year-old roared, drawing so deeply on the tainted Source that Aran could feel the air pressure drop. The boy met the damane's weave head-on, tearing through the female channeler's structured shield with sheer, brute force. The backlash of the shattered weave snapped back, killing the second damane where she stood and throwing her sul'dam violently from her horse.
The rebel master cheered from the barricades, rallying his surviving men. But the boy was staggering, bleeding from his nose, his mind buckling under the unimaginable strain of holding so much tainted power without training.
The third sul'dam did not panic. Cold and methodical, she yanked her silver leash. Her damane, weeping and trembling, a girl barely fifteen year old, wove a spear of solidified Earth and drove it directly through the boy's chest.
The young male channeler collapsed, the roaring fires dying instantly as his connection to the Source was severed by death.
"No!" the rebel leader screamed.
Driven by absolute, blinding grief, the rebel leader abandoned his cover. He leveled a heavy arbalest, ignoring the Imperial infantry charging him, and fired a single, barbed arrow across the chaotic battlefield.
The heavy bolt caught the third sul'dam directly in the throat. She fell backward off her saddle, dead before she hit the muddy floor of the canyon.
Driven by absolute, blinding grief, the rebel master dropped the heavy arbalest and drew a jagged, heavy broadsword. He roared, charging blindly through the smoke toward the stunned Captain Varek, fully intent on taking the Imperial commander to the grave with him.
He never made it.
Aran had already slipped down from the ridge, moving like a ghost through the acrid smoke and the slaughtered bodies. He did not run; his genetically optimized reflexes simply flowed into the space between the vulnerable Imperial captain and the charging rebel.
The draw was a single, flawless blur of motion. The glass-like Atherion hummed, singing its lethal, resonant note over the din of dying beasts. Aran stepped seamlessly inside the rebel master's chaotic, grief-fueled guard. He pivoted his weight, channeling his strength into a fluid, horizontal strike that sheared effortlessly through the traitor's neck, severing his head in one perfectly clean motion.
The rebel master collapsed heavily into the bloody mud, his life extinguished before his sword could even strike the earth. Aran flicked the pale blade downward to clear the gore, the sharp snick of the sword returning to its scabbard ringing with finality ,then look at eyes of bodyless head.
The battle ended in a breathless, bloody silence.
The rebel operation was entirely annihilated. Every enemy was dead. But the Imperial cadence had been decimated. Captain Varek, leaning heavily on his sword, stared at Aran in stunned silence. Only a handful of his heavy infantry remained standing. The surviving grolm and torm were heavily wounded, bleeding in the mud, barely contained by the surviving morat'grolm and morat'torm.
While Varek was distracted by the sheer scale of the slaughter and rallying his surviving men, Aran turned his back and stepped toward the rear of the formation.
He found the third damane.
She was on her knees in the mud beside the corpse of her sul'dam. She was not a woman; she was a child, barely older than Miri, drowning in a shapeless gray dress. She was not running. She was not attacking. The psychological conditioning of the Empire, combined with the sickening fail-safes built into the a'dam, had completely paralyzed her.
Because the silver bracelet was still locked around the dead sul'dam's wrist, the child was physically tethered to the corpse. The cruel mechanics of the ter'angreal prevented a damane from moving more than a few paces from an unworn bracelet without experiencing blinding, paralyzing agony. She was locked in a state of helpless stasis, weeping quietly into her small, mud-stained hands.
Aran looked down at her. She was a weapon of mass destruction reduced to a broken, frightened animal. For a man of the High Age, the sight was a profound desecration.
Pity, cold and sharp, pierced his pragmatic heart. He had to act before Varek regrouped.
Aran knelt in the blood-soaked mud. "Sai'shen dhael, al'cera," he whispered in the melodic tones of the Old Tongue—hold perfectly still, little one.
He drew the Atherion. He did not reach for the bracelet. Instead, he slid the impossibly thin, frictionless edge of the glass-like steel between the child's bruised neck and the heavy silver collar.
The a'dam was designed to be unbreakable by normal means, but the Atherion was a masterpiece of High Age artifice. Aran pivoted his wrist, applying his enhanced physical strength to the leverage point. The Power-forged blade sheared cleanly through the silver matrix with a sharp crack.
The collar fell away into the mud.
The sudden, violent severing of the psychic link, combined with the overwhelming trauma of the battle and the gory corpse beside her, was too much for the child's mind. Her eyes rolled back, and she collapsed.
Aran caught her before she hit the mud. He had only moments.
He reached deep into the inner pocket of his coat, his fingers finding one of the small, crystal stasis boxes he had salvaged from his vault. Inside was a Well. As he uncapped it, Aran drew a thin thread of pure, untainted saidin. The relief of holding the pristine Power, entirely free of the Dark One's oily rot, washed over him like cool water.
Working with the blinding speed of a master weaver, Aran spun a web of Air and Fire, bending the light around the unconscious child and the broken pieces of the silver collar. A perfect Mirror of Mists settled over her, rendering her completely invisible.
Next, he touched her forehead, weaving a delicate thread of Spirit into her sleeping mind—a simple, deeply rooted suggestion. When you wake, you will run into the deep forest. You will hide. You will not let anyone in armor find you.
He swiftly carried her invisible form to the edge of the tree line, laying her gently in the thick ferns where the Imperial soldiers would not accidentally trample her.
Returning to the battlefield, Aran needed a decoy. He moved through the smoke and found the charred, unrecognizable remains of a rebel soldier caught in the nineteen-year-old boy's raging firestorm. Aran dragged the smoking corpse across the mud, dropping it directly next to the dead sul'dam. He draped a torn, soot-stained scrap of gray fabric over the blackened remains, making it look as though the damane had been incinerated in the chaotic crossfire.
By the time Aran casually strolled back out of the smoke, pretending he was merely securing the perimeter, Captain Varek was directing his surviving men to sever the heads of the rebel mercenaries.
Varek walked up to Aran, his insectoid armor dented and soaked in blood. He looked at the fallen rebel master, then up at the aristocratic wanderer.
"You saved my life, Lord Valeris," Varek said, his voice stripped of all its former suspicion, leaving only gruff, military respect. "It was a costly victory. The rogue male abomination was an anomaly we could not predict, and we lost the third damane to the flames." Varek shook his head, staring at the charred decoy Aran had planted. "But the Empire is absolute."
He gestured to the pile of severed heads. "Pack them in salt. We march back to Imfaral. High Lord Turon will spike these on the city gates as a warning to all who dare steal from the Crystal Throne."
Aran nodded slowly, his hand resting on the Atherion. He had tipped the scales of the battle, saved a child from a lifetime of slavery, and secured Captain Varek's absolute trust.
The ghost of the High Age was officially at war, and the gates of Imfaral were wide open to him.