Prints/cards etc are on sale rn:

Egwene stood far back from the window. She did not want any of the women below to look up and see the glow that she knew surrounded her as she channeled the One Power, probing delicately at the collar around her neck, searching futilely; she could not even tell whether the band was woven or made of links — sometimes it seemed one, sometimes the other — but it seemed all of a piece all the time. It was only a tiny trickle of the Power, the merest drip that she could imagine, but it still beaded sweat on her face and made her stomach clench. That was one of the properties of the a'dam; if a damane tried to channel without a sul'dam wearing her bracelet, she felt sick, and the more of the Power she channeled, the sicker she became. Lighting a candle beyond the reach of her arm would have made Egwene vomit. Once Renna had ordered her to juggle her tiny balls of light with the bracelet lying on the table. Remembering still made her shudder.

Now, the silver leash snaked across the bare floor and up the unpainted wooden wall to where the bracelet hung on a peg. The sight of it hanging there made her jaws clench with fury. A dog leashed so carelessly could have run away. If a damane moved her bracelet as much as a foot from where it had last been touched by a sul'dam... Renna had made her do that, too — had made her carry her own bracelet across the room. Or try to. She was sure it had only been minutes before the sul'dam snapped the bracelet firmly on her own wrist, but to Egwene the screaming and the cramps that had had her writhing on the floor had seemed to go on for hours.

Went down a Wikipedia hole today on the Millerites, a religious movement based around a specific prediction about the timing of Jesus’s second coming, and now I have three more Wheel of Time worldbuilding things to gleefully complain about and/or theorize on, as is my custom. (As usual, ‘ware whole-series spoilers.)

1) The Millerites apparently believed that Jesus would return "literally, visually, in the clouds of heaven" and I can't help but wonder if that's what RJ was borrowing for his 'Rand and Ba'alzamon fight in the clouds above Falme' aesthetic? The whole thing always struck me as super super weird since there's no in-world explanation for it except 'it's in the Prophecies', which doesn't tell you how it's done. Like we know the One Power can do projections/illusions, but there's no note anywhere that Moiraine or whoever was doing One Power cinematography at that moment. (However, I will consider headcanons that Verin was doing it for mysterious Verin reasons, just because that seems fun. Verin is extremely fun and mysterious, especially in book 2.)

I thought maybe it's the same kind of thing as the ta'veren television effect that the boys all start getting in later books- the swirl of colors in their heads that resolves into images of the other ta'veren, triggered by thought? But I think the color swirls are more related to 'reading the Pattern' and are similar to Egwene's Dreaming/the scenes Perrin sees in the sky in Tel'aran'rhiod/Min's visions. But 'floating images'/'images in the sky' does seem to be like... a way the Pattern appears to people, so maybe it is connected? And it's been a while since I read book 2; it's possible that Rand and Ba'alzamon are fighting at least partially in Tel'aran'rhiod, maybe due to the appearance of the Heroes of the Horn, who live there? In which case, sure, giant sky projections, sounds plausible, Tel'aran'rhiod is batshit like that.

2) I'm unreasonably annoyed that the calendar extant in the Westlands at the time of the books is set at 998 NE and the events of the books take 2 years, so that the apocalypse is RIGHT ON SCHEDULE at the end of the millennium. I CALL BULLSHIT. NOBODY'S APOCALYPSE ARRIVES ON TIME. That cute little note about the calendar at the end of every Wheel of Time book? Where they're like 'oh yeah we lost a ton of records at various points in the Third Age, there were a bunch of different calendar systems before this, and the Farede calendar dating from the arbitrarily decided end of the War of the Hundred Years is now in use'? 'ARBITRARILY DECIDED', MY ASS.

Honestly the only way this makes sense is if the books were written in the 'far future' and either the author or (from an in-universe angle) their civilization fudged the dates of events so that the end of the War of the Hundred Years was exactly the time needed to have the Last Battle end right at the millennium. Actually, this also explains why the timeline is so extraordinarily compressed and everything supposedly happened in just two years. It absolutely didn't, they just fudged the timeline from the distant vantage point of the future. XD

In RJ's defense, that does appear to be part of the conceit. I think the implication is supposed to be either that Loial wrote the books, presumably 100s of years later knowing Ogier lifespans/project timelines, or someone else is writing this based on Loial's notes/book. This is supported by that FASCINATING opening verse in Lord of Chaos, with the skipping rhyme from 'Great Arvalon, the Fourth Age' which is clearly future Tar Valon. (I've always been obsessed with that verse, and I think the only other Fourth Age quote we get opening the books is at the end of AMoL, and that's about the Breaking and doesn't tell us anything about the future except that there is one.)

3) What are the odds that the Seanchan still use FF (From the Founding, the calendar Artur Hawkwing tried to establish that now 'only historians refer to') for their calendars? Pretty good, right? I wonder what wacky stuff they were expecting around whenever their millennial date was. Everybody would have an extra-keen eye out for omens once the date drew near.

#Japan-Special ツ