The moon was red above Minethereen.
Rand barely noticed it.
There was too much smoke. Too much blood. Fires burned across the field, some bright and ordinary, others burning with a light that made his eyes ache when he looked at them. Men lay where they had fallen, some in the colors of the Light, some in black, and some wearing no colors at all. The dead did not care which side had claimed them.
The wind carried the smell of ash and something worse.
Rand had smelled that before.
Balefire.
He could still feel the wounds it had left in the Pattern. They were not wounds in the earth, though the ground had been torn apart in places. They were deeper than that. Something had been burned away. Not destroyed. Erased.
The Breaking had never felt like this.
That thought frightened him more than the battlefield did.
"Rand."
Moiraine's voice was little more than breath.
He turned.
For a moment, he did not recognize her.
Her blue shawl was gone. What remained of her dress hung in strips, dark with dirt and blood. One side of her face was swollen, and blood ran from her nose. Her left ear was little more than a ragged wound.
Yet it was her eyes that caught him.
Moiraine's eyes had always seemed to know more than they should. Even when she had been wrong, she had carried herself like a woman who had already considered a dozen answers.
Now she looked afraid.
"Something is—"
"Rand!"
Egwene stumbled toward them.
Nynaeve had one arm around her, keeping her upright. The Amyrlin's face was pale beneath the dirt. Her stole was torn and one hand shook despite the effort she made to hide it.
Rand looked from one woman to the other.
Then he felt it.
Not saidin.
Not the Dark One.
The Pattern.
It shuddered beneath the world.
Rand drew a slow breath.
"The Pattern."
Egwene's eyes met his.
"What about it?"
He did not answer at once.
There had been times when Rand had wished he could hear the Pattern more clearly. Now he wished he could not feel it at all.
A thread was pulling loose.
No.
Not a thread.
A thousand.
The ground several paces away simply ceased to be.
There was no explosion. No flash of light. The grass, the stones and the bodies lying upon them were simply gone. In their place was darkness.
Not the darkness of night.
Rand had seen the Dark One's prison.
This was not that.
This was an emptiness with no hunger because hunger implied that something remained to be consumed.
"The Pattern is coming apart," he said.
Egwene stared at the place where the earth had vanished.
"We cannot hold it."
"We have to."
"Rand, we can't."
Her voice broke on the last word.
The ground trembled again.
Moiraine stepped closer. "How much time?"
Rand almost laughed.
Time.
There was less of that than anything else.
"I don't know."
Nynaeve's grip tightened around Egwene's arm.
"We make time."
Rand looked at her.
Nynaeve's face was streaked with blood. He could not tell whose.
She was staring at the three of them with that familiar look—the one she had worn when they were children and had done something foolish enough to earn a scolding.
Only this time, there was no village Wisdom to return to.
No village.
No Two Rivers.
Perhaps no world.
"We link," Nynaeve said.
Moiraine shook her head. "Nynaeve—"
"We link."
There was something in her voice that stopped the objection.
Nynaeve seized Moiraine's hand, then Egwene's.
Rand stepped into the circle.
The instant their hands joined, saidar touched him.
Then saidin.
The two Powers met.
For one brief moment, the chaos around them seemed distant.
Nynaeve closed her eyes.
"Follow me."
Rand reached deeper.
The Power answered.
"Sakarnen," he said.
The shattered pieces of the angreal lifted from the ground.
They were fragments now. Broken stone and metal, glowing faintly as they spun around the center of the circle.
"We need an anchor," Nynaeve said. "Something that will remain when everything else is gone."
Moiraine looked at the fragments.
"And if there is nothing left for it to anchor to?"
"Then we make something."
Egwene's eyes narrowed.
"The Great Weave."
Nynaeve nodded.
They began.
The weave was unlike anything Rand had ever touched.
It was not simply a weave of Fire or Air or Spirit. It was structure itself, layer upon layer, a pattern within the Pattern. Threads crossed and separated and crossed again, each one carrying a purpose.
Preserve.
Remember.
Continue.
Rand felt the first strain almost immediately.
Saidin burned through him.
"Too much," he said.
Nynaeve ignored him.
"We need more."
"There is no more."
"There is always more."
She sounded like she believed it.
Perhaps that was why he followed her.
The weave trembled.
A crack appeared in the air above them.
Egwene gasped.
"It's failing."
"No."
Nynaeve's voice was sharp.
"It is not failing."
The weave shuddered again.
Moiraine gritted her teeth. "Nynaeve."
"I said it is not failing!"
Then the circle widened.
Rand felt other hands join theirs.
Aes Sedai.
Asha'man.
He could feel them through the weave, each one frightened, exhausted and stubborn enough to stand when the world itself had begun to fall.
Logain.
Rand felt him before he saw him.
The man who had once been called the False Dragon stood among the others, face drawn and bloodied.
He said nothing.
He simply joined.
More came.
One after another.
The Power grew.
Saidar flowed into saidin.
Saidin flowed into saidar.
For the first time since the Last Battle had begun, Rand felt the two halves of the One Power moving together without conflict.
The weave steadied.
Golden light gathered around Sakarnen.
It spread outward in branching lines, like the limbs of some enormous tree whose roots had sunk into the Pattern itself.
Egwene stared.
"We're holding it."
Rand almost smiled.
Almost.
Then the darkness came closer.
It swallowed a hill.
Then a river.
Then half the sky.
There would be no escaping it.
Moiraine knew it too.
Rand saw it in her eyes.
Egwene looked at him.
For a moment, none of them spoke.
They had known one another too long for words to matter.
Moiraine.
Egwene.
Nynaeve.
Rand.
He looked at each of them and tried to remember.
Not the battle.
Not the pain.
The small things.
Moiraine sitting beside the fire in the Winespring Inn.
Egwene laughing in the Two Rivers.
Nynaeve shouting at him because he had climbed a tree he had been forbidden to climb.
Home.
For a heartbeat, Rand could almost smell the apple trees.
Nynaeve's eyes filled with tears.
"We did what we could," she whispered.
Rand nodded.
"We did."
The darkness reached them.
Nynaeve tightened her grip.
"Now."
They gave the last of themselves to the weave.
Rand felt his skin begin to burn.
He felt saidin tear through him.
He did not let go.
Around them, the others did the same.
Aes Sedai.
Asha'man.
Men and women who had fought until they could no longer stand.
They became part of the weave.
Part of the thing that would remain.
The darkness swallowed the field.
It swallowed Minethereen.
It swallowed the sky.
It swallowed Rand.
For one instant, there was nothing.
Then there was light.
Not the light of the sun.
Not saidin.
Not saidar.
Something older.
Something that had no name yet.
The golden branches around Sakarnen stretched outward.
They reached through the darkness.
And the darkness receded.
Time turned.
The world shook.
Then everything was still.
The Wheel turned.
The Pattern settled around its new thread, holding the old and the new together.
A new Age began.
And somewhere beyond the reach of memory, a prophecy was written.
The Pattern of Encant'adia had begun.