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butterflydm · 10 months

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wot reread: a memory of light (chapter 38-epilogue)

spoilers for a memory of light!

Well, the rest of the chapters have fewer pages in total than chapter 37 did, so this is going to be my last full reread post, though I do have a couple of follow-ups planned.

My timing ended up being pretty good, even though my original intention was just to reread books 1-3 in anticipation of the second season of the show. And now I’ve still got over a month to get good and excited about everything the show will be bringing to the table.

1. We go back to Rand, still deep in his conversation with TDO. The chapter “the Last Battle” really revolved around the battle between the forces outside Shayol Ghul, because it ended when the commander of the other army finally was killed (though there are still a ton of his forces to take care of, the head of the snake was cut off and so was the person who fancied himself Demandred’s replacement).

2. The ‘let go’ that Rand is hearing in his mind is in his father’s voice, and the meaning expands here -- let them sacrifice. it is their choice to make. And then Egwene’s voice -- am I not allowed to be a hero too?

Because this is something that Rand has been resisting over the course of the books -- basically ever since he accepted that he will be the sacrifice, he’s struggled with knowing that he’s not the only one, with knowing that other people are sometimes even sacrificing just to get him here, to this place. And, I imagine, with his tentative plans to maybe even survive this ‘sacrifice’, that’s going to make him feel even more guilty about other people giving up their lives in this fight.

3. He talks in dialogue with Egwene’s voice in his head (given that he’s existing around and between reality, it might really be Egwene’s voice too). He is not in charge of protecting her. He decided to take that charge on himself, back in EotW, but it was never his to claim. Let us die for what we believe, and do not try to steal that from us.

4. And so Rand takes himself through his list again, backwards, this time, releasing his feelings of shame for failing to save them, releasing his need to protect them. Letting go of the mountain that has been crushing him for the majority of the series.

He hadn’t realized how large it had become, how much he had let himself carry.

...

Ilyena was last. We are reborn, Rand thought, so we can do better the next time.

So do better.

5. And now Rand, as he stands surrounded by all time and nothing at the same time, comes to understand that the Darkness was never a being, never an entity of its own. It is the between of everything. It can only win if no one is willing to keep fighting against it.

6. Mat gets the news of Lan’s reported death. As he did with Egwene and with Elayne, he swallows the grief and doesn’t let it show to anyone else, instead using the news to spur the army onward to attack the now-stunned foe.

7. Rand tells TDO that he can’t win, and TDO argues that it has Rand in its grasp right now, and Rand says that that’s missing the point, because it was never just about his victory. The people he lists:

Morgase (?) - a woman, torn and beaten down, cast from her throne and made a puppet

Thom - a man who remembered stories and took fool boys under his wing

Moiraine - a woman who hunted truth before others could

Perrin (?) - a man whose family was taken from him, but who stood tall

Nynaeve - a woman who refused to believe she could not Heal those who had been harmed

Mat - a hero who insisted with every breath that he was not a hero

Egwene - a woman who would not bend her back while she was beaten and who stone with the Light for all who watched

Rand realizes -- “it was never about beating me. It was about breaking me.”

8. Okay, I have to say. I have to! But this is... this is literally also how the Seanchan work. This is their philosophy of life -- to take people and break them to the Seanchan’s purpose. As I’ve said before, there really is no way around the fact that the Seanchan are going to be the Great Evil of the Fourth Age. There are just too many Shadow-Seanchan parallels! Maybe Mat and Min can slow the train slightly but I don’t think they can actually put the breaks on it.

9. But back to now -- Rand and TDO watch the battlefield, where Mat is fighting -- Tam at his side, then Karede and his suicide-slave troops, then Loial and the Ogier. “Outnumbered three to one”. Mat is shouting in the Old Tongue: For the Light! For honor! For glory! For life itself!

I will take a moment to be glad that, despite the first half of this book trying so hard to align Mat with the slavers for whatever fucking reason, he’s not fighting for the slavers in this battle. That he actually did become the General of the Forces of the Light, not primarily the General of the Slavers. Looking back, it really does feel like the change was signaled when Mat first took off his Seanchan clothes and put back on his Two Rivers coat*. That seems to have been a visual cue about his change in characterization -- how he started pushing back more against Tuon, forcing her into more compromises, and standing more aligned with the Forces of Light rather than pandering to the slavers all the time. idk, maybe forcing Mat over to Ebou Dar at the start of the book was Sanderson’s way of trying to finally create a synthesis between the horrible Mat of CoT & KoD and the non-horrible Mat of the earlier books, and he felt like he actually had to take Seanchan!Mat to his worst conclusion before bringing him out again? It still really sucks that the Mat and Rand reunion happened during our low point of Mat’s characterization, though.

(* which appears to have been triggered by the ‘not pleasant’ conversation that Mat and Tuon had after Tuon berates him for not telling her that Egwene was briefly enslaved by the Seanchan. After that (off-screen) conversation, Mat starts being much more combative re: the Seanchan -- after that conversation is when he has his bitter/sarcastic thought that he’s not done much to convince Tuon to stop using damane and when he suggests to Min that she mislead Tuon about her viewings to try to soften her stance on Aes Sedai; so I think we can safely give Egwene credit for the turnaround in Mat’s characterization -- I wish that that conversation between Mat and Tuon hadn’t happened off-screen! like so many important emotional moments!, but it seems like perhaps that was a watershed moment for Mat)

Rand and TDO watch, and TDO taunts Rand “the son of battles. I will take him [Mat!]. I will take them all, adversary. As I took the king of nothing [this is Lan, I assume]”.

10. Mat thinks about how he knows he can win this battle, despite the horrible odds. He just needs “a favorable toss of the dice”.

And, not too far away, with the Trollocs outside his hiding place, Olver gives up on the idea of trying to get the Horn to Mat, and lifts the Horn of Valere to his lips.

11. First Mat, and then everyone else, hears Rand’s voice -- he calls out Shai’tan as wrong, telling everyone that Lan isn’t dead. And just after he says that, Mat hears the familiar golden and clear note of the Horn of Valere.

...wow, the Seanchan feel so superfluous to requirements right now. They didn’t show up until after the final combat was engaged, after Rand had his final necessary epiphany, after the Horn was blown (they have still not shown up, technically).

I’m going to take a moment to daydream about a world where Tuon’s nature as marath’damane was revealed and accepted, so she really did flee with the Seanchan (so that she can try to recover from this blow to her powerbase) and the Seanchan never returned to the Last Battle. This would be a much easier way to de-tangle Mat from the Seanchan than whatever he’s gonna need to actually do post-canon.

12. The Heroes of the Horn return and our first sight of them is Birgitte coming to save Elayne from Mellar, with a shining silver arrow. 😍

Birgitte standing over her own corpse kinda cracks me up. Good for her! It’s also probably the first time she’s felt like herself in books and books.

“That was the bloody Horn of Valere!” Mat announces to his troops. “We can still win this night!” Inside, he marvels over how the Horn was sounded without him, showing that one of the things that he’d believed that he was permanently tied to isn’t tied to him after all.

Well, if that knot can be untied, Mat, maybe another one can be as well.

13. Between losing Demandred and the appearance of the Heroes of the Horn, the Shadow are now the ones who are on the defensive, with some Trollocs breaking and trying to run away.

The mist of the Heroes forms near Mat and he feels a moment of worry, wondering if maybe someone on the side of the Shadow summoned them. Hawkwing rides up to Mat, and tells him, “Do take better care of what has been allotted you. Almost, I worried we would not be summoned for this fight.”

I know, right? The lack of urgency in the Mat-in-Ebou-Dar half of the book about actually getting him to Merrilor to blow the Horn was really frustrating to me too!

When Mat confirms that this mean they’re fighting for the Light, Hawkwing tells him, “We would never fight for the Shadow.” The rumors about the Horn are wrong -- I feel like we learned this back in TGH as well but, you know, Mat was dying at the time, so I don’t blame him for not remembering.

Yeah, here’s the line: “We have come to the Horn, but we must follow the banner. And the Dragon.” So it was Rand, Perrin, and Mat who learned that. But, like I said, I don’t blame Mat for not remembering.

14. Hawkwing and Amaresu both scold Mat for not showing Rand enough appreciation for saving his life. Honestly, so fair and legit for Mat to finally be on the other end of a scolding like that. “I have seen you murmur that you fear his madness but all the while you forget that every breath you breathe - every step you take - comes at his forbearance. Your life is a gift from the Dragon Reborn, Gambler. Twice over.”

Mat feels so scolded. As he deserves.

He’s told that they can fight here because they have Rand’s banner and because Rand is... technically sort-of kind-of leading them... from a distance.

Amazingly, Mat takes a moment out of this encounter to marvel at how pretty one of the heroes is and then Remind Himself again that he’s married. He really does have to keep Reminding Himself. One of these days, he’s not going to remember to Remind Himself until after he’s already slept with someone else. It’s been more subtle in this book than in ToM, but Mat is still constantly checking out Every Other Lady around him.

15. Olver gets dug out of his hole by Trollocs but Noal, now one of the Heroes, arrives to save him. I don’t care about Noal, and Jordan definitely didn’t do enough to build up their relationship in CoT & KoD, but I still got a little misty at the tiny orphan child feeling grateful that one of the people who ‘abandoned’ him has finally come back.

16. haha, this next chapter is called ‘wolfbrother’ so I guess that Perrin is finally gonna wake up. But first, we have Elayne!

She’s able to wriggle lose enough to make the medallion copy shift away from her skin and fall to the ground, and now she can embrace saidar again. Elayne apologizes to Birgitte but Birgitte laughs it off, “Why do you mourn, Elayne? I have it all back! My memory has returned. It is wonderful! I don’t know how you stood me these last few weeks. I moped worse than a child who’d just broken her favorite toy.” Ah, yeah, that confirms that Birgitte’s spiral into bitterness was not meant to be a reflection of Elayne but on the dark place that Birgitte was in, with her loss of memories, I think. But it’s a shame that it feels like parts of the fandom just took Birgitte’s unrelated bitterness as a reason to slam on Elayne more. My girl gets so much undeserved hate.

And Elayne and Birgitte will ride back into the battle together. Not as Aes Sedai and Warder, but as friends. 😍 😍 😍 😍

17. Aviendha! I’ve missed you! Her timeline isn’t advancing as quickly as it has been for those further away from Shayol Ghul, so not as much as happened here in the valley. She can feel the channeling inside the Pit of Doom - “a quiet pulse”. Oh! The wolfbrother of the chapter’s title is actually Elyas, who Aviendha runs across now. The Darkhound Wild Hunt is happening, and hundreds of wolves have come to fight back against them.

Aviendha is about to go fetch channelers to help bring down the Darkhounds, when she spies Graendal a bit higher on the slope, with some Turned channelers, and Aiel guards under compulsion. Aviendha alerts her companions (Amys & Cadsuane) and then begins the fight against Graendal.

18. Elayne has a sword again. Where is she getting these swords? I’m just gonna assume it’s made out of Air or something. More useful than the sword, Elayne creates a banner with the Power, the red lion of Andor, lighting up the night.

19. [Mat] remembered, within those memories that were not his, leading forces far grander. Armies that were not fragmented, half-trained, wounded and exhausted. But Light help him, he had never been so proud.

...

This was the moment he had been seeking. It was the card upon which to bet everything he had. Ten to one odds, still, but the Sharan army, the Trollocs and the Fades had no head. No general to guide them.

...

Elayne’s death had been a lie. Her troops had been in disarray - they had lost more than a third of their soldiers - but just as they were about to be routed by the Trollocs, she rode into their midst and rallied them.

20. Catching up with Moggy! Hi, Moghedien. I bet your Last Battle is going pretty shitty. She kicks Demandred’s abandoned corpse. Oh, his devoted Shendla just left his body there to rot? Yikes. For Moghedien, she discovers that now that so many of the Chosen have been killed off, TDO is ready to let her have a taste of that sweet sweet True Power.

She disguises herself as Demandred and heads to the Sharan forces. I have to admit, given how open Min has been about her Talents, it’s kinda astonishing that Moghedien doesn’t know about her viewings. Min will tell anyone who stands still for five seconds, plus Tuon announced her as a Doomseer and has been plumping her up for the past whatever-number of chapters.

Moghedien starts to gear up for her role as Fake Demandred...

...and then she gets a blast of cannon/dragon-fire in her face from the Band’s part of Mat’s plan.

21. Instead of the Band leaving their caves to fight; channelers are opening them up brief windows to shoot through. Aludra is placed up on a high location with a spy-glass, giving orders to the channelers for the next locations for the booms. Honestly very clever.

22. As Aviendha fights in the valley, plants grow to cover her passage.

They had come right when she had needed them to hide her approach. Happenstance? She chose to believe otherwise. She could feel [Rand], in the back of her mind. He fought, a true warrior. His battle lent her strength, and she tried to return the same.

Determination. Honor. Glory. Fight on, shade of my heart. Fight on.

😍 😍 😍 😍 😍 😍 😍 😍

23. Aviendha kills a Compelled attacker, only realizing it’s Rhuarc after she has struck the fatal blow. She kills him moments before he would have killed her, and only her shoulder gets injured.

She does her best to convince herself that she only killed a shell. That Rhuarc was already dead.

There is a burst of determination from Rand (Strength, Aviendha) and her fatigue leaves her, and she refocuses on the fight.

24. Aviendha studies Graendal and decides on her approach -- she creates a spear made out of fire and light, and some other weaves in reserve -- and charges for Graendal. See, this makes a lot more sense that Elayne randomly having a sword, because this is a weapon and Aviendha knows and has trained in most of her life. I think that Sanderson Just Likes Swords tbh.

I really love the description here because of how it brings back Aviendha’s Maiden roots as she launches her attack on Graendal. The ground explodes underneath her (her legs get pretty destroyed, it sounds like), but she’s leaping up already aimed like a spear herself, and she sinks the spear into Graendal’s side just as Graendal is using the True Power to Travel... and because they’re touching, she goes along with Graendal when she Travels.

25. Mat rides with the Heroes of the Horn. He gets them to confirm that he isn’t one of them. He can see Elayne from where he is.

Mat saw Elayne’s banner glowing above them in the sky, crafted of the One Power, and caught a glimpse of someone who looked like her riding among the soldiers, hair glowing as if lit from behind her. She seemed a bloody Hero of the Horn herself.

26. And then the great battle is over, at least here on the battlefield.

He would have to thank Tuon for returning. He did not go looking for her, though. He had a feeling she would expect him to perform his princely duties, whatever they might be.

Hmm.

27. He does feel that tugging. Rand needs him. He tries to convince himself that this was his part, out here, and whatever is going on where Rand is... that’s Rand’s business. The dice are still tumbling in his head. This part here manages to capture Mat’s double-think in a way that I didn’t feel like came across in the actual chapter when we had the Rand & Mat reunion.

After trying to talk himself out of it, Mat ends up saying that he’s a fool because “I need to go to Rand.”

As a parting note, he asks Hawkwing to go have a conversation with “their Empress” (Tuon), and hmm, interesting. Okay, I need to break this down a bit.

So, one of the things that gave Tuon the big jollies back in the negotiation chapter with Rand was Mat referring to the Seanchan forces as “our forces”, which she basically interpreted as “haha you’re mine now, no take-backs”. And here, he does not call the Seanchan empress “my” Empress. He says she’s “their” Empress. The Empress of the Seanchan, who he is not currently identifying with, it would seem. So. That’s interesting.

We don’t get to see the conversation between Hawkwing and Tuon, of course, but what would Mat assume about what Hawkwing would tell Tuon? Why would Mat send Hawkwing to talk to her? The Heroes of the Horn follow Rand, pretty explicitly. They literally just recently scolded Mat for not appreciating Rand enough. They are aware of current events in the world and of the Seanchan Empire.

Which is to say... of course, Mat is assuming that Hawkwing will try to set Tuon straight on how to be an Empress without abusing millions of people under her power. Hawkwing told him that they would never fight for the Shadow. I think it’s reasonable for Mat to assume that he would disapprove of slavery. And Hawkwing’s hatred of Aes Sedai in his lifetime was canonically influenced by Ishamael, if I recall correctly, so the idea that Ishamael’s corruption is still influencing him in his Horn-form just seems like kinda silly to me. So. That’s my stance on that. Mat has clearly stated in recent chapters that he disapproves of the damane system, in particular, and that he wants to influence Tuon to soften her stance on Aes Sedai. So we know what Mat’s motivations are in sending Hawkwing off to talk to her. And it kinda fits Mat’s pattern of trying to use other people to influence Tuon to be less awful.

28. Rand has thought about Mat often, here in the battle with TDO. He thinks of him again -- Beneath them, on the battlefield, the Trollocs had fallen, beaten by a young gambler from the Two Rivers.

29. Oh, hey, Perrin just woke up. Page 853. He went to sleep on page 670. Nice long nap. Missed... a lot of stuff.

He learns that the battle at Merrilor has been won, but the battle at Thakan’dar, outside of Shayol Ghul, rages on. He gets his exhaustion washed away by one of the Aes Sedai and goes physically back into TAR (where he left Gaul to guard the cave where Rand fights).

30. In the waking world, Thom is the one guarding that cave entrance and he ponders the various ways that the ending of the world can be turned into a song, once this is all over.

31. Mat goes to Grady and tells him that he needs to be taken to Shayol Ghul. He’s brought Rand’s banner with him. Hanging out with Grady are Olver and Noal. The dice are still tumbling in Mat’s head. As far as I can tell, they haven’t stopped since Elayne asked him if he knew what he was doing.

Mat, on thinking about Noal/Jain becoming a Hero of the Horn:

Well, you wouldn’t find Mat trading places with him. Noal might enjoy it, but Mat wouldn’t dance at another man’s command. Not for immortality itself, no he wouldn’t.

Another data point that I’m placing into the pile.

Grady says that Traveling is wonky in that direction. Can’t be done.

Mat won’t accept that as an answer, and he gets Grady to take him (and Olver) as close as they can get -- a Seanchan scouting camp, a day away.

32. lol, we get a tiny glimpse into Fain the mist god-demon here. This just feels so anti-climatic, to still have Fain around at a time like this. Anyway, he’s basically a walking Shadar Logoth at this point. Fain kinda suffers from the same issues as Slayer, in that it feels like he’s a villain that the story grew past and yet he hung around anyway.

33. Gaul has been standing alone against Slayer all this time in TAR, fighting against him and protecting Rand, on his own, while Perrin was taking his restorative nap. But now Perrin is back to help. On the plus side, because of the time dilation stuff, only two hours has passed for Gaul in here.

34. Since he couldn’t take a gateway to Shayol Ghul, Mat is going by dragon to’raken. And, yes, Mat takes time out of his terror at being up so high to notice how pretty the morat’to’raken is, even as he thinks that anyone willing to do this must be “completely insane”. Olver, who is riding with them, is having a great time, though.

From up high, Mat sees a mist covering the valley below and gets a tingling that tells him... it’s about Fain and the dagger.

35. Then their to’raken gets hit by arrows, killing the rider or knocking her out. Mat undoes his straps and climbs over to take the to’raken’s reins. So he’s... he’s riding the closest thing that this world has to a dragon. Subtext, fun for the whole family.

He does his best to give them a gentle landing. It is not terribly gentle.

36. In the aftermath of the crash, Mat thinks that kidnapping Tuon (aka marrying her) is the worst decision that he’s ever made. Hmm. And this is after she ‘returned’ to the battlefield per their plan.

“That,” [Mat] finally groaned, “is the worst bloody idea I’ve ever had.” He hesitated. “Maybe the second worst.” He had decided to kidnap Tuon, after all.

And he doesn’t undercut that thought with any kind of caveat. He just lets it stand as he moves on to the next thing. Another interesting data point.

37. Mat literally panics when he realizes that Rand’s banner has gone missing during their dragon to’raken flight. Why does it seem like Sanderson is so much better at writing Cauthor-related scenes when Mat and Rand are separated from each other?

Olver points out that the swirling clouds above them are forming Rand’s sign, and then he blows the Horn again, for good measure.

38. Rand breaks out of his frozen battle with TDO and re-enters his own body. “From his watching of the Pattern, he knew that although only minutes had passed here since he’d entered, in the valley outside this cavern, days had passed, and farther out into the world, it had been much longer.”

He points Callandor at Moridin, and Moridin promptly throws a knife at Alanna.

Broke back to consciousness by Nynaeve’s herbs, Alanna pulls herself together long enough to release the bond she forced on Rand before she dies.

...I kinda feel the need to point out that Moiraine has done nothing but be a battery for Rand since she entered the cave with him.

I also feel bad for Alanna, who really disappeared from the story once Min was bonded to Rand and could take over as Cadsuane’s Rand mood-ring, and now is only here so that she can die. I have extremely large beef against Alanna for forcibly bonding Rand but it feels like the story really should have used that beat even more than it did, rather than it disappearing after WH.

39. Perrin kills Slayer. Finally. And then he pulls back out of TAR and is “on the rocks in the valley of Thakan’dar”, near where the Aiel are gathered.

40. Mat leaves Olver with the Heroes and meets up with Perrin at the mouth of the cave. So, yes, Mat and Perrin get another reunion. Why does Perrin! Get all the reunions! This is what I was talking about when I said how annoyed I was that Mat thinking about Rand tugging on him wouldn’t end up with any good payoff. All we get is yet another Mat and Perrin reunion.

That Rand is literally inside that cave and yet the three ta’veren do not reunite here is honestly somewhat infuriating for me. Genuinely those two things: the Emond’s Five reunite and the ta’veren three reunite should have been at the TOP of Sanderson’s priority list! There is a lot that I have enjoyed about AMoL but there are just way too many important emotional moments that were either skipped or didn’t happen at all but should have happened.

And, fuck, letting Mat and Rand have a scene that doesn’t take place during Mat’s weird Ebou Dar adventure. That would have been nice! Once Mat decides that he’s not going to be a lapdog for the Seanchan/Tuon anymore, his storyline and his PoV get so much better and so much more enjoyable and I am just... eternal bitterness that our only Mat & Rand reunion was plopped into our most lapdoggy-Mat era.

Mat came here specifically to protect Rand and then he never sees him! That is just fucking awful. They deserved a better reunion. What was the point of having the Heroes scold Mat if we didn’t actually get to see Mat and Rand interact again after it? This is kinda a place where the epilogue is mostly at fault -- Mat just strolling off to plan a fireworks show for Tuon post-Last Battle conflicts pretty hard with him spending time with his dying best friend, tonally-speaking -- but that really just makes it all the more frustrating that the only Cauthor reunion took place when Mat was in his worst Seanchan-era.

41. Aviendha attacks Graendal with an exploding gateway; and Mat kills Fain/Mordeth/etc.

And Perrin almost takes off to go searching for Faile but manages to resist the urge: If Rand died, then he would lose Faile. And everything else.

Yes. I have tried to yell this at the fictional characters so many times: if the world dies, then so does your sweetheart! It’s nice that Perrin finally listened.

42. And for his final trick, Moridin grabs Callandor, and Moiraine and Nynaeve spring their trap, using the flaw in Callandor to take control of the ‘circle’ that Moridin has accidentally formed with them. With Moridin having pulled the True Power, Rand is now able to enter the link, and Moiraine and Nynaeve can feed him all three sets of Power: saidar, saidin, and the True Power. Light explodes from him, and from Shayol Ghul, as Rand uses the True Power to protect himself as he reaches through the Bore and grabs onto the Dark One.

43. We get a quick beat of people reacting to the light:

Elayne is on the battlefield of Merrilor, as they search for the living among the dead. She feels the “swelling of power in Rand” and her attention focuses on him.

Thom shields his eyes as the light bursts from the entrance to the Pit of Doom.

Min appears to have managed to get away from the Seanchan for now, changing linens for the wounded, perhaps also on the Field of Merrilor.

Aviendha is drawn back from the darkness of near-death by the light and the warmth of Rand inside her, and realizes that her explosion twisted the compulsion weave so that Graendal compelled herself to worship Aviendha. Awkward!

Logain sees the light and knows that it’s what was meant by the message that Egwene sent, and he breaks the seals on the Dark One’s prison.

44. In TAR, Perrin runs across Lanfear. Together, they walk into Shayol Ghul, and we learn that she apparently compelled Perrin a little while ago? He’s able to pull out of it by reminding himself of his duty and of Faile, and he snaps her neck, killing her.

*squints at the scene*

Yeah, I mean. That’s certainly still what looks like happened? Sorry, Sanderson, I’m not seeing your hints here about Lanfear tricking Perrin and surviving.

45. Rand holds the Dark One in his hand. Or the representation of his hand. And, once again, when Rand tells TDO how pitiful he is, all I see are echoes of the Seanchan:

You would have enslaved me as you would have enslaved the others. You cannot give oblivion. Rest is not yours. Only torment.

Rand can feel himself dying, his life blood slipping away. Realizing that the world that he’d seen without the Dark One would have been the truth, he knows that he cannot kill it. So he thrusts TDO back into his prison, braids saidar and saidin together to reforge a new shield onto the Bore.

With this new form of the Power, Rand pulled together the rent that had been made here long ago by foolish men.

He understood, finally, that the Dark One was not the enemy.

It never had been.

(because it only reflected the evil that people were already capable of)

46. The black hole inside the cave expands, as Moiraine and Nynaeve run for the safety of the cave entrance.

47. And now we are at the epilogue.

Much like I did with The Last Battle chapter, I’ll take the epilogue in sections by character. Rand & co will go last, this time.

Perrin

The spirits of the dead wolves fade back into the dream. Perrin voluntarily worries about Rand? Wow, that feels kinda out of character for Perrin, who has always been way better at pushing away thoughts of Rand than Mat has been, but I guess let’s go with it. It seems to exist to tell us that Perrin no longer sees color swirls and no longer feels any tugging towards anything. “Those seemed like very bad signs.”

“Have you sent for the three?”

What a weird way to ask “do Rand’s girlfriends know that he’s dying?”

I’m going to take a minute and count up the PoV & page counts everyone gets in the epilogue.

Rand: 3 PoVs (4 pages total)

Mat: 2 PoVs (1 1/5 pages)

Perrin: 3 PoVs (6 1/5 pages)

Loial: 1 PoV (3 pages)

Moghedien: 1 PoV (1 page)

Nynaeve: 1 PoV (2 pages)

Birgitte: 1 PoV (1 page)

Tam: 1 PoV (1 page)

Min: 1 PoV (1/2 page)

Cadsuane: 1 PoV (1 page)

That’s a lot of Perrin, comparatively-speaking.

Anyway, Perrin finds Faile, happy ending, etc.

...oh, I just looked it up and Sanderson answered some questions about the epilogue (tor[dot]com/2013/01/23/brandon-sandersons-wheel-of-time-answers-from-torchat/)! He added Perrin’s and Loial’s scene(s). Ha! I knew that Loial was a Sanderson addition because he uses “Matrim” instead of Mat (that is, imo, by far the easiest ‘tell’ of a Sanderson scene -- someone using ‘Matrim’ when they normally wouldn’t). And the Perrin scenes make sense too because it really builds off of and finishes the narrative thread that was at play earlier in the book for Perrin, which was presumably all written by Sanderson.

Mat

Mat strolls away from the aftermath of having killed Padan Fain, calling the dagger “a gamble I don’t want to touch”. The dice stop rolling in Mat’s head after he decides not to pick up the dagger. Hmm. Mat avoiding becoming the new Fain for the Fourth Age?

After that, we skip to his scene with Tuon. And there are only those two scenes with Mat in the epilogue -- killing Fain and finding out that he’s been baby-trapped into the Seanchan Empire. Though Perrin confirms in his own PoV scenes that he no longer gets the swirls or the tugging, we don’t get the same kind of confirmation in Mat’s (very short) scenes.

I will say that there is more subtlety in Mat’s ending here than I had remembered -- I was extremely unhappy about his ending but this marriage is pretty troubled already in the text, and so it’s not really the book that tries to pretend this is a happy “babies ever after” ending for Mat; I feel like that’s maybe more of a vibe that I got from fans at the time, rather than from the text. There are a lot of “male power fantasy” fans who just really like that Mat ends up married to an Empress and commanding vast armies, I think, at least from what I’ve seen around the internet (and especially back when the series was originally published).

And Mat specifically forces a grin at the news that Fortuona is pregnant, so he’s not genuinely happy about it (and we got things in recent chapters like Mat thinking that kidnapping Tuon was the worst idea he’d ever had).

But, honestly, I do still hate that it happens. I hate it up one side and down the other. It sucks as an ending for Mat so much. Miserable marriage, awful wife, horrible shackles tying him to a terrible fascist empire built on slavery.

That being said... just Tuon’s rule is incredibly fragile, this marriage is also incredibly fragile (which is probably why Jordan slapped a baby in there to begin with -- otherwise, given his general misery level in many of the Seanchan-related scenes, it’s difficult to see how Mat could bring himself to stick with Tuon for long enough to do whatever plot-related things Jordan was imagining would have happened in the outriggers -- the baby is a trap for Mat, not from Tuon but from Jordan).

There are still so many things about the Seanchan that could end up being deal-breakers for Mat if he finds out about them!

(ex. Bodewhin Cauthon is never mentioned in the books after Knife of Dreams, so it is entirely possible that she is among the new damane who were taken by the Seanchan in recent days, and Mat might end up seeing his sister with a collar around her neck post-canon. How would he react to that? And to Tuon’s unwillingness to let her go?)

In addition to Mat potentially seeing people he knows and cares about in collars, we also have the possibility of him learning just how brutal Tuon’s attack against the White Tower was (there isn’t any indication that he knows about the attack at all yet); or Talmanes telling him about Verin’s letter and Mat realizing how damaging his fear of Aes Sedai has been for the world; or further in the future there’s Mat’s potential reaction to the lethal political wrangling that Imperial heirs are meant to get up to (he was disturbed enough that Galgan liking him only means that subpar assassins will be sent against him -- when he realizes that Tuon might well encourage their own kids to kill each other to win her favor, it’s very hard to see him brushing that off). Plus he’s regained his sense of disgust over the damane system. So there are a lot of powderkegs waiting to be blown sky-high for Mat, post-canon.

idk, Mat’s storyline is maybe the one where I most have to untangle whether I dislike it more because I feel like it was executed poorly or if I dislike it because it sets up a situation that will never get resolution. And how connected are those things?

A big frustration that I’ve had with how Jordan and then Sanderson handled Mat’s storyline over the course of the last few books of the series was how many shortcuts were taken with his character and how artificial forcing him into the Seanchans’ arms has felt to me.

a. Mat getting trapped in Ebou Dar and then all the characters involved taking a vow of silence when it came to telling Rand about it. Mat getting trapped in Ebou Dar is plot nonsense: relatively forgivable. But having multiple characters being given the opportunity to change that situation and just... not bothering to do it is... that’s a characterization issue. It severely impacted my feelings about Nynaeve for Jordan to turn her into the kind of person who just doesn’t bother to tell Rand that his best friend was left behind in that kind of perilous situation. Plot manipulations... that’s just how the plot works. But over and over, characters got broken or bent for the purpose of jamming Mat into the Seanchan storyline.

b. Setalle Anan is a minor character, so I get why people don’t care about her, but she’s a character who pretty much completely reverses her characterization between WH & CoT (in WH, she is anti-slavery and finds Mat charming and trustworthy; in CoT & KoD, she protects and waits on Tuon while treating Mat like the dangerous one, including betraying Mat’s secrets to Tuon -- and her betrayals are never acknowledged by the text in any way; she just keeps on being treated as if she’s a friendly supporting character) and, from what I could see, it’s just so obviously done in order to protect Tuon from ever having even a sliver of character growth rather than it making sense for Setalle Anan’s character.

c. We keep tiptoeing up to the brink of Actually Having A Plot Happen with the Seanchan and then backing away at the last minute without really having a good reason to do it. Incredibly frustrating. This was one of my main annoyances with CoT & KoD. And in AMoL, both Rand and Egwene inexplicably back down when they have Tuon on the ropes and off-balance.

d. Mat’s teleportation to Ebou Dar in-between Towers of Midnight and A Memory of Light. I’ve talked about this one a lot but yeah. It’s just... really bad? I do suspect that Sanderson couldn’t figure out any way to actually make it believable that Mat would go to the Seanchan and that’s why he had it all happen off-the-page. But the careless damage that it does to Mat’s characterization is just horrific. Mat gets ripped out of the action of the first third of the book, and doesn’t get to the Last Battle itself until the book is more than half over. Once Mat is actually engaging in the Last Battle, his characterization steadies a lot but especially those first four chapters with Mat, it feels like we’re only working with half of his characterization and the other half has vanished somewhere in-between ToM & AMoL.

(and if Mat hadn’t been cut-and-pasted from the Tower of Ghenjei over to Ebou Dar, then we would have had a full reunion at Merrilor. So I’m annoyed/bitter about that too)

I could keep going but... let’s keep it at four issues for right now so that we’re not here all day, lol.

All of those issues are problems that I had with the execution of the storyline.

I am not inherently opposed to depressing endings for characters that I love but... it has to be done well. It has to make sense. And Mat’s ending just... required cutting away too many parts of him (and other characters) for it to make sense to me.

But though it is not always handled well (to put it mildly), Mat’s storyline with Tuon (and Tylin before her) is an example of the ‘typical gender roles are swapped’ done in a way that is more down to the very core of his storyline than a lot of other storylines, which are more on the surface.

He’s much less politically powerful than his spouse and needs to use guile, intrigue, and manipulation to get his way and try to persuade her to a gentler and kinder path than her warlike nature naturally aligns towards.

He undergoes something of a gender-swapped version of “The Taming of the Shrew” storyline, in which a fiercely independent person gets coerced/’tamed’ into being a properly submissive spouse (or, depending on your interpretation, into pretending to be one) -- many of the tricks that Tuon and Tylin use are similar to what Petruchio does to Katherine in the play. Mat gets publicly humiliated and starved by Tylin into submitting to her (which is what Petruchio does to Katherine during/after their wedding), and isolated away from his past connections during his time with Tuon, where he constantly has to act to try to figure out how to appease her without provoking her temper (Petruchio compares taming Katherine to falcon-taming, but Tuon would probably compare it to horse-training or damane-breaking), and Petruchio changes her name from ‘Katherine’ to ‘Kate’, which fits pretty well with Tuon’s insistence on never once calling Mat ‘Mat’.

Plus Mat getting his name changed to indicate that he now ‘belongs’ to Tuon’s people fits into this general category -- and historically, in the culture that Jordan belonged to, that’s normally a role given to women, to be given a new name that shows that they are now of their husband’s people and not their father’s; it’s usually their last name but, in the not too-distant past (and maybe currently in some places as well, idk), at least in the USA, women were often referred to as Mrs. “husband’s first name” “husband’s last name” with none of their own name making it into the address.

But a lot of the issues that I have with how this was written is that it felt like Mat was behaving like his hand was forced even when it wasn’t. Which is definitely a writing issue -- it’s a similar issue to the one that I have with the Rand & Min romance, for example, where Min desperately chases after something even though she doesn’t really want it at the start. Prophecy gets used as a way to skip actually writing important character or relationship beats, instead of prophecy being one of many tools in the writer’s kit.

So, yeah, it really is the execution of the storyline that is the biggest problem for me with Mat & Tuon, and the way it feels like he is pulled away from his other attachments whether or not that makes any narrative or character sense.

I really hope that the show does better with them, and with Mat in his endgame (should we get there, etc.).

I will say that I do think that Sanderson handled the romance better than Jordan did; the main problem was that it was already fundamentally broken by how the relationship was written in CoT & KoD, imo (the KoD collaring chapter in particular made me despise them as a pairing and my feelings never recovered from that moment). But in Sanderson’s books, we actually see the effects of Tuon compromising with Mat during various points of the Last Battle (though we see don’t actually see their private discussions and/or arguments that lead to those compromises), and there’s always a throughline showing how miserable the Seanchan lifestyle is for Mat, and those are two things that were majorly missing from CoT & KoD for me, but that make sense as the only way to make the romance even half-believable for Mat’s pre-established characterization from WH and earlier.

The three big issues that I have with Sanderson’s Mat are: the terrible first chapter of TGS (with the gross sexism); the terrible first chapter of AMoL (now featuring inexplicable teleportation); and the deep deep disservice done to Mat and Rand’s friendship (Rand got a personal goodbye with EVERYONE important to him EXCEPT Mat! And Mat got a personal reunion with everyone important to him, except Rand! All they got was the negotiation scene that was ultimately all about Fortuona and the Seanchan treaty, with Mat and Rand’s friendship being the set dressing around the scene).

But the relationship with Tuon honestly... makes a lot more sense in this book than it did in CoT & KoD (once we work past the brain-breaking logistics of the first chapter or so). There are TONS of hints that Mat has uncomfortable vibes going on underneath his casual exterior, plus Tuon actually does make some attempts at compromising with him, and if the well hadn’t been poisoned by how much I despised CoT/KoD-era Mat & Tuon then... I might have had a chance at enjoying AMoL-era Mat & Tuon for the toxic trainwreck that it is.

But, like all the characters & relationships in AMoL, we skip some pretty big moments in the Mat & Tuon relationship -- we see the effects of them compromising but we never actually see them coming to that compromise in private, which I feel like we needed after how unyielding and frankly how annoying Jordan made Tuon about everything.

We do end up with a Mat & a ‘Fortuona’ who remain at cross-purposes -- Mat continues to think of and refer to her as ‘Tuon’ while Fortuona has kinda reversed from thinking of him as a ‘buffoon’ to instead believing that he has the same kind of practical motivations behind his choices that she does, which is also not accurate. But Sanderson did add in some actual give-and-take to their relationship, which Jordan never seemed willing to do, so the AMoL-era Mat & Tuon is a lot more genuinely engaging for me, even if I do still think that they are one of the most obviously doomed fictional marriages that I have ever seen.

Final Mat-related question for the moment: the Seanchan Empire is based on authoritarian governments throughout history, so does how the Seanchan Empire operates mimic the behavior of a cult?

The popular model for cults is the BITE model, which was developed by a man who was deprogrammed from the Moon cult in 1976 (Steve Hassan). It’s an acronym:

Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotion control. BITE.

Do the Seanchan seek to control people’s behavior? (yes) Do they seek to control the flow of information that the people under them learn? (yes) Do they seek to have their members reject critical thought and only apply to the group-think? (yes) Do they manipulate the emotions of their followers, usually instilling fear or paranoia about outsiders? (yes)

We know from earlier books that the Seanchan culture =/= the Seanchan Empire. There are constant civil wars and uprisings in their native land. This is explicitly why they are such good soldiers, because they are always fighting each other. Yet they present themselves as a monolith when they come to the Westlands, bragging about how they’re here to bring ‘order’ to a lawless continent. What they say about themselves does not match the truth of what else we know about them.

How does the Seanchan Empire exercise its control over its people? Everything I included here is something I think we’ve see the Empire do, but I did bold ones that are particularly blatant in the text.

Behavior control: Control types of clothing and hairstyles; permission required for major decisions; rewards and punishments used to modify behaviors both positive and negative; discourage individualism; encourage group-think; impose rigid rules and regulations; punish disobedience by beating, torture, burning, cutting, rape, or tattooing/branding; threaten harm to family and friends; encourage and engage in corporal punishment; instill dependency and obedience; kidnapping; beating; torture; murder

Information control: Distort information to make it more acceptable; systematically lie to the cult members; minimize or discourage access to non-cult sources of information; ensure that information is not freely accessible; control information at different levels and missions within group; allow only leadership to decide who needs to know what and when; encourage spying on other members; impose a buddy system to monitor and control member; report deviant thoughts, feelings, and actions to leadership; ensure that individual behavior is monitored by group; extensive use of cult-generated propaganda

Thought control: require members to internalize the group’s doctrine as truth; adopting the group’s ‘map of reality’ as reality; instill black and white thinking; organize people into us vs them; change person’s name and identity; use of loaded language and cliches which constrict knowledge; encourage only ‘good and proper’ thoughts; thought-stopping techniques to shut down reality testing: denial, rationalization, justification, wishful thinking; rejection of rational analysis, critical thinking, constructive criticism; forbid critical questions about leader, doctrine, or policy; labeling alternative belief systems as illegitimate, evil, or not useful

Emotion control: teach emotion-stopping techniques to block feelings of homesickness, anger, doubt; make the person feel that problems are always their own fault, never the leader’s or the group’s fault; promote feelings of guilt or unworthiness; instill fear, such as fear of: thinking independently, the outside world, leaving or being shunned by the group; ritualistic and sometimes public confessions of sins; phobia indoctrination: inculcating irrational fears about leaving the group or questioning the leader’s authority, no happiness or fulfillment possible outside of group; shunning of those who leave; being told there is never a legitimate reason to leave.

“Destructive mind control can be determined when the overall effect of these four components promotes dependency and obedience to some leader or cause; it is not necessary for every single item on the list to be present.“ (in this case, that would be to the Empress, ~may she live forever~)

(all taken from freedomofmind(dot)com -- not linking because sometimes outside links make tumblr act weird about posts)

On the page, we witness the slow process of Leilwin née Egeanin pulling away and deprogramming from the Seanchan Empire, and then in this book, it feels like Mat has begun that process as well. And it feels like they started the same way -- because of a massive overreach by Tuon, the leader of the cult/Empire. Leilwin née Egeanin gets humiliated and punished by Tuon for no reason; just because Tuon felt like being a brat that day, and that moment of humiliation -- the re-naming and the forcing of the jewelry on her in a way that treated her like a slave -- was really what made Leilwin née Egeanin start to pull away from the other Seanchan and go into the path that eventually led to her being, however briefly, Egwene’s Warder.

For Mat, it really seems like whatever happened in that ‘not pleasant’ discussion that he and Tuon had after she berated him for, essentially, prioritizing Egwene’s privacy over Tuon’s desire to get information from him... that discussion (that we didn’t get to see) really seemed to lead to the more combative Mat who refused to back down and roll over for her. Mat still feels a level of protectiveness and affection for Tuon through the rest of the book but he stops letting her push him around and he starts acting like he cares about doing something about the slavery system in the Seanchan Empire again, which was a part of him that we lost at the start of CoT and I have hated so much that we lost in his character. But it slowly grows back over the course of the second half of AMoL.

Again, my big regret here is that the Mat & Rand reunion happened before Mat started his spine regrowth program. Even though Mat does start to push back on Tuon more here, he still never finished several of his character arcs that were set up over the course of the entire series: namely his own mistrust of Aes Sedai and his fear of Rand as a channeler. Both of those fears were things that he was actively working in the text and that he abruptly backtracked on when Tuon was introduced into his life (because being chill with channelers and being chill with people who enslave channelers is contradictory and so Jordan decided... to go with being chill with slavers). So those are two flapping loose ends for his character at the end of this series that never got to fully be addressed because the ‘romance’ was prioritized over Mat’s characterization.

Loial

Loial is looking for people to help him with accounts for his book and “Perrin ignored me and Mat cannot be found”.

Mat just completely disappearing from the Westlands side of things to go set up a fireworks show for Tuon (and asking Aludra to be the one to set it up, which just seems kinda mean, considering that the Seanchan pretty much completely eliminated the Illuminators) is just... frustrating. Apparently Mat visited the battlefield here “smiling and healthy” but then vanished. So, in theory, there’s an empty place here where Mat might have visited Rand and talked to Elayne & co one last time, since Rand is in the main healing tent on this battlefield.

Loial also notes how odd it is that Elayne and Min don’t seem to feel any urge to go in to hold Rand’s hand while he’s dying (Aviendha is getting her legs looked at). I know, Loial! They’re the worst fake-grievers who ever lived, I swear. If the whole point is to trick people into thinking Rand is dead, then it might be a good idea to... actually try to trick people?

Moghedien

In which Tuon’s people are already breaking the terms of the treaty by snatching up channelers from the battlefield at Merrilor. No hundred years of peace, Rand. I’m sorry.

Rand (& all those who say ‘goodbye’ to him, or who don’t)

Rand leaves the mountain, slipping on his own blood and carrying a body. Shayol Ghul is trying to close before he can leave and he only barely makes it out in time before the cave snaps shut behind him.

Moiraine tells Rand that he did well, and Nynaeve tries desperately to keep him alive, but eventually, and without ever waking back up, ‘Rand’ dies.

Elayne, Aviendha, and Min do the absolute worst job of playing grieving widows ever. Like, if Rand had actually died, I could understand this better. Because they might really be in shock. But they know he’s alive! And their whole job is to convince people that they absolutely believe that he’s dead! Just... pinch your arm until you start crying! This is literally the most suspicious way that they could have gone about things -- Nynaeve is already extremely suspicious of how they’re acting. Seriously, she’s gonna wiggle the truth out of them pretty much five seconds post-epilogue.

Birgitte comes to say goodbye to Elayne because she’s about to be reborn... and to mention that she’s tossed away the Horn of Valere. Sure hope that Elayne doesn’t regret that in ten years when they’re at war with the Seanchan!

Tam hopes that now his son can get some rest. My hope is that Rand will, you know, go and talk to his dad after he’s had a chance to recover from the stress and trauma of the Last Battle. Also, Tam... you’re gonna have grandkids. No thoughts on that, I see. Still no thoughts on that.

The funeral scene frustrates me to pieces.

Honestly, the most frustrating thing about the funeral scene is how easy it would have been to casually mention that Mat and Perrin were there? Like, that’s ONE SENTENCE. Just... the erasure of those years of friendship, because heterosexual marriage, in Jordan’s fictional world, meant that close male-male friendships just stopped existing. It’s depressing. That CADSUANE is considered to have more right to be at Rand’s funeral than his childhood friends who were also vital parts of the Last Battle. It’s insulting. And apparently Tam organized it? But he couldn’t be bothered to invite his kid’s best friends. Definitely a place where Sanderson should have done some editing of the original epilogue. One sentence is all that was needed.

*sigh*

I do think that Sanderson did try to set up why Mat wouldn’t have gone -- we have seen Mat, in several of his recent PoV scenes, swallowing his grief over losing people he loves and not letting it appear to affect him openly, even as it rocked him deeply, so Rand’s death would be another of those gut-punches that he would do his best to pretend didn’t happen. But, fuck... it just sucks that the friendship between Mat and Rand is such a sublimated thing in this last book, when Rand and Mat both got to much more openly deal with pretty much every other important relationship that they had (though I will note that Rand and Sulin never got a reunion either! Rude!).

Perrin didn’t get anything like that kind of subtextual explanation, but Perrin actually did visit Rand’s healing tent while he was dying, so at least he got that much. *shrugs*

Min thinking here about how the assembled people expect a ‘show’ of grief -- yes, they have all found it exceedingly odd that none of you appear to be grieving the man you said that you loved.

Rand wakes up in his new body, washed clean of the wounds that he’d taken over the course of the series. No more missing hand; no more agonizing pain in his side.

I have to admit “she left me some money” feels like a pretty anti-climatic way for Alivia to “help Rand die”? She wasn’t really involved in his “death” at all -- it was really Moiraine and Nynaeve who were the ones who ‘helped’ him die. I mean, any one of Min, Elayne, or Aviendha could have left him some money, since they all know he’s alive. I wonder if Jordan was originally thinking that Alivia would be the one joining Rand & Nynaeve for the cave journey, and it was Sanderson who decided that Moiraine would be more appropriate? Nothing distinctively Moiraine happens in that cave, not the way that Nynaeve was needed to be there to heal Alanna without using the Power. Like, this poor woman was harassed by Min for a handful of books because of that prophecy and all she did was leave Rand some money! Min better find her and apologize to her! (I already know that she won’t)

Haha, so confession: my brain edited out that new!Rand had lost saidin. My brain was just like “nope, of course he can still channel”. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of Rand not being a channeler at the end of the story, so that part I’m not thrilled about. He does have his newfound ability to use the threads of reality to basically channel anyway, though. Or at least I assume that’s what the pipe scene is about.

And then his thought, too, about ‘which’ of the women will follow him - yeah, you’re right that thinking that means you’ve gotten a swollen head! They all have responsibilities! Though since Rand leaves so abruptly here, there’s a lot that he doesn’t know, and the two things that most affect this specific question are: the extent of Aviendha’s injuries and the extent of Min’s involvement with the Seanchan. Literally zero of them is in a position to go chasing after Rand, even if they wanted to! Rand is the one who has no obligations and can easily visit them if he wants (well, maybe not ‘easily’ if Min does end up in the Empire).

But I can still remember, wow, what a relief it was that he was alive at the end, and free and unbound. The rest can be... adjusted by post-canon theories.

In terms of ‘things that aren’t covered but that we can probably assume’:

It does look like Elayne ended up with all three of the medallion copies -- the one Mellar used on her, the one that was on Birgitte’s body, and the third was with Lan and she probably reclaimed it (there’s nothing to indicate that Mat spoke with Lan and got it back), so the slaver empress never gets that medallion that Mat wanted to give her back in ToM. Tragic.

Despite Elayne and Tam speaking frequently over the course of AMoL, they somehow never speak about the whole grandkids issue. I feel like we can assume that this happens at some point, post-epilogue? Elayne and Aviendha both seem like they would go back to Caemlyn to rebuild. And Tam doesn’t really have a reason to go back to the Two Rivers at this point, so I can see him ending in Caemlyn too because: grandkids.

Technically, Min has slipped the Seanchan net at this point and could just not go back if she wants, so she can either go back to the Seanchan or she could go to Caemlyn with Elayne & Aviendha, but if she does stay away from the Seanchan, Tuon is going to try to get her back. Unless she was super-turned off by Min actually standing up to her in front of all the Blood and hastily makes Selucia her Truthspeaker again. That’s another possibility.

Ah, since we were told earlier that Melaine was about ready to give birth and Birgitte tells Elayne that she’s about to be reborn: Melaine might be her mom. I feel like Birgitte being reborn as Aiel sounds kinda fun.

I feel like Rand would not actually enjoy traveling all on his own after a while, given what we know about him, so he would probably end up visiting Caemlyn. And given how suspicious Nynaeve already is in the epilogue, I’m going to guess that she knows the truth by the time Rand goes to Caemlyn.

If Mat decides to leave the Seanchan behind at any point, he will probably also go to Caemlyn, and Mat and Rand can finally have a good reunion.

All in all, there are things about the ending that don’t thrill me but there are also things I really like. And having an ending at all helps in terms of sparking the imagination for fanfiction or meta or... an Amazon Prime television series. I don’t think we would have ever gotten the series if the books had stayed unfinished.

The epilogue checklist (and my theories about how it affected AMoL)

So, while reading AMoL, it felt like Sanderson took a couple of shortcuts in order to bruteforce the characters into reaching their epilogue endpoints, because there simply wasn’t enough time for it to happen naturally. This is my list of things that I believe got shortchanged due to “writing to the epilogue”:

Fortuona is pregnant in the epilogue: at the start of AMoL, Mat gets teleported to Ebou Dar without any kind of narrative or logistical explanation (contradicting his PoV chapter in the ending of ToM, where he was planning to return to Caemlyn, which would have thrust him directly into the main stories at play in the prologue & early chapters). I feel like part of it is that Sanderson really wanted to get that bun in the oven as quickly as possible.

“they expected something from the three of them; a show of some kind” : There’s just a wide acknowledgement in the epilogue that literally everyone knows that Rand has three girlfriends, so everyone just already knows in AMoL that Rand is in a relationship with three women now. No need for anyone to have emotional reactions to it, please! (not even Rand’s literal dad!) This one also ends up being weird because it seems to change from moment-to-moment whether or not the whole army knows that Rand has three girlfriends (if everyone knows already, why is Rand playing spy games with Elayne?).

Min is Fortuona’s pregnancy test: Min instantly respects ~Fortuona~ as an empress even while thinking that she doesn’t normally respect nobility. Bizarre, considering Min’s own history with the Seanchan from Falme.

Mat kills Fain: we got two super-quick glimpses of Fain earlier in the book to set up this moment but Mat had so much other stuff to do that Sanderson couldn’t really do more than say: yeah, Fain exists and he’s bad, lol.

Minor elements I think were affect by the epilogue:

Rand is still pondering over the idea of choosing between Elayne, Aviendha, or Min: we get Rand’s going “am I allowed to love three women? idk sounds fake” when he and Aviendha sleep together in chapter 4, which just was kinda silly. I think the epilogue is also the genesis of the vibe where Rand appears to consider “having sex with Min for months” to not be any kind of “choice” when it comes to the three women, but having a romantic interlude with Aviendha or Elayne would signal a choice -- because the epilogue acts like the situation between Rand and each of the three women is roughly equal, so “months of sex with Min” appears to hold the same emotional weight to Rand as “pining from afar with two nights of intense passion” does when he thinks of either Elayne or Aviendha.

Mat has no thoughts about any of the Westlands characters: I think that this is more of a subconscious effect -- as he focused more on the final book, I think Sanderson focused on the relationships highlighted in the all-important epilogue... and the only person that Mat cares about in the epilogue is himself *cough* I mean, Fortuona, of course, lol. In both TGS and in ToM, Mat’s deep affection for various Westlands characters was constantly on display, as shown in his own ‘loves lying to himself’ way. This gets curtailed in AMoL, especially in the early Ebou Dar chapters.

I think I’m going to let myself might let myself marinate over the various books before I post a final list of my personal ranking of the books.

One thing that I’ve really noticed is that, more than any other character, the quality of Mat’s storyline has a huge impact on my overall enjoyment of the book. In CoT & KoD, Elayne and Egwene (both of whom I love), got pretty good stories. But Mat’s story was so bad that it made it difficult for me to enjoy the good parts. But maybe some time just letting myself think about the series as a whole will balance out my thoughts. Does that make Mat my favorite character or just my most impactful character? idk. I feel like Elayne or Rand would more consistently hit the top of my favorites.

Overall top five characters throughout the entire series:

1. Elayne

2. Rand

3. Egwene

4. Mat (might be higher if not for CoT & KoD)

5. Nynaeve (might be higher if she didn’t basically disappear after she married Lan)

Then, moving on to the next favs, I think there’s more uncertainty there for me:

6. Verin, probably, but it could be Moiraine. Let’s say they tie.

7. Aviendha and Siuan can both go here. Both generally very good and interesting characters.

8. You know, I had a real turnaround with Gawyn in this reread of the books; I’m gonna put him here. He can share this spot with Leilwin née Egeanin.

9. Loial, probably. Needed more PoV; that would have been nice. I’ll put Faile here with him.

10. For more minor characters, I gotta give a shout-out to Narishma (favorite Asha’man), Sulin, Pevara during her Black Ajah Hunter phase, Olver is really good in his sections here in AMoL, Asmodean for being my favorite fail-Forsaken and Moghedien for sticking it out until the very end, Elaida honestly very fun PoV as far as villains go, Teslyn and Joline for being troopers and enduring Mat Cauthon at his very worst, my girl Berelain who always deserved better, the ‘Finn in general always lots of fun, Aludra and Juilin who always kept their integrity intact.

#wot #wheel of time #wot reread #wot book spoilers #wot spoilers #wot amol spoilers #wot a memory of light spoilers #mat cauthon #rand al'thor #elayne trakand #so it really feels like the 'main characters' of the actual last battle #were rand mat egwene and elayne #with everyone else being more of a secondary character #who helped the one of those main four storylines #posting this today because ao3 is being slightly iffy right now #so i'm going to post the next chapter of voice on thursday #and just give ao3 some time to work out whatever the connection issues are

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vargaslovinghours · 10 months

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Fandom: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac (But really Vargas lol) Rating: Teen and up Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

What, exactly, did Scriabin take from Edgar when they separated?

My first multichapter fic for Vargas! :D Yay!

(Pls read Ch. 1 first - Ch. 2 is also recommended, but as long as you're caught up on the first, you're good to go!)

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Side B

What the fuck.

"It's, it's possible that if, maybe whatever happened earlier, whatever caused all that blood and for us to be knocked unconscious-"

What the fuck.

"-and if I suffered a head injury, then maybe-"

No. That's enough.

Scriabin pushed away from the closet door he'd defensively pressed himself up against and put his hands on Edgar's shoulders, which quieted him. He looked at him expectantly, with eyes that Scriabin somehow only just now realized were casually guarded, curious, uncertain in a way that denoted inexperience. That was so messed up, that was completely wrong. Edgar should've been on guard, absolutely, but only because he knew exactly what Scriabin was capable of. He really didn't want to look at him right now if this was what he was going to be seeing instead.

He spun him quickly and pushed him out the door before he could protest. He got one last look at those wide, confused eyes before he slammed the door behind him, bracing it shut with both hands for good measure.

What. The fuck. His head came forward, making a dull thud as his forehead connected with the door. He doesn't remember me? His fingers curled on the door. What does he mean he doesn't remember me?! How could he not know me?! One hand pushed through his hair; his scalp tingled and that was so weird, he felt it and it was so weird- We literally just- He literally just-! As if pulling him screaming into life wasn't bad enough, now he had decided to play some sick prank!

This can't be true. It's just like him to try and make jokes at the worst possible time, he has no tact.

There was a timid knock on the other side of the door. Scriabin jumped as it resonated through his skull, his elbow, pressed to the door with his hand buried in his hair, set his jaw. Then silence.

If he was really trying to get back in, clear things up, say he was only kidding, he'd actually try.

Nothing.

Scriabin's blood was ice as he went over it again. The way he'd said his name. The vacant look in his eyes as he said it, like his mouth knew its shape but none of the meaning. No fear, no realization, nothing that really felt like Edgar, just sound, just noise.

Maybe he really had-

Oh god. His knees gave out, and his arms had no practice at holding him upright, not yet. His hand slid down the door, his other hand guarding his head as his hair fluffed against the grain.

How could he do this

This is all his fault

Stupid, idiotic

He can't do this to me

I can't believe him

I can't believe this

How dare he leave me alone like this

Thoughts spiralling, and all he could do was hold himself down, press his fingers into the back of his neck, force his chest to his knees and maybe he wouldn't immolate under it all. He was shaking, from tension or fear he couldn't tell, his mind too hazardous and loud to cut through it all. He was shaking, dizzy, and if he moved, letting go would surely kill him.

He can't do this to me.

He breathed. And breathed. And swallowed. Eyes closed, heart pounding, sure. Confusion and dismay, whatever. Pain. Fine. So be it.

This isn't like me. A hand untethered from his vice grip in his hair, and he stayed attached to the floor. It connected with the carpet below him and became a new lifeline. He pushed up and away into a limp sit, arms already burning slightly from holding himself up after all that. He shook his head mildly. This isn't who I'm going to be in life. His body, this fear response be damned, he was in control now.

Regroup. Let's- a mental pause, barely a quarter of a second long as he turned the word in his head. Let's pretend it's all true- what does that mean?

He flopped over, leaned upright with his back against the door, heels of his fists pushed down into the carpet to scootch closer. Moving was so awkward still, very unfitting.

He was acting normal. Well, Edgar's baseline for "normal" had changed considerably, so maybe put an asterisk on that. Not that he was ever normal to begin with, but normal-for-Edgar, -ish. That means he has to have some memory.

Scriabin held out a hand, arm slung over his knee, one finger held out. He had recognized his glasses. One. The apartment. Two. Which key to use. Three. He had said Todd's name. Four.

His stuff can be discounted, he's had all that for a while. Back down to one. The kid is a new fixture. Which means he remembers the last couple months at least. He shook his head and brought his hand up to comb through his hair. Well...it's fuzzy for me, so it probably is for him, too. Scriabin remembered everything in as much clarity as the last couple months allowed, there was no way Edgar would know more even if he had all his memories.

Speaking of which, Scriabin could remember everything. He flipped through; the last two months and bringing Todd in, Edgar's parting words to Johnny, his and Devi's conversation - he grit his teeth - and further back, everything along the way, all the way back. False dreams, shared childhoods, everything that was once Edgar's alone, he still remembered it. Nothing was out of place which made it all the more strange!

This is so fucking weird, if I remember everything, then why would he-

He stopped short. His purported purpose had been to replace Edgar. Take him over completely. If he bought into the conceit for a moment, just to play in the space... He was alive now. That was not as intended; it shouldn't even have been possible.

Did he...give me his memories? Like, all the way? Not just to borrow, to shape him, give him legitimacy - he was alive now. His own person. Separate, embodied, and whole. Was this the price of life?

That's stupid. But possible, he couldn't discount. If this - he brought his hands up and looked down at them, watched himself touch his own chest and felt it beneath his coat, shirt, the nerves firing as his slid his fingers up himself - if this was possible, then...

He continued for a moment, curious and reverant, all of him new and privately exciting, to exist and to touch, to feel, smell, see, all of it clear and fresh and penetrated deeply into his mind, as if a layer of film had been lifted from his senses. The moment passed as the memories, unbidden but important, cluttered in around him again.

There were still a lot of questions, and most of them couldn't be answered without Edgar, ugh. If getting anything out of him before had been like pulling teeth, he was very sobered to think about how it might be now. Depending on how much Edgar remembered, maybe he could start piecing things together.

Did he do it on purpose? Did he know this would happen? There's no way he would have been willing to if he had- But he couldn't ask him things like that. Even if he did remember, admitting something like that...

He was just spinning his wheels at this point. Better to gather what he could from the man himself. He looked up, preparing to stand.

Ah-

The room was still in something of a state.

Edgar would be annoying, or at least distracted by trying to pick up the clothes and uncarefully unpacked items strewn about the floor from Scriabin's very successful excavation of his old glasses. The clutter would have to go if he wanted his full attention.

He grumbled as he pushed off the door to pick up the first few things. First day of life and I'm already his maid. Figures. He's always needed me to clean up after him.

Silence.

Somehow it only just hit him. Thinking alone in the late hours, planning things behind Edgar's back, it was nothing new. But a barb unsunk into his mental flesh was left out in the wide emptiness, poised to stab whoever happened upon it next, and he was the only one here.

He felt very small all of a sudden, and he didn't like it at all.

His eyes blankly scanned the room, looking for nothing, until they settled on the toy at Edgar's bedside. His toy.

He dropped the items he'd bundled into his arms and made his way over. He picked up the small simulacrum, turned it over in his hands once, and stared at it.

He wouldn't know this. Not really. He brushed a thumb up and over the little mouth, the contours of its small face. Retroactively, I've never been this at all.

I'm no one to him.

Does this mean we can start over? The thought struck him like lightning, freezing his heart in his chest. He was fixed solid, staring down at the small figure in his hands.

Before he could even think, he'd already thrown it through the open closet door, landing noisily in the box he'd dug through with a clatter. He grabbed up the fallen clothes and items and stuffed them back in the box, burying the toy in mundane detritus, then closed the cardboard flaps and slammed the door of the closet for good measure.

His breath was laboured and he glared, like wishing it gone would make the closet itself disappear.

Answers. He needed answers, more than anything.

He ripped the door open, and there was Edgar who looked up, staring dumbly back at him and carrying the clothes he'd shed earlier over his arm. Something in his mind clicked over, and he didn't think about it.

"Alright," he caught his breath for half a second, "what do you remember?"

Edgar just kept on staring, mouth open, eyes unconfident behind weak glasses. Scriabin huffed irritably, I don't have time for this, and moved towards him, arm outstretched.

"Come on." Edgar gave a small startled sound behind him as he grabbed his collar and dragged him through the doorway. He threw him across the room, not bothering to watch his arc as he closed the door behind him. The bed was that way, he'd be fine.

When he turned back, Edgar had managed to catch himself, though already halfway on the bed. Scriabin stood with his back to the door, feet planted and he crossed his arms. No more speculating around impossibilities, tangible and present as they might be, it was time for a proper interrogation. It was at least preferable to-

Edgar made a face at him and scooted back, offering a seat next to him on the bed. Equal footing briefly flashed through his mind and while he wouldn't consider it ideal, nothing today was really going his way. He sighed, then made his way over and sat across from Edgar, who was eyeing him with a certain degree of caution. At least the feeling was mutual.

"Spill." He re-crossed his arms and leaned towards Edgar. "What do you know?"

Edgar hesitated, apparently thinking, his hands laced and fingers agitatedly if quietly rubbing the backs of his hands.

"I want to verify some things first."

Scriabin snorted dismissively. Where had Edgar's overly-trusting nature gone? A serial killer, well he's an honoured guest, but Scriabin? He didn't even distrust him for the right reasons.

He gestured with an open hand, Go ahead, then tucked his arm back in.

"Todd's last name?"

Pfsh. At least it was proof enough that anything Edgar knew, Scriabin did as well. As expected.

"Casil. His stupid bear's called Shmee in case you forgot that too." Edgar shook his head. No he hadn't? If only he could just check!

"Do you know our phone number?" Obviously he did, so he rattled it off quickly, Edgar nodding in turn. He flipped his hair in time with the last digit, careful to keep his eyes covered. It was a bit of a timid attempt, being the first in this body, which was a minor blessing he supposed.

Edgar mulled over what he'd given him for a moment, then a moment longer, then a moment even longer. His eyes searched absently, gazing down into his own hand, his other on his chin, lightly thumbing his goatee. He was focused on names and numbers, but those were child's play compared to everything, everything Scriabin still wanted to know. It was frustrating on a visceral level, watching him struggle with such simple innocuous nothings while the most important person in his life was sitting right in front of him.

He was supposed to be the most important.

It was frustrating.

"You really don't remember anything, do you?" He didn't hide the sneer as it shaped his voice - odd the way his body just did that now, did things without him actively thinking them into being. Even things like the little waver that made its way in that he pushed back down and under. He was frustrated, angry, tired - any emotionality could be attributed to those, nothing else.

Edgar didn't answer, just kept his gaze locked to his face. That was almost worse. Watching him fumble through things, it wasn't fun, but at least he wasn't trying to pry. He could see him try to look past his bangs, and the fact that he didn't know better...

Scriabin looked away for a moment, then thought better of it. Best defense is a good offense.

He reached for Edgar's face, for those damn scars, ever-present reminders. Edgar shied away, not wanting to be touched suddenly by someone he didn't know. As if Scriabin had ever cared about that.

Well, things were different now. Maybe he didn't really want to touch him anyway. Not yet.

"Do you remember these...?" Instead he framed his face with his hands less than an inch from his skin, and even there he could feel the heat coming off him. Edgar reached for his face, looking away from Scriabin as he touched the angry red marks. He winced minutely, then glanced back at Scriabin, searching him, his expression guarded again. Scriabin could hear his own pulse in his ears.

"...Johnny?"

"Fuck." Fuck! "Of course you'd remember him but not me." God damn it! It wasn't right, it wasn't fair, just because Johnny came first by a hair's breadth, just because he wasn't in Edgar's head, with Edgar's fucked up little obsession with the murderous stick figure- It limited what he could get away with too, if he remembered that far back. Absolutely nothing was going in his favour.

"I'm sorry..." He sounded genuinely remorseful, and it stuck in his throat. Disgusting. "So you know Johnny, too."

"Unfortunately." Scriabin tucked his chin to his chest, arms crossed again in close proximity. This sucks. Edgar just kept rambling, unaware as ever. His excuses held this time at least, one point in his favour, no points for bringing his annoying habits with him despite everything.

"I don't think I've seen him for a couple months now? Everything's awfully..." He gave a vague gesture and Scriabin uncurled slightly. He was giving him room to contribute. He shook his head.

"You haven't."

"Have you?"

He returned to his tight coil of sulking. Not like he was keen to meet up and chat, but he couldn't explain why he hadn't had the opportunity to either.

"I remember he called, too."

"Ugh," barely above breath. Enough about Johnny! Again, Edgar continued obliviously.

"Although I don't really recall what we talked about, not for a while..."

Of course not. I took over for half of those.

He perked a bit, and Edgar focused more on him, patiently setting his hands in his lap.

"You know."

He could play this to his advantage. Give Johnny some well-deserved karmic justice for fucking him over so many times. It was almost better that Edgar didn't know - Scriabin had been trying to get him away from Johnny all this time, and if he really had forgotten everything, not just the moments when Scriabin took over but every moment they had shared, then that meant it coincided almost perfectly with his first meeting with Johnny. Blank spot after blank spot after blank spot, all lined up immediately after getting his face slashed.

He could work with that.

"It's probably trauma." Edgar startled and his hand shot to his temple, lightly touching his hair.

"Like, head trauma?" Scriabing almost laughed. Yeah, probably that too. But that wouldn't help his case.

"No." He leaned in, taking a more intimate, secretive tone. "Think about it. When did things start getting fuzzy?" If he was right on this - which of course he was, but not being able to verify, not being able to see that he was right, it was disconcerting - but if he was, Edgar's memories of Scriabin should start with that first fateful encounter, give or take. A bit of reframing here, a touch of implication there... It probably wasn't even an outright lie; if Edgar's memory were perfect after experiencing everything Johnny had put them through, that would be some kind of twisted miracle.

His only real concern was their "childhood" - how much had Scriabin pulled with him? Would that throw off his story? But that was so far back, there was no way Scriabin or Johnny could be implicated in that. As long as Edgar didn't bring it up before he thought his way around it...

Edgar stayed quiet for a long while. His eyes raced behind closed eyelids, searching, scanning, retracing - Scriabin could almost see the moments where he hesitated, stopped and went back, then starting recollecting again. He wished he could see it for real, watch him unfold himself, touch those memories again, hold up his own in contrast. Even just hear Edgar's thoughts as they went by, feel the emotions he felt. But he couldn't, so he just stared as unblinkingly as this new body would allow, just watched as Edgar went over everything on his own.

He finally opened his eyes, staring back into Scriabin's though he was sure they were still hidden. He felt naked and awkward and Edgar still hadn't said anything. If he could just see like he was supposed to, or if Edgar would just tell him, he wouldn't have to ask. I have to do everything around here.

"It was after you met him, wasn't it?"

"You think it's...mental trauma?" An unspoken 'yes.' Relief flooded him, and he pushed ahead.

"Edgar. He stabbed you." Edgar gripped his shoulder, his eyes closing again and he looked to be in pain. That was a very effective reminder at least. "Do you even know why?" He shook his head and spoke throught half-grit teeth.

"I must have made him mad, but I don't remember-" Of course not, I did that.

"Your mind is trying to protect you." Not. But one of us has to with your inexhaustable deathwish. Scriabin reached out to touch him properly, but Edgar pulled away. He didn't follow, still not yet. Play up the pity. "He messed you up so bad," with a curl in his tone, an I told you so that barely made it to words even privately; how long had he been holding that in? "Surely you must've felt like you wanted, you needed to get away from him, that he wasn't good for you, that you-" He'd told him so many times, some it must have stuck, some of it had to have-

"Then-!" Edgar's eyes shot open, wide and desperate with an edge of disbelief. A strangled gasp escaped him, half-choking him as he tried to speak. "Then why can't I remember you?!"

He almost began rolling off the cuff, but really, he still didn't know for sure. And it definitely wasn't like he could tell the truth even if he wanted to; who, who hadn't lived it, would believe him? Edgar certainly wouldn't, not with his lack of imagination. He had to dress this up, weave a narrative that was plausible, had the perfect mix of truth and falsehood to stand up to scrutiny.

Huh. Ironic.

"I..." No. Some of this was Edgar's fault too. "We...argued."

"Argued?"

"I... Mng." He wanted to aim for some kind of levity, but his throat had tightened on him. He just wanted to tell this stupid inside joke and not have it affect him, not have it mean anything, and here he was getting emotional? He'd say it and fucking mean it. "It's not like I'm in your head, so-" spat out in a rush, there, he'd said it. Haha, isn't that so funny. He swallowed harshly, pushing down everything he felt into his stomach acid. He was in control. He was fine. This didn't shake him. "I can't know for sure," another humourless laugh inside, "but I was against your relationship with Johnny. Maybe you shut me out so you could keep seeing him with no pushback."

It certainly wasn't outside the realm of possibilities of what Edgar would do to avoid taking Scriabin's extremely basic advice about fraternizing with serial killers. How many times had he been ignored up to this point, only to culminate in the ultimate 'I don't know what you're talking about.' Pfeh. I bet he wishes he'd thought of this sooner. It did nothing for his painfully stuttered pulse.

"You know, I've been trying to convince you to stop going back to him for a while, but, well..." He waved his hand at Edgar's hand still death gripped into his shoulder, and Edgar averted his eyes guiltily. At least he showed some remorse. Better than his nigh constant apologia.

He stayed quiet a moment longer, and just before Scriabin made to fill the silence again, Edgar struck him with an intense look.

"What are you to me?" Ugh. Of course. There was not a single good answer for that. Even if he told him everything- no, especially if he told him everything, there was no way Edgar would believe him. But coming up with a convincing lie on the spot, when they were so clearly something to each other - even he needed time to come up with something workable. How could he have ever prepared for a situation like this? It was never meant to happen, so many things were never meant to happen!

He continued at Scriabin's silence. "You know Nny," Ugh! Even his awful nickname. "And Todd. And...me." He couldn't refute it, so he nodded tightly. "Do you live here?"

Technically he had, and technically he hadn't. Still, going forward, it would be easier to let Edgar assume that he did. It wasn't like he had anywhere else to go at the moment anyway.

"Yes."

"Are we..." He searched him, looked him over as much as he could and he wasn't subtle about it. If only Scriabin had his proper glasses, he'd let him look as much he wanted, behold his spectacle! As it was, he just felt self-conscious and it was very unbefitting. "...family?"

The baggage on that. He did not feel like opening that particular can of worms in either of their current states. He turned his head and flipped through any number of halfway decent ways to phrase it until he hit on something Edgar would remember. Better not to contradict for now.

"You told Johnny you have no family when you met."

"That's true..." Edgar blinked, processing. "Wait, did I tell you that?" Scriabin startled. Even after he'd accounted for his memory! Of course he had to pick his story apart now, he never knew when to leave well enough alone.

"When you-" No, he had to be involved. "When we bandaged your face."

Edgar mulled on that for a few seconds, taking on a thoughtful pose. "I only remember being alone."

"You don't remember me at all. What do you want from me?" He huffed.

"No, sorry, you're right."

"Thank you." He was right!

Where had Edgar expected him to be? There was something weird about how he'd said it. He filed the thought away for later.

"So, if you've been living here, where..." Edgar looked around the room, then back to Scriabin. "Where have you been sleeping? Todd's already on the couch..."

Scriabin couldn't help as a smile sprung to his face. If he was going to present him with such a perfect opportunity, well, he'd better take it. He even had the decency to look nervous in response! This was too good.

"Would you believe me if I said right here, in bed?" He again tucked his chin, playfully this time, his hair falling further in his eyes. Even through the dark tangles he could make out Edgar's face immediately bristling with heat.

Ooh. That's such a fetching shade on you, my dear.

"But-! I, I haven't been sleeping on the floor!" He was visibly sweating!

"Correct." His smile grew. This was too easy, and he needed an easy win right about now.

"W-" He leaned forward on his legs, though refused to get any closer. When he spoke it was a harsh whisper. "Why...?"

Scriabin shrugged easily, not bothering to reign in his smile in the least. "I mean, where else, right?" He leaned in since Edgar refused to, and oh. He was blushing all the way up to his scalp. Hilarious. "You certainly didn't seem to mind." He couldn't hold back the slightly musical tone or his eyebrows inclination to move on their own. His body knew what he was getting at, and he could see it only increased Edgar's fluster. All the better.

"Well I do now!" Edgar darted up and away, stumbling in his hasty retreat. "If you'll excuse me!" though he was already practically in the hallway by the time he said it. What a display, and Scriabin's laugh was loud and natural.

Finally, something positive. He'd managed to fumble his way through, not his best work in lying or manipulation, but he'd set some important groundwork. He'd gotten some answers, and he could start to shape some more believable stories around them.

The biggest hurdles were Johnny and Devi. As long as Edgar didn't meet with them too soon - or well, at all would be preferable, but he doubted he could just keep him locked up, as much as the idea appealed to him. There were so many things that were possible now, things that he had the ability to do, given the right circumstances... All of that in due time. For now he had a yarn to spin.

He listened as Edgar fumbled in the hall, the sheer sound of cloth being pulled and folded over an arm barely perceptable. Was he really going to try to sleep on what little was left over? Maybe he'd give up once he realized the pickings were thin and beg Scriabin to let him sleep with him. Hah.

While he was out, Scriabin made his way over to the pajamas drawer. They were all old and soft, even just to his hand. They'd do for now, until he could get his own. It wasn't like he hadn't worn all this before anyway.

By the time he'd finished dressing, his clothes discarded on the opposite side of the bed to where Edgar had set up his little nest, Edgar had finally gotten himself a set of pajamas. He wondered for a moment if he'd dress with Scriabin in the room again, though maybe his intense stare drove him off. Who could say. He patted the bed with a wide grin when he returned and was dutifully ignored. He settled down to the side, and Scriabin laid on his arms to look down at him.

"Ugh, lame."

"I don't-"

"Yeah, whatever." He'd heard it all before. At least he could literally look down on him like this. He folded his hands and leaned just a bit further, looking him over. A desire he hadn't realized he had surfaced in the dark and quiet. "Give me your hand."

"Sorry?" Scriabin held out his hand expectantly.

"I used to hear your heart beat every day." Edgar looked at him incredulously, but Scriabin was unperturbed. "Let me hear it again."

He hesitated but eventually slowly offered his arm. "...Okay."

He pulled his arm up and placed his thumb against his wrist. He felt a strange mismatch - where he'd been expecting one heartbeat, there were two. He covered his surprise, near shock at the realization that of course he had his own body now, by pulling harder on Edgar's arm, directing him up to his ear.

"Wh-"

"Shh." Quietly. He had wanted this, wanted this body, this separation, this freedom for so long, and now... He spoke quietly, his voice betraying nothing. "I'm listening."

Edgar's pulse was erratic, but he hardly paid attention to it. His own fingers on Edgar's skin, warm and pliant, and Edgar's fingers twitching in his hair, he could feel it, he was trying not to touch him- This hesitation was killing him, every jerky movement away not from fear of what Scriabin could do to him, just uncertainty, like he was still a stranger- He pressed him harder to his head, and he could feel goosebumps under his fingers. He wanted to just hold him there until all the memories they'd shared poured back through him, into his blood, into his breath.

Where are you?

But he replied in that same uncertain, guarded tone that indicated he didn't know, not really.

"C...can I have my arm back now?"

He pushed him away. "Fine." Edgar curled his hand protectively against his chest, and he noticed he rubbed it slightly, he probably hadn't even realized.

He mumbled out a harried "Good night," and it was almost enough to make Scriabin smile. Almost. He could still affect him but this wasn't enough, it wasn't right.

He laid his head on the pillow, not bothering to pull his arm up over the side of the bed. If he twitched in the night and touched Edgar, well, that could mean anything. Maybe he was dreaming. Maybe he did it on purpose. Plausible deniability was one of his greatest assets.

As it was, he was just tired. Maybe he didn't pull it back because he hated the thought of sleeping alone, pushed out and forgotten, and hated it more that he was even thinking something like that. How pathetic. He didn't need anyone, especially not Edgar.

But he was tired. Not in his right mind.

Does this mean we can start over...?

The thought echoed and died, and he slept.

#💟#Fanfiction #Blank Slate AU #Edgar #Scriabin #Todd #Shmee #He's technically in there but once again no speaking lines :P Yet anyway lol #It's fanfic time again! I fell into yet another writing fugue and finished Chapters 1 and 2 in like four days lol #If you'll notice tho ♪ Neither of those chapters are featured under the cut :3c Pls do read Ch. 1 at least to get caught up before diving in #This one took a bit longer but that'd be because it's Almost as big as both previous chapters combined lol #I'll update it to the chapter list in a few days! Y'all get a preview here :D It'll be the same there with slightly different formatting #Decided to try something new since tumblr doesn't normally allow underlines but it's very important to Scriabin's syntax #I promise they're all just links to the first chapter lol - you're welcome to check but I promise I didn't put a sneaky link anywhere lol #My one gripe is that it doesn't look as good on-blog :/ Fine on the dash! But I'm not willing to sacrifice the dark colouration on the links #Italics were chosen as the only light feature for a reason ♪#I mean at least it's not Bolded lol I'll take it #These were a lot of fun to write so far ahhh <3 I've been wanting to dig a little deeper for a long while now!#I mentioned this idea offhandedly in the tags of Incoming Outgoing but ahhh it's very rewarding to put to words :D #Fun Fun Fun

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