It had been me.
Turning my ruined head with deadly purpose, I leveled my one remaining eye at the woman holding Quolosin’s Fire. She stared at me open-mouthed, clutching the stolen tome to her breast. The wind flogged her as she stood dumbfounded near the cliff edge. Behind her glimmered a body of water that spanned to eternity.
“D-do you have any idea what you just destroyed?” she stammered. Her anger gave her courage in the face of my looming revenge. “Is your pride so great that you’d ruin the very thing you were created to protect?” Her words condemned me, and I felt them pierce me as no attack ever had.
I said nothing. I strode forward with grim resolve, and she saw her death loom in my shadow. Desperate, she hurled sorcery at me, but it bounced off. She summoned a scorching wind, but it could not erode me. She screamed the blasphemous names of powerful beings to aid her, but even they dared not challenge me.
I crossed the final distance between us and raised my fist to hammer her into her grave. But in that final moment, trapped between me and the endless ocean behind her, she did the only thing she could.
She hurled Quolosin’s Fire toward the open sea.
As the flame arched into the air, time stretched like the vast eternity of all my years. The woman fled, the stolen book clasped safe in her arms. My instinct screamed to reach for her, but instead I followed the arcing Fire with my remaining eye as it plummeted beyond the edge of the cliff.
I could not bear to reenter a world of darkness. I made my choice.
The pathetic woman forgotten, I stretched for the Fire, which spun end over end in the middle of nothing. I took a mighty step and launched myself from the cliff.
As I descended in free fall toward the crashing waves, I felt small and weak. I was a pebble beside the plates of the earth. Separated from my connection to the ground, a profound sense of loneliness crashed through me. Had I truly lived by myself for thousands of years? Despair bore down on me, plunging me toward the sea.
I grabbed Quolosin’s Fire just before I hit the water. The ocean surged around me, coursing through every channel in my rocky form. I began to sink, the water rushing above my head, and for a moment only my hand and the Fire remained above the surface.
I held to my final glimpse of light as long as I could. The last thing I saw before the Fire went out was a blazing ball of light, brighter even than the Fire, raging high above me at the peak of the noontime sky. Then the ocean consumed the Fire and snuffed out my vision.
I would have wept, but I had no tears to shed. For I am made of stone.
My world consisted of utter darkness once more. As I grounded upon the ocean’s floor, I felt the return of my profound connection with the earth and everything it touched. That, along with the heavy sensation of water pressing down, somehow comforted me.
I searched with quiet desperation. I must have moved half the mountain, sifting through the underwater rubble of the tower. But I never found my master’s bookshelf or his summoning circle. I mourned the loss of the stolen tome but knew it would soon be dust along with the wretched woman.
Accepting that nothing remained of my master’s home, I descended deeper into the valley of the sea. My footsteps pressed into the soft earth, kicking up silt as I passed.
For over a thousand years I wandered the depths. In that ageless period of my life the earth shook and shifted. The ocean surged and slept again. I crossed the mountains and plains of the unseen world.
At one point a massive force slammed into the land. The sleeping stone deep beneath my feet cried out in agony as its mantle broke, shattering the spine of the world. Violent energy radiated up my body and threatened to tear me apart. Unknown chaos raged around me as the ocean hurled itself onto every corner of the planet.
I stabilized myself as the disaster settled. Memories of the doomed kovuls washed through me. I wondered if the humans would survive this tremendous event.
Settling into a solid position, I relaxed and extended myself into the world around me. The earth clawed at me, desperate to drag me down into its torment. I held the pain at bay as I expanded outward, seeking its wounds.
Miles away, I felt landslides and broken hills. Hundreds of leagues distant, I felt the shape of sealed-off valleys and enraged volcanoes. Across great distances, I traced the courses of rivers and flooded canyons. Farther and farther I reached, shifting the energies of stone to envision the doomed land.
At last I found the civilizations of the world and felt them crumble. The weight of their charging feet bore down on me as they fought and killed over precious resources. I witnessed their fall but did nothing to help. I remained motionless at the bottom of the ocean, beyond their memories and history.
I thought again of my master and all his lost knowledge. For centuries I’d hoarded it in my desire to protect. What good came of that? Perhaps by holding onto it, I had, in fact, been working against my master’s desire. Long ago he said our purpose lay in benefiting the world. I believed his legacy broken, but perhaps I could salvage something.
Extending my will, I merged with the earth. The soil became my skin, the mountains my bones, and the molten core at the center of the planet my heart.
Through my extended body I heard children cry, their wails reverberating against the mountains. I listened to a mother weep as she buried her baby. And in one particular cave on the far side of the ocean, I overheard a scraggly man praying into the stone floor on which he knelt. His whispered pleas asked for help in a time of desperate struggle. His soft whispers brushed against the cavern floor and vibrated to me.
I thought of Qual’Jom and his kindly voice. I thought of what he’d said, and so I decided to help this man.
Shifting my energy with deft precision, I carved words into the ground beneath his nose. I felt him jump back in surprise, but I continued to carve shapes in the language he knew.
A valley with water waits for your people two weeks to the northwest. Find shelter there. Reforge your lives. Give thanks to Qual’Jom.
The man prostrated himself, then ran to share the news. Satisfied, I moved my attention to a hilltop where a starving woman knelt in the dirt and prayed for food. I shifted the earth, and broke words in the ground before her.
Find fresh water and meat in the fertile land south of the burned forest. Rebuild your home. Give thanks to Qual’Jom.
She wept and kissed the soil. Hundreds of times I sent such messages, and with each one I told them to give thanks to my master.
In time, societies managed to rebuild themselves. Some raised shrines to honor Qual’Jom. I watched from afar as they prayed to him, and later turned to him for wisdom and guidance. The runes I’d seen on the walls of my master’s dwelling remained fresh in my memory. The knowledge they’d awakened within me burned. On days when I felt large gatherings at Qual’Jom’s shrines, I shared the runes by carving them onto stone altars and tablets. The runes told the story of finding eternal life beyond death, and it pleased me to pass on my master’s knowledge.
The people rejoiced at this gift. They honored Qual’Jom by carving statues and spreading his lessons. Every culture depicted him differently, but a strange phenomenon surprised me. Every rendering in every society showed him as a man with no eyes.
The realization that they honored me, and not my master, disturbed me. I retreated for years, not daring to reveal myself further. But as I hid in my lonely ocean, hopeful prayers continued to bombard me from afar. Elders placed soft flowers on my statue on feast days. Children from across the world sat on my carved lap. Men and women danced in swirling patterns matching the runes, and I felt their whispered thanks.
Intended or not, I accepted the lineage my master once held, and became his successor. I would have smiled, but I could not, for my ruined face is made of stone.
As the age of humans elapsed, I fulfilled my silent role as benevolent steward, guiding people toward revelations my master had worked so hard to preserve. Days came where I felt my watery home grow cold. I warned
the people as much as I could, but in the end they came to their tragic fate, and I mourned their passing. The ocean froze around me, and for another endless span of time, I existed within a prison of ice.
Eons passed, ages beyond counting. All the time that had passed since my awakening was but an instant compared to what I experienced there. The mind cannot fathom the years that passed in the world above. In that time of solitude I tilled the emotions of my life, churning them endlessly until they had no hold over me.
Then at last, with a thaw that spanned a thousand times a thousand lifetimes, the ice melted away, shifting now to the other extreme. The warm and comforting sun above, which I so lovingly remembered from my brief encounter with the sky, became an angry tyrant, raging with such intensity that it burned away the ocean, exposing me to its hideous scorching furnace.
The weathering of ages had eroded my once mighty body of stone to smooth, thin lines of lime that could no longer bear their own weight. I sat on the dry, parched bed of the lost ocean and crossed my legs beneath me.
During that last, endless spread of time, I searched within myself, coursing over the ancient symbols on the walls of my master’s cave. I basked in their transmitted wisdom. Where there were gaps, I traveled deeper within myself until the missing secrets came forth like magma from the earth’s core. I had given the runes and their secrets to those who asked, but now I applied their lessons myself.
Despite the burning above and the loss of my body below, I felt my unbroken connection to the terrain around me. I reached out farther than I ever had, feeling every nuance of the world. Every stone and seared grain of sand made itself known to me. My eyes still could not see, but my awareness became so acute that the combined vision of every previous living being could not compare to my own. I discerned countless trees burn to cinder. On every continent, I felt the last traces of water torn from the soil. I sensed every tiny pebble across the planet quiver in fear of the murderous ball of fire above.
I knew then I was the only life remaining in the world. I, a golem of stone, had inherited the last legacies of every race, and of the earth itself.
When the last epoch came to its end, the storm of nuclear fire above swelled beyond its breaking point, setting fire to the air and to the stone itself. I felt the final cry of the condemned land as it disintegrated to ash, and then the ash itself annihilated. The last of my body vanished, and only the infinitude of my consciousness remained. Light replaced darkness, completely.
And in this light, I saw, at long last, my master.
He came to me, hobbling with his staff, and I welcomed him. “You returned to me, master. Have I done well?”
“Yes, golem, you have,” he replied, stroking me with his words. “You guarded well the one possession that mattered: the great lessons of our lineage, which have led you here, and will live again someday when the world is reborn. You did well, my golem. So very well. Thank you.”
And with that, the last of what I’d been holding onto became free. I rejoiced in the vindication that I had done my master’s work to my end. The universe blossomed within me, revealing all the experiences a being might possibly witness. Closing my formless eyes of awareness, I released myself from the constricting passage of time.
In the moment of my apotheosis, I returned to the firmament of creation, to that place-before-places I had known in the moment of my awakening. A place where nothing is made of stone, where all of time exists within one endless, perfect moment, and where I, the stone golem of Qual’Jom, am made of light.
ROBERT JORDAN & BRANDON SANDERSON
DURING THE EDITING OF EVERY NOVEL, YOU REALIZE THAT CERTAIN scenes just aren’t working. There are a variety of reasons this happens, and while removing those scenes is always one of the most difficult parts of the creation process, it functions like the proverbial pruning of a tree—providing room for other scenes to grow. In the end, the book is better off.
That said, I’m always looking for places to show off scenes like these. They not only expose something I find very interesting about the process, but they often have gems in them that I am eager to share. (The scene with Gaul and the bridge in this excerpt is a good example.)
The following sequence was pruned from A Memory of Light, the final book of the Wheel of Time. Fair warning up front, it includes a lot of characters in the middle of their arcs, so without a background in the Wheel of Time, you might be a little lost. I’ve done what I can to make it work on its own, but it can’t—by nature of its origins—ever truly be a standalone.
It also is not canon to the Wheel of Time. Though I’m very fond of how the sequence plays out, our eventual decision to delete it necessitated revisions to A Memory of Light, which grew to include some elements of this piece. The final book has no room for these scenes in its chronology; characters would literally have to be in two places at once. In addition, a few arcs of side characters play out differently here, contradicting the published narrative.
This shouldn’t be seen as a replacement for those scenes. More, this is a chance for me to present something that never quite made it to publication. Imagine it as a glimpse of where the story could have gone, but ultimately did not.
The setup is simple: the enemy has been using an alternate dimension known as the Ways to move troops in secret and attack cities unexpectedly. Caemlyn—the capital of the nation of Andor, and one of the most important cities in the series—has recently been invaded using the Ways.
Our characters have decided that it’s vital to interrupt the enemy’s ability to use the Ways. They can’t allow continued resupply and reinforcement of armies behind their front lines, and so a desperate plan is hatched. Perrin, with a team of elite troops and channelers (users of arcane power in the Wheel of Time), will travel through the Ways and destroy some of the paths the enemy is using.
Hopefully you will enjoy this for the fun bit of behind-the-scenes material that it is. In the postscript, I’ll further explain why we deleted it.
For now, please enjoy!
Brandon Sanderson
A Fire within the Ways
Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson
CHAPTER 1
The Gate
Perrin stepped through the gateway into Cairhien, gripping his hammer, and looked right and then left down the narrow, cobbled alley. It was night, and the alley was dark—though lantern light shining through the gateway painted the cobbles golden at his feet.
The city was rank with the smells of men: smoke from nearby chimneys, the lingering aroma of powders and perfumes, even the scent of paint on the wooden boards of the alley—long dried and gone stale. Missing was the scent of rotting food so commonly associated with cities. Not even the smallest scraps were left to rot in Cairhien these days.
Part of him fixated on the smoke first, then tucked its presence into the back of his mind. Fire was the simplest and often the first way for a wolf to know that men were near.
Perrin prowled down the empty alley, waving for his group to follow. The still air was strange—for wolves, noise was the other sign of humankind. People were often oblivious to how much noise they made. A man in the woods was usually a thunderous, crunching, snorting, grumbling affair. That cacophony should have been magnified many times, here in the city.
And yet, it was still. Unnaturally still. Cairhien should not have been a quiet place, even at night.
Perrin reached the mouth of the alley and scouted the larger thoroughfare that it intersected, his eyes piercing the darkness. To his left, across the street, a building flew the Lion of Andor beside the Rising Sun of Cairhien. A few people passed by out here, smelling of wine and unwashed bodies.
“Where is everyone?” Arganda asked, slipping up beside him, holding a shielded lantern. First Captain of Alliandre’s guard in Ghealdan, Arganda was a compact man, like a lean and powerful jackrabbit. He was a good one to have along on a hunt.
“Elayne has pressed most of them into one military division or another,” Perrin said
softly.
“Farmboys with kitchen knives and hay rakes,” Gallenne said, coming up on Perrin’s other side in his well-polished breastplate and helmet with three plumes, his single eye peering down the street. He could be a useful man too, if he could be kept in check. “They’ll be cut to pieces by the first Trolloc they see.”
“I think you’ll find, Gallenne,” Arganda said, “that some farmboys can be dangerous. Particularly if cornered.”
“Quiet, you two,” Perrin growled.
“I mean no offense, Arganda,” Gallenne whispered. “This is not a matter of class, but of training. A well-trained soldier is of equal value to me in battle, farmboy or lord, but pressed armies have no training at all. Queen Elayne should not rely upon them.”
“I don’t think she’s going to,” Perrin said. “But what would you have them do, Gallenne? Sit and hide in their houses? This is the Last Battle. The Shadow will hurl everything it has at us. Better that the people should be armed and ready, if the soldiers fail.”
The man quieted as, behind, the rest of Perrin’s force moved through the gateway. Perrin wished he could still the clanking of armor and the fall of boots; if the Dark One discovered what they were up to, they’d find a force of Trollocs waiting for them in the Ways. And yet, to go without at least some troops would have been foolhardy.
It was a careful balance. Enough men to take care of trouble, if encountered, but not so many as to draw their own trouble. He’d settled on fifty. Was that the right number? He’d stayed up nights, carefully going over this plan a hundred times, and was confident in it—but this mission still had him constantly second-guessing his decisions.
The Ways were no careless jaunt through the forest. He suspected he knew that better than anyone.
Last through the gateway, crowding the alleyway, were six pack mules laden with supplies. In addition, each soldier carried a kit with extra water and food. Gallenne had questioned the need for so many supplies, but Perrin had been firm. Yes, the pathway they’d planned looked like it would take only a few days, but he was taking no chances. While he couldn’t plan for everything, he’d not have the mission fail because of something as simple as supply problems.
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