#oh no an emotion without any irony whatsoever how will i survive | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

neuxue · 5 years

Text

Wheel of Time liveblogging: The Gathering Storm ch 42

In which Rand gives everyone else his abandonment issues.

Chapter 42: Before the Stone of Tear

Ah, excellent, a Rand chapter. This ought to be…well, not good exactly, but. Well.

I know this book is Rand’s darkest hour—at least, darkest so far; I suppose it could get even worse but we’re so close to the ending now that I feel like his arc has to hit a turning point soon—and I know this state of mind he’s in and these things he’s doing are Not How He Is Supposed To Be, and that he can’t continue like this and have any hope of a true victory.

But at the same time, this is what I’ve been waiting for ever since Rand set himself on this path, and I am loving every moment of it, because sometimes you just want to see your characters self-destructing against their own carefully honed edges as the world looks on in horror and all they feel is cold. It’s a thing.

Anyway, we open with Rand and Lews Therin arguing with each other (themselves? Himself?) over ownership (management?) of the List.

No! the madman sputtered. Who are you? It’s mine! I made it.

Except…Rand is the one who made it, who began it. It’s yet another thing that makes me think this barrier is no longer truly between Rand’s current life and his past one but between the things he lets himself think and know and be, consciously, and the things he pushes away and holds desperately apart.

So where once it was just Lews Therin’s memories leaking across and Rand, frightened, trying to keep them back, it became a way for Rand to shove aside emotions he couldn’t afford to feel and pain he could not endure. He has claimed much in the way of the memories, now—at least, those that are useful to him. And in exchange he has filled that gap with pieces of himself, over time, keeping the sides of the barrier balanced but not as they once were. Now it seems as if it’s just as much—or perhaps more—Rand al’Thor on that side as it ever was Lews Therin.

Which, if this is correct, makes it even more imperative that he let the barrier go; he is divided against himself, and forcing parts of himself away, and still refusing to acknowledge any of what is on that other side as his, even though ‘what is on that other side’ is at this point largely determined by him, and was ‘his’ not so long ago, and much of what was on that other side is now in his conscious perception of himself.

Overanalysing fictional characters? On this blog? Never.

What have we become? Lews Therin whispered. We’re going to do it again, aren’t we? Kill them all. Everyone we’ve loved. Again, again, again…

“Again and again,” Rand whispered. “It doesn’t matter as long as the world survives.”

Oh.

It was his greatest fear; it was the thing that he held to the strongest as a difference between himself and Lews Therin, the thing he could not accept, the thing that made him most afraid of his fate, that it could end up the same as before. He threw it in Lews Therin’s face—You killed yourself, Kinslayer, after you murdered your wife and your children and the Light alone knows how many others. I won’t kill where I don’t have to!—but now… Now even that, he accepts. Now that he has crossed all his own lines, now that he has destroyed a fortress with balefire. Now it is Lews Therin who fears it. Or rather, what parts of Rand he has pushed over to that side of his mind, holding them desperately on the other side of a barrier full of holes.

To hear Rand just…accept that, accept the thing he so reviled, the thing that in large part caused him to divide his mind this way and fight against himself, is…wow. It shows just how far he has come. (Or how far he has gone? I suppose the verb makes rather an important difference in tone there).

To hear him say ‘It doesn’t matter’.

Which means that now, if it came to that…he would do it. In his efforts to avoid this fear, he has brought it into the realm of possibility. In pushing away everything of himself that fears that fate, he makes it all the more probable. It’s a terrible and beautiful irony.

“We’re here, ready to fight. Again and again.”

The emphasis throughout this exchange on ‘again and again’, not just killing everyone he loves but the fight itself…it sounds very like what Moridin was saying back in chapter 15. An endless cycle of war and death and no way around it. To which Rand at the time responded ‘your logic destroyed you, didn’t it?’ but now he sees no problem with that exact logic. Oh, Rand. Is this truly your own thought?

He couldn’t let [Min], or any of them, see him slipping. They mustn’t know how close he was to collapsing.

Rand. My friend. It is way too late for that. You are (still) nowhere near as subtle as you think. Though how you think making cold claims of mercy and then balefiring a massive fortress with the most powerful sa’angreal ever created is subtle, I have no idea. After telling one of the people you think doesn’t yet see you slipping to dream on your behalf. Seriously, as cries for help go, yours are…impressive, certainly, and really not at all hidden in any way whatsoever.

So many dead by our hand.

And it was just the beginning.

Your hero, ladies and gents.

“I am well, Min” he said. “I was thinking.” “About the people?”

In a manner of speaking…

Each time he’d conquered a kingdom before, he’d left it better than when he’d arrived. […] Each land he’d destroyed had, essentially, been saved at the same time.

If only you had seen it that way at the time, we might not have come to this. But no, at the time, it was just ‘always I destroy’. Of course he would only come to understand the salvation-destruction duality when he is no longer capable of the former.

Ah, so he’s heading out. With absolutely nothing resolved in Arad Doman, and the situation easily worse than he found it. No point lingering for a lost cause, is that it?

Somehow, the people realised that, and it was very hard for Rand to look at them.

Even now, it’s hard. Even now, it tries the cold he has locked himself in, though he cannot quite admit it. There’s such a strong impulse in him to care that suppressing it takes everything he has. And a good ten or so books of working on it.

Their hungry eyes accused him: Why bring hope, then let it dry up, like a newly dug well during a drought?

That’s more or less Rand’s own logic. It’s why he’s stopped letting himself feel, or to hope for anything that isn’t death and destruction and the bleakest sort of victory. Because to hope means opening himself up to more pain, and he’s too afraid that it would break him, and then where would the world be?

So Arad Doman is being left with even less of a government than the USA had for the first month of the year. That’ll end well.

It is not my problem, Rand thought, not looking at the people.

Wellllllllllll…… *equivocates with both hands* I mean, technically I suppose it’s not, because you’re not actually the ruler of Arad Doman, but only because you’ve refused to take on that responsibility after arguably causing most of the problems here, albeit indirectly. Though Graendal can’t entirely be blamed on Rand, and she absolutely had a hand in creating this mess. But also, being the prophesied saviour of the entire world unfortunately makes said entire world your responsibility, but also that means much of what happened was arguably inevitable, but…

Jury’s out on that one, is what I’m saying.

Oh, right, Ituralde’s been sent up to the Blight. No doubt he’ll be sending a Strongly Worded Letter to Rand when he finds out what’s happened here.

“he warns that something is gathering.”

A storm, perhaps?

I’ll stop making these puns when they stop walking right up to my door and knocking until I let them in.

Rand had wanted to leave directly from Lady Chadmar’s mansion grounds, but that would have been to vanish like a thief, there one day and gone the next. He would at least let the people see that he was leaving and know that they had been left to themselves.

An odd moral hangup for someone who has, by his own reckoning, crossed the last line into irredeemability and can kill hundreds of people with balefire without qualms. And also is very much leaving them to themselves, regardless of the manner in which he does so.

Oh but wait, it gets worse!

“The food! It has spoiled.”

“What food?” Rand asked.

“All of it.”

It’s almost funny out of context, mostly because of the ‘ALL the things’ phrasing, and also just ‘what food?’ and then wait oops it’s not funny at all because literally all of the food in the city spoiled overnight.

Which, okay, food has been spoiling for a few books now, more or less since the Dark One decided climate change wasn’t working and went for decay instead, but for so much to happen so suddenly? At…probably about the same time as Rand erased Natrin’s Barrow from existence? It feels like maybe the Dark One’s touch was…magnified, or amplified, or triggered or otherwise linked with Rand’s own ta’veren effect, which itself is…far out of the balance it once had.

In which case, yikes.

A city full of refugees, a city already strained by an influx of people brought precisely because he had sent food, now condemned to starvation.

And Rand’s not really in a bread-and-fishes sort of mood, I don’t think.

“What will we do?”

Rand closed his eyes.

“My lord?” Iralin asked.

Rand opened his eyes and kicked Tai’daishar into motion. He left the dockmaster behind, mouth open, and passed through the gateway.

He won the crown of Illian because he kept them from starving, because he ordered food sent from Tear without even really thinking about it. And now, he has refused to claim the crown of Arad Doman and is leaving them to starve.

Without even a word. That, to me, seems like the cruellest part of this. Not that he’s leaving, but that when they bring him this news and ask what to do, he just walks away without a response. Not even an empty ‘I’ll do what I can’ or instructions for gold to be given to the acquisition of food from elsewhere or, hell, even an ‘I’m sorry’. Or instructions that the Sea Folk ships be made available to assist refugees in going elsewhere where there might be food. Or anything at all.

There may not be much he can do, but to simply ignore their questions and their pleas and their need—when it was at one point so important to him that the food be brought here—takes it from awful to cruel. And frightening.

He put the coming starvation out of his mind. It was shocking how easy that was.

It has a similar feel to it as the calm, cold way he destroyed Natrin’s Barrow. Something he knew should terrify him but didn’t. Just…inevitability, and then done.

It’s a different situation, and he’s not deliberately erasing all of Bandar Eban, but at the same time it really isn’t all that different, especially in the way he’s approaching it. Accepting the huge death toll this will take, and then turning away and putting it out of his mind.

And it almost hurts him, you can see that in the way he closes his eyes against their pleas and even in the way he rides through the gateway without a word, perhaps because he knows he can offer nothing and cannot bring himself to face them with that. It almost hurts him, and he pushes it away too easily and leaves it behind too cruelly and it almost hurts him; there are cracks in that ice, but what will it take to open them? If enough balefire to ruin a fortress and shake the Pattern, and the imminent starvation of a nation full of refugees isn’t enough?

Bandar Eban vanished, those too-silent people vanished.

Literally out of sight, out of mind.

And now for something completely different! Tear greets him with cheers and adulation, because his turning up must be a good thing. They obviously haven’t heard the news from Arad Doman.

The adulation hit Rand like a wave of reproach. He didn’t deserve such praise. Not after what he had done in Arad Doman.

For once I’m actually in full agreement with Rand’s self-loathing thoughts, because…yeah. But again, he can still almost feel. Enough to hate himself, at least. Enough to abhor what he’s done, even as he does it. But not enough to make him open himself to the pain it causes, because it would only be worse, now, and he cannot endure that.

But at some point he’ll have to, right? So we’re back to the question of…what could possibly make him feel again, decide to feel again, when now that would mean letting all of this hit him in full? And how will he survive that?

Must keep moving, he thought, kicking Ta’daishar into motion again.

If you run fast enough, your problems can’t catch you!

Nearby, two flapping pennants got caught in the wind, and inexplicably entangled. The men holding them aloft, near the front of the crowd, lowered them and tried to pull them apart, but they were knotted tight, somehow twisted that way by the wind.

The wind emphasising the importance of alliances and unity? You try so hard, wind.

Rand had found that outlanders—no matter what the city—paid him less heed when he visited. This was true even when those outlanders were from another country he had conquered. […] Perhaps they didn’t like being reminded that their lord and their enemy’s lord were the same man.

That’s…a really interesting—and astute—observation, and one I very much like, but I’m having trouble coming up with much more to say about it than that. But I do really, really like this. Maybe it’s just my entire Thing about enemies-and-allies or enemity-and-loyalty or really just enmity caught up with any of its various opposites. But it also seems to highlight the absurdity and futility of war, and the idea that these people shouldn’t be enemies, for they have a much greater enemy they all share, and they’re so much more closely entangled than they think, and yet humanity is humanity and so to war it will go, clinging all the way to denial if need be.

Yet here they stand, united, cheering for him. It’s promising, almost, that so many different people can stand side-by-side and look to him not in fear or hatred but in expectation and admiration. Except it comes right after he has left another city full of outlanders bereft and doomed to starvation. It’s an interesting contrast, and something of a study in the duality of salvation and destruction as sides of the same coin.

And of how much has changed, because the people here are looking to Rand and seeing him as they remember him—as he was before The Last That Could Be Done, as something of a saviour even if he is a hard one to accept at times, and with the benefit of a long absence to smooth some of those edges—while the people of Bandar Eban were reacting to the person he is now. And the two are…different, to say the least.

It’s a well-done contrast, on several different levels. And it serves so well to highlight those differences, by taking two baseline-similar situations—Rand appearing in front of a gathered crowd of citizens and foreigners in a city he has conquered—and using them to show what was against what is…and even what is against what could be.

From this point on, Rand would be easy to locate. No more hiding in wooded manors. No more travelling alone. Not with Lan and his Malkieri riding to the Gap. There wasn’t enough time left.

It feels appropriate that Lan is, in a way, the…spark, here. The one that sets this final play in motion, the one who makes the move that forces the rest to start their final plays, the inciting incident that begins the Last Battle.

Perhaps it is just an illusion—perhaps the Dark One was already set to move at this point, and Lan is responding to that, and perhaps everything is being pulled to this point simultaneously and this is just the way it all has to play out… But still, it seems fitting.

This is, after all, a strike he has been holding back—or held back from—since the Dragon was reborn. An arrow that’s been drawn and then held for twenty-some years, for this exact purpose. Malkier was destroyed and the surviving uncrowned king has been bound for vengeance and then held back from it by a promise to see the Dragon Reborn to the Last Battle, and so that counterstroke against the Shadow’s last sweeping attack against a nation has been held, and held, waiting, and Rand may be the Champion of the Light but it seems fitting for Lan’s own story if he is the Light’s opening salvo, he who has focused his whole life towards this one goal and who finally has been released to follow it.

Bashere wants to know if Rand is even going to bother to tell Ituralde what he’s done and Rand figures Ituralde will eventually find out. He didn’t want to leave Bandar Eban ‘like a thief’ but he doesn’t care if Ituralde only finds out by word-of-mouth or by…just finding Rand gone? Okay.

And he also doesn’t really care if Ituralde leaves the Borderlands and fights the Seanchan. Or if the Seanchan take more territory. It doesn’t matter anymore. It mattered so much, once.

“This whole thing is a mess”

Truer words have never been spoken, Bashere.

Next up is dealing with the Borderlanders, which honestly I’m kind of with Rand on—I still just have a ‘what the entire fuck’ reaction to that whole situation because sense, it does not make. Clearly I am missing something here.

“I have little patience for men who abandon their duties.”

Have we done that? Lews Therin asked.

Does it count as self-awareness if it comes from the voice in your head you staunchly refuse to acknowledge as a part of you?

In this series, I’m going to just go ahead and say ‘yes’, because really the standards are, in fact, that low.

His ta’veren effect seemed to be growing more powerful, causing increasingly greater distortions. And more dangerous ones.

That should be a giant red blinking warning light with very loud sirens, Rand. And maybe a flashing neon sign saying ‘YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG’.

Actually all of that was quite a ways back, across that chasm of a line you crossed, so uh…here be dragons, I suppose.

During his last visit, Tear had been besieged by rebels, but the city hadn’t suffered.

Again, you seemed to see it very differently at the time. What with the starving children and trying to send gold to avert one of Min’s visions and all that. And the self-hatred, of course, but that’s just a constant at this point.

The way he selectively remembers things in this chapter is kind of fascinating. It all looks so much more positive in hindsight—almost a parallel to how the Tairen response to him is so much more positive than the Domani, because in Tear they’re still seeing who he was—now that he’s stopped letting himself care. And now that he’s done so much worse. Now that it’s too late for that shift in perspective to help him.

None of [the Stone] would be much use against an army of Seanchan with damane and raken.

Good thing Egwene is keeping them occupied elsewhere, then.

It’s a killing field, Lews Therin said.

Here, another crowd cheered Rand.

Oh, wow, that contrast. *Shivers*

Hi, Darlin. Also why are we spending so many words on Weiramon?

I like him, Lews Therin thought.

Rand started. You don’t like anyone!

He’s honest, Lews Therin replied, then laughed. More than I am, for certain! A man doesn’t choose to be an idiot, but he does choose to be loyal. We could do so much worse than have this man as a follower.

Is this directed at Weiramon or at Darlin? It seems to be Weiramon, from context, in which case…I have so many questions.

Mostly beginning with ‘what’ and ending with ‘the fuck?’

Lady Caraline was a given; the slender Cairhienin was as beautiful as Rand remembered. A white opal hung on her forehead, the golden chain woven into her dark hair. Rand had to force himself to look away. She looked too much like her cousin, Moiraine.

Was that…a feeling? Careful there, Rand; that could turn into an emotion.

Sure enough, Lews Therin started naming off the names on the list, Moiraine at the forefront.

In the ongoing discussion regarding the data structure of Rand’s list, I propose for your consideration: a hash table. He has been shown a few times to be memorising the women’s faces as well as their names, and here it’s the visual cue that starts the recitation of the list, with Moiraine’s image calling up Moiraine’s name.

Also since when did it become just ‘sure enough’ that Lews Therin is the one reciting the list. Rand’s list. (Since he crossed his own last line, and killed a woman, thus forcing the list and all its implications and constraints across that barrier in his mind, because he can no longer hold to it).

All that aside, Caraline has good taste. White opals are gorgeous.

Rand steeled himself, listening to the dead man in the back of his mind

(‘Steel yourself, Egwene’ she thought as she read a dead woman’s list of names).

A quick roll call of the surviving Tairen lords and ladies, which I will admit is appreciated because I’m pretty good at keeping track but it’s nice when I don’t have to, and now we can get down to business.

Darlin’s not happy with the ‘hurry up and wait’ nature of Rand’s orders to him to gather an army, but honestly, Darlin, would you rather have to use that army right away? Think about it for a few minutes.

Oh.

Um.

So that army is no longer intended for Arad Doman. Because Rand is very, very thorough in his abandonment.

And because…

“And…where will we be marching?”

“To Shayol Ghul.”

But you can’t go to Shayol Ghul yet, Rand! You still have two books left, and an entire conscience to regrow!

Next (TGS ch 43) Previous (TGS ch 41)

#I had to reformat this entire post #because tumblr keeps trying to paste text as an image #Wheel of Time #neuxue liveblogs WoT #The Gathering Storm

40 notes · View notes