Balefire is one of the most confusing things in the book, for me. I find the fine aspects of it, the whole threading together of the things that work in it… Could you be a little more elaborate on that?
All right. The cosmography we’re looking at here, is not the cosmography of here and now. The Wheel of Time is in its way a spinning wheel. The fabric of reality is woven by the threads. Those threads are the lines that are formed by people passing through time. Each person has a thread. The thread has its sole dimension in time, its life is in time. Those are the threads that are used to weave the fabric of reality. When balefire strikes a person, a thread here, it doesn’t simply stop the thread there. The thread burns backwards a little bit, like you just took a thread and put a match to it and it burns up a little bit before it goes out. It depends on how hot the flame is how far it’s going to burn back and what the material is opposed to. It burns up a little bit, it doesn’t just catch fire on the end and go out. So that person that was hit here is burned out of the pattern back to here. What that person did between here and here was no longer done. Other people remember seeing it. They may remember the supposed effects of it but what that person did wasn’t done. It didn’t happen, it’s not real. Now that’s a little bit of a shiver on the fabric of reality as it is. The reason that there was an unofficial agreement in the War of the Shadow to not use balefire any more, to stop using it, was simply that several cities were destroyed in that way. Hundreds of thousands of threads were burnt out from the Pattern in one go and the fabric of reality began to unravel. And even the guys going for the Dark One knew that there’s not a whole lot of point to winning if winning means there’s nothing there to rule, nothing there to win. If you burnt out the stakes, forget it. Have I made it a little clearer I hope?
I was really referring to the scene where the wall falls on them and Rand uses balefire and they all come back to life. There’s a prophecy about Mat how he was going to die and I’m not sure whether that incident is where he dies or not.
Well you’re not supposed to be, are you! Once, Mat was hanging by his neck and Rand wasn’t sure whether he caught a heartbeat or not. You see, the thing is Mat doesn’t know. Mat thinks he’s got a little ace in the hole but maybe he hasn’t. Maybe he doesn’t have that ace in the hole that he has a death to give yet, and still live, the way he thinks. Maybe. There’s an acronym they use on the net, RAFO. Read and find out.
RJ confirmed at Balticon XXX that the prophecy was fulfilled in Caemlyn rather than Rhuidean.
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