Was pre-Consolidation Seanchan like [the Land of Madmen] or was it different?
No, pre-Consolidation Seanchan was a quilt of petty kingdoms, or queendoms, if you will, ruled by Aes Sedai, with no unifying power. More Aes Sedai died by assassination than by any other means. They ruled by use of the One Power, gathering a small group of other women around them who could channel, constantly struggling for power against other small groups of women who could channel, who ruled their own small kingdoms, and the constantly shifting quilt—because if the wrong woman died or the right woman died in a particular country, or small fieflet, whatever, small kingdom, it would be absorbed by those around it—there were two continents of almost continual rolling open warfare: there’s war here, war here, war here, war there, stop here, now there, now here, now stop there, okay this could go on here, and constant plotting and scheming, because the only way to rise to the top is if you were and Aes Sedai is to kill those ahead of you. The most common means of death for an Aes Sedai, or cause of death for an Aes Sedai there was assassination. That is the world in which Arthur Hawkwing’s army arrived and began the Consolidation.
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