Robert Jordan - The Gathering Storm

From there, he’d need to move on to Amador, then to Tanchico and others. He’d Travel quickly, never remaining in one place long enough to be caught by the Forsaken. A flickering light of death, like a burning ember, flaring to life here, then there. Many would die, but most would be Seanchan. Invaders.

He stared down at the access key. Then he seized saidin. The sickness washed across him more powerfully than it ever had before. The force of it knocked him to the ground like a physical blow. He cried out, barely noticing when he hit the stones. He groaned, gripping the access key, curling around it. His insides seemed to burn, and he turned his head, rolling onto his shoulder and vomiting onto the bridge.

But he held on to saidin. He needed the power. The succulent, beautiful power. Even the stench of his own vomit seemed more real to him, more sweet, for the power within him.

He opened his eyes. People were gathered around him, concerned. A Seanchan patrol was approaching. Now was the time. He had to strike.

But he could not. The people looked so concerned. So worried. They cared.

Screaming in frustration, Rand made a gateway, causing the people to jump back in shock. He stumbled to his feet and threw himself through, scrabbling on all fours, as the Seanchan soldiers drew swords and yelled unfamiliar words.

Rand landed on a large stone disc of black and white, the air around him a void of darkness. The portal closed behind, locking Ebou Dar away, and the disc began to move. It floated through the void, lit by some strange ambient light. Rand curled up on the disc, cradling the access key, breathing deeply.

Why can’t I be strong enough? He didn’t know if the thought was his or if it was Lews Therin’s. The two were the same. Why can’t I do what I must?

The disc traveled for a short time, the only sound in the void that of his breathing. The disc looked like one of the seals to the Dark One’s prison, split with a sinuous line dividing the black from the white. Rand lay directly atop it. They called the black half the Dragon’s Fang. To the people, it symbolized evil. Destruction.

But Rand was necessary destruction. Why had the Pattern pushed him so hard if he didn’t need to destroy? Originally, he had tried to avoid killing—but there had been little chance of that working. Then he’d made himself avoid killing women. That had proven impossible.

He was destruction. He just had to accept that. Someone had to be hard enough to do what was necessary, didn’t they?

A gateway opened, and he stumbled to his feet, clutching the access key. He stepped from the Skimming platform and out onto an empty meadow. The place where he’d fought the Seanchan once with Callandor. And failed.

He stared at this place for a long time, breathing in and out, then spun another gateway. This one opened onto a field of snow, and icy wind blasted at him. He stepped through, feet crunching into the snow, and let the gateway close.

Here, the world spread before him.

Why have we come here? Rand thought.

Because, Rand replied. Because we made this. This is where we died.

He stood on the very point of Dragonmount, the lone peak that had erupted where Lews Therin had killed himself three thousand years before. To one side, he could see down hundreds of feet to where the side of the mountain opened into a blasted-out chasm. The opening was enormous, larger than it looked from profile. A wide oval of red, blazing, churning rock. It was as if a chunk of the mountain were simply missing, torn away, leaving the peak to rise into the air but the entire side of the mountain gone.

Rand stared down into that seething chasm. It was like the maw of a beast. Heat burned from below and flakes of ash twisted into the sky.

The dun sky was clouded above him. The ground seemed equally distant, barely visible, like a quilt marked with patterns. Here a patch of green that was a forest. There a stitch that was a river. To the east, he saw a small speck in the river, like a floating leaf caught in the tiny current. Tar Valon.

Rand sat down, the snow crunching beneath his weight. He set the access key into the bank before him and wove Air and Fire to keep himself warm.

Then he rested his elbows on his knees and his head on his hands, staring at the diminutive statue of the man with the globe.

To think.

Wind blew around Rand as he sat at the top of the world. His weaving of Air and Fire had melted away the snow around him, exposing a jagged gray-black tip of rock about three paces wide. The peak was like a broken fingernail jutting into the sky, and Rand sat atop it. As far as he could tell, it was the very tip of Drag-onmount. Perhaps the highest point in the world.

He sat upon his small outcropping, the access key sitting on the rock in front of him. The air was thin here, and he’d had trouble breathing until he’d found a way to weave Air so that it compressed slightly around him. Like the weave that warmed him, he wasn’t certain how he’d done it. He vaguely remembered Asmodean trying to teach him a similar weave, and Rand hadn’t been able to get it right. Now it came naturally. Lews Therin’s influence, or his own growing familiarity with the One Power?

Dragonmount’s broken, open mouth lay several hundred feet beneath him, to the left. The scents of ash and sulphur were pungent, even at this distance. The maw was black with ash and red from molten rock and blazing fires.

He still held to the Source. He didn’t dare let go. This last time he’d seized it had been the worst he could remember, and he feared that the sickness would overpower him if he tried again.

He had been here for hours. And yet he did not feel tired. He stared at the ter’angreal. Thinking.

What was he? What was the Dragon Reborn? A symbol? A sacrifice? A sword, meant to destroy? A sheltering hand, meant to protect?

A puppet, playing a part over and over again?

He was angry. Angry at the world, angry at the Pattern, angry at the Creator for leaving humans to fight against the Dark One with no direction. What right did any of them have to demand Rand’s life of him?

Well, Rand had offered that life to them. It had taken him a great while to accept his death, but he badma.de his peace. Wasn’t that enough? Did he have to be in pain until the end?

He had thought that if he made himself hard enough, it would take away the pain. If he couldn’t feel, then he couldn’t hurt.

The wounds in his side pulsed in agony. For a time, he’d been able to forget them. But the deaths he had caused rubbed his soul raw. That list starting with Moiraine. Everything had begun to go wrong at her death. Before that, he’d still had hope.

Before that, he’d never been put in a box.

He understood what would be required of him, and he’d changed in the ways he thought he needed. Those changes were to keep him from being overwhelmed. Die to protect people he didn’t know? Chosen to save mankind? Chosen to force the kingdoms of the world to unite behind him, destroying those who refused to listen? Chosen to cause the deaths of thousands who fought in his name, to hold those souls upon his shoulders, a weight that must be borne? What man could do these things and remain sane? The only way he had seen had been to cut off his emotions, to make himself cuendillar.

But he had failed. He hadn’t been able to stamp his feelings out. The voice inside had been so small, but it had pricked at him, like a needle making the smallest of holes in his heart. Even the smallest of holes would let the blood leak free.

Those holes would bleed him dry.

The quiet voice was gone now. It had vanished when he’d thrown Tarn to the floor and nearly killed him. Without that voice, did Rand dare continue? If it was the last remnant of the old Rand—the Rand who had believed that he knew what was right and what was wrong—then what did its silence mean?