Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

You know, I remember thinking Nynaeve was jumping at nothing when suspecting a certain Aes Sedai following the Gray Man attack.

Any clue you can give us on who sent the Gray Man to kill Egwene and Nynaeve in The Dragon Reborn? I've always wondered about that.

I'll get you an answer to that someday.

I'm finding Nynaeve less annoying as her character develops.

She's always been my favorite of the Elayne-Egwene-Nynaeve group.

Think of it as...ah, as what is autonomic, nervous-system really, autonomic nerve reflexes. You still breathe, you still move, but I would not...I would not ask him to play the flute.

Language skills?

Ehm...no.

Absolutely nothing at all?

Absolutely nothing. Unless it's done in the form of a Gray Man. Which is a voluntary ahh...rejection of your own soul. In that case, there are other skills, higher function. That's a matter of making a deal with the Dark One, and there are other prices to be paid from that.

(Yup, that was me again. Olver-Cain suddenly begins to look dim to me. Kudos to Rando for not being swayed on this point. I always thought it a likely possibility that Cain's soul would be reborn naturally, but that in the last instance the Pattern gave him a yank to make him be reborn in an older body. Rando however pointed out that Olver had a lot of skills, while a newly reborn soul should be as a blank slate. I argued that the body of Olver could very well have retained the language skills from the previous soul, which could then quickly be acquired by Cain...That doesn't hold though, so I'm going to have to find a different explanation. How possible is that a one-year old soul, given input on and above the level of that of a 9-11 year old boy would rise to the challenge and acquire knowledge and skills fast enough to stay alive and become experienced enough to be this 9-11 year old boy? Actually, I think that's very possible. And it would explain why Olver now is developing so rapidly. He has 'learned' to mature far faster than normal people...There, my belief in the theory is saved.)

Err, they are...oh, uhm, no, it is gone. It is gone. And it ceases to exist in any form that you could of as real.

So threads and souls are the same thing?

Err, not the same thing, but they must coexist. The thread can be removed; you die in this world. You die and the soul remains to come again and begin another thread. The soul disappears from this Gray Man, it's gone. Think of the Dark One as having eaten it. It's a fiction, but a convenient fiction for the moment. The thread of the Gray Man remains until the Gray Man dies, physically.

And the rest of the Shadowspawn?

What? Do they have souls you mean?

Yeah, and how do their threads work?

The threads work in the way, in the same way that the thread of any living thing works. It is part of the Pattern. They are not outside of the Pattern. Neither are the Forsaken. But the Pattern in a thing that is open, that's change. It is not a matter of the lives being forced necessarily. It's wide, you have the Pattern, the Heroes that are bound to the Wheel, they're not always heroes in the way of someone who rides in galloping with a sword, or carries out daring rescues. The people, the Heroes who are bound to the Wheel, are the corrective mechanisms. Human behavior is throwing the Pattern out. It's throwing the balance off. And the Wheel spins out the proper correctives. Put everything back in the balance. So not even the Forsaken are apart from that, they're not outside. The only things that are outside are the Creator and the Dark One. Neither is affected by the Pattern.

Well, if a Forsaken dies and is reborn naturally, through the turning of the Wheel, no.

If then the Dark One puts him in a new body?

Oh, if the Dark One puts him in a new body, it is for all intents and purposes the same person, with a new body. It is a shift of an entire person. The concept here, with the exception of the Gray Men: You've seen an Ogier who lost his soul. And in effect there's nobody home anymore. It is a body that lives and breathes, and will move if it is helped along. But it does not, there's nobody home in there. The Gray Men are slightly different. But they also have given up their souls. They've given up their souls in a way. Already, their souls are gone. But it's happened in a way that protects them against this emptiness, as if they're severed from the physical and spiritual side. And the spiritual side is gone, but the physical side remains so there is an intellect in that body, but no soul. And that's why they are Gray Men. Your eyes slip past them, the perfect assassins. You can look right at one and look on, never having realized you saw somebody there. So there's, when a soul ... (break in audio file)

Sorry, just checking the time...we have to do some things in the morning.