Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

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.