The thunder of Egwene’s battle with M’Hael rivaled that of the crashing clouds above. M’Hael. A new Forsaken, his name proclaimed by his Dreadlords across the battlefield.
Egwene wove without thought, hurling weave after weave toward the renegade Asha’man. She had not called upon the wind, but still it rushed and roared about her, whipping her hair and her dress, catching her stole and flipping it about. Narishma and Merise huddled with Leilwin on the ground beside her, Narishma’s voice—barely audible above the battle—calling out weaves as M’Hael crafted them.
Following her advance, Egwene stood upon the top of the Heights, on even ground with M’Hael. She knew, somewhere deep, that her body would need rest soon.
For now, that was an unaffordable luxury. For now, only the fight mattered.
Fire flared toward her, and she slapped it aside with Air. The sparks caught in the wind, swirling about her in a spray of light as she wove Earth. She sent a ripple through the already-broken ground, trying to knock M’Hael down, but he split the wave with a weave of his own.
He’s slowing, she thought.
Egwene stepped forward, swollen with power. She began two weaves, one above each hand, and spouted fire at him.
He responded with a bar of pure whiteness, wire-thin, which missed her by less than a handspan. The balefire left an afterimage in Egwene’s eyes, and the ground groaned beneath them as the air warped. Those spiderwebs sprang out across the ground, fractures into nothingness.
“Fool!” she yelled at him. “You will destroy the Pattern itself!” Already, their clash threatened that. This wind was not natural, this sizzling air. Those cracks in the ground spread from M’Hael, widening.
“He’s weaving it again!” Narishma cried, voice caught in the tempest.
M’Hael released this second weave of balefire, fracturing the ground, but Egwene was ready. She sidestepped, her anger building. Balefire. She needed to counter it!
They don’t care what they ruin. They are here to destroy. That is their master’s call. Break. Burn down. Kill.
Gawyn…
She screamed in fury, weaving column after column of fire, one after another. Narishma shouted what M’Hael was doing, but Egwene couldn’t hear for the rush
of sound in her ears. She saw soon, anyway, that he had constructed a barrier of Air and Fire to deflect her attacks.
Egwene strode forward, sending repeated strikes at him. That gave him no time to recover, no time to attack. She stopped the rhythm only to form a shield that she held at the ready. A spray of fire off his barrier made him stumble back, his weave cracking, and he raised his hand, perhaps to attempt balefire again.
Egwene slammed the shield between him and the Source. It didn’t quite cut him off, for he held it back by force of will. They were near enough now that she could see his incredulity, his anger. He fought back, but was weaker than she. Egwene pushed, bringing that shield closer and closer to the invisible thread that connected him to the One Power. She forced it with all her strength…
M’Hael, straining, released a small stream of balefire upward, through the gap where the shield had not yet fallen into place. The balefire destroyed the weave—as it did the air, and indeed, the Pattern itself.
Egwene stumbled back as M’Hael directed the weave toward her, but the white-hot bar was too small, too weak, to reach her. It faded away before hitting. M’Hael snarled, then vanished, warping the air in a form of Traveling Egwene did not know.
Egwene breathed deeply, holding her hand to her chest. Light! She had almost been obliterated from the Pattern.
He disappeared without forming a gateway! The True Power, she thought. The only explanation. She knew next to nothing about it—it was the Dark One’s very essence, the lure that had coaxed channelers in the Age of Legends to drill the Bore in the first place.
Balefire. Light. I was almost dead. Worse than dead.
She had no way to counter balefire.
It’s only a weave… Only a weave. Perrin’s words.
The moment was past now, and M’Hael had fled. She would have to keep Narishma close to warn her if someone started channeling nearby.
Unless M’Hael uses the True Power again. Would another man be able to sense that being channeled?
“Mother!”
Egwene turned as Merise gestured toward where most of the Aes Sedai and Asha’man were still engaged in a resounding battle with the Sharan forces. Many sisters in colorful dresses lay dead across the hillside.
Gawyn’s death haunted her thoughts like an assassin in black. Egwene set her jaw and stoked her anger, drawing in the One Power as she launched herself at the Sharans.
Hurin, his nostrils stuffed with cloth, fought on Polov Heights with the other Borderlanders.