Who filled the stasis Boxes?

[scott_swampy]

This may have been answered at some point but if it was, I missed it.I  had thought that perhaps they were just storage containers, like we might put something into a vacuum sealed bag. But then a gholem emerged from one of them. And all of those weird servants whose name escapes me now come out of another.Thing that someone obviously thought could come in handy at some point in the future.

 

I ask because I always assumed that it was the forsaken but I was thinking about it the other and a question came into my head. Why? As we learn in the strike at shyol gaul they , at the time the bore was sealed, had no reason to believe that they were going to be sealed up for two thousand years+. So why would they pack stasis boxes? They wouldn’t.

 

So then who did? It had to have been some one powerful to have got a gholam into one of them. The other dreadlords is the obvious thought but why would they trap one of their strongest weapons against the light whilst they were still fighting them?

 

Any thoughts or ideas?

 

[Arkelias]

Only the Chosen were caught in the bore.  If you were a powerful Aes Sedai sworn to the 'great lord' you would have been free after the forsaken were caught. The great lord may have commanded you to prepare for the future by filling statis boxes with certain belongings.

 

People who followed the light may have done so as well.  As soon as the breaking was in full swing they may have done it to preserve whatever they could.

[deviant728]

Maybe the stasis box wasn't meant to preserve the gholam, but rather to trap it. Do we know that the gholam can only be commanded by the DO or Forsaken? If that is the case, with its masters being sealed, a rogue gholam on the loose would be pretty scary even amidst the madness of the breaking for either side. Maybe the AoL people needed to keep it locked away and what better way to lock something away that can fit through a tiny hole than throwing it in a stasis box and letting someone else deal with it?

[scott_swampy]

Only the Chosen were caught in the bore.  If you were a powerful Aes Sedai sworn to the 'great lord' you would have been free after the forsaken were caught. The great lord may have commanded you to prepare for the future by filling statis boxes with certain belongings.

 

People who followed the light may have done so as well.  As soon as the breaking was in full swing they may have done it to preserve whatever they could.

 

It is feasible that if the DO commanded the dreadlords to do so they would have, but the dark one was newly seal. So how could he issue any such order? I did partially address this point in my original post. The forces of dark were still fighting even after the bore was sealed so why would they lock up there strongest weapon against good Aes Sadie?

 

Maybe the stasis box wasn't meant to preserve the gholam, but rather to trap it. Do we know that the gholam can only be commanded by the DO or Forsaken? If that is the case, with its masters being sealed, a rogue gholam on the loose would be pretty scary even amidst the madness of the breaking for either side. Maybe the AoL people needed to keep it locked away and what better way to lock something away that can fit through a tiny hole than throwing it in a stasis box and letting someone else deal with it?

 

This is a strong possibility, but it still makes me wonder how? They couldn’t just ask it to get in. So unless it was a darkfriend/dreadlord I can’t see a gholm just doing what you said. And that is even if they would listen to anyone lower than the forsaken.

[Arkelias]

I probably wasn't too clear so that was my bad.  After the DO was sealed he knew the war was over.  He knew it was time to start preparing for his attempt to break free, in 3,000 years when the Dragon is reborn.

 

He'd have sent visions to each of his suriviving followers, and would have had them prep statis boxes to help serve the chosen when they eventually escaped.

 

I think a lot of it has to do with the circular nature of the Wheel of Time.  The DO has seen every age, and knew what was coming.  It makes sense he'd order his followers to prepare.

[scott_swampy]

Ahh that dose make sense I suppose, although I don’t like to admit it. In say that, however it dose raise a few other questions. Like why, if preparing for a war against the old enemy at some point, would you pack that see through material that Grendal is so fond of?

[Arkelias]

Because the DO has an appreciation for hot women in skimpy dresses?  Can't say I blame the man, err dark god.

[Jai_Ashendrei]

There is more than one stasis box.  Not all of them were prepared for war later on.  Some were just filled with random things from that time.  I think of them as those time boxes that we do that aren't supposed to be opened for one hundred years.  You just fill them up with junk that no one will use later on because they will have better stuff.  Except in this case, the world got worse instead of better.

[The golden BEE]

i think the stasis boxes were made by poeple from every sides.it must have been common knoledge  back then and i see no reasons why with the breaking coming on poeple would'nt want to preserve stuff.ishamael and dreadlords have put away some things and aes sedai did the same.Sammael did the same because he always secure his defence first.i think in the AoL he had already a couple boxes that he was using to his advantage.

[Majsju]

First of all, every Aes Sedai who turned to the shadow during the AOL was a Chosen/Forsaken, so there were thousands left out in the world after the DO and "our" forsaken was sealed. (Dreadlord = channeler fighting for the shadow in the trolloc war).

 

So, several thousand Chosen running around, having lost their leadership, the men starting to go crazy, and the world starting to break apart. They would not know that it would take 3000 years before the DO could start breaking out of his prison, or that the Breaking would be such a huge event. Seems like a quite logical thing to do, stashing away a couple of stasis boxes with useful things, and retrieve them once the world starts to settle down, and they can go back to winning the war.

 

And if they could not think of that themselves, the DO could have ordered them, since Ishy was not completely sealed, and out and about quite soon after the strike at SG, as we saw already in the TEOTW prologue. It would not have taken him long to gather a few trustworthy Chosen, and give them a list with things to fill a few stasis boxes with.

If that is the case, there is a possibility Ishy might sit on a stash of really funny things we have not seen yet.

[Mr. Micawber]

First of all, every Aes Sedai who turned to the shadow during the AOL was a Chosen/Forsaken, so there were thousands left out in the world after the DO and "our" forsaken was sealed. (Dreadlord = channeler fighting for the shadow in the trolloc war).

 

So, several thousand Chosen running around, having lost their leadership, the men starting to go crazy, and the world starting to break apart. They would not know that it would take 3000 years before the DO could start breaking out of his prison, or that the Breaking would be such a huge event. Seems like a quite logical thing to do, stashing away a couple of stasis boxes with useful things, and retrieve them once the world starts to settle down, and they can go back to winning the war.

 

And if they could not think of that themselves, the DO could have ordered them, since Ishy was not completely sealed, and out and about quite soon after the strike at SG, as we saw already in the TEOTW prologue. It would not have taken him long to gather a few trustworthy Chosen, and give them a list with things to fill a few stasis boxes with.

If that is the case, there is a possibility Ishy might sit on a stash of really funny things we have not seen yet.

 

Neither male nor female Dark Side channelers went crazy.

 

What happened, from what we've gathered from the Strike story and the BBWBA is that Latra Posae, the woman behind the Concord, essentially destroyed the bad guys, who could no longer count on the literally world changing power of the Dark One. Moreover, the fact of the Dark One's imprisonment almost certainly put a damper on recruitment.

 

However, as we see in the glass columns of TSR, the vast majority of Light side male channelers did not go crazy the instant LTT sealed the Bore. Instead, they gradually realized something was going wrong.

 

Then, as the Dark Side was getting their collective posteriors handed to them by a reinvigorated Light, half of the Light's channeler base began to go mindblowingly insane. Thus, even though the Light was able to pretty much destroy the Dark Side, they still utterly lost their civilization, since they essentially had nutsos running around planting nuclear bombs in fault lines. I mean, I dread to think what would happen if Lex Luthor's plan from the first Superman movie had actually been carried out. And that's what happened all over the world for hundreds of years.

 

[mb]

The gholam, I think the putting into the stasis box would have been done sometime during the Age of Legends since they probably would not last forever.

 

servants, do you mean zomara?

If so, those also would have been put in during the Age of Legends since those also probably wound not last forever either.

 

 

Or if either could last forever, the putting in would probably still have been done during the Age of Legends since no one would have known about stasis boxes (nor where to find them) after the Breaking.

 

Given these things, probably a Forsaken put them in the stasis boxes.

 

[Charlz Guybon]

Maybe the stasis box wasn't meant to preserve the gholam, but rather to trap it. Do we know that the gholam can only be commanded by the DO or Forsaken? If that is the case, with its masters being sealed, a rogue gholam on the loose would be pretty scary even amidst the madness of the breaking for either side. Maybe the AoL people needed to keep it locked away and what better way to lock something away that can fit through a tiny hole than throwing it in a stasis box and letting someone else deal with it?

There would have been others with the Chosen mark outside of the Bore who would have been able to command it, but they surely died in the fighting and anarchy that followed. So I suppose you could be right.

[Mr Ares]

Neither male nor female Dark Side channelers went crazy.

The men did. The top leadership vanished, the men started going nuts, Shai'tan was gone, they turned on one another, and during the decades that followed the Light was able to fight back, until the Breaking forced them to abandon anything beyond survival.

[scott_swampy]

First of all, every Aes Sedai who turned to the shadow during the AOL was a Chosen/Forsaken, so there were thousands left out in the world after the DO and "our" forsaken was sealed. (Dreadlord = channeler fighting for the shadow in the trolloc war).

 

 

I am not sure that is the case. The glossaries of PoD and WH (the only books I have on me) both suggest that the Forsaken was the name given only to the top thirteen of the dark one channelers:

 

From the Path of Daggers glossary:

 

Forsaken, the: The name given to thirteen powerful Aes Sedai, men and women both, who went over to the Shadow during the Age of Legends and were trapped in the sealing of the bore into the Dark Ones prison.

It goes onto tell that there were other that turn but nowhere calls them forsaken. So unless this is changed later only they would have had control over the gholem.

 

[Nightstrike]

Tor question of the week:

Week 12 Question: In Winters Heart, you mention that back in the Age of Legends, there were several other Forsaken that the Dark One had killed because he suspected they would betray him. What's their story? Were those people ever as high ranking as the 13 survivors, or where they more like high-ranking Dreadlords then actual Forsaken?

 

Robert Jordan Answers: First off, Dreadlords was the name given to men and women who could channel and sided with the Shadow in the Trolloc Wars. Yes, the women were called Dreadlords, too. They might have liked to call themselves "the Chosen," like the Forsaken, but feared to. The real Forsaken might not have appreciated it when they returned, as prophecies of the Shadow foretold would happen. Some of the Dreadlords had authority and responsibility equivalent to that of the Forsaken in the War of the Shadow, however. They ran the Shadow's side of the Trolloc Wars, though without the inherent ability to command the Myrddraal that the Forsaken possess, meaning they had to negotiate with them. Overall command at the beginning was in another's hands.

 

Forsaken was the name given to Aes Sedai who went over to the Shadow in the War of the Shadow at the end of the Age of Legends, though of course, they called themselves the Chosen, and despite the tales of the "current"Age, there were many more than a few of them. Since they occupied all sorts of levels, you might say that many were equivalent to some of the lesser Dreadlords, but it would be incorrect to call them so. At the time, they were all Forsaken—or Chosen—from the greatest to the least.

 

Some of those Forsaken the Dark One killed were every bit as high-ranking as the thirteen who were remembered, and who you might say constituted a large part of the Dark One's General Staff at the time of the sealing. With the Forsaken, where treachery and backstabbing were an acceptable way of getting ahead, the turnover in the upper ranks was fairly high, though Ishamael, Demandred, Lanfear, Graendal, Semirhage, and later Sammael, were always at the top end of the pyramid. They were very skilled at personal survival, politically and physically.

 

In large part the thirteen were remembered because they were trapped at Shayol Ghul, and so their names became part of that story, though it turned out that details of them, stories of them, survived wide-spread knowledge of the tale of the actual sealing itself. Just that they had been sealed away. Other Forsaken were left behind, so to speak, free but in a world that was rapidly sliding down the tube. The men eventually went mad and died from the same taint that killed off the other male Aes Sedai. They had no access to the Dark One's protective filters. The women died, too, though from age or in battle or from natural disasters created by insane male AesSedai or from diseases that could no longer be controlled because civilization itself had been destroyed and access to those who were skilled in Healing was all but gone. And soon after their deaths, their names were forgotten, except for what might possibly be discovered in some ancient manuscript fragment that survived the Breaking. A bleak story of people who deserved no better, and not worth telling in any detail.

 

 

Dragoncon '05 reports:

Q – Part 3: Well, then is there something unique about the Forsaken other than the fact that they are his favorites that he would transmigrate them, or be able to?

 

RJ: Well, he would have been a lot less likely to in an earlier time when they were a lot of powerful … knowledgeable channelers who were in his service. Essentially half the people in the world who could channel were on his side, during the War of the Shadow. Now he has very few, he’s got the Black Ajah, and a few wilders, and some stuff I ain’t going in to, but uh he doesn’t have a lot, but he can’t afford to waste assets.

 

 

[Nimic]

Neither male nor female Dark Side channelers went crazy.

 

That's simply wrong. Every male channeler went crazy, eventually. Light side or Dark side, it was all the same.

 

I am not sure that is the case. The glossaries of PoD and WH (the only books I have on me) both suggest that the Forsaken was the name given only to the top thirteen of the dark one channelers:

 

They were all Chosen/Forsaken, that's been confirmed. "Our" Forsaken weren't even necessarily the most powerful, except for the obvious ones in Ishamael, Lanfear and Demandred (and possibly some others). Which would suggest that they all had the ability to control gholam. It's impossible to say how many they were at the end of the war, but at some point there has to have been millions of them. I can't imagine anything but an idyllic and disease-free society such as the Age of Legends having quite large population numbers.

[scott_swampy]

Tor question of the week:

Week 12 Question: In Winters Heart, you mention that back in the Age of Legends, there were several other Forsaken that the Dark One had killed because he suspected they would betray him. What's their story? Were those people ever as high ranking as the 13 survivors, or where they more like high-ranking Dreadlords then actual Forsaken?

 

Robert Jordan Answers: First off, Dreadlords was the name given to men and women who could channel and sided with the Shadow in the Trolloc Wars. Yes, the women were called Dreadlords, too. They might have liked to call themselves "the Chosen," like the Forsaken, but feared to. The real Forsaken might not have appreciated it when they returned, as prophecies of the Shadow foretold would happen. Some of the Dreadlords had authority and responsibility equivalent to that of the Forsaken in the War of the Shadow, however. They ran the Shadow's side of the Trolloc Wars, though without the inherent ability to command the Myrddraal that the Forsaken possess, meaning they had to negotiate with them. Overall command at the beginning was in another's hands.

 

Forsaken was the name given to Aes Sedai who went over to the Shadow in the War of the Shadow at the end of the Age of Legends, though of course, they called themselves the Chosen, and despite the tales of the "current"Age, there were many more than a few of them. Since they occupied all sorts of levels, you might say that many were equivalent to some of the lesser Dreadlords, but it would be incorrect to call them so. At the time, they were all Forsakenor Chosenfrom the greatest to the least.

 

Some of those Forsaken the Dark One killed were every bit as high-ranking as the thirteen who were remembered, and who you might say constituted a large part of the Dark One's General Staff at the time of the sealing. With the Forsaken, where treachery and backstabbing were an acceptable way of getting ahead, the turnover in the upper ranks was fairly high, though Ishamael, Demandred, Lanfear, Graendal, Semirhage, and later Sammael, were always at the top end of the pyramid. They were very skilled at personal survival, politically and physically.

 

In large part the thirteen were remembered because they were trapped at Shayol Ghul, and so their names became part of that story, though it turned out that details of them, stories of them, survived wide-spread knowledge of the tale of the actual sealing itself. Just that they had been sealed away. Other Forsaken were left behind, so to speak, free but in a world that was rapidly sliding down the tube. The men eventually went mad and died from the same taint that killed off the other male Aes Sedai. They had no access to the Dark One's protective filters. The women died, too, though from age or in battle or from natural disasters created by insane male AesSedai or from diseases that could no longer be controlled because civilization itself had been destroyed and access to those who were skilled in Healing was all but gone. And soon after their deaths, their names were forgotten, except for what might possibly be discovered in some ancient manuscript fragment that survived the Breaking. A bleak story of people who deserved no better, and not worth telling in any detail.

 

 

Dragoncon '05 reports:

Q Part 3: Well, then is there something unique about the Forsaken other than the fact that they are his favorites that he would transmigrate them, or be able to?

 

RJ: Well, he would have been a lot less likely to in an earlier time when they were a lot of powerful knowledgeable channelers who were in his service. Essentially half the people in the world who could channel were on his side, during the War of the Shadow. Now he has very few, hes got the Black Ajah, and a few wilders, and some stuff I aint going in to, but uh he doesnt have a lot, but he cant afford to waste assets.

 

 

 

I do not doubt anything you say but in ACoS Ch25 it is said that only thirteen were aloud to use the True Power in the AOL.

 

And in WH ch13 in Demandred’s POV he thinks that Osan'gar would never have been one of the chosen if not for his special skill. So were our Chosen the top forsaken or were they somehow different?

 

[Luckers]

I do not doubt anything you say but in ACoS Ch25 it is said that only thirteen were aloud to use the True Power in the AOL.

 

Actually Moghedian said 29, not 13. The various high-up Chosen from throughout the war--some died at the Light's hands, some were killed by the Dark One, some by their fellow Forsaken--and those that were left either went mad if they were men, or faced the same issues anyone faced in those days--the Breaking, not to mention Latra Posae Decume's ongoing war effort.

 

And in WH ch13 in Demandred’s POV he thinks that Osan'gar would never have been one of the chosen if not for his special skill. So were our Chosen the top forsaken or were they somehow different?

 

They were amongst the top Forsaken, yes.

[Nightstrike]

(Luckers answered first, but I'll post this anyway)

I do not doubt anything you say but in ACoS Ch25 it is said that only thirteen were aloud to use the True Power in the AOL.

It says "only 29 others". And the quotes I gave was from RJ answering questions.

 

And in WH ch13 in Demandred’s POV he thinks that Osan'gar would never have been one of the chosen if not for his special skill. So were our Chosen the top forsaken or were they somehow different?

I can't recall that part about Osan'gar. But they were all Forsaken, from the weakest to the strongest. The thirteen remembered were always high up on the ladder. Otherwise they wouldn't have made it.

 

 

[Aagaard]

Ok so the darkfriends male aes sedai went mad because the dark one filters wasn't available to them. One question though, why then didn't Ishy go mad? He was free from the death of LTT to Rand killed him in the Dragon Reborn.

 

I know Ishy is a little mad, and all the other forsaken say he is too, but his madness is another kind... Saa- brought-on. (Plus some say he was already mad during the war of the shadow)

 

This puzzles me!

[Nightstrike]

Ishy was partially sealed, so he probably had some protective filter. That is my guess, anyway.

[Luckers]

We know the Dark One was able to protect his male channelers from the taint even though he was sealed--he did so during the Trolloc Wars. Therefore the simplest explanation is that he chose to let them go nuts to double the destructive effect of the Taint.

 

You guys gotta remember... the Dark One is kind of a douche.

 

[scott_swampy]

Actually Moghedian said 29, not 13. The various high-up Chosen from throughout the war--some died at the Light's hands, some were killed by the Dark One, some by their fellow Forsaken--and those that were left either went mad if they were men, or faced the same issues anyone faced in those days--the Breaking, not to mention Latra Posae Decume's ongoing war effort.

 

Sorry encyclopaedia-wot has it as 13 on one page and 29 on another I didn’t realize until after I posted. Sorry.

 

And the quotes I gave was from RJ answering questions

 

I know Nightstrike I was not questioning the quote i just wondered if anyone could shed any light on the quote from Demandred

 

I can't recall that part about Osan'gar. But they were all Forsaken, from the weakest to the strongest. The thirteen remembered were always high up on the ladder. Otherwise they wouldn't have made it.

 

WH, CH13:Wonderful News

If not for his particular skills, he never would have been Chosen.

[Nightstrike]

I think Demandred might have meant that Aginor's research was the thing that made him become a Chosen.