About cuendillar, some things would be impracticable as cuendillar since it is a solid substance. Armor (suggested in past threads) would be one of those things; because armor needs to be flexible.

jets, rockets, machines; some of their parts may need to be flexible and/or moveable. moveable things would also be impracticable as cuendillar.

Why would components that move be impractical?

Why would armor need to be flexible? Just how flexible is an iron/steel breast plate? If flexibility is necessary, scale armor and custom crafted interlocking metal bands for joints would rectify that problem.

Maybe the larger pieces have been sunk beneath the sea or earth. Cups and stuff are easy to pack and carry with you, while escaping during the Breaking. Jet/rocket parts have no use to someone fleeing for their life from a crazy male channeler. So, the large pieces were probably buried in the chaos. Also, maybe there was a special law regulating making cuendillar. Maybe they had the same technology trend we have these days, where only a few years goes by before what was new and amazing is now obsolete. Making something indestructable when you may have to retire it in only a few years, or even decades, is not practical. They can reinforce things just fine using other methods (look at Rand and Lan's swords).

I don't believe that the swords are cuendillar, they are power wrought weapons.

One idea I forgot to finish was if cuendillar could be made of other base materials and if so, does the cuendillar item carry some of the base properties over or does all cuendillar regardless of the base material gain a standard set of properties. IE, the weight of a cuendillar cup that began as an iron cup vs the weight of a cuendillar cup that began as aluminum or Styrofoam. That could have some pretty interesting uses.

Has Egwene made cuendillar from any thing other than iron?

Does cuendillar have to start with a base of iron or metal or can it be made from anything? Glass, wood, rock, etc?

Other than the fact that the making of it was forgotten, it does not seem especially difficult to make. There probably would have been a pretty strong manufacturing base of cuendillar for very specific items. Why the heck are we only seeing cuendillar cups and not cuendillar jet/rocket parts? or some other component of an engine or machine that would greatly benefit from a precise item that never wears out?

Anyone think that Tamyrlin (the first channeller) was a life of the Dragon?

Has there been any interviews or Q&As about the composition of the DO?

Just what is he/she?

So far we've been introduced a voice and the idea (from Lanfear) that killing the DO is absurd.

What more do we know?

This could open up new possibilities for how food and logistics are dealt with in the Blight. It takes some degree of sophistication to breed,raise, and feed warhorses. No way that raids into the Borderlands would provide enough horses to mount thousands and thousands of Fades.

To K.I.S.S., I'll just chalk this up as a bookism. Horses and fantasy go together like swords and fantasy. The bad guys need a set of wheels to get around also.

I was reading the thread asking if there are any Aiel among the HotH and it sparked a question.

Has there been any Heroes of the Horn born outside of Randland? Has there ever been a Hero born in Seanchan, Shara, the Aiel Waste, or the Island of Madmen?

I don't want this to devolve into a conversation on who among current characters are Heros, so characters present in the books do not count.

The only person with knowledge of the seals and the DOs prison at this point is Rand. The problem was surely worked on at some point but as with most things in this fallen world the knowledge was lost over time. Rand refused to share anything with Egwene and did not request aid from the greatest repository of knowledge in the world. Instead purposley angers Egwene and is leaning on Min alone to figure out how to seal the bore. Wouldn't it have been far better to get Min into the WT library and set a number of Browns to working on the problem with her? Once they all saw what books Min had surely they would have known where to start on the problem.

So your stance is that the WT and AS knew nothing about the Seals, the Bore, and the Last Battle until just recently? That is why they have never made a study of the Last Battle and the concepts surrounding the Last Battle, something that has been in prophecy and has been Foretold for over three thousand years?

Finally in regards to power plays saying they are concerned with that over facing the shadow is false. The WT's end goal has always been to face the shadow and that is made clear time and again through povs in the book. MOir talks about it, Eggy hammers us over the head with the responsibility she feels for the WT to be strong for TG. You can argue with how they have gone about it, but you can't question what their end goal is.

I'm not arguing about their end goal at all. I didn't even imply that battling the Shadow and the DO was not their goal. I am simply pointing out that they failed.

How on earth does it fall to Min to study this stuff?

 

Her visions' purpose has been achieved; and she needed a purpose other than being in love with Rand.

 

I know why she did it, but not why she had to do it. There should have been people who were working on it already.

 

Of course, that is in theory. The first logical step, in my mind, when you hear there is going to be the Last Battle, you immediately try and find out how to win. I suppose that everyone was a bit preoccupied with the...events that have been happening. But still I would have thought SOMEONE would have been doing some research, but we only have Herid Fel and Min so far.

It should have fallen to the White Tower, specifically the Brown and White Ajahs, to be freakin on point with knowledge of the Last Battle, the Bore, and the Seals. Just like everything other mission the White Tower is responsible for, it failed. They are more concerned with stopping the Dragon and petty power plays than the triumph of Light over the Dark One.

The discussion about Harid Fel and Min got me thinking. There is a bit of an inconsistency there. Min doesn't know the Old Tongue. Harid probably did, being a smart old genius, but there is no reason for a poor mining town girl to know the old tongue.

The reason I say this is because many of the books that Harid and Min are reading would have to be either translated into common tongue from the Old Tongue or still in the old tongue. The books are old, many date from the AoL or from early after the Breaking. We don't know exactly when the common tongue became standard, but it was sometime between the Trolloc Wars and the end of Hawkwing's Empire, therefore many books would be in the Old Tongue.

When studying a subject, reading a translation is seldom good enough. In today's world if you want to understand many subtle nuances in philosophy, you study it in German. Ideas are lost in translation or sometimes the translator's bias affects how the translation is recorded.

Unless Min has had a chance to pick up the Old Tongue, I don't see how she will ever find the correct answer.

Ah well. Back to the drawing board.

 

Though I still maintain that it has nothing to do with humans or AS in that world. It's a lifeless world. Lanfear brought the grolms to further her plans. Perhaps it has something to do with the DO and the razor sharp burn marks where no plant will grow..

 

Razor sharp marks still sounds like rocket burns to me.

Perhaps, but I'm quite sure that heat from a rocket engine wouldn't create a sharp edge like that.

The more I think about it, it has to be something with the one power. Some of the marks were old, some where new(er). Are the flash burn spots still happening in that world?

Ah well. Back to the drawing board.

Though I still maintain that it has nothing to do with humans or AS in that world. It's a lifeless world. Lanfear brought the grolms to further her plans. Perhaps it has something to do with the DO and the razor sharp burn marks where no plant will grow..

What else could cause a contrail besides an aircraft, alien (!), or meteor?

A channeller.

Humanity is wiped out from that particular mirror world. Animals are wiped out. Insects are wiped out! Heck, there is not even plant growth along the edges of the burnt stripes. The world is describes as faded, the water is flat. Lifeless. Even if every form of life other than plants was destroyed on the mainlands (Randland, Shara, Seanchan, even LotMM) and then the Shadow destroyed itself...a freakin fly from some pissant island would have been able to repopulate on the mainland in year since the Shadow eradicated itself. If there was any form of life in this world, Rand would have noticed it.

However...A channeller from the AoL could travel to the mirror world and fly aided with the One Power.

What other channeller was present in this mirror world? Lanfear. Lanfear brought the grolm. Lanfear can fly.

Lanfear watching Rand from above and flying to keep close, but far enough distant to escape any type of visual. Lanfear wanted to keep an eye on Rand and co as they moved towards Kinslayer's Dagger. She could easily watch from above, perhaps with some saidar enhanced vision or with a tracking beacon and then plan the right time to move in on him.

Is ever hinted or explicitly stated that Min will/will not have children with Rand?

Is it canon that in each turning of the Wheel that the ages are the same?

I've read several posts that either imply or outright state that each age is exactly the same as the corresponding age in a previous turning of the Wheel.

Forsaken are tricksey. I'm sure Moridin, one of the strongest and most knowledgeable channellers from the AoL and a preeminent natural philosopher could figure it out.

EDIT: Anyway, this shows the battle in Camylen will not be that serious.

I'm using the assumption that Moridin or someone else was able to counteract or protect against the Black Winds. The note was clear that it was a large host of Shadowspawn.

If the Shadowspawn are contending against both the Black Wind and two very tight bottlenecks (the Waygate and the exit from the basement), then the battle for Camelyn is going to be a minor skirmish.

What the heck were Loial and the Asha'man (Karldin?) doing while traveling around closing the Ways? They obviously failed if aknown Waygate, one that Loial himself used, is still open and an entire ARMY of Shadowspawn can use!

 

That wasn't one of the gates Rand told them to close. He took care of that one. I know it doesn't explain what happened to the Gate, or even how an "Army" can travel through the ways when it's been said time and time again that Shadowspawn using the ways have to travel in small groups and meet up later (Apparently thats one hell of a basement).

 

But there ya go.

On the other hand, seeing flame above the city may be a case of 'the bark is worse than the bite'. It would take a relatively small number of Trollocs to scare the hell out of civilians and start a significantly large fire.

How does the math work out? What was the rate for Perrin's force to move through gateways? Wasn't it several days to move ~100,000 people through a gateway roughly the size of a Waygate? Once the channellers linked they could make a large gateway, but prior to that they would have been much of the same size as a Waygate.

If 100k Trollocs were on the other side of the Waygate, it would take time to get them through. On the inside the Ways, all 100K Trollocs will not have immediate access to the exit. How many can line up abreast in front of the Waygate? 10? That would be a formation 10,000 ranks deep. Even crowded butt to nut, the furthest Trollocs would be 20,000 feet from the exit.

Surely 10 Trollocs cannot exit at once. We see Rand and friends enter/exit one at a time by horse. So maybe 2 to 3 Trollocs can exit per second at the start, but it would take longer for the Trollocs further back in the ranks. Also factor in the time it would take for the Trollocs to leave the basement.

Talamanes, mercenaries, and Guardsmen will outnumber Trollocs for a long period of time. The first priority would be to fight to the Waygate and close it, then begin mopping up the shadowspawn that got through.

What the heck were Loial and the Asha'man (Karldin?) doing while traveling around closing the Ways? They obviously failed if aknown Waygate, one that Loial himself used, is still open and an entire ARMY of Shadowspawn can use!

How does one go about becoming a Darkfriend? With it being a crime punishable by death in most (if not all nations), even the act of seeking a group out would be quite risky.

To further that...How does one such as Lindrin seek out the BA and successfully find them within 2 years, yet no other AS runs across them. With as much inter-Tower politics as there is, any thing out of the ordinary that a BA AS does would be identified...

I have two questions...neither one specifically dealing with content.

1. When aMoL is finally published, will the Kindle version be released at the same time as the hardback version? I will not be in a geographical location with access to just released books - but can use the internet to d/l the kindle version.

2. I've read a few comments here and there about outrigger novels. Is there more info on this possibility?