Chapter Text
Ishamael watches the waves lap at the barren rock beach. The salty water spills over his boots, tries and fails to seep through the leather, before gravity pulls it back into the writhing mass of the ocean.
The water had been bright, once. Turquoise and crammed full of tiny fish. It is black, now, a wartorn decade’s worth of oil, hazardous waste, and blood spilled into it.
A bird dives, pulls a meager, wriggling fish out of the waves, then disappears back into the night, heading west, towards the coast.
It will die once it eats its bounty, Ishamael muses, but then again, it is 3:51am, and it will only be a minute now.
As if on cue, a tremor rises through the ground. The water vibrates, and stone cracks and breaks behind him. He does not bother turning around, does not bother to meet the landslide head-on or create a gateway to escape it.
Screams, explosions, the distant presence of Saidin– the noise of battle reaches him even on the other side of the Shayol Ghul, and Ishamael decides to choose a quieter place to die next time. The ground rumbles and cracks, the water rises up to his knees and seeps through his clothes, spills down into his boots.
He breathes in the foul stench of the sea, holds the breath in his lungs until the last of the fumes have been absorbed into his blood, holds on until it hurts, then breathes out in a sigh. Back when he was young, he would have killed for an opportunity to study the limits of the Wheel. He supposes he has, in a way.
The water rises to his thighs, and he thinks he can feel the acid eating away at his skin. But it does not matter now, at 3:52am.
The fabric of reality writhes and bleeds around him, an animal caught in death throes. The Wheel comes to a grinding halt; for a blissful second, the edges of Ishamael’s soul brush against absolute nothingness.
Then, groaning and screeching impossibly loudly, it snaps backwards, the pattern unravels a fraction of an inch–three hours and fifty two minutes, to be exact–and Ishamael finds himself amidst the ruins of the High Seat’s palace for the fourth time. Somewhere down the echoing hallways, Lews Therin has started calling for Ilyena again.
Lews dodges around his son–why was he charging at him?–and continues down the hallway. He does not have time for playfighting, and wasn’t Ajax too old for it, anyway?
A thud and a wet squelch sound behind him, but it is white noise. Lews sheathes his sword absentmindedly. He knows that Ilyena is here somewhere, he just has to find her.
He suspects her up on the roof, wind whipping through her hair, crowned by the night sky. Her flowers are up there, too. He misses singing with her. Lately, he did not have much time to spare– not even for his wife; the Shadow did not wait for him to make time for it, after all.
The layout of the palace was intentionally inconvenient, mazelike with small windows, a relic of a long bygone era. It was more of a decorated fortress than a palace, really.
The building groans and shakes around him. Lews traces the currents of Saidin, a myriad of golden, pulsing webs, through its walls. The defense system has sprung, and he idly considers who would have dared to break into his home, but the thought is fleeting, as intangible as fog when he tries to grasp it.
He halts at a crossing of hallways, studies the yawning darkness that stretches into every direction. Vaguely, he can make out rubble, oddly shaped lumps, and dried stains on the floor. He scowls. Ilyena will be upset with him when she sees the state of their home.
Well, Lews had always wanted to renovate.
With a flick of his wrist he cuts his path to the stairwell short, breaking the wall to his left into pieces, using the resulting rubble as a stepping stool to the mid-point of the staircase.
“Ilyena!” He calls upwards, listens to the sound of his own voice echoing back to him. The walls swallow his words quickly. She does not respond; the oppressive silence is his only answer.
Lews blinks dust out of his eyes and starts his journey upwards.
He is seven flights of stairs from where he started–close to the roof, the palace is not as terribly tall as the other buildings in Paaran Disen–when he hears the telltale quiet and rythmic–familiar?–thudding of footsteps below him. Someone is following him, it seems.
He wonders if it is another of their children, coming to look for their mother. The thought is unmoored, and quickly drifts off into the fog at the back of his mind, the footsteps equally ignored; drowned out by the ringing in his ears. Before he knows it, he has reached the top.
Tonight, the moon is but a sliver of white in the sky, just barely enough to see. His gaze glides over the blooming flower beds and empty lawn chairs nestled between decorated towers and pitched roofs. Ilyena is nowhere to be found. But there is a hole in the floor, large enough for multiple men to fit through side-by-side. I need to patch it before it starts raining, Lews thinks.
Before he can inspect it closer, a hand lands on his shoulder.
“Do you have a moment to spare?” A voice asks from behind him. Not one of my children, Lews thinks, but he knows him nonetheless. He figures he has a few minutes to spare for an old friend.
“I am looking for my wife, have you seen her?” Lews turns around, the hand falls away easily. Elan steps back, seemingly uncomfortable with the sudden closeness. He is as finely dressed as always, though he looks a little rough, as if he had walked through a battlefield.
“I have,” he answers. Lews had wondered how he got into the building, but the thought of Ilyena sweeps everything else away.
“Really? Where is she?” He asks, uncharacteristically excited– the High Seat is to remain poised at all times. It’s just Elan, the petulant voice in his head says, You’ve seen each other stripped bare. Still, he’d never seen him quite so disheveled. “You should clean yourself up,” Lews advises, “Ilyena doesn’t like it when people track dirt into her home.”
Ah, but it was already so dirty, wasn’t it? She would be unhappy with him when he found her, regardless.
His gaze drifts away from Elan and back to the flowerbeds. “Say, do you possess the voice-?”
Elan’s hand lands on his shoulder again, claws digging into his flesh. There’s a sharp whoosh, and a sword–Lews’ sword–skids over the floor and disappears into the hole behind him. A second later, he hears it hit the bottom; a rather dull thud, as if muffled by a carpet.
“She isn’t home,” Elan says calmly, both their eyes fixed on the cavity. “I can-”
His voice becomes white noise as Lews frees himself from his grasp, following the sword’s path to the edge. I should retrieve it, he thinks. It had been a gift.
His eyes catch on a white, brown-dotted carpet, trail the spray of color to its center– and there She lies beneath the moonlight, a hole blown through her torso, limbs contorted awkwardly. His vision tunnels until he can see only her face; gray and dull and twisted in shock.
Idly, he wonders how long she had lain there, unmoving, until her flesh turned cold. As if time slowed down just for this moment, he watches as the sight of her is blocked by a blade, emerging from his chest, shining red. The fog abruptly clears from his mind, an unnoticed pressure lifted.
Lews Therin Telamon does not survive knowing, and neither does the rest of the world.