Time Loops, Wheel of Time Part 5

"Do you think we actually have a chance of killing the Dark One without destroying the world or getting everyone killed?" Egwene asked as she watched Natalie al'Vere turn into purple mist and flow into the ring that Mist was holding.

"I don't know," Mist admitted as he sent the ring to Egwene's room, dropping it on the pile of bottles and rings he'd already sent back to Winternight. "If we can get the time loop set up and kill Ishamael, we've got a decent chance to kill him but a lot of it requires finding a way to pull the Dark One into the world so we can kill him."

"How long will it take to set up the time loop?" Egwene asked.

"About five seconds once I get there, I've got a trinket," Mist replied with a grin as he pulled an old fashioned lighter out of his inventory. "Are you ready to go home?"

"Not really," Egwene admitted. "I left everyone to die and I never visited, if I'd checked in, maybe I could have saved people when the trollocs showed up the second time."

"And maybe one of the forsaken would have killed everyone while you were gone or decided to destroy the village because you cared, it's hard to say," Mist offered. "You made the best choices you could or at least you tried. I doubt we'll manage to kill the Dark One on the first attempt, which means you'll have plenty of chances to explore and try different things."

"It's going to be weird not being a part of the Tower," Egwene admitted.

"You'll always have a piece of the Tower in your heart," Mist assured her as he leaned against the empty table. "But honestly, would you want to go back to being a novice or accepted?"

"No," Egwene admitted after a couple of seconds of thought. "I've already learned everything they'd teach me and you gave me a school that hands out fantastic prizes."

"Exactly," Mist replied with a grin. "What's the point of recruiting a thousand untrained channelers from other worlds if you don't have anywhere to train them in a reasonable timeframe?"

"It certainly makes it easier," Egwene agreed as she twisted around so her feet were on the ground and stood up, wanting to be standing when she was sent back. "Is there anything else I need to know before you send me back?"

"Nothing we haven't already covered unless you want another shower or trade for more ter'angreal?" Mist asked as he gestured toward the shower room.

"That depends, what do you have?" Egwene asked.

"I have a copy of Cadsuane's collection of ter'angreal and a ring that gives you immunity to lightning and lets you turn invisible," Mist said as he pulled the ring out of his inventory.

Egwene sighed as she realized that she'd probably have to make the deal unless he wanted something completely insane. "What would I have to trade?"

"I want you to promise that you'll never swear oaths with the Oath Rod," Mist told her.

"So you basically want me to give up ever being an Aes Sedai?" Egwene asked with annoyance.

"Are you going to tell Lanfear to her face that she isn't an Aes Sedai? Or Semirhage? Or Ishamael? I mean, sure they sort of failed when it comes to being servants of all but they certainly had the training and they've never sworn any oaths."

"I'd want an angreal or a sa'angreal and Cadsuane's defensive gear but they failed at protecting people so they don't deserve the title," Egwene admitted.

"And yet, in a lot of ways, they have more right to the title than most Aes Sedai," Mist argued. "The title has a lot of baggage and you never really fit, you were always a wilder at heart and that should be a source of pride. I suggest picking a different title and running with it."

"Like what?" Egwene asked, curious what types of titles he'd suggest.

"Egwene al'Vere, Wielder of the Sacred Flames, Wise Girl, Girl that Studies the Mystic Arts, or maybe Egwene al'Vere, Witch of the Two Rivers?" Mist suggested.

Egwene shook her head. "Wise Girl?"

"You're barely twenty and you never finished your training with the Wise Ones, which means you have to take what you can get, thus girl rather than woman," Mist teased.

"Do you have any other suggestions?" Egwene asked, willing to admit that he had a point about not finishing her training with the Wise Ones.

"Egwene al'Vere, Student of the Mystic Arts or simply Egwene al'Vere the girl from Edmond's Field that needs no titles because she is awesome," Mist offered. "You spent the last couple of months dealing with the Tower's shit while in the middle of a war, take a couple of years and figure out who you want to be."

"And what if I want to be an Aes Sedai?" Egwene asked.

Mist laughed. "Then I'll know your mother probably dropped you on your head as a child."

"She didn't, my sisters would have told me," Egwene argued.

"That's fair," Mist admitted. "Joking aside, if you promise not to swear any oaths for five years, I'll give you the ter'angreal."

"That I can swear," Egwene agreed, not seeing a problem with waiting a couple of years to rejoin the Tower if it meant that she'd be able to fight.

"That works," Mist replied as he teleported the ring to her room in the Winespring. "It's on your pillow in your room. Are you ready to go back?"

"No but I should," Egwene replied. "I'll try to make sure Rand doesn't hit you when he realizes how many family members you kidnapped from other worlds."

"I'm honestly a bit more worried about Perrin," Mist admitted, fairly sure Rand wouldn't deck him for rescuing people.

"Nah, Perrin's a big softy," Egwene assured him.

'Tell that to the idiots that kidnapped his wife,' Mist mused, thinking about the time that he'd cut his way through half an army to rescue her in the books. "Stay safe and best of luck explaining everything."

"I could say the same thing," Egwene replied a touch sarcastically.

"Oh, right," Mist replied as he touched his disguise ring and let the illusion he'd been wearing vanish. "I should probably avoid looking like the person that watched everyone have sex."

Egwene studied the dark haired man that looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties. "Is that your actual face or another illusion?"

"Close enough," Mist replied with a smile as he gestured and sent Egwene back to Winternight, causing her to merge with her younger body. 'Now I just have to survive the night without the trollocs or Ishamael killing me,' he mused as he checked both rooms to make sure they hadn't left anything behind. 'This would be easier if I didn't have to be in the world to start the time loop,' he complained as he used his 'character' doll on his inventory page to swap his shorts for a set of clothes that wouldn't be completely out of place for the world.

"Time to have some fun," he muttered as he used the last of his borrowed power to teleport himself just outside of town a second after he'd dropped Egwene back into the world. He quickly glanced around to make sure no one had seen him and that the town wasn't being overrun by shadowspawn or anything weird. 'Looks good.' He flipped the top of the lighter open and spun the wheel, creating a green and purple flame and starting the time loop. He put the lighter back in his inventory so no one could end the time loop early and started walking toward town with a spring in his steps and a smile on his face.

0o0o0

Mat grinned as he found himself back in the Winespring inn with both of his eyes and feeling better than he'd felt in years. "I was half expecting some type of trick," he admitted as he checked to make sure his foxhead necklace was around his neck.

Rand glanced down at his arms that were resting on the table and smiled when realized that his hair was red which meant that he was probably back in his own body. "Is the place smaller than I remember?"

"No, it's just crowded," Perrin replied as he glanced around the room, trying not to think about what he'd been doing before he'd gotten sent back. "This is going to be weird."

"How much do you remember?" Rand asked, doing his best to ignore the fact that he could feel the source again, something he hadn't been able to do for twenty years.

"Too much," Perrin muttered, thinking about the various battles he'd been in.

Mat smiled as he realized that he remembered things he'd forgotten because of the cursed dagger now that he'd merged with his younger self. "Everything."

"Do you think it's too late to vanish?" Rand asked thoughtfully when Egwene walked out of the kitchen.

"Probably," Mat admitted as he saw Nynaeve making her way through the crowd, looking like she wanted to hit someone with a stick. "I should have asked Mist for a warder cloak or something."

Egwene walked over to Rand's table. "How much…"

"Do I remember?" Rand asked. "Would you believe me if I said that I had a weird dream and I ended up in the past?"

"So, all of it?" Egwene asked, not sure how she was supposed to feel about the situation she found herself in.

"Probably," Rand admitted, not interested in saying anything else where someone might overhear. "So, now what?"

Egwene leaned in and whispered so she wouldn't be overheard, "If anyone asks, there was a masked girl and you don't know who she was."

"Fine with me," Perrin agreed, figuring this was one of those times where lying was the right move or at least not volunteering information.

Nynaeve walked over to their table. "We need to find the trollocs before they attack."

Perrin scowled as he thought about Fain. "You need to find Fain before I do, I'd rip him apart."

"Lan is already dealing with it," Nynaeve assured them, trusting her husband to deal with the twisted merchant in a way that wouldn't cause a scene. "Have you seen Mist?" she asked, wanting a word with the man since he hadn't warned her that Lan's bond with Moiraine would merge the bonds so she was linked to both of them.

"Not yet," Egwene replied as she scanned the crowd, looking for anyone that she didn't recognize. "He said that he'd be around and he changed his appearance before he sent me back."

"Probably for the best," Nynaeve admitted as Bodewhin and Eldrin walked into the inn, looking a bit lost or like they were looking at something they hadn't seen in a while. "How many people did you bring back in bottles?"

"If you include the people that were sent back in spirit, almost a thousand," Egwene replied smugly, rather proud of how much they'd managed to stack the deck before Mist's borrowed power had started running out.

"What?!" Nynaeve sputtered, shocked that they had more channelers than the Tower had Aes Sedai.

"Congratulations, you've got at least a dozen siblings and three dozen children by various people trapped in bottles in my room," Egwene told her.

"Siblings?" Nynaeve asked, finding the idea stranger than the idea of different versions of her having children with different people for some reason.

"Six or seven brothers and a couple of sisters, I sort of lost track since I was trying to explain things and Mist kept summoning more people," Egwene admitted. "I think he was having fun trying to find the weirdest matches he could."

"Great," Nynaeve muttered, not sure how to feel about the entire mess.

"It could be worse, Rand has at least four dozen children and Mat probably has at least a hundred siblings and children trapped in bottles," Egwene offered.

"This is going to make holiday parties weird," Mat admitted as Bodewhin and Eldrin walked over to their table.

"Holiday parties?" Bodewhin asked, doing her best to pretend that everything was completely normal.

Mat turned to look at his sisters. "Egwene got a bit carried away summoning people from the mirror worlds, we picked up a bunch of new family members."

"Good," Bodewhin replied with a grin, not seeing a problem with having more channelers around, especially if they were family.

Eldrin shook her head. "We're going to have trouble feeding a thousand extra people."

"We have gateways, we can always head to a port city and buy fish," Bodewhin suggested.

"Except we're basically broke," Eldrin reminded her. "Unless Mist left you with a couple of bags of gold?" she asked Egwene.

"Not that I know of," Egwene admitted. "But I know a couple of nobles that would love to toss gold at anyone selling heartstone dishes or power wrought swords."

"We'll probably need to build another forge," Perrin warned her.

"Give me half an hour and I can put together a decent forge by fusing stone with fire and earth," Bodewhin offered, having built several forges over the years.

"There's plenty of stone in the mountains, a bit of work and we'll have four walls up and everything ready to go other than the bellows," Eldrin offered.

Nynaeve shook her head. "Let's worry about the forge after we kill the trollocs."

"Do you remember which farms were hit the first time around?" Rand asked, wanting to avoid anyone dying.

"Of course," Nynaeve replied. "What are you thinking?"

"I'm just trying to figure out if we have enough channelers to cover the farms," Rand said, wanting to make sure everyone survived.

Nynaeve took a couple of seconds to glance around the room at the girls and women she could sense. "I think we'd have that covered with just the people in the room."

"Can you find Moria's bottle?" Rand asked Egwene.

Egwene nodded. "It might take a couple of minutes but her ring is pretty distinctive. What are you thinking?"

"Moria's good at making ter'angreal and she can turn jewelry into defensive ter'angreal that should be able to stop a hit from a trolloc unless they get lucky."

"Not everyone has jewelry," Bodewhin pointed out.

"Everyone has copper coins, it shouldn't be hard to melt them down and turn them into bracelets using the power," Egwene pointed out.

"Good idea. It's probably better if we provide the bracelets, that way we can take them back if we need them for something else," Eldrin suggested.

"How many copper coins does the inn have?" Bodewhin asked, figuring they could borrow some until they got everything worked out.

"I have a better idea," Mat said with a smile that didn't reach his eyes.

Rand turned to look at Mat. "What's that?"

"Fain should have plenty of copper in his wagon and he's not going to need it. He brought the trollocs, the least he can do is pay for our defensive efforts," Mat pointed out.

"He's got a point," Rand admitted as a skinny teenage girl with brown hair walked over.

"How much should we tell people?" Jerilin al'Caar asked Nynaeve and Egwene, having noticed that they were a lot stronger than they should be, which meant that they'd also come back.

"I don't know," Nynaeve admitted. "We should probably have a discussion about it with everyone and figure out what we're going to say."

"Do you need help with the trollocs?" Jerilin asked in a whisper, not wanting to alarm people that didn't know about the attack until they'd sorted everything out.

"It wouldn't hurt," Nynaeve agreed.

"Let me know what you need, I'm going to make sure my friends don't say anything they shouldn't," Jerilin replied, then headed back to tell her friends that they were going to keep their traps shut until the group discussed it.

'At least she didn't recognize me as the girl in the stone room,' Egwene thought, happy that the mask had worked to conceal her identity. "I'm going to grab Moria's ring and Faile's bottle," she told the group then headed for the stairs.

"This is going to be a mess," Mat muttered as he watched Egwene head to the stairs.

Bodewhin laughed. "Look on the bright side, if the Tower complains about us not sending the girls to the Tower we can tell them to piss off and there's jack and shit they can do about it."

"Good," Mat agreed, less than impressed with most of the Aes Sedai he'd met over the years.

0o0o0

Elaida stared at Elayne in disbelief as her potential power jumped in the middle of her lecture, going from a level not seen for a thousand years to a level that hadn't been seen since the Trolloc wars or even the Age of Legends. "How?!"

"I don't know, you're the one that is supposed to be explaining things," Elayne replied with annoyance, less than happy that Elaida had noticed her jump in power before she'd managed to create a ter'angreal to hide the increase.

"Your potential strength jumped," Elaida told her.

"That's good, right?" Elayne asked, trying to appear confused.

"That shouldn't happen, what did you do?" Elaida asked, trying to figure out how her power had jumped.

"I didn't do anything," Elayne replied, not sure how she was supposed to talk her way out of things and not sure that she should.

"Don't lie to me girl!" Elaida snapped when she realized that Elayne wasn't as shocked as she should be.

"Fine," Elayne replied as she quickly embraced the source and shielded Elaida before she embraced the source and did something stupid. "You want the truth?" she asked as she split her flows and chained the woman in place with threads of air and wove a ward against sound around them so no one would hear Elaida scream. "The truth is that I've been channeling for years and that I'm sick and tired of listening to your stupid opinions about boys and the Tower or your bloody ajah."

"You're going to be in a lot of trouble if you don't release me," Elaida warned her, wondering where she'd learned the complicated weave she'd used that made the sounds in the rest of the palace fade away or how she'd learned to tie it off.

"From my mother or from the Tower? Because my mother can barely sense the source and the Amyrlin hates you. You were a bitch when she was an accepted and your behavior hasn't really changed."

"Where did you hear that?" Elaida demanded.

"From my aunt," Elayne replied with a shrug, not surprised that she didn't try to deny it. "I'll make you a deal, I'll let you walk out of here alive if you swear that you'll write the names of every red sister involved in the so-called Troubles on a list and confess to arranging the murder of Thom's nephew. If you don't, you're not going to be walking out of this room."

"You're just a scared little girl and someone has been feeding you stories," Elaida replied, making a mental note to track the bard down and ask him some pointed questions.

"And that's not a denial," Elayne replied as she walked over to the closet and grabbed one of Elaida's trunks. "It's a bit on the small size, but I think you'll fit."

"I'm not getting in there," Elaida told her, deciding that she'd call her bluff. "This has gone on long enough."

"Long enough? No, I don't think you understand," Elayne told her as she hauled the trunk out of the closet, letting her hatred for the bitch that had ordered her husband tossed in a box show on her face. "I'm going to stuff you into the trunk, then I'm going to walk out of the palace looking like you."

"How?" Elaida asked, knowing the guards would check if someone walked out of the palace wearing a cloak, especially if it wasn't raining.

"Mirror of Mists to take your appearance and threads of air to make the trunk lighter," Elayne replied with a smile that didn't reach her eyes. "I'll be gone and you'll be blamed. In a couple of hours or a few days, I'll stumble back into the city and give the guards a story about getting out of the trunk and hitting you on the head and making my way back to the city. They'll never find your body and they'll assume that you ran away, putting a rather large black mark on the red ajah and the Tower."

"Why?" Elaida asked, wondering when the girl had lost her mind.

"Because I can and because I want to make you scream in agony and terror when the water is rushing into your trunk or when you realize that no one is going to let you out and that you'll die lost and forgotten."

"What did I do to you?" Elaida demanded.

"Nothing," Elayne replied as she split her flows and picked Elaida up with flows of air. "Or at least nothing yet. You're not the only one that sees visions of the future, you ordered my husband tossed in a box and beaten half to death in a future that isn't going to happen, because you're going to die screaming."

Elaida scowled as she realized that Elayne had married a channeler. "He could channel, couldn't he?"

"And now you know why I hate you," Elayne replied as she used the threads of air to fold Elaida's body and stuff her in the trunk that was just barely large enough for the woman to fit, being careful not to kill her.

"I'm going to escape," Elaida promised.

"Just be happy that I didn't beat you half to death first," Elayne told her as she tied off the weaves keeping Elaida curled up and in the trunk.

"You're going to regret this!" Elaida screamed at her, already planning the ways she'd torture the bitch when she escaped.

"I doubt it," Elayne replied as she wove the weaves that turned Elaida's necklace into half of an a'dam then finished the rest of it with the bracelet she was wearing, letting her sense Elaida's emotions and general state of health.

"What was that?" Elaida demanded, having never seen the weave before.

"That was me crossing a line," Elayne admitted as she wove a weave to keep Elaida from hearing anything outside the trunk and to keep people from hearing anything in the trunk. She tied the ward against sound off then let the other ward against sound on the area vanish. She closed the trunk and used a thread of air to drill a couple of discreet air holes in the trunk so that the bitch wouldn't suffocate as death would have been a kindness compared to what she was planning.

"Egwene is going to be annoyed about the a'dam," Elayne muttered as she opened a gateway to Emond's Field, placing the gate flush against the Winespring Inn so she wouldn't hurt anyone. "She'll get over it," she said as she floated the trunk through the gateway, figuring she had a couple of hours before she had to get back to the palace. 'At least her long lectures are good for something.'