By the end of his first year at the Hall of the Servants, Aren Valeris had learned three important things. First, most people here assumed competence and were deeply disappointed when you didn't immediately demonstrate it. Second, Aes Sedai considered vague instructions a perfectly acceptable teaching method. And third—most annoyingly—Seraya Tellen was almost always right.
He had stopped arguing that point out loud.
Internally, however, he maintained a strong and principled disagreement.
"You're doing it again," Seraya said, not looking up from her work.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're trying to force the weave into symmetry. How many times do I have to tell you not to do it?"
"That's because symmetry is efficient."
"Just because you're a tradesman's son," she replied, "not everything needs to balance like an account ledger."
Aren leaned back slightly, eyeing the construct in front of him. "Everything improves when it balances."
Seraya finally glanced at him. "This is why your first attempt collapsed."
"It collapsed once. Why do you have to remind me of my failure every time?"
"It collapsed three times."
Aren frowned. "You're exaggerating."
"I'm being generous."
Despite himself, he smirked. "You enjoy this too much, you know that?"
"Correcting you? Yes."
"Helping me."
That made her pause, just briefly, before she returned her attention to the weave. "That too," she admitted.
The Hall did not slow down.
If anything, it moved faster the longer you stayed. The first year was about keeping up. The second was about understanding why things worked. By the third, you were expected to contribute—to choose a direction, refine your focus, and begin doing something that actually mattered.
For most students, that meant a clean decision: research, infrastructure, healing, or governance.
For Aren, it was… complicated.
"You're not choosing pure research," Seraya said, as she had already finished the conversation.
Aren didn't bother denying it. "No, you know I can't choose it."
"Good," she said.
"That's it?" he asked. "No lecture about wasted potential? About how I am deceiving myself?"
"You don't like being told what to do," she said. "Why would I waste time?"
"That has never stopped you before."
"That's different. I enjoy those."
Aren huffed a quiet laugh, then grew a little more serious. "I can't stay here. Not as you can—you come from a family of researchers."
Seraya nodded once. She already knew.
House Valeris wasn't just wealthy—it was important. Trade networks, logistics systems, and supply chains that connected cities, most of which people never thought about. Aren wasn't just a student.
He was the heir.
Responsibility wasn't optional.
"You're still choosing engineering," she said.
"Yes."
A slight tilt of her head. "So you've found a way to justify it."
"I don't need to justify it," Aren said. "I'm good at it. Besides, my parents don't care what I do as long as I don't neglect my responsibility."
"That's not what I meant."
He hesitated, then shrugged. "It's useful. Practical. I can build things that matter outside the Hall."
Seraya watched him for a moment, then nodded. "That fits."
Aren glanced at her. "…that didn't sound like a compliment. More like condescension."
"It wasn't a compliment, nor was it sarcasm."
"I'm choosing to take it as one."
"That's also very on brand."
"You can't help yourself, can you?"
If anything, choosing engineering made things worse.
Because now he wasn't just studying ter'angreal related to the True Source.
He was obsessed with them.
It wasn't considered unusual. In the Age of Legends, ter'angreal were tools—complex, yes, but still part of daily life. Devices designed with purpose, created with precision, used without much thought beyond their function.
But Aren couldn't look at them that way anymore.
He saw structure.
Efficiency.
Possibility.
"You're staring at it again," Seraya said.
"I'm thinking."
"You've been 'thinking' for two hours."
"That's not a long time."
"For something that already works, it is."
Aren gestured at the projected weave in front of them. "It works, but it's inefficient."
"It's stable."
"It's redundant."
"It's reliable."
"It's wasteful."
Seraya exhaled slowly. "You're going to rebuild it, aren't you?"
"Yes."
"You're going to break it first."
"Probably."
She considered that. "…I want to see that."
Their work sessions became less structured over time.
They still attended classes and completed the required studies, but more and more of their time was spent in side labs, shared workspaces, or anywhere they wouldn't be interrupted.
Not because they had to.
Because they wanted to.
Aren's first successful ter'angreal wasn't impressive.
It didn't reshape anything. It didn't impress instructors. It didn't even hold more than a minor function—a stabilised light construct with adjustable intensity.
But it worked.
Consistently.
Cleanly.
Seraya turned it over in her hand, examining the weave structure with quiet focus.
"…you corrected the instability," she said.
"Yes."
"You overcompensated."
"Yes."
A pause.
"…but it works," she admitted.
Aren folded his arms. "Of course it does," he said proudly. "And that sounds like approval."
"It's more of an acknowledgement rather than approval."
"I'll take it."
She handed it back. "You should."
Then, a little quieter:
"You're getting better."
Aren then abruptly said, "I'm going to name it Al'cairen Solath. And my mother's been asking when you're going to come home again."
She paused, hearing the second sentence. "Last time didn't go very well."
"It went splendidly."
She looked at him like he was talking nonsense, then said, "Give me a day. Then we'll go."
Aren smiled, leaning in slightly. "That's why I love you."
And life went on.
________________________________________
By the summer of their third year at the Hall of the Servants, the air in Paaran Disen didn't just feel warm—it felt heavy, as if the atmosphere itself was thickening with unspoken dread. The city was still the jewel of the world, a sprawling masterpiece of white stone, soaring towers, and chora trees whose trefoil leaves breathed peace into the streets. But to Aren, a student who looked at the world through the lens of structural integrity and flow, the foundations were groaning.
He sat in the Great Library, staring at a schematic for a "Bridge of Light"—a project meant to span the Sea of Fire. It was a masterpiece of Earth and Fire weaves, intended to last a thousand years. But his instructor, a man named Jarid who usually spoke of aesthetics and harmony, had spent the morning lecture discussing shielding harmonics and how to collapse a structure from the inside out using resonance.
"It's not obviously changing," Aren whispered to himself, his fingers tracing the crystalline blueprints. "Not dramatically."
But it was enough.
The schedules were the first thing to fracture. The masters of the Power, the Aes Sedai who once spent their days healing the land or researching the stars, were becoming ghosts. You would see a Master of Earth like Solan rushing through a corridor, his face pale, not toward the construction sites, but toward the "Strategy Rooms" that had recently been partitioned off from the public wings.
Aren stood and walked to the window. Below, the jo-cars moved in their usual humming lines, but the patterns were wrong. They weren't flowing toward the recreational sectors. They were diverted. Supplies—crates marked with the sigil of the Hall—were being moved in bulk toward the outskirts.
"They're moving the weight," Aren muttered. As a builder, he knew when a load was being shifted to prepare for a collapse.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
"You feel that?" Aren asked later that afternoon.
He had found Seraya on one of the upper terraces, a place they used to come to study the way the setting sun caught the glastic spires of the city. Today, she wasn't looking at the sunset. She was looking at the horizon, toward the direction of the Bore, the previous Collam Daane university
Seraya didn't pretend to misunderstand. She didn't offer a platitude about the "Peace of the time" or the stability of the Hall. "Yes," she said softly.
It wasn't the same awareness as saidin, that roaring river of fire and ice that Aren was learning to touch. This was a social vibration. A shift in the collective soul of the city. It was purpose, but a dark, sharp kind of purpose.
Across Paaran Disen, things were aligning. It was like watching a massive machine, long dormant, suddenly clicking into a gear it was never designed to use.
Aren leaned slightly against the railing, his knuckles white against the cool stone. He pointed toward the lower transport lines. "Look at the logistics. That's not routine. They've rerouted the main power grid from the residential sectors to the Waygates and the Gateway Hubs."
"It's more than electricity, Aren," Seraya said, her voice tight. "The Aes Sedai... they aren't scattered as individuals anymore. Look."
Below them, in the grand courtyard of the Hall, groups of women in white and men in grey were gathering. They weren't debating philosophy or sharing research. They were moving in coordinated squads. Their movements were clipped, precise. Military.
"…they're mobilising," Aren said. The word felt like lead in his mouth. In a world that hadn't known true war for millennia, the word itself felt archaic, like a dusty relic pulled from a forbidden archive.
Seraya watched a flight of hoverflies streak across the sky, moving faster than any civilian craft was permitted to fly. She felt a cold shiver crawl down her spine. The "Collapse" had been a slow rot—a century of rising crime, of people becoming crueller, of the world losing its shine. But this? This was the snap.
"Information is coming in from the North," Seraya said, her voice barely a whisper. "The rumours aren't just rumours anymore. My father... he's been staying late at the Ministry of Provisioning."
Aren turned to her, his brow furrowed. "I heard they tried to open it further. The Bore. Beidomon and the others... they thought they could find a new source of power, but now the talk is that the Shadow isn't just an influence. It's an army."
"My father says they attempted a coordinated strike," Seraya replied, her eyes tracking a Gateway opening in the distance—a shimmering hole in reality that vomited out a line of armoured figures. "Not at the infrastructure. Not in the cities. At the Bore itself."
"What do you know about that?" Aren asked, a bit surprised by the specificity of her knowledge.
Seraya gave him a sharp look, the kind she usually reserved for when he spent too much time obsessing over a stone's grain. "Do you think your family is the only one that knows what's happening in the world, Aren? My father hasn't slept in three days. He says the 'First Attack' happened at the Hall of the Servants' northern outpost. It wasn't an accident. It was a massacre."
Aren exhaled slowly, the air whistling through his teeth. "No… I didn't mean it like that. Yeah—sorry. It's just... It's happening, isn't it?"
Seraya studied him briefly. He looked so young in the fading light, a boy who wanted to build bridges being asked to watch the world burn. "Do you think this war will come to us? Here, to the Paaran Disen?"
Aren looked conflicted. He wanted to say no. He wanted to believe the Lews Therin the highest seat of hall of servents, could hold the line. "No… but you don't know how the Wheel will turn. The patterns are breaking, Seraya."
(Aren's POV)
From the terrace, they could see more now. The sky was beginning to bruise with purple and gold, but the city below was lit with a different kind of light.
Gateways were forming with increasing frequency. These weren't the leisurely portals of scholars. These were jagged, rapid deployments. Flows of the One Power were being woven in the air, but they weren't the gentle Earth-weaves for maintenance or the delicate Air-weaves for weather control. These were thick, braided ropes of power meant for movement and defence.
And then, they saw him.
In the centre of the main plaza, a figure stood surrounded by the High Council. Even from this distance, the presence of Lews Therin Telamon was unmistakable. It wasn't just the way people stood back to give him space; it was the way the very air seemed to vibrate around him.
He wasn't the "First Among Equals" today. He looked like a general.
"Even from here," Aren whispered, "you can see it. Something has changed in him."
"It's not just him," Seraya corrected. "It's everything around him. Look at the Aes Sedai. They're linking."
It was a sight rarely seen in public—circles of men and women joining their strength. In the Age of Legends, linking was for Great Works—moving mountains or creating the chora trees. Now, they were linking to prepare for a "Response."
Orders moved through the structure of the Hall almost instantly. It wasn't chaos; it was terrifyingly efficient. The precision of a society that had perfected science and art was now being turned toward the science of conflict.
"…did you ever expect something like this to happen?" Aren asked, his voice cracking. "When we started our first year? When we were learning the properties of resonance?"
"No," Seraya said. "My mother said things have been changing ever since the Bore opened. They just didn't know how to stop it. They thought they could study it. Contain it."
"And now they know they can't," Aren replied.
A brief silence settled between them, broken only by the distant, rhythmic thrum of the mobilisation. Aren looked back at the city. It was still shining. It was still functioning. The fountains were still playing, and the music from the lower cafes was still drifting up on the breeze.
"It's still pretending," Aren said, gesturing to the city. "The city is still trying to be the Age of Legends."
"It can't pretend for long," Seraya said. "This is the start, isn't it? The start of the transformation. The end of... whatever we were."
Aren exhaled, a long, shaky breath. "And here I thought we would become famous builders. I wanted my name on a monument. I wanted people to walk across my bridges and feel safe."
Seraya's gaze didn't leave the movement below. The first units of the Light's army were stepping through a massive Gateway, disappearing toward the front lines. "We still can be Artificer, Aren."
Aren shook his head slightly, his eyes filling with a grim clarity. "…not for the same reasons, Seraya. If I build a wall now, it's not to hold up a roof. It's to stop a spear. If I build a bridge, it's so an army can cross it before the enemy destroys it."
This time, she didn't argue. Because below them, the forces of the Light were already moving into the dark.
The War of Power had officially begun. It wasn't a series of riots or a philosophical debate anymore. It was a fight for the existence of the Pattern itself.
And somewhere in the quiet space between thought and action, Aren realised that the things he was learning—the way to weave Earth and Fire, the way to understand the stress points of the world—might one day decide whether a thousand people lived, or whether they were swallowed by the Shadow.
He didn't know if that made him more determined... or less certain.
But as the first alarms began to chime across Paaran Disen, signalling a city-wide blackout for the first time in history, Aren didn't let go of the railing. He didn't run. He watched the light fade from the towers, and in the growing dark, he started to plan.
Not a bridge. A fortress.
I'm always open to corrections if I get the lore wrong or miss a detail you had in mind; the best way to guide me is to just tell me what I got wrong or what I need to know! You can always turn this off in your settings.