The trek out of the deep woods took a full day and a half.
Aran moved with a cautious, measured pace, his senses constantly scanning the dense canopy and the shadowed underbrush for any sign of another grolm. Miri walked beside him for the first few miles, but the harsh terrain and her bruised, bare feet soon slowed her to a crawl. For the remainder of the journey, the ghost of the long-past age carried the child on his back.
He didn't mind the weight. His optimized physiology had fully stabilized thanks to the venison and his disciplined rationing, and the physical exertion kept the biting mountain chill at bay. As they walked, Miri proved to be exactly what she was: a terrified child recovering from trauma, swinging wildly between exhausted silence and endless, nervous chatter about village superstitions or what these people call omens.
By mid-afternoon of the second day, the untamed forest began to thin, giving way to stump-dotted fields and organized timberlines. Then, the smell of woodsmoke and livestock drifted on the wind.
They crested a low ridge, and the village of Vaelen revealed itself.
It was larger than Aran had expected—a moderate-sized settlement of perhaps three thousand people. The architecture was pragmatic and heavy, with thick timber walls, slate roofs, and narrow, winding streets designed to break the freezing mountain winds. At the center of the village stood a large, fortified forge, its chimneys constantly venting dark smoke into the iron-gray sky.
When Aran walked down the main thoroughfare with the missing girl on his back, the village came to a standstill.
"Miri!"
A woman's scream shattered the quiet. A woman in a rough-spun wool dress dropped a basket of root vegetables and sprinted through the mud, tears streaming down her face. She practically tore Miri from Aran's back, collapsing into the dirt as she crushed the child to her chest, sobbing uncontrollably.
A moment later, a broad-shouldered man covered in wood shavings and forge-soot pushed his way through the gathering crowd. This was Kael, Miri's father. He was a licensed Foda'nar—a sanctioned gatherer and venture-hunter who harvested rare iron-roots and timber from the deep woods to pay his tithes to the local lord. Kael dropped to his knees in the mud beside his wife and daughter, his face haggard and hollowed out by days of sleepless terror.
"Blood and ashes, Miri," Kael wept, his voice thick with a crushing guilt. "I told you to stay in the village. I told the elders to watch the gates. I thought the woods had crept up and taken you right from the tree line while I was gone."
Miri sniffled, burying her face in her mother's shoulder. "I'm sorry, Papa. I just wanted to go with you, so I tricked Afeen at the gate. I told him his mother was calling for him and that she was very angry. He was so afraid he ran like a mad bull."
Kael stared at her for a long second, processing the confession, then let out a breathless, watery laugh, pulling her into another crushing hug. "I don't care. Light blind me, I don't care how it happened. You're alive."
He stood, wiping his soot-stained face, and truly looked at Aran for the first time. He took in the man's physical appearance: Aran stood taller than anyone in the village, broad-shouldered but lean, moving with a fluid, predatory grace. He wore a pale coat of a strange, seamless material, and a frighteningly thin, glass-like sword rested at his hip. But it was his face that demanded obedience—sharp, aristocratic features, piercing eyes, and an innate, commanding presence. To Kael, this stranger looked like a man of high status.
Kael didn't ask questions. He bowed low, pressing his hands to his knees in a gesture of profound subservience.
"My home is yours, stranger," Kael said fiercely. "My hearth, my food, my blood. You have given me my life back."
Aran, functioning entirely on the egalitarian social customs of the Age of Legends, extended his hand for a firm handshake to accept the man's gratitude.
Kael froze. He stared at the outstretched hand, completely bewildered, his eyes darting between Aran's palm and his aristocratic face. In his society, a commoner did not clasp hands with a lord or someone who looked of a class entirely above his own. The silence stretched awkwardly for a long moment before Aran realized the cultural disconnect. With a smooth, unaffected motion, he withdrew his hand and simply offered a respectful nod instead.
For the next week, Aran lived under Kael and Lira's roof.
He learned quickly that as free citizens, they possessed no surname—family names were an exclusive right of the nobility, a class known to the common people simply as The Blood, the absolute rulers of the continent. Aran introduced himself simply as a wanderer from the high peaks, a man who had been isolated for a very long time and had lost his memory of the world's current shape.
He spent his days helping Kael process massive logs of iron-root. His genetically enhanced strength made him a terrifyingly efficient worker; he effortlessly hoisted massive timber beams that would normally require a team of three stout men. The village people watched him in stunned amazement, whispering among themselves about the strange, lordly man who possessed the strength of a draft beast.
But his evenings were spent with Torin, the village headman and somewhat local scholar , a very weird combo.
Rather than relying on Torin's oral history alone, Aran asked to see the village records. He sat at Torin's heavy wooden table by the light of a tallow candle, carefully paging through crumbling, leather-bound books and hand-drawn maps. Aran dismantled his own ignorance methodically, pointing to coastlines, asking about the distance to cities like Seandar, and extrapolating the scale of the civilization.
What he read, and what Torin confirmed, horrified him to his core.
"The year is 833 since the founding of the Empire," Torin explained, tapping a gnarled finger against a map that depicted a massive, isolated continent. "You stand in the Empire of Seanchan, on the continent of Seanchan. Before the Empire, this continent was a nightmare. It was ruled by warring Aes Sedai."
The title hit Aran like a physical sting. Aes Sedai.
Aran's brow furrowed, his voice tight but controlled. "Aes Sedai means Servant of All."
Torin snorted bitterly. "It may have meant that once, in some forgotten time. But the Aes Sedai before the great Emperor Luthair took the throne were no better than beasts hungry for power." The old man shook his head. "Women who could channel the One Power... They were warlords, Aran. They built fortresses of stone and enslaved the common people, using the Power to burn armies and subjugate millions. It was an age of endless slaughter."
Aran kept his face impassive, tracing the edge of a map with his finger, but his logical mind raced. The Aes Sedai of his era had been healers, scholars, and peacemakers. They had not degenerated into petty tyrants. The simplest, most logical conclusion snapped into place: the surviving forces of the Shadow had landed on this continent during the Breaking. They had conquered the survivors, corrupted the histories, and twisted the truth to paint the Light's servants as monsters.
"But eight hundred and eighty-three years ago," Torin continued, "the great fleet arrived from across the eastern ocean. Luthair Paendrag Mondwin, son of the High King Artur Hawkwing, brought the Armies of the Night to our shores to bring justice. And he put those aes Sedia on a leash to serve the empire."
Torin traced a crude shape in the margin of a ledger—a thick collar connected to a bracelet.
"An Aes Sedai named Deaine, seeing the righteousness of Luthair's cause, invented the a'dam and surrendered it to him. It is a collar that binds a Damane's power to the will of the one holding the bracelet, the sul'dam. With it, Luthair leashed the warlords. He turned their own weapons against them."
Aran sat in stunned silence as Torin casually explained the concept of da'covale—people who were considered property. But the true nightmare was the treatment of the channelers.
"The damane," Torin whispered. "The Leashed Ones. Women born with the curse. The Empire catches them, collars them, and gives the leash to a sul'dam. They are weapons, Aran. Less than hounds. Kept perfectly tame so they can never break the world again."
Aran's breath hitched. A cold, suffocating horror gripped his chest, and his fingers twitched instinctively toward the hilt of his sword. He forced his hand down, abruptly excusing himself from Torin's table. He walked out into the freezing night and stared up at the iron-gray sky.
In his Time, society had been built on absolute utopian ideals. Standing and honor were calculated strictly by one's service to the community. His own family, the Valeris line, had been incredibly wealthy, yet it did not matter—only their service to the Light carried weight. The idea of owning another human being was psychologically unfathomable.
Seraya, the woman smiling in the crystal photograph in his satchel, had been a channeler. To imagine a woman like her chained by the neck, treated as a rabid beast of burden by an empire built on institutionalized slavery...
The world hadn't just broken. It had become a festering, diseased corpse of its former self.
On the morning of his eighth day in Vaelen, the village alarm bell began to ring—a frantic, rhythmic clanging that echoed off the mountain walls.
Aran stepped out of Kael's timber house, his hand resting instinctively on the heron-marked hilt of the Atherion. The villagers were rushing toward the edges of the streets, clearing the main road, dropping their eyes to the mud and prostrating themselves.
"Let go, Aran!" Kael hissed from the doorway, As he saw aren keeping is hand on his sword. "It's a patrol from the city. they are here at are calling".
Aran did let, but He stepped backward into the deep shadow of the forge's overhang and watched as the Imperial detachment rode into the village square.
Ten soldiers were riding heavy, armored horses. The men wore segmented, overlapping plates of lacquered armor that made them look like terrifying, predatory insects. Their helmets were painted to resemble the mandibles of monstrous bugs, giving them an entirely inhuman silhouette.
Flanking the soldiers were two handlers leading beasts on heavy chains. One was a tom, a bronze-scaled, six-clawed nightmare that looked like a cross between a cat and a lizard.
A moment later, a massive shadow swept over the square. A raken—a massive, leathery-winged beast—descended from the sky, landing with a heavy thud that rattled the timber frames of the nearby homes. Aran calculated the creature's speed; it must have taken the flying beast a mere two days to cover the vast distance that had taken his party seven days at a grueling pace. Staring at the torm and the raken, Aran felt a strange sense of dissonance. They felt familiar to his eye, likely twisted biological constructs held over from his Age, yet they had mutated into something entirely alien.
But Aran barely registered the soldiers or the strange beasts. His eyes were locked on the center of the formation.
Riding a pristine white gelding was a woman in a dark dress heavily embroidered with panels of silver lightning. She sat with an air of absolute, unquestionable authority. In her hand, she held a thick, silver leash.
The other end of the leash was connected to a heavy silver collar locked around the neck of a woman walking in the mud beside the horse.
The collared woman wore a shapeless, drab gray dress. She was barefoot, her steps perfectly synchronized with the horse's gait. Her eyes were completely devoid of light, hope, or humanity. She moved exactly like a broken, well-trained hound.
Aran felt a physical pressure in his chest. His breathing turned shallow. The Atherion at his hip seemed to hum against his thigh, the dormant standing flows within the ter'angreal reacting to his rising, icy anger.
The patrol commander, a captain with two painted plumes on his insectoid helmet, reined his horse in front of Torin, who was trembling on his knees in the mud.
"Headman," the captain's voice was muffled and metallic through his faceplate, strictly professional and authoritative. "You sent a report to the provincial capital a week ago. You claimed a grolm attacked a child in the sanctioned timber reserves."
"Y-yes, my Lord," Torin stammered, not daring to look up. "A Foda'nar's child. And there are rumors from the deep trappers... rumours of more than one. A whole pack of the beasts, wandering far from the Blood's hunting estates."
The woman in the lightning-paneled dress—the sul'dam—gave the silver leash a slight, absentminded tug. The damane in gray stumbled slightly, then immediately corrected her posture, offering no resistance.
"A pack of grolm does not wander, Headman," the sul'dam stated, her tone crisp and rigorously authoritative, correcting the peasant with the stern discipline of a master addressing a servant. "They are the Empress's beasts, may she live forever. If they are in these woods in such numbers, they have either been displaced or someone is hoarding them without sanction. Both matters require the Empire's attention."
The captain nodded slowly, his armored gauntlet resting on the pommel of his sword. "We will scout the deep woods. Ensure your village has provisions and fresh mounts ready for my men when we return."
In the shadows of the forge, Aran stood perfectly still, his knuckles white around the hilt of his sword. He had survived the breaking of the continents, centuries of stasis, and a starvation march across a frozen sea. But as he watched a channeler led through the mud on a chain, he realized with terrifying clarity that his war had never truly ended.
The Shadow had not just survived; it had changed its shape. And Aran was no longer a ghost.