A Memory of Light

I started The Eye of the World as a teenager and caught up somewhere around Knife of Dreams, book eleven, right when the wait between volumes had become part of the experience. Then Robert Jordan died in September 2007, and the wait turned into something else. Nobody knew if the story would ever end. When his wife and editor Harriet McDougal chose Brandon Sanderson, the young author of Mistborn, to finish the series from Jordan's notes and dictated scenes, I felt relief mixed with dread. The Gathering Storm in 2009 reassured me. Towers of Midnight in 2010 kept the faith. A Memory of Light, published by Tor Books on January 8, 2013, is the fourteenth and final volume. The hardcover runs 912 pages, ISBN 9780765325952, and it carries the weight of twenty three years of reading.

The premise is simple and crushing. Tarmon Gai'don, the Last Battle, has arrived. The dead walk, the weather fails, and every army still standing must fight at once. Rand means to break the remaining seals and face the Dark One directly at Shayol Ghul. Everyone else has to hold the line long enough for that contest to matter. Nothing is held back below.

The meeting at Merrilor

The book opens with the rulers of the world gathered at the Field of Merrilor, and Rand laying his plan on the table. The seals are failing anyway, he tells them. Better to break the last ones on his terms and meet the Dark One now than to wait for the prison to rot open at the worst hour. Egwene al'Vere, the Amyrlin Seat, argues against him in front of everyone. Breaking the seals deliberately could free the Shadow entirely. The debate is fierce, public, and political, with Elayne, Perrin, the Borderland rulers, and the Seanchan all weighing in. What saves the meeting is Moiraine, back from the dead in the previous volume, who speaks for Rand with an authority nobody else carries.

Out of that quarrel comes the war plan. Four fronts, four armies. Elayne commands the combined forces at the Field of Merrilor itself, facing Trolloc hordes pouring through. Lan leads the Borderlanders and their allies at Tarwin's Gap in Kandor, holding the northern pass. A third force under Ituralde and others contests Caemlyn, where Trollocs flooded through the Ways. And Rand takes a small company to Shayol Ghul, into the Pit of Doom itself, to face the Dark One while the armies bleed for time. The Aiel, through Aviendha, name their price. They will fight, but the Dragon must give them a place in the peace that follows. Rand agrees, and the resulting Dragon's Peace binds every signing ruler to keep borders open when the war ends.

The Shadow has its own surprise ready. The enemy commander in the north, the brilliant general who has been outmaneuvering everyone, is unmasked as Demandred, one of the Forsaken, commanding an army of Sharans, channelers from beyond the known map whom nobody counted. Demandred spent years building power in Shara while the world watched the wrong borders. His arrival turns a desperate defense into something worse. Lan's army faces a stronger force led by a man who has hated Rand's soul since the Age of Legends.

Rand in the Pit of Doom

Rand walks into Shayol Ghul with only two companions, Nynaeve al'Meara and Moiraine, and with Callandor, the flawed male sa'angreal that can only be wielded safely when two women guide the flow. Around his neck hangs the deeper problem. His link to Moridin, the Forsaken whose soul mirrors his own since their streams of balefire crossed, means Rand can touch the True Power, the Dark One's own essence, and it means Moridin feels everything Rand feels. The little company passes through valleys of Trollocs and Dreadlords, guarded at a distance by the armies, and descends into the cavern called the Pit of Doom. What happens there is the heart of the book.

The fight is not fought with swords. The Dark One meets Rand with visions, whole possible worlds pressed against his mind. In one, Rand kneels and rules, and his empire rots into cruelty. In one, he never lived at all, and the world still suffers. In one, the Light wins without him and the victory still curdles. Each vision is vivid, specific, and cruel. The Dark One's argument is simple. Look at humanity. Selfish, violent, brief. Surrender, and the pain stops. Rand answers the only way he can. He answers with what he has seen across fourteen books. Farmers sharing bread. Soldiers holding bridges for strangers. People choose kindness daily, knowing it costs them, and that choosing is the whole meaning.

Around this contest of wills, the physical battle rages. Nynaeve and Moiraine pour their strength through Callandor while Moridin duels them in the cavern, blade against Power. Outside, Lan's and Perrin's forces strain to keep Dreadlords off the cave mouth. At the hinge moment Rand draws saidin, saidar through the women, and the True Power through his link to Moridin, seizing the Dark One's essence and forcing it back, weaving all three powers into a new seal over the Bore. The Dark One is shut out, not destroyed, because destroying him would unmake the choice that gives life meaning.

Egwene, Lan, and the northern fire

While Rand wrestles in the Pit, the northern front becomes a graveyard of heroes. Demandred, armored in confidence, calls out for a champion. Lews Therin is busy, he mocks. Who dares face him? Gawyn answers first, wearing bloodknife rings that trade his life for speed. He fights brilliantly and dies for a scratch. Galad answers next, and Demandred takes his arm and leaves him bleeding. Galad lives. Barely.

Then Lan rides forward, and the duel that follows is one of the finest in the series. He fights in the Malkieri way, accepting death as the price of the opening. When Demandred's blade goes into his side, Lan's sword takes Demandred through the throat. The Sharan army breaks and runs. Lan collapses, mortally wounded, and only Nynaeve's Healing pulls him back.

Egwene's end comes at the Field of Merrilor, facing a different monster. Mazrim Taim, the self proclaimed Dragon turned Dreadlord commander, the M'Hael, leads channelers and Trollocs against Elayne's lines. Egwene meets him with the Tower's full strength, and the duel escalates past anything her training allows. Taim wields balefire, burning her army out of existence. So Egwene reaches past the known weaves and creates the Flame of Tar Valon, a weave of pure sacrifice that burns away Taim with it, at the cost of her own life. She draws more of the Power than any living channeler can hold and does not let go. When the light fades, the Amyrlin is gone. Her soldiers take up her banner and break the rest in a fury of mourning.

Perrin, Mat, and the other fires

Perrin Aybara spends the book in two worlds at once. In the waking world he commands wolves and men at the valley of Thakan'dar, guarding Rand's back. In the wolf dream, Tel'aran'rhiod, he hunts Slayer, the assassin who is Luc in one skin and Isam in another, a killer who has stalked Perrin's family and friends across books. The duel moves through nightmares and familiar places, the Two Rivers, the White Tower in dream form, Shayol Ghul itself. Guided by Hopper's memory and Gaul at his side, Perrin learns the final lesson. He is both, man and wolf, and does not have to cut away half his soul to win. He kills Slayer in the dream, and the death holds in the flesh.

Mat Cauthon gets the career his luck always promised. His old memories, the battle knowledge of dead generals, make him the finest commander the Light has, and even Demandred respects the trap work at Merrilor. Mat's problem is Tuon, the Seanchan Empress, who trusts him as her husband and distrusts every ally he brings her. Through the middle of the book he schemes, begs, gambles, and finally convinces her. The Seanchan commit their damane and legions to the Light at the decisive hour. The empire built on chains chooses, freely, to fight for freedom.

Faile carries the quietest vital mission, guarding the Horn of Valere through the Ways while Trollocs and Darkfriends hunt her company. When all seems lost, young Olver puts the Horn to his lips and blows. The heroes of legend answer, and the line holds.

Aviendha leads the Aiel Wise Ones through the fiercest channeler fighting of the war, dueling Dreadlords and shielding armies from balefire strikes. The Black Tower, meanwhile, tears itself free. Androl and Pevara, the bonded Asha'man and Aes Sedai pair, turn the tables on Taim's loyalists from inside, and Logain arrives in time to lead the freed Asha'man to the field. Logain's promised glory never comes as a crown. It comes as a rescue, which suits him better.

The sealing and the quiet pages

Victory arrives in layers. The Bore sealed. Demandred dead. Taim unmade. The Trolloc armies break once their channeler masters fall. The Dark One's touch lifts. Soldiers who fought for days in nightmare light look up and find ordinary sky.

The cost fills the quiet pages. Egwene's pyre draws every surviving Aes Sedai, and the Tower that warred over her kneels to her memory as one. Elayne survives, holding her throne and carrying the twins who will inherit a changed Andor. Lan lives to raise his banner over a Malkier reborn. Perrin and Faile walk out hand in hand. Thom and Moiraine face the future together.

And Rand dies. The three women who love him feel the bond sever, and the world buries the Dragon Reborn with full honors. Then comes the last turn. A stranger with Moridin's face rides away from the pyre, carrying Rand's soul across the link into the body that shared his pain. He can no longer touch the One Power. Instead he shapes the world by thought alone, lighting his pipe with a wish. After fourteen books of burden, Rand gets the one thing the Pattern never offered him. A life that belongs to nobody.

The rulers sign the Dragon's Peace over the ashes. Cadsuane, of all people, the iron willed legend who bullied kings and humbled Amyrlins, is raised to the Amyrlin Seat to rebuild the Tower. The Seanchan hold their conquests but join the peace. The Aiel take their appointed role as its enforcers. The Black Tower stands recognized beside the White. It is a hopeful ending with teeth. Nobody pretends the peace will hold forever. The point is that they signed it anyway.

Where the finale strains

The honest criticism first. The battle sprawls. For hundreds of pages the viewpoint cuts every few scenes, Merrilor to the Gap to the dream to the Pit and back, and the rhythm grows numbing. Each cut lands at a cliffhanger, and after the twentieth the trick stops gripping. The middle of the Last Battle is a corridor of peaks with no valleys.

Some choices will divide readers. Gawyn's runs at Demandred read as brave and futile, two good men spending their lives to scratch armor. Androl, a minor Asha'man elevated across the last three books, carries more weight than his history supports. The Sanderson seam still shows. The sentences run shorter and plainer than Jordan's, and a few beloved voices sound slightly modern to a careful ear.

The Demandred reveal splits opinion too. Years of theories placed him everywhere, and the Sharan army answer pleased some readers and annoyed others. A hidden nation of channelers appearing in the final volume can feel like a trick, even though Jordan's own notes pointed that way. And the sheer stacking of deaths, heroic last stands piling atop heroic last stands, risks turning grief into routine. Egwene's farewell earns its tears. A few of the smaller farewells blur beside it.

Set against that, what works works hugely. Rand's contest of visions gives the whole series its thesis. Choice matters more than victory, and a world that can choose wrongly is worth more than a paradise imposed. Egwene's end, foreshadowed since her first stubborn lessons as a novice, pays off completely. Lan's duel pays off twenty years of oathkeeping. Perrin's acceptance of both halves of himself resolves his longest arc. Mat and Tuon, Olver and the Horn, the Dragon's Peace, Cadsuane's elevation, every one of these lands because books of groundwork sit beneath them.

I closed the 912 pages feeling wrung out in the way only a fourteen book road can manage. The flaws are real and worth naming. The achievement stands past them. If you walked with Rand from the Two Rivers, argued about seals at Merrilor, and wept at Tarwin's Gap, this is the ending the story needed. Choice by choice, fire by fire, the Light holds. And a man with borrowed hands rides out to see what an ordinary life feels like.