In yesterday’s blog, I postulated an alternative ending to The Wheel of Time that I thought more fitting than the published one, but in my own “wheel” universe, I only reread the first eleven books, so there is no ending, which leaves two possibilities for an alternative to that alternative ending.
The first possibility is foreshadowed in The Great Hunt where the main hero gets trapped in a time loop by one of the bad guys. He keeps living the same few minutes over and over again. He’d been determined never to use the power of the universe since the male half is tainted and ends up making men go mad. He doesn’t know how to use the power, anyway, since the power users who could teach him are three thousand years dead. Still, frantic, needing a way out of the time loop, he finally manages to reach the power and save himself.
So, one ending is that evil doers, who are told by some of their evil masters that they can’t kill the hero and told by others that they must kill him, end up trapping him in a time loop because they don’t know what else to do. Hence, the hero keeps repeating the same eleven books without ever finding a way out. He doesn’t even know he’s caught in a trap since it’s a loop of a couple of years duration rather than a couple of minutes, so he has no memory of what has gone before. But it’s a wheel, right? So what goes around comes around. Maybe forever. Or at least until I finish playing my own private Wheel of Time game.
The second possibility is foreshadowed in Lord of Chaos, where the Dark One asks one of his minions if he’d use balefire in his service. He also tells him to let the lords of chaos rule. In The Wheel of Time, balefire is an immensely powerful magic weapon that destroys targets by burning them backward in time, so the target, anything they’d done, and anything resulting from their actions is erased. In a previous age, both sides used so much balefire that it practically unraveled existence, so the use has been banned except, apparently, in service to the Dark One.
So, the second ending is that the minion, who was mostly offscreen where we never really saw what he did, follows the Dark One’s dictates and creates chaos using balefire, but he uses so much and for so long, that he erases everything that happened back to the moment where the first book began. Hence, as in the scenario above, the wheel keeps turning, replaying those eleven books over and over again. Sort of a takeoff on Dorothy’s dream where she ends up back in the same place she started but without the hero knowing it was a dream and without having learned anything.
It’s funny that I forget so much of what I read as soon as a book is closed, but I can’t forget those last three cringeworthy books by the substitute author. Perhaps someday, as the wheel turns, I will, but for now I purposely try to put any memory out of mind as it arises. And anyway, this current preoccupation with the books will eventually pass so none of it will matter. Except that I do own those last three books. I keep wanting to get rid of them, but I don’t. I don’t know why.
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.
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