Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she was lying down carefully behind the bar. She wore a long set of denim pants and a blouse that might have once been white, now turned gray from the soot that she must have had to climb through. A smile played upon her face as she walked around the counter to find a small red-haired girl, perhaps ten or eleven summers old. She made her way over, brushing a strand of her raven hair back, still retaining its color after all this time. Shallow breaths, from the room’s corner, drew her attention. Of course, given how little the Great Lord had actually been active over the last two Ages, she was uncertain of that.Īs she rounded the corner into the next room, a small break room with a bar counter, she heard a noise, different from the rumbling and crackling of flames outside. If they had only given themselves over to the Great Lord, perhaps they would have lived. People had run here, hoping to escape the catastrophe, but while the building had survived, they had not. The heels on her boots clicked as she walked down the stone halls, ignoring the mutilated and desiccated corpses that lined the edges. Deep within the building was something she needed. She had met the architect that designed the building in the Fourth Age, and the woman had ensured that her vision would survive into the Fifth and beyond. The building was one of the oldest ones in this city, and nobody alive now knew why it existed, but she did. She stepped into a building that the flames had seemingly left untouched, but on closer look, she could see where the fire had licked away the paint, revealing the pure alabaster white stone beneath it. It was amazing the fuel sources that they had been able to come up with, that they would continue to burn this long, even after others would have been exhausted. The drivers’ bodies had long-since been fully engulfed during the initial burn of the city. Minor weaves of Air kept the smell of burning flesh from reaching her nostrils, and she simply strode around the crashed and still-burning vehicles. She walked through the streets of the burning city, keeping hold of Saidar as she did. The touch of destiny had been upon them, and they had chosen to use it in this way. Sure, even now, there were ta’veren, or there had been, people who simply gathered those to themselves and gained power. No reaching for the Dark Lord, no trappings of destiny and no use of any sort of Power beyond human ingenuity. Frankly, it had amazed her how much humanity had managed to accomplish. The Fifth Age had been one of technological advancement without the use of the One Power. Not that many people of this Age believed in the Wheel. Of the Chosen, she knew that she was likely the last one alive, and she planned on remaining so until her master came again-until the Great Lord would reveal himself and break the Wheel itself. He was eternal, after all, as was she, despite many setbacks. Surely, the Great Lord could not have been brought low by a pitiful excuse for a human being such as that man. Still, since the ending of the Third Age, she had not seen any evidence of her Great Lord, beyond herself. She had people of all walks of life, from the greatest to the least, seen empires rise and fall, seen humanity take themselves to the stars only to flame out upon establishing colonies. The Age she had been born into had long ago been forgotten, its wonders lost to the ravages of time and the drums of war. Not many people got to see the end of a single Age.
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