Ripple Three: The Final Truth
written by Drelle Tai'shar and Caden Ives

The Warder Hall laid in eerie silence that late evening, and the darkness seemed to absorb the firelight of torches and candles along the corridors.

When they entered the study designated the Gaidin Captain of the Yards, Caden leaned against the doorpost while Edon walked inside. Somewhere along the way from the Tower to the Yards he had realised that he was not fit to accomplish the task he had set out for. He had wanted to distance himself from the failures he had made when carrying his officer title right away. But even though his will had carried him this far, his body's protests had grown rather loud. He was still wearing his scaled armour and the attached steel pauldrons... or shoulder cops, the gorget, the neck-guard, and his long-sleeved gauntlets were tucked behind his weapon belt. Edon had always cleaned the parts of his armour with sand and vinegar to prevent rust and then painted them black to make sure they stayed free of the oxidation. Now the worn armour reeked of sweat, blood, soot and the soiled water of the tunnels. At many places on the torso, he needed repair after blows he had taken from Myrdraal and shadowsworn alike. His fancloak was partially melt from the fire that had ruined his face. All of it now weighed him down, but he had not the strength to remove his burdens.

He was also in no condition to carry his belongings from the study, and he did not want Edon to do it all on his own. So he found himself staggering to the mantelpiece of his unlit fireplace. There he stood, and Edon moved to stand as a silhouette against the stained glass window of the armoured Warder... ready to do his masters bidding. With his hand upon the cold stone, the scarred Gaidin tried to regain control over his battered body. He tried to force the pain away by willpower alone. "Edon, pour me some brandy," he rasped and pinched the bridge of his nose as he figured that he needed something that could numb the pain. His squire quickly found a bottle in a side-table and handed him a crystal goblet with dark fiery liquid. When he did so, Caden saw a large red stain at the sleeve of his white robe. "Did you cut yourself?" he asked.

Edon slowly shook his head in reply. "No, master Caden. I helped the injured by the Main Gate after a group of shadowsworn tried to cut their way towards freedom. It seems to me that they were scared of discovery and had decided to bet it all on one card. It happened right before the forces that just returned marched for the Claw Stone." Edon's perfectly mannered voice and level tone made it sound like he was talking about the weather. Caden nodded, mind already elsewhere. Looking back at the hours that had passed from the dawn that same day, the Gaidin tried to sort out the truth behind it all. Maybe he could take his mind of the pain that way.

An assault from three fronts, he reflected as he looked down into the goblet. One force would have attacked the Tower over land... hundreds of trollocs striking against the battlements during the cover of darkness. At the very same time, a second force would have made its way through the ancient passageways leading from the Claw Stone to the Old Tower, and then onwards to the bowels of the Grey Tower itself. This force would have emerged inside the Tower, and struck where it would hurt the most. As for the third attack... What was certain was that it had been of many facets. All Sitters and Ajah Heads, along with the whole Executive Council as well as the Amyrlin Seat and M'Hael had been exposed to assassination attempts of varying kind. The reason for this selection was obvious; the Shadow had wanted to make their agents reach all positions of influence and power. No army of shadowspawn since the Trolloc Wars could stand against the collective force of the Grey Tower. Therefore, Caden was rather certain that the two direct attacks had been meant as a diversion for this third one. What he did not like, was his lingering sensation that something remained unaccounted for. He could not set his thumb on the exact matter. It was more like a creeping sensation along his spine. With his free hand, he withdrew the last letter of Luantar cen Thaal, the martyr that had saved them all. His eyes trailed the lines across the bloodstained parchment, remembering that he had thought something strange about the contents. What is it that I am missing?

Then, a slow stream of recollections played out before his eyes. When he had been fighting the Dawn of Blood in the passageway to the Old Tower, he remembered that he had managed to direct a slash across his torso. His blade had not found flesh, but the tip of his sabre had torn the man's Dedicated's garb open. Caden narrowed his eyes and shook his head. No, that can't be right. He now remembered that the skin that had been revealed was unscathed. That is wrong. In all the legends and documentations about the Dawn of Blood, the supposedly young man carried a monstrous red scar across his chest ?from shoulder to hip. The skin he had seen had been unmarked! His head was suddenly spinning with vertigo in rhythm with the memories. The body they had found in the rubble beneath the Claw Stone had worn a torched Dedicated's coat. No... he found himself staring wide-eyed at the mantelpiece, a cold hand of dread folding over his spine. It cannot be.

Then the final blow came.

He remembered lying almost dead on a ledge in the water-filled passageway. When he had come to - in the company of Beatrise Sedai, Neilan and Negrath Devir - he had heard the Aes Sedai's voice. Captain Ives...Captain Ives... wake now. Amora Sedai has sent you aid. There is much to tell you. Are you well enough to speak? He did not answer this time either. He had been as incoherent as the ledge below him. I can not heal you further Captain. There is a vicious trap woven about you with saidin. But if you come with us, I can take you to one who may be able to. Before you decide whether to join us, please listen... There had been the distinct rustle of a scroll being unfolded. This is the Dawn of Blood, the man who casts this treacherous Shadow across the Tower. In the future you will stand before an unlit hearth in your study. Behind you, the Dawn of Blood will stand, and you will turn to face him. He felt like he was about to vomit. It did not end however, since before the memory had played itself out completely, he remembered what he had seen as he laid there. Through the narrow slit of his unburned eye, he had actually been staring at the portrait Beatrise held up. The features of a young man with dark hair to the shoulders stared back at him. The lustrous dark hair was combed back to frame hard angles in a face to young to suit them. There was a kind of... mysterious nature about his features, a quality Caden knew no artist in the world could hope to fully capture. It cannot be... Like a lightning strike, the truth was finally revealed to him.

He did not know how Amora Sedai could have known the future so intimately and been able to draw such a close resemblance from a vision. Nevertheless, he found himself fulfilling it. He turned and faced Edon Santagar. The young man was standing with his hands folded behind his back, his halcyone hazel eyes looking much darker... like shiny pools of coal-oil.

"You made a mistake," he rasped, feeling prophecy act with a deft hand inside the walls of the study. His single green eye lay on his squire's, but there was no surprise to be found in them. They were as void of emotion as the wall behind him. "In the letter Luantar cen Thaal wrote, he said his banes were already waiting for him when he reached the bottom of the Tower. How could they have known that if you had not told them?" It was all so very clear now. Edon Santagar slept in a separate room in his own chambers, and the cursed snake would have been able to see Luantar arrive in the middle of the night.

Slowly, a cruel smile spread across the Dawn of Blood's face. It was as if his presence in the room had changed. He now filled the room more with his dark aura than with the fact of his body. "Wrong," he said with the deep resonance in his voice. He seemed rather amused. "I did not tell them. But one of the other two did."

"What other two?" asked Caden immediately, but as soon as the words left his mouth, another memory came to him. The side of his face remembered the pain from when it had been burned, and an important question surfaced in the agony; Why do I still live? And the answer came now, when he remembered how he had reached up and desperately dug his fingers around the Dedicated's windpipe... and then torn it free. I killed him. So there musty have been another one fighting at the Claw Stone.

"Ah, Dedicated Arkenda and Hanathiel served me well," said the Dawn and shook his head in false sadness, "My two aides who always wear my name were most useful until the time they died, maybe the best during the past hundred years or so. I fail to remember. The centuries fly by so fast you hardly notice. I have not enjoyed playing the ignorant young protégée with you, but oh, it has really had its compensations. Like watching you flail around in your ignorance, granting you life day by day just to see if you would get wise."

Caden's Domani temper flared and he threw the goblet with brandy into the fireplace and clenched his fists by his side, his brow-ridge lowering gradually over his mismatched eyes. "So the young man isn't all he seems," he rasped like a saw attacking iron, "what are you?"

"I forgive you for not noticing, don't you worry. Looks can be very deceptive, my dear Runelord. As for your question," the Dawn mentioned the title Runelord as if it was common knowledge that Caden had been born as a unique kind of shadowsworn before he was given true humanity by Aviane Sedai and his friend Durent Antian. Is that why he chose me? The young man unbuttoned the white robe and Caden saw that he was not wearing his usual black shirt and tunic and thus displayed the legendary monstrous scar. The angry hue of red almost shone in the light of the oil lamps, "I am the Shar'rahien. I was born in the Shadow's midst. I am four hundred years old now, and I have walked the Nations as the one the Great Lord send to deal with matters in the most discrete subtlety, and to invoke fear for his cause. He had my chest opened when I reached manhood, and his Myrdraal poured something into my blood and over my heart. What it was I truly do not know, yet from that day, I do not perceive things as you do. Where you see fact, I can see the events that resulted in the fact. When I form a goal in my mind, I see exactly what I have to do to reach it. It is some kind of reversed prophecy, I reckon. And that, is just the beginning." By his final word, the oil lamps went out as one as if a channeler had extinguished them, and the study was cast in the stark moonlight outside the windows. Immidiately, Caden tore his sabre free, but it had barely left its sheath when it felt like his heart had seized to beat in an invisible attack. The pain that flooded from his chest was nothing like... in comparison... small ache of his face. It was like someone had impaled him with a spear, and he sank to his knees. He was at the shadowsworn's mercy.

The Dawn of Blood laughed merrily. "I was right under your nose! I don't know what is most amusing, that you as the Gaidin Captain was not a good enough judge of character to see through me or that you in fact reproach yourself because of it now, as the Great Lord has stepped right into your backyard... by your acceptance and word! Today I failed. But it is the way we handle failure that defines great men. You have no idea how much I learned by instigating this plot. And the next time there will be no stopping me." He walked over to Caden and kicked away his sabre from his cramping hand, and the Gaidin could do nothing about it. "You are not useful to me anymore. The Ward I had Hanathiel place on your body was meant for the Amyrlin Seat. I knew that if she were to escape from us, she would be the one who could find you dying down there in the tunnels. She should have been the one who Healed you, no other. I was wrong, for someone who knew prophecy plotted against me."

The creature Caden had known as Edon Santagar bent down to grab his hair. Those black eyes search his own, but Caden could find no way to speak... to tell him that his death was pending, that his face was in Amora's portrait. His mouth only worked soundlessly and his single eye rolled in his skull on the waves of agony. "You are an interesting man, Caden Ives," came the Dawns voice again, "I really admired you to begin with. Now, a part of me feels sorry for you. Kneeling, bent and ruined before me you are, without even uttering one animal mewl of protest. Where is your maleness, your traditional superiority? You are nothing now: not an image or an icon, not a protector or a provider; you are, as I see it, not even an enemy. You are merely a means to an end!"

His burned skin was covered in pristine beads: the sweat of pain. His ragged breath broke from his partly open mouth like the sigh of a wind seizing to blow. For a long time the Dawn of Blood stared down at him while all manner of thought flung itself like rain in his mind. Then the Dawn of Blood withdrew his blade - a blade Caden had given him - and he saw its long, gleaming length reflecting the moonlight. The Dawn shook his head, "There are no more warriors left in the world."

Driven by demons that whispered her black name, Drelle stalked down the halls behind Edon and Caden. She had let the Amrylin escape, and killing Caden would incapacitate her long enough to be found by the Dawn's men, and destroyed. She herself had found Lyn, and become Healed enough with Lyn's weak Healing abilities to venture forth once more, swearing to tell the Sitter the whole story as soon as she could. If I'm still alive, that is.. While still weak, she no longer bled from the various cuts and scrapes across her body, and the stab wound from the exploding furniture earlier was closed up and partially Healed. She only hoped it was enough...

The two men went into Caden's rooms, and she paused outside the doorway. Fool man, leaving the door open like this. The door stood open the barest crack. Through the slim slit, Drelle could clearly see Edon standing there, for all intents and purposes innocently watching Caden. When the expected attack on Caden came, something inside Drelle snapped and she pushed the door open on it's silent hinges. So intent on Caden was the Dawn, that he didn't see her coming.

"There are no more warriors left in the world."

In a voice that was both calm, and cool, Drelle responded, "As long as there are beasts like you, there will always be those willing to stand up and fight." And when the Dawn turned to her, and her blood ran cold, she prayed. Her face was as cold and passionless as the moon, and her silver eyes were clear and bottomless as the sea. She stood there, staring her own death in the face, and gathered her strength for the blow soon to come.

Thinking the closure had come, Caden was dimly caught by surprise by the uttered words from the door. His eye saw the Dawn swing around to face the speaker, but the grip of his hair remained firm. The stark moonlight came from the side, so the Gaidin Captain could not see the man's features when he looked upon the source of the voice. There was no telling what kind of look that passed from that shadowed face, but Caden could hear a word whispered faintly into the air. "River..."

The spell was broken the next moment, for the Dawn lifted Caden to his feet with the grip of his hair like a child with armour and all and shoved him away from the door towards the desk and windows on the other side of the study. He impacted with the ground and rolled to the base of the wide desk, knocking over a large chair on the way. The grip of pain still held him, and he ground his teeth hard while he tried to observe what happened on the other side of the room. His mind was in panic because of the pain but he could not find a way to survive.

The Dawn of Blood's back was illuminated by the moonlight, his shoulders were drawn up in fury. Was it an inner battle he percieved? The curved sword in the young man's hand shivered in its grip. "You should not have come here." Caden saw a young woman standing by the door. "I granted you the mercy to end your own life, but you persist in defying my wishes." The Dawn suddenly slashed out with his sword in the air before him, and the woman flew sideways across the floor... as if struck with a giant fist. "I will deal with you later, slave."

Still incapable of doing anything but to suffer, Caden saw how the Dawn rounded on him and came towards him. It was time for him to die. With each step the Dawn of Blood took, he saw the end coming.

She gasped in pain as she hit with a hard thud against the wall. Slowly, she slid to the floor as the room spun around her. I must not give up yet! As blackness threatened, she thought of the softly bearded face that had come to her earlier that day, the one she saw in her mind. The kind smile on the face that so resembled hers in shape, if not coloring.

Stumbling to a standing position, she waited for the room to once more stop spinning. She couldn't let the Dawn take another life. Not when she had the chance to stop him. Grinding her teeth agaist waves of nausea and dizziness, she pulled the slim blade from it's sheath in her ragged boot, and slipped up behind the one whom Caden had called 'Edon.'

As she watched the Dawn bend to reach once more for the Gaidin Captain, she struck. Later, she would think on how easily the blade slipped between his ribs, and penetrated his dark heart, but for now her only thought was that she was killing the man she loved. In to the hilt, her hand still on it, the knife stuck from his back like a porcupine's quill. She would never forget that sight. Never in a million years. Her jaw clenched against the tears she knew were spilling down her face, but she did not try to stop them. She yanked the knife free of it's bloody sheath, and caught him as he started to fall..

Withdrawn into the last shadows of this soul, Caden Ives had embraced the fact of the situation. He had embraced the death that awaited him, and in the moment of submission, he found what was waiting for him in the afterlife... for he had already been there once before. The pain that made his body convulse in cramping spasms threatened to tip him over sanity's edge, but he would not have to hold on much longer. He relaxed, and waited for the strike to fall, not feeling how Edon Santagar lifted his head up in order to finally sever his head clean off.

But the strike did not fall.

The grip of his hair slackened, and he opened his eyes to find the Dawn staring into the roof of Caden's study with his moth partially open. It was the moment where the Pattern turned in a completely new direction, and when the future unravelled and formed to something entirely else. Caden did not dare even breathe, for the moment when his life returned was so fragile that it would shatter by the faintest sigh. The demon is undone, he thought as he realised that the pain was gone from his torso. It was as if the fabric of time itself shifted in the study, and then finally seized the scene.

Everything came alive again in the moments of death.

The sword fell from the Dawn of Blood's useless fingers and clattered against the floor. Behind him stood the woman who had appeared in the doorway, with tears running down her face and with a dagger buried deep into him. Wordlessly, Caden saw how he finally slackened and fell into the woman's arms once she tore the blade free; how they both sank to the floor in a final embrace. When the dagger had been cleared, the blood that flooded fourth and spread across the wooden floor was rendered completely black by the moonlight.

The young man he had known as Edon Santagar looked up into the young woman's face. "I told you... River..." he said, even though he should have been dead. If it had to do with the damned blood of the Dark One in his veins, Caden did not know, all he knew was that the Dawn defied his body for the importance of his final words. "I could not understand... what affected me when I saw you? but I know that it was... from a world beyond what I should... have... known." His eyes began to roll in their sockets as if they could not see anymore, and Caden held his breath when the final moment descended upon the study to take the Dawn to his maker. "You conquered me... even in this... field of battle." Then his head fell back, and it was finally over.

A restless soul had finally been granted respite after centuries of torture.

"I told you... River..." he said, even though he should have been dead. "I could not understand... what affected me when I saw you? but I know that it was... from a world beyond what I should... have... known. You conquered me... even in this... field of battle." Then his head fell back, and it was finally over. Tears poured freely from silver eyes as Drelle kissed his cooling lips, taking his last breath into her body. Oblivious to the man who would soon decide her fate, she wept, "Edon.. my love.. I am sorry. I could not save you.. I tried, and I failed.." She pulled him closer to her, held him tightly as if her embrace alone could bring the light back into his eyes.

She looked around her, felt the sticky blood that pooled around her body, and the body the blood had belonged to. Gazing up into Caden's burned and scarred face, "Drelle Tai'Shar." She whispered, "It means River of True Blood.." Her eyes lost focus, and she collapsed, her body completely empty of energy to keep her concious any longer. As the darkness closed in about her, she wondered if they would kill her when she woke...

Epilogue: Beneath the Surface
~Ripple One: The Grand Hall
~Ripple Two: The Infirmiry
~Ripple Three: The Final Truth
~Ripple Four: A New Council Forms
~Ripple Five: The Ball of Raisings

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