Tall round towers marched along the great outer wall of gray stone streaked silver and white, and within rose even taller towers, and domes of white and gold gleaming in the pitiless sun. Many said Caemlyn was the second most beautiful city in the world, and not only Andorans, who often named it first, overranking Tar Valon itself. Hope of salvation and fear of destruction, from the same source. Sometimes, the same breast that held fear, held hope. It was a close question which of the two caused more fear. The figure on it, like some strange golden-maned, four-legged serpent, sun-eyed and scaled scarlet and gold, seemed to ride on the wind. The other banner slashed snow white across the sky. One banner floated red as blood, upon it a disc divided by a sinuous line, half white, half black as deep as the white was brilliant. Westward, until the wind passed across Caemlyn, lifting two banners above the Royal Palace, in the heart of the Ogier-built Inner City. There were no burned-out ruins in Andor, but villagers eyed the swollen sun nervously and farmers tried not to look at fields that had produced no fall crops. Westward the wind blew, stirring drought-shriveled leaves on the trees, riffling the surface of shrinking streams bordered in hard-baked mud. Winter should have been beginning to send out tendrils, the first snows long past, and those who sweated feared the reason it was not so, though few dared voice those fears.

Both towns baked, and if more prayers for rain rose in Aringill, where refugees from Cairhien jammed inside the walls like fish in a cask, even the soldiers packed around Maerone offered up words to the Creator, sometimes drunkenly, sometimes fervently. Where the small town of Maerone faced larger Aringill across the River Erinin, the wind crossed into Andor. The wind held no moisture, and the sun tried to sear away what little remained in the land. War had racked Cairhien, war and civil war, invasion and chaos, and even now that it was done, insofar as it was done, only a handful began to trickle back to their homes. Westward the wind blew over abandoned villages and farms, many only jumbles of charred timber. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. In one Age, called the Third Are by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose among brown-thicketed hills in Cairhien. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend.

Lord of Chaos by Robert Jordan