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The Strike at Shayol Ghul
     
     
    The Strike at Shayol Ghul
    Prequel to The Wheel of Time
    Robert Jordan
     
     
     
    Foreword by Robert Jordan
    Sometimes fans ask me whether I mean to write prequels to The Wheel of Time.
    While some requests are for books about The Trolloc Wars or the rise and fall of
    the High King, Artur Hawking, or the life histories of various characters, the
    most frequent are for books about the AOL and its end in the War of the Power,
    and the most often asked question is, I believe, "Why, when the greatest feats
    of the Age of Legends were done by men and women working together with the One
    Power, was the final attack on Shayol Ghul carried out by men alone?" At present
    I do not intend to write any of those books, but I won't say that a story or two
    might not creep out eventually. I do not normally do short fiction. My editor
    claims that for me, a short story means fifty thousand words. As for the
    question, though . . . I hope that those fans (and the rest of you) will be
    satisfied for the time with what follows, a fictional bit of "non-fiction," a
    piece from an Age called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long
    past . . .
     
     
     
     
    The Strike at Shayol Ghul
     
    (A Preliminary Introduction)
     
     
     
    by Jorille Mondevin,
    Royal Historian to the Court of
    Her Most Illuminated Majesty, Ethenielle Kirukon Materasu,
    By the Blessing of the Light,
    Queen of Kandor,
    Protector of the Land,
    Shield of the North,
    High Seat of House Materasu.
    O ne of the most important finds of recent years, perhaps since the Breaking, is
    a partial copy of no less than a history of the world from the drilling of the
    Bore into the Dark One's Prison to the End of the Breaking of the world. The
    original apparently dated from early in the First Century A.B. Despite the
    extreme paucity of material from the entire first millennium after the Breaking,
    we can only be thankful that the art of printing survived the Breaking of the
    World when so much else did not, and was indeed practiced to some extent during
    the Breaking itself, though under severe and restricted conditions. Considering
    the widespread destruction of The Trolloc Wars and the War of the Hundred Years,
    which although far less than the near totality of the Breaking still saw cities,
    nations, and far worse, knowledge, go to the fires, we must marvel at any
    writing that has survived more than three thousand years. What we know is based
    on fragments, copied and recopied a thousand times, but at least we know
    something from them. Even a little knowledge is better than ignorance.
    Discovered in a dusty storage room in Chachin, the pages were in a chest full of
    old bills and receipts, students' copy books and private diaries, some so foxed
    by age and with ink so faded as to be unreadable where the pages themselves had
    not crumbled. The fragmentary manuscript was readable, barely, but presented the
    usual problems, quite aside from the difficulties of translation and dealing
    with centuries of copyists' errors; such a history would no doubt be a vast,
    multi-volume work (please see the author's Note at the end), yet of the two
    hundred and twelve surviving pages, the largest number of consecutive pages
    number six, and nowhere else more than two. Such dates as are given are totally
    incomprehensible, as no calendar dating from the Age of Legends has ever been
    found. Many references to cataclysmic events (dire battles and cities destroyed
    by balefire during the War of the Shadow, whole regions covered by the sea and
    mountain ranges raised overnight during the Breaking) and to such minutiae as
    the appearance of a certain person are but curiosities. The pages which might
    reveal exactly where these things happened, what their special significance was,
    the resolution or end result, are usually missing. Why then is this collection
    so important? First because, sundered as it is, it contains more information of
    the War of the