Books The Wheel of Time Reading The Wheel of Time: Lan Rides, Perrin Dreams, and Graendal Escapes in Towers of Midnight (Part 1) By Sylas K Barrett | Published on July 7, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Good day and welcome back to Reading the Wheel of Time! We are starting Towers of Midnight this week, and will be covering the first half of the prologue, which includes Lan’s section, Perrin’s section, and Graendal’s section. Onward to Tarwin’s Gap the recap. Towers of Midnight opens with Lan riding through Saldaea, proceeding on a road that runs parallel to the Blight. He is annoyed with how quickly Nynaeve learned to use her words like an Aes Sedai, and regretful that his death will cause her pain. He is wary of the possibility of attack, keeping his bow and quiver near at hand. A few sliding rocks betray the presence of someone near by. He is ready to shoot, but when the figure comes into view, it is only a man leading a packhorse. He addresses Lan by name, assuring Lord Mandragoran that he has brought supplies and wishes to ride with Lan. When he identifies himself as Bulen, Lan finally remembers him—he’d known Bulen when the man was just a messenger boy, twenty years ago.  Lan learns from Bulen about Nynaeve spreading the message that he is raising the Golden Crane, and that that others will be coming to join him as well. Lan remembers that Nynaeve made him promise to allow anyone who asked to ride with him to do so. However Bulen is on foot, so Lan decides that technicality allows him to send Bulen away. Bulen, however, is persistent, telling Lan of his Malkieri father and Kandori mother, who were killed by bandits when he was very young. He wants to wear the hadori, the only thing he has left of his father, and fight the Shadow, but tradition says he must receive permission. And he has no one to ask. Lan urges him to go to the Dragon Reborn or to the Kandori army, but when Bulen points out that there is no food to be scavenged along the road, Lan hesitates.  Bulen asks Lan formally for permission to wear the hadori and to fight beside him. Lan, thinking of his honor and his promise, agrees, though he makes the young man promise that they will ride anonymously. “Then wear that hadori with pride,” Lan said. “Too few keep to the old ways. And yes, you may join me.”Lan nudged Mandarb into motion, Bulen following on foot. And the one became two. Elsewhere, Perrin dreams of working in Master Luhan’s forge. He knows he is making something important, but doesn’t know what it is. Hopper lies in the corner of the room, lazily watching him. He communicates that he doesn’t understand the things Perrin is doing, and that they are idle foolishness, “like a pup snapping at butterflies.” When Perrin realizes that the thing he has made is nothing but a misshapen lump, he begins to remember who he is—that he is no longer an apprentice. Somehow, things seem worse now than they did before, and Perrin doesn’t know why. He started pounding. I need to spend time with Faile, to figure things out, remove the awkwardness between us. But there’s no time! Those Light-blinded fools around him couldn’t take care of themselves. Nobody in the Two Rivers ever needed a lord before. Hopper suggests that, if Perrin is unhappy, he can just take Faile and leave, letting some other lead his pack. But Perrin replies that he can’t leave, can’t give in to being a wolf. He had thought he had more control over himself, but recent events have shown him how close he is to giving in to the wolf. Hopper seems amused, though Perrin tells him his problems aren’t funny. Perrin longs for the freedom of being a wolf, but knows it would cost him too much.. Problems are not amusing, Young Bull, Hopper agreed. But you are climbing back and forth over the same wall. Come. Let us run. Perrin tries to ask if he can reverse the transition into a wolf, but Hopper doesn’t understand what he means. In the dream, he finds a figurine in the quenching barrel: the image of Aram, his face distorted in a scream. The walls fade away as the dream shifts into memories of Malden, but in this version, Perrin kills Aram himself, as a shadowy wolf. He also kills Aiel, though he remembers that in the real version of events he used his hammer and a knife, not the axe. He accuses Hopper of making him dream. They return to the forge, where Perrin finds more and more figurines in the quenching barrel, all looking at him accusingly. They become shards, shattered hands reaching for him, as do the pieces of the figurine of Aram. Perrin starts awake in his tent, Faile asleep beside him. They have been camped in the same place for a few days, after a bubble of evil manifested as snakes. Aes Sedai healing prevented anyone from dying of the bites, but many are still recovering. It is difficult for Perrin to fall back asleep. In Natrin’ Barrow, Graendal sips wine while Aran’gar complains of boredom and a desire to be back where the action is. Graendal thinks action and excitement is best viewed from a distance. She uses a trickle of the True Power, all she has access to, to make a ribbon of air to caress Aran’gar’s cheek The Great Lord’s essence forced the Pattern, straining it and leaving it scarred. Even something the Creator had designed to be eternal could be unraveled using the Great Lord’s energies. It bespoke an eternal truth—something as close to being sacred as Graendal was willing to accept. Whatever the Creator could build, the Great Lord could destroy. Aran’gar is shocked that Graendal has the ability to channel the True Power, but Graendal reminds her that before the naming of the Nae’blis, the Great Lord’s favor was not confined just to Moridin, in this regard. Aran’gar sends for Delana and the two start “exchanging affections.” An alarm, for Graendal’s ears alone, goes off, and Graendal leaves them, sending some of her Compulsioned pets to jeep Aran’gar distracted. In her audience chamber she meets with a man who begins to introduce himself when he is cut off by Graendal’s use of Compulsion on him. “I am Piqor Ramshalan,” he said in a monotone. “I have been sent by the Dragon Reborn to seek an alliance with the merchant family residing in this fortification. As I am smarter and more clever than al’Thor, he needs me to build alliances for him. He is particularly afraid of those living in this palace, which I find ridiculous, since it is distant and unimportant. Ramshalan goes on to say that the Dragon is weak, and that Ramshalan believes that he can get himself made King of Arad Doman. He wishes to create his own alliances. Graendal cuts him off, thinking of the fact that the Dragon Reborn has found her, and that he has sent a distraction, hoping to manipulate her. She almost leaves immediately via gateway, then remembers the orders to bring pain and anguish to Rand al’Thor. She remembers, too, that Aran’gar was punished for losing her place with Egwene al’Vere. Graendal does not wish to suffer any similar punishment. Aran’gar’s voice from outside the door makes up Graendal’s mind for her. She allows the other Forsaken to come in and tells her what has happened. She orders Aran’gar to have Delana place Compulsion on Ramshalan, as intricate and complex as possible, and then for Aran’gar to do the same. Once Ramshalan’s memory has been altered and the parameters of his actions are decided, they release him and send him away. In private, Graendal puts a web of compulsion onto a dove, controlling it enough to navigate it over the forest outside and to see through its eyes. She is terrified when she locates Rand, so close to her hideout and looking directly at it. She watches as Ramshalan is brought to him, though she can’t understand his words through the bird’s ears and mind. When she sees the Access Key and realizes his intention, she snaps back into her own mind. Al’Thor had sent Ramshalan in, expecting him to be captured, expecting him to have Compulsion placed on him. Ramshalan’s only purpose was to give al’Thor confirmation that Graendal was in the tower.Light! How clever he’s become. Desperate and terrified, she releases the True Power and embraces saidar. Aran’gar is standing in the room looking towards the building force of saidin that she, a channeler of the male half of the Power, can sense. Graendal realizes that, since Aran’gar and Delana performed the Compulsions on Ramshalan, their survival would suggest her own, and their deaths would make al’Thor think she is dead. She shields both Aran’gar and Delana, leaping through the Gateway as the blinding light of balefire consumes everything. She lands nearby, winded and with a twisted ankle. A wave of wrongness washed over her, a warping in the air, the Pattern itself rippling. A balescream, it was called—a moment when creation itself howled in pain. She can see that all of Natrin’s Barrow has been destroyed, and beyond, the ridge where she knows the Dragon Reborn is standing. He has become far more dangerous that she assumed he could, and the loss of her hideout and all her servants is a disaster.  Graendal consoles herself with the knowledge that al’Thor will think her dead; she is safer now than she has been since she escaped imprisonment in the Bore. However, she did cause the death of a fellow Chosen, which the Great Lord will not be pleased about.  She limped away from the ridge, already planning her next move. This would have to be handled very, very carefully. Oh, my dear Lan. I appreciate how cool Borderlanders are. There is something special and mystical about their devotion to defending against the Blight, up to and including to their own deaths. (We’ll see more of this next week when we cover the second half of the prologue.) However, it is also deeply tragic and kind of depressing. Lan is a wonderful person, and I loved seeing him as a mentor to Rand, especially in the early days when Rand desperately needed it. But Lan was also a terrible mentor because his whole thing is “I inherited a duty to die,” which definitely rubbed off on Rand. I can certainly understand why Lan’s parents would want to have the oath of the Malkieri sworn for their son, and to have him raised in Malkieri tradition, but in doing so, they basically inducted their infant son into a death cult. Perhaps they didn’t realize they were doing so; the oath, after all, is to defend the Malkieri, not the nation of Malkier, after all. They perhaps intended Lan to keep the survivors together, to lead them as best he could even without a land. But Lan certainly sees those oaths as being a debt to a dead nation, and sees fighting the Shadow as something that should, and will, take his life. Moiraine was right that Lan’s life was wasted going into the Blight to fight alone, and that he could do much more to fight the Shadow as her warder than going on an ongoing suicide mission that benefited no one. This reasoning is why she asked him to be her warder in the first place, and why she arranged to have his bond transferred without his permission. Setting aside the moral issues of consent and the promise she made to him, you can see why Moiraine acted the way she did. Lan’s not so much living to fight as he is fighting to die. Rand accepted that the lines about his blood on the rocks of Shayol Ghul foretold his death. Lan accepts his very existence as a death sentence; he has clearly always believed he was meant to perish in the Blight. In fact, his conviction is so strong that I forgot that the oath of the Malkieri kings includes the line “To defend the Malkieri while one drop of blood remains,” and not “to defend Malkier.” True, most Malkieri died when the country was overrun by the Blight, but not all of them. Yet Lan has always seemed more focused on the country being gone, and there being nothing left to defend, than focused on the survivors who are looking for a sense of identity, much in the same way he is.  It feels incredibly significant that the first person Lan encountered who wanted to ride with him was Bulen. A young man who has no memory of Malkier, just as Lan has no memory of the land that fell when he was just an infant, Bulen also lost his parents very young, and is desperate for a sense of belonging and connection to his heritage. He wasn’t raised with male guardians who taught him Malkieri ways, as Lan was, but the similarities are striking all the same. I can’t help thinking that Lan let Bulen come with him as much for that reason as for a sense of obligation or adherence to his promise to Nynaeve. It is Bulen’s request for permission to wear the hadori that appears to chance his mind, after all—that and the realization that he has no supplies and might not find enough food on his journey to make it all the way to the Blight. After all, Lan has a death wish, but he doesn’t want to die for just any reason. He specifically wants to die fighting the Shadow. We see a little bit of resentment from Lan in regards to his thoughts about Aes Sedai and his wife, though his annoyance is tempered by his regret for causing her pain when he dies. Of course, he has no regret for his own death, because he’s kind of a dummy. A dummy with trauma, but a dummy nonetheless. It will be interesting to see how Lan’s opinion of Nynaeve’s actions and Moiraine’s actions might change if he survives the Last Battle. I assume the Blight will be destroyed, or at least healable, if Rand is successful in repairing the hole in the Dark One’s prison. If so, the Malkieri refugees and their descendants might be able to settle on that land and build a new Malkier. Lan and Nynaeve could actually become rulers in fact, rather than just symbolically. Even if that doesn’t happen, the defeat of the Shadow and the eventual transfer of Lan’s Warder bond to Nynaeve surely would change Lan’s perspective on his life, and the value of living it. If he survives, that is. I can’t really imagine the new Rand leaving Lan and his men to die in the Gap as a distraction for the Shadow, but I suppose those events will be revealed in time. I really really loved Perrin’s extended dream sequence. His ongoing struggle to understand himself and the nature of his own violence needs to come to a head, soon. It’s been dragging on a little too long with how long Faile’s captivity went on, but now that she’s back and Perrin has realized his willingness to abandon all his duties and responsibilities in favor of saving his wife, his culpability in the death of Aram, and his own brutality against his wife’s Aiel captors, it seems like he is getting pretty close to having his own sort of Dragonmount moment, in which he is actually honest with himself about who he is and why he is doing what he is doing. Perrin puts a lot of effort into not being honest with himself, although it seems to be largely an unconscious action. We see this throughout the series, but I think it’s very nicely summed up in his dream. At one point, he accuses Hopper of making him dream these things, to which Hopper replies; This is not my dream, Young Bull. Do you see my jaws on your neck, forcing you to think it? It’s not the first time Perrin has blamed Hopper for the nature of his dreams, or accused Hopper of controlling him or not answering Perrin’s questions, when in fact Hopper is answering his questions, or is giving advice that is more useful than what Perrin was asking. But my favorite part of their discussion is when Hopper points out to Perrin that there is no difference between the axe and the hammer when both are used to kill. A horn or a hoof, Young Bull, does it matter which one you use to hunt? Hopper was sitting in the sunlit street beside him.“Yes. It matters. It does to me.”And yet you use them the same way. This is a point I’ve been desperate for Perrin to realize. He has skirted around it, I think, but he clings to the concept that a hammer can be used to make or destroy, while an axe is only used to kill. This could be a healthy perspective, if the point is that Perrin wants to remind himself of balance, of the fact that he can always choose a way of non-violence under whatever circumstances allow it, even if he does choose to fight at other moments and other times. However, Perrin seems more focused on the idea that he can look away from his violent nature and desire to fight by refocusing specifically on the hammer’s non-violent attributes. Perrin also blames the wolf part of himself for the moments in which he loses himself to anger or violence, but as I’ve pointed out before, all of Perrin’s most violent moments have been very human, especially the ones he carries the most guilt over. Perrin seems to have tied his (very understandable) fear of losing himself to the wolf the way Noam did with his fear of becoming a violent killer, and has yet to realize how separate those two fears, and the danger of them happening, really are.  Hopper also points out that Perrin quibbling over whether he killed Aram or Aram died by Aiel arrows doesn’t really matter, saying that the dead are dead regardless of how they died. While I agree with Perrin that he has some responsibility for contributing to Aram’s downfall through neglect and ignorance of Aram’s needs, and that it is good for him to hold himself accountable to that lesson going forward, Hopper’s lesson is also important. Perrin should learn from what happened to Aram, but he can’t go back and change it. Litigating just how much at fault he was or dwelling on his guilt, in a dream or in the waking world, won’t serve anybody. It will keep Perrin stuck, rather than helping him move forward. I am really waiting for either Faile or Hopper to finally get through to Perrin, but Perrin really needs to take the first step. Like Rand, he has to start seeing the truth of the problem, rather than what he perceives it to be, before he’ll be able to hear what anyone is actually saying to him. Honestly, if I were Hopper, I’d be a bit annoyed with Perrin’s inability to hear what Hopper is actually saying. Which perhaps Hopper is, in his own wolfy way. The whole dream sequence is really well done, in my opinion. I was particularly struck by the imagery of Perrin hammering metal into useless hunks, and by the repeated emergence of figurines from the quenching barrel showing the images of people Perrin has lost or feels he let down. From the start, Perrin has felt lost and confused about his purpose and who he is, even more so than Rand, in a way. The dream really shows how he has yet to find an answer to that confusion, and how he feels trapped within his own life and circumstances. Honestly, I can relate, even as I get frustrated with Perrin’s inability to change his perspective. I think we’ve all been there, stuck turning over the same memories and pounding the same thoughts until they become useless. I know I have. A thing of men indeed. Well, whatever else you think about Graendal, you have to admit she is both quite clever and also very lucky. She partially guessed that Rand had more of a plan than could be initially deduced from Ramshalan’s story, and even though she couldn’t have guessed about the balefire or that Rand was specifically trying to use her compulsion of Ramshalan to prove her death by said balefire, she is cautious enough to have had Delana and Aran’gar do the compulsion instead of her, just in case. If she had done it herself she might still have escaped death by balefire, but Rand would have known that she wasn’t killed. At best, he would have been hunting her while she lacked many resources to escape/fight him. At worst, he might have been able to find her alone on that hill and finish the job he set out to do. I did assume Graendal survived his attack. From a narrative perspective, it seemed highly unlikely that Graendal would perish without a confrontation, and of course, there’s the general rule of genre fiction that no body = no death. I mean, Moiraine survived, Tom survived… Ishamael/Ba’alzamon survived the fight at the end of The Eye of the World, despite Rand’s conviction that he killed the Dark One. You can’t assume someone’s gone just because you had a big supernatural victory over them! I’m still having trouble believing Sammael is really dead, since Rand never actually saw mashadar touch him. But of course, that’s my reader’s eye seeing things that someone within the story can’t see. I think it is reasonable for Rand to assume he managed to kill Graendal, given the size and severity of his attack as much as anything else. It’s a bit ironic to realize that if he hadn’t been so clever, using Ramshalan as bait and confirmation of Graendal’s death, he actually would have been successful in killing her. If he had just shown up and released his balefire bomb on the place, she would never have had any warning of his presence. He wouldn’t have had any proof she was in Natrin’s Barrow when he attacked, of course. I think there’s something to be said, narratively speaking, for the fact that the destruction of Natrin’s Barrow is arguably the worst thing Rand does in the series (not withstanding any actions in the last two books, but given his revelation on Dragonmount, I don’t think we’ll see anything like that from him again). It is also a complete swing and a miss, as far as achieving his goals goes. Something something evil bringing about its own downfall. Not sorry to see Aran’gar and Delana go, though. I think there are two possibilities for how Graendal’s story goes for the rest of the series. The first is that she manages some kind of terrible comeback/revenge enacted on Rand and very nearly defeats him. The second is that even though Rand failed to kill her, his success at destroying her hideout and the death of Aran’gar will still bring the wrath of the Dark One down upon her and she’ll be rendered pretty much useless, i.e. Moghedien and Lanfear/Cyndane for the rest of the series. (Not that I’m counting Lanfear out just yet. I’ll be disappointed if we don’t see her with at least one more trick up her sleeve before the end of the series.) I also really enjoyed the description of Graendal using the dove to spy on Rand. It is a very interesting revelation that Compulsion can be used on animals, though I am curious about whether or not it can only by done with the “True Power” or if it can be done using saidin or saidar as well. Graendal may be using the “True Power” in this way to avoid detection, or because only the True Power can do what she is trying to do. However, the following paragraph, in which she muses over the fact that it would be easier to use a raven or a rat for her purposes, may provide the answer. Though, most vermin that watched for the Great Lord had to report back before he knew what they’d seen. Why that was, she was not certain—the intricacies of the True Power’s special weaves never had made much sense to her. Not as much as they had to Aginor, at least. This seems to suggest that the compulsion of animals is something that can only be done with the “True Power,” but doesn’t quite read as definitive to me. Either way, it certainly seems like only the most talented practitioners of Compulsion would be able to do what Graendal does with the dove. I’m also very curious whether or not this paragraph is stating that the ravens and rats only spy for the Dark One if they are under Compulsion. (Compulsed ? Compelled?) We know that not all carrion animals are the Dark One’s spies, but that any of them can be, so it would make sense if the hypothesis that ravens and rats are more susceptible to being compelled by the True Power is true, rather than being actually more connected to the Dark One. After all, carrion eaters, insects, fungus, and other types of life that feed on death and decay are an important and natural part of the world; they are not evil, nor are they anti-creation, the way the Dark One is. I’ve personally always thought of the Dark One’s connection to such things as a sort of “translation” of his essence to something that fits within the scope of the Pattern. Just as he needs humans and animals, beings of the Pattern, in order to interact with it, so too does he need a “mood” or “theme” that exists within the Pattern in order to translate his own influence into the Pattern. Death, decay, drought, famine, terrible winters—these are all things that exist naturally within the Pattern. They don’t come from the Dark One; his influence merely extends and enhances them to an unnatural degree. Rats and ravens are not evil, but as the Dark One translates his nature into the Pattern, they are a substitute that he can graft his aspect onto. I like this theory, and I like that Graendal’s musings about the Dark One’s favored eyes and the usage of weaves specific to the “True Power” fits well with my theory. I also went down a very interesting rabbit hole reading about the type of vision birds have, and can confirm that the description of the dove’s sight is accurate. Most birds can see in infrared, which explains how intense Graendal finds the colors. Doves and pigeons, with their laterally placed eyes, do have depth perception, but the way they achieve it is very different from the way those of us with forward facing predator eyes do. Did you know that this is why pigeons and doves bob their heads around so much, to establish depth and position? Because I didn’t. I love learning new things about animals, especially from unexpected sources. Next week we will cover the second half of the prologue, which includes Galad (yay!), the creature formally known as Padan Fain (ew), and a new character, Malenarin Rai, commander of Heeth Tower in Kandor (as I mentioned before, more depressing Borderlander heroics). See you then![end-mark] The post Reading The Wheel of Time: Lan Rides, Perrin Dreams, and Graendal Escapes in <i>Towers of Midnight</i> (Part 1) appeared first on Reactor.