"Jordan has come to dominate the world Tolkien began to reveal . . . the evil laced into the forces of good, the dangers latent in any promised salvation, the sense of the unavoidable onslaught of unpredictable events—bear the marks of American national experience during the last three decades, just as the experience of the First World War and its aftermath gave its imprint to Tolkien's work."—The New York Times Book Review
The Wheel of Time turns and Ages come and pass. What was, what will be, and what is, may yet fall under the Shadow. Let the Dragon ride again on the winds of time.
With this phrase, millions of readers have entered a world strikingly real, rich in detail and complexity—the world of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time. A world of kings, queens, and Aes Sedai—women who can tap the True Source and wield the One Power, which turns the Wheel and drives the universe: a world where the war between Light and Shadow is fought every day.
At the moment of Creation, the Creator bound the Dark One away from the world of humankind, but more than three thousand years ago, Aes Sedai, then both men and women, unknowingly bored into that prison outside of time. The Dark One was able to touch the world only lightly before the hole was soon sealed over. But the Dark One's taint settled on saidin, the male half of the Power, and every male Aes Sedai went mad. In the Breaking of the World they destroyed civilization and changed the very face of the earth, sinking mountains beneath the sea and bringing new seas where land had been.
Now only women bear the title Aes Sedai. Commanded by their Amyrlin Seat and divided into seven Ajahs named by color, they rule the great island city of Tar Valon, where their White Tower stands, and are bound by the Three Oaths, fixed into their bones with saidar, the female half of the Power: To speak no word that is not true, to make no weapon for one man to kill another, and never to use the One Power against another except as a weapon against Shadowspawn or, in the last extreme, of defending her own life or that of her Warder or another sister.
Men still are born who can learn to channel the Power, or worse, who will channel one day whether they try to or not. Doomed to madness, destruction, and death by the taint of the saidin, they are hunted down by the Aes Sedai and gentled, cut off forever from the Power for the safety of the world. No man goes to this willingly. Even if they survive the hunt, they seldom survive long after gentling.
For more than three thousand years, while empires rose and fell, nothing has been so feared as a man who can channel. But for all those three thousand years there have been the Prophecies of the Dragon, that the seal of the Dark One's prison will weaken and he will touch the world once more, and the Dragon, who sealed up that hole, will be Reborn to face the Dark One again. A child, born in sight of Tar Valon on the slopes of Dragonmount, will grow up to be the Dragon Reborn, the only hope of humanity in the Last Battle.
A world of kings and queens, nations and wars, where the White Tower rules only Tar Valon but even kings and queens are wary of Aes Sedai machinations. A world where the Shadow and the Prophecies loom together.
This is the world Robert Jordan invites all to enter. This is the world of The Wheel of Time.
