A few dogs lay panting in the swelter, and two shirtless boys ran, beating a stuffed bladder along the ground with sticks. The springs were beginning to run low this summer. The forest had long since thinned to thickets by the time the wind swept dust down the lone street of a village called Kore Springs. Scattered villages appeared before the wind crossed the border of Andor, and fields where worried farmers trudged arid furrows. They were weathered and worn, and no human eye would have recognized them for the remains of a city remembered in story yet otherwise forgotten. In an open place where grass had vanished and only thin, withered brush held the soil with its roots, the wind began uncovering long-buried stones. Brown leaves come early dotted some trees, and naked stones baked where small streams had run. There had been no rain for long weeks in the land below, and the late-summer heat grew day by day. South and west it blew, dry, beneath a sun of molten gold.

There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the great forest called Braem Wood. 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.

Wheel of time the fires of heaven