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Rand al’Thor in many ways, is nothing like what Asmodean remembers of Lews Therin Telamon and in others…

There are moments, moments Asmodean feels his breath catch, when Rand fingers the lobe of his ear, or hums a familiar snatch of song, or comes up with a plan that is all at once clever and poetic and dangerous, where he sees glimmers of the soul behind the face, shards of the man he once called friend. But they’re always gone, either ruthlessly suppressed or flickering out on their own like a guttering candle, and all that’s left is the too sweet sheepherder trying to do his best with more power than any king could dare dream of.

Every time it happens, Asmodean feels himself grow a little more cold, a little more afraid, whether because he feels the faint hope of triumph over the Great Lord growing more distant, or because he’s been taunted by a chance to see his old friend again, to speak as they did once many years ago, even Asmodean can not say.

It’s probably for the best, he reflects one cold night in Rhuidean. Lews did promise to kill him if they ever came eye to eye again. Yet somehow, that doesn’t make him feel better.

<X>

They grew up together, the three of them: Lews and Mierin and Joar. The Telamon estate stands in what he suspects is now Kinslayer’s Dagger, and every summer Joar’s mother would bring him out to the same countryside as part of ‘reflection and rest’. Their own smaller manor is only a few miles off from the one the Telamons live in, and Mierin and Lews are the only other people his age for miles around.

They are inseparable by the virtue of their shared isolation, and yet despite that they get along well. Lews takes charge from the beginning of course, leading them to pluck plums from the orchard, to rescue local wildlife when a forest fire breaks out, and to sneak off to watch the Da'shain sing a nearby field to life, all at Mierin’s gentle encouragement and direction of course, and a bit of inventive quick thinking from Joar.

Joar remembers the Da’shain singing with perfect clarity: the three of them sitting on a hill, watching the towering scarlet haired men and women, interspersed with Ogier, walking across the field, singing a beautiful refrain of pure music, while the Nym dance before them. Joar remembers watching the shoots of tree spring from the earth and rise to the heavens, becoming oaks in seconds, remembers watching the grain sprout and flourish in heartbeats, and he remembers thinking that, however cruel it might have been for the Creator to leave them to fend for themselves, at least he left them music too. A greater kindness, Joar could not imagine.

<X>

Joar’s mother doesn’t approve of his hobby.

An influential Restorer, Avliara Nae Nessosin has no time for frivolities or distractions, and she does not tolerate them in her son. Joar is expected to be great, so as not to dishonor his mother and reflect poorly on her, and so he will have a career of substance, of meaning. Preferably a Restorer, but a Sitter in the Hall of the Servants would do as well, she allowed, or a researcher at the Collam Daan. What he will not do however, is whittle away precious hours on something as useless as plucking strings on a harp like some ancient barbarian.

The third time she catches him with a harp hidden in his room, she weaves Fire, burning and scaring the flesh on his hands until it turns a char black. It hurts, it hurts so much he can not move, and she refuses to heal him until he apologizes for disobeying and forswears music all together.

He holds out for two hours, almost three, before he is overwhelmed by pain, and with tears in his eyes he does as she demands.

Her healing is flawless, the flesh on his hands is as if it had never been burned. There isn’t so much as a lingering twitch or scratch, only a few seconds after she sets the Weaves. All that remains is the memory of pain, and the certainty of his mother’s willingness to act with decisiveness should he disobey again.

Joar never tells Lews or Mierin about this. He doesn’t realize he should: it’s a private family matter, and his mother is an influential Aes Sedai. Surely, what she does can not be wrong?

Can it?

<X>

(Years later, when Asmodean captures his mother, he recounts this incident. Cites it as the cause.

Her words in response stick with him for the rest of his existence.

Still such a child, who would rather play with sound then do something of meaning. You could have been great, Joar. Instead you are this. Kill me, so I need not live with the disgust I feel looking at your face any longer.

He Severs her instead.

Her screams as the blade of Spirit slices her from the True Source forever are not harmonic, not beautiful or pleasing to the ear. But they are satisfying.

I am what you made me, mother. He tells her as she is dragged off by Myrddraal, to  be kept alive and locked away, to feel the full bite of this despair. He will not let her die until she has known true agony, until she has wasted away without the Power, as he did once without music.)

<X>

They end up at the same academy of course, and their circle of friends increases. People come and people go, but at the heart the three of them remain a constant. Lews, all leadership and charisma and piety, Mierin with ambition and drive, and Joar with some small measure of good sense and creativity when it’s called for.

He remembers the news that Mierin and Lews are seeing each other, a few months short of his twentieth year. It’s casually given, wedged between an idea that they should try and spend some more time in the lab working on thread cohesion theory, and a request to pass the salt.

It’s not really a surprise, Mierin has always looked at Lews with the possessive light of ownership in her eyes, and Lews has always been so blissfully unaware, so really, it was a matter of waiting for her to close the trap. Yet it still rocks Joar’s world on its foundations.

(Maybe, Asmodean can admit, with several thousand years of distance and a bit more self reflection then he wants to admit, a tiny bit of that was jealousy. Of which of them he can’t say. Maybe it was both.)

Joar buries his surprise, congratulates them, and then passes the salt.

Over the next ten years, all three come into their own. They complete their studies and are raised to full Aes Sedai. Joar moves out of his mother’s house and begins training to become a Restorer, Lews enters the political track, and within five years he is addressing the entire Hall, while Mierin dedicates her whole being to research, to delving the secrets of the One Power.

Mierin and Lews draw closer and closer together and further away from him. They get invited to more and more parties, on more trips, drawn like gravity into the echelons of power.

Joar spirals in his Restorer education. He hates the sight of blood, and his hands shake violently anytime he has to heal even the smallest burn.

By the time he drops out, there are months in between the three of them being together. It takes almost a year for Lews to show up at his tiny apartment in one of the housing rings that float above Paaran Disen, where low-standing Aes Sedai, with few contributions to the world to their name, are kept. It’s cramped, a bedroom, a living room, and smallest of all a refresher, with a slightly cracked standing pool. None of the rooms are more than a few strides across.

Joar is a little drunk, even though it’s only ten in the morning, and Lews has to help him sit.

“Why?” he asks, when he’s sure Joar isn’t going to fall over.

“I hate Restoring.” He says quietly. “I never wanted it. I wanted…” He cuts off.

There is silence as he lets the words trail away. He can’t explain it, not really. He won’t.

“…I’ll get you a job in the political office, as an aide.” Lews finally says. “You can live with me and Mierin, our quarters in the Spire have more than enough room.”

Joar shakes his head. “No Lews. I don’t need your pity.”

(Is that the real reason I never told him about my mother burning my hands? Asmodean wonders years later. I didn’t want him to look at me like someone who needed saving, another cause for him to champion. A weakling he had to protect, as surely as he protected that deer from the flame?

You always had an outsized sense of pride. Demandred once told him, snidely and unforgiving. He was right, Asmodean knew.

But when pride was all you had to your name, giving it up was not easy.)

“It’s not pity. You’re my friend-“ Lews protests and Joar shakes his head.

“I quit school a year ago.” He points out. “And you didn’t find out until today.” Lews would not have waited. He would have come over the moment he found out. He always was a man of action. “What does that tell you, friend?” He spits the last word, and it’s cruel but he doesn’t care.

Lews is quiet, unsure of how to respond, before sheepishly saying, with the air of a man who knew he was making an excuse. “…Mierin and I have been busy.”

Joar nods. “I know. So don’t let me keep you.”

Lews leaves.

<X>

The next day the couriers bring him a harp. It’s silver chased and worked all over with dragons, forged he thinks, with the Power. A useless frivolity and yet…

This used to bring you such joy. Maybe it will again. – Lews

Joar cries for a while after he reads that note.

Of course the bloody fool remembered even decades later. Of course he did.

<X>

(I should have kissed him that day. Asmodean thinks as he plucks his power wrought harp. They are marching hard, with the so called Aiel, straight for the Jangai pass. I should have taken his offer.

Lanfear would have killed you the next day. He argues back. Without hesitation.

…Lanfear would have yes. But would Mierin? Maybe he could have persuaded her to share. Maybe, between the two of them, they would have been enough for Lews. Maybe he could have counterweighted Mierin’s flaws, smoothed away the cracks and the edges in their relationship that drove them apart, and Lews into the arms of Ilyena.

Are you really going to delude yourself that far? A voice that sounds remarkably like his mother whispers in the back of his mind.

Yes. He replies, staring at Rand’s back. Yes I am. Self delusion is the only way I can make myself keep going.

That cliff’s edge would give under his grip soon or late. What harm could there be in pretending now?)

<X>

It takes months to be able to pluck the strings without devolving into a panic attack, the pain of phantom flames covering his hands leaving him unable to stand for hours. It takes almost a year before he can produce anything but discordant twangs.

The first time he makes it through a whole sound sculpture without a mistake, he takes the recording into bed with him and listens to it again and again for hours, letting the sound of the harp surround him, filling him as surely as saidin ever did. For those few hours he feels no anxiety, no fear, no panic. He made this, he made this with his own two hands. This? This has meaning. This matters, if only to him.

It is enough, for the moment.

<X>

Lews and Mierin break up. It’s all anyone can talk about; the power couple, the living embodiment of Aes Sedai, one man and one woman, sundered.

He goes to Lews immediately.

Lews had not been boasting, he had some truly impressive apartments in the Spire, a network of rooms designed to hold an entire family, with a startling natural view of the Hall of the Servants and a swath of Paaran Disen in one wall.

The place is also an absolute mess. Spunglass sculptures lay in shattered fragments on the ground as if they had been hurled about by the One Power, the shards left unattended. Wall hangings stand askew or on the ground, and the impressive kitchenette has half the cabinets open, with filthy dishes piled high in the sink.

In the bedroom, Lews lay sprawled out on the bed, eyes bleary and bloodshot, stubble covering his jaw, the faint smell of rancid wine filling the air. He’s got a glass Nindia pad on his knees, which he is using to play no'ri, moving the tiny white and black discs across the crosshatch without really paying attention.

He says nothing as Joar seats himself on the edge of the bed, and begins to play. A trilling gentle piece, that brings to mind distant meadows and babbling brooks.

“You’re still amazing at that.” Lews notes as he ceases channeling, causing the light that covers the glass pad to wink out.

Jaor shrugs. “No. I’m once again amazing. I’m afraid it’s taken some time to get my skills back. But…now that I have it…it may be a useless frivolity. It may do nothing for the good of the world, but it is my offering.”

Lews shakes his head. “It does good. It makes a broken heart feel better.”

Joar is quiet for a while after that, save for the harp.

<X>

“I loved her.” Lews says a few hours later, when Joar asks what happened. “But she loves only power.”

<X>

“That woman he works with.” Mierin spits when Joar asks her a few weeks later, sitting in a cake shop on the other side of the city. “She poisoned him against me.”

<X>

(The Wheel weaves. That bitterness, that rage, that heartbreak, will echo through the Pattern for three thousand years, until it leads Lanfear to risk everything, for the chance to have her love back.)

<X>

Joar keeps playing music. He and Lews grow slightly closer again, but the distance is never properly bridged. He meets Ilyena, and Barid. Duram and Yanet, and attends some truly mind numbing dinners where Kamarile lectures them on the sin of excess, and the illusion of beauty while herself in possession of a face that would stun many to look at.

The simple reality is that he and Lews live in different worlds now. Joar has no desire to rub shoulders with the mighty and the powerful, the influential and the brilliant. He just wants his music and the quiet company of old friends, but trying to get Mierin and Lews in the same room is like trying to wrestle the moon into the same sky as the sun. Impossible and sure to lead to disaster.

Joar focuses on his work, he learns every song, every movement, every musical cycle and opera and sound sculpture that he can get his hands on. The ancient and the new and ones of his own creation. He starts to feel tiny and insignificant and meaningless again, beside the sheer mass of how much music humanity has made and collected over the eons, more than he could learn if he spent the rest of his days doing nothing else.

Soon he’s invited to play at events. Just parties at first, some for Lews and his friends, some for strangers. Events become concert halls, become live broadcasts. Suddenly he is being invited to parties by Sitters, by the Rods of Dominion, even by the First Chairs, asked to play a few notes, and to soothe hearts and minds with his music.

Somehow, he became famous. Somehow, he stumbled into Lews’s world after all.

He runs into his mother at one of those events, and she treats him as a servant and a stranger. One of the help, of no accord to her.

<X>

What Joar does not do, however, is become famous enough to escape the comparisons to others. Music is more competitive than he ever imagined when it was only a distant dream of his.

He’s good considering he found it so late in life.

If only he had started younger, then he would already have his third name.

Oh maybe he has as much talent as Denarin and Cassinia, but they’ve been at it so much longer, he’ll never catch up!

They were lucky, he wanted to scream till his lungs turned raw. They had the chance to pursue their passion from the age they found it.

They never had to feel phantom fire, or flinch at the striking cord of a harp. The Pattern was kinder to them.

Something angry grows in him, something bitter. He tries to squash it, but never quite succeeds.

(That they are right makes him all the more furious. That he lost out on years, that he will never be as good as he might have been had he not yielded to his mother. Had he not been caught. Had he only-)

(He chokes that line of thought off before it can go any farther)

<X>

Lews gains the ring of Tamylrin and sits in the First Chair.

Mierin, wanting a third name more than anything, opens the Bore.

<X>

At first the Collapse is a distant, far off thing. Joar is awash in riches, in the love and affection of women and men alike, and in fame. What did it matter to him if there was distant trouble out there in the world? No one could hurt him any longer.

His songs earn him his third name for the power of his music to shape the lives of men, to soothe their hearts, and make them witness the transcendence of the light. He becomes Joar Addam Nessosin, and at Lews’s request, he helps organize concerts that become fundraisers, and platforms for speaking about the growing instability, cruelty, and malice.

“Something is wrong, Joar.” Lews tells him one night, as Joar is putting up his harp. “I think with the world itself.”

Joar shrugs. “The Pattern demands balance, Lews. We’ve had almost an age of peace and prosperity. Maybe we’re overdue for some tragedy to balance it out.”

Lews frowns, not liking that thought, but then, Lews has never cared for any line of thinking that leaves him powerless, especially powerless to help others.

<X>

Joar now lives on an estate far to the south, a tiny port town where he can peacefully compose his next song.

He has taken the musical world by storm, but his late start makes him understand he will never realize his full potential. He is constantly compared to his inferiors, who equal his fame only because they by chance, were Woven the opportunity, given supporting parents who encouraged them, from their first breath, to follow that which made them happy.

Some nights he dreams of blinding them or cutting away their fingers in some fashion that no Restorer can fix, to balance out their good luck. He wakes up in a cold sweat those nights and wonders if Lews is right, if there is something dark and twisted loose in the world.

But he stares down at his hands, shaking in the darkness, and feels phantom flames from long ago, knowing that no. This shadow has been in him his entire life, and will be with him till he dies.

<X>

Merian casts down her name before the Hall of the Servants. She is Lanfear now, Daughter of the Night. She is the first of the Friends of the Dark, and she will break the Wheel and spit in the eye of the Creator.

The War of Power has begun.

<X>

She comes to him in his small estate, dressed in snowy white with silver stars in her hair, and moons across her belt.

“Do you want power?” she asks.

“Not particularly.” He responds. He doesn’t. He never has. He just wants his music, and his fair due. What was denied to him by fate.

Lanfear frowns at him, clicking her tongue. “…What about revenge, against all those fools who think of themselves as your equals? Your betters?”

That, Joar can admit, is more appealing.

(Will the flames burn me less if I spread them to others? Will this anger go away if I purge it? This pain lessen if I inflict it upon someone else?

No. But he doesn’t know that at the time.)

“You know what I want?” Joar asks, leaning back, looking down at his harp. A gift from Lews. It had just come too late. “I want eternity to keep perfecting my music. I want time to learn every song, to make every song. Music is the only thing of meaning in our world, and I want enough time to master it.”

Lanfear smiles. “The Great Lord can offer you that.”

<X>

They name him Asmodean.

Lews’s doing no doubt. Not as dramatic as Betrayer of Hope, or Daughter of the Night or Promise of Pain. Not as damning.

Just. The Musician.

Lews must hope he can come back from this, return to the Light.

He is wrong. The Shadow has been festering in him since long before the Bore was opened.

<X>

“I should have told you.” Asmodean realizes one night, as he and Rand practice. It’s an idle thought, a musing brought on by his reflections these last few days. They’re almost through the pass, into Cairhien. “When we were children, I should have told you.”

“What?” Rand says blinking, not understanding. But then, why should he? The words are not for him, they are for whatever shard of his old friend remains buried deep in the Sheepherder.

“Nothing, my Lord Dragon. Shall we try weaving Earth again?”

If I had told you, Asmodean thinks. You would have done something. You were always hungry for a cause to champion, a battle to fight. You would have seen me taken away from her, placed with your own family if you had to. You would have encouraged me not to let her poison me against that which I loved, and there would never have been any doubt who was the finest musician in the world.

You would have choked the Shadow out of me before it could ever grow.

But I had too much pride to allow myself to be saved.

Of course, then Asmodean would have been one of the Hundred Companions, would have fought on the side of the Light, and been driven mad by the Great Lord of the Dark.

But then, maybe there would have been twelve Forsaken sealed away, and four farm boys from the Two Rivers. A trickster, a blacksmith, a swordsman, and a musician with a hand carved harp. Maybe he and Rand, would together be stumbling through the first steps of saidin, learning to wield it together, believing that Rand would succeed and seal The Great Lord away again.

It wouldn’t make it so, Asmodean knew. They would still fail and the Dark Lord would still triumph, but it would be nice to believe, to live in ignorance once more.

It would be nice to be friends again. To not have Rand stare at him like a wicked stranger.

That night he plays The March of Death, and does his best to pretend he can’t feel the cliff crumbling beneath his fingertips.

For the first time in centuries, he feels the memory of fire.