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.

One 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 Shadow than any other known single source, perhaps as much as all other sources combined in some ways. But even more importantly, it gives a great deal of information available nowhere else. And most importantly of all, the six consecutive pages and others which must be placed close to them contain the only known account of events surrounding what surely must be the most far-reaching single event in the history of the world, in any Age: the sealing of the Bore by Lews Therin Telamon and the Hundred Companions.

We still cannot be certain how long passed between the creation of the Bore and the actual beginning