"Sure he just jumped from one place to another, but as it didn't say that there wasn't a gateway, that totally means he just forgot to notice the large hole he'd never seen that opened up in thin air, that he promptly stepped through" is that it?
"I have to get away!
"No!" Aginor shouted. "You shall not have it! It is mine!"
Rand did not move, and neither did the Forsaken, yet they fought as surely as if they grappled in the dust. Sweat beaded on Aginor's face, no longer withered, no longer old, that of a strong man in his prime. Rand pulsed with the beating in the cord, like the heartbeat of the world. It filled his being. Light filled his mind, till only a corner was left for what was himself. He wrapped the void around that nook; sheltered in emptiness. Away!
"Mine!" Flame shot from Aginor's mouth, broke through his eyes like spears of fire, and he screamed.
Away!
And Rand was no longer on the hilltop. He quivered with the Light that suffused him. His mind would not work; light and heat blinded it. The Light. In the midst of the void, the Light blinded his mind, stunned him with awe.
He stood in a broad mountain pass, surrounded by jagged black peaks like the teeth of the Dark One. It was real; he was there. He felt the rocks under his boots, the icy breeze on his face."
"Since long life spans and excellent health care resulted in large viable populations, it is fortunate that birth-control methods were extremely reliable and without side effects."
For all of being a short blurb, it stick in my mind as being the closest we ever heard to an actual "problem" with the utopian AoL.
There was an extensive argument years ago on the WoT MB, where someone (Tor, maybe? ) kept insisting it was absolutely implausible that no one managed to pass on the weave through the Breaking.
Not without a demonstration. Rand couldn't learn because Asmodean could not form the weave. Any weave is easy to duplicate once seen, if you have the appropriate proficiencies and Talents. But no one figures it out on their own, except Aviendha, and she is never able to replicate the feat. She is forced to use the different weave Egwene learned, which does not work as well for her.
But the described mechanism is not intuitively obvious. It WOULD have been an obvious one if you moved yourself, as in the hypothetical original version of Traveling, but not in what is shown. People who want to be somewhere else do not think of boring holes between the Pattern, or merging two points in the Pattern into the same place, they think of their bodies being whisked away.
Where as teleportation Traveling... Wouldn't of been hugely useful for anyone aside from the channeler themselves.
Anyway, that just goes back to the implausibility to teleportation - it works as a much more plausible thing in those circumstances, because it IS intuitively obvious, instinctive and self-preserving. THAT form would have been much less likely to be lost, while the method as shown in the books is much more believable as something that would get lost. Traveling would not have made a huge difference, because the destruction and slaughter was random and unpredictable. What's to keep your places of refuge from suddenly getting turned inside out because a mad man 100 miles away flattened a mountain range, or created a new ocean? The geography of the Waste suggests that the eventual refuge of the Jenn Aiel, Rhuidean, was at the bottom of the sea when they set off on their trek. It turned out that Dragonmount & the isle where Tar Valon would be built made it through the whole thing intact, but who could have predicted that in the aftermath of LTT's death? And maybe it went through different climates too, before returning to relatively temperate once the world got back into normal cycles. Recall that at the time the Aiel crossed the Dragonwall, Cairhien was a desert.
“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.” GK Chesteron
Inde muagdhe Aes Sedai misain ye!
Deus Vult!
*MySmiley*