that we never had seen Demandred under an alias on-screen.

Darlin has been around for a long, long time.

And again, why would Demandred care about an army of non-channellers anyway?

His top priority is Rand, and matching Rand in battle.

Darlin's army wouldn't stand five minutes against Rand's channellers. Same for Roedran, the Bordermen, the WC.

Demandred is behind Taim, and was the only Forsaken clever enough to build a real power base that would come into play only in Tarmon Gai'don, meanwhile putting an expandable pawn between Rand and him. If things went sour, Rand would strike at Taim, not at Demandred, and there was always an army of BA he could fall back to then.

Demandred's main goal is to defeat Rand. He wants to kill him himself or finish him off on the battlefield, and nothing else would do to satisfy him because it won't prove that Demanded is the better man of the two. To achieve that, Demandred needed Taim's faction, and after the Cleansing he's realised he needed a mix gender army to face him, thus the BA proposal of allying with the BT.





A bit of both I'd say, and yet another motivation to go to Moridin was to distance themselves from Semirhage's initiative (they didn't know, and they didn't know this was Moridin's own initiative to begin with), make sure Moridin didn't blame them too for this. Mesaana in particular had big motivations to be proactive with this fiasco, after her punishment. Demandred wouldn't want to experience a similar fate either, and he must have been really pissed off the second of his allies had mistepped badly. As for the motive to rescue Semirhage, this speaks of desperation in part. They don't really like this woman (nor each other), and had it happened to Aran'gar or Graendal, Mesaana would never have invoked "duty" to a fellow Chosen (which was a bit pathetic, too bad Sanderson didn't make Demandred cringe at that). No... what this speaks for is that losing Semirhage hindered their endgame, not only weakened their "alliance". This also suggests strongly neither Mesaana nor Demandred has any agents with the Seanchan, and they both needed Semirhage.

If Demandred mounted a rescue with Taim without Moridin's permission, he was likely finished. Same for Mesaana and the BA. They're not supposed to strike at Rand.

The military situation is also that Logain sneaked off and joined to Rand's inner circle a substantial force of women with whom to link.

Demandred is too intelligent not to have realised with the Cleansing that he needed to upgrade his plans. No doubt any of the DF Asha'man is more than a match for Rand's superior number of men (pre-KOD, anyway, and likely even after Blossoms of Fire and Deathgates etc) - his pawns have trained those Asha'man, so Demandred knows fairly exactly what they can and can't do (recent reports by Elza would have been more than alarming....), and even could influence massively their tactics... If Demandred can spot tactical flaws, it goes without saying he can introduce some willingly too.

The big problem with the Cleansing, however, was that Demandred knew then he would have to face a mixed gender army and circles, and his men's skills would be offset by sheer strength. The Chosen didn't link and lost against Rand's circles, and right now Demandred's army can't link either, and it's all men who are highly trained. Worse, Rand has some powerful circles with nifty toys, and more in various caches are all still warded. Mixed gender work was unexpected - the Asha'man and AS looked to be in conflict, and nowhere close to any alliance. It wasn't good either that the Light would have more time to practice mixed gender linking and how to best use it. And if he decided to forget the WT, Rand still had hundreds of WO, and SF he could try to convince to form circles with his men.

After Rand started sharing mass destruction weaves, the situation got from bad to really bad (though Jordan was cautious not to create a situation where Rand would start training his men, or else the Shadow became totally outclassed...)

But back to the immediate Cleansing aftermath. In Demandred's place then, my priority would be to take the initiative from Rand, and the army within the army plan had worked most excellently, so why not reproduce the same strategy and upgrade his army into a mix gender one right under Rand's nose? The alliance would happen anyway, so why not control it?

That's when a BA (Moria) went and proposed an alliance with the Asha'man. Of course, the AS insist to bond Asha'man, and would loose a terrible amount of efforts trying to bring those men in line like warders. So, let the Light bond themselves silly - you kill one in the couple and the other will either go mad or cry herself silly through the LB, and most AS would also insist to lead the circles. Better yet, the Shadow would know who's bonded to whom, who will lead the circles in battle, what they can and can't weave etc. Massive advantages. You target the right women in a circle, and the men in it go mad... end of the circle...

The real benefit of the alliance was that Mesaana/Demandred could bring all the BA rebels to the BT openly once the alliance happened, and make sure they pretended to bond men from Taim's faction. By the LB, Demandred would have again an army far superior to Rand's, expert at advanced mixed gender linking, and advanced mixed gender warfare, while Rand's forces would struggle to discover those weaves (before the Tear attack and the worrying development that Rand seems to remember all those WOS weaves...). The rest of the BA, those in the WT, could be used to increase the strength of the circles - Demandred would already have his male/female circle leaders, highly trained. This is also an all-Shadow army, which is much, much better than the armies the other generals have tried to assemble.

Aran'gar was also becoming a problem, especially after she sided with Graendal but even before. This is why I think it's not Aran'gar but a man sent by Demandred who killed the two women linked to her cover story, and when the AS sat on their collective butts and didn't puzzle it out fast enough, Mesaana taught another BA (Nacelle) a weave to detect weaves of saidin, that would have made it nearly impossible for Halima to channel anything safely. I also suspect Elza conveniently reminded Narishma and his AS (or more simply Rand) he should really let the AS know about a female channelling saidin at the Cleansing.

Then Verin went and screwed everything up with her BA purge. It's a big setback, Demandred lost a sizeable percentage of the expected female forces, and now the BT/WT alliance musn't happen anymore. OTOH, nothing hinders the training of his army now.

In any case, I think it was always the plan to join the BA to Taim in the end, and I think it's why Mesaana insisted that Alviarin served her and not Demandred, and why in a more general way she never really cared about the BA, or losing many of them. Why care? They were never to really serve her in TG, but join Demandred. Mesaana's interest was to bring down the WT through her own sheer cleverness, finish what she has started in the AOL and bring down the last remnants of AOL civilization, and most of all the "AS guild". She didn't seem to really care that Semirhage's Seanchan would eventually come to wipe off what's left, and probably even less that at some point Demandred would end up with the BA for the war. Surely Mesaana has no more intention to fight in the war then she had during the WOS. Mesaana's a patient woman, the ultimate long term planner among the Forsaken. She was probably already planning how to re-establish her educational system once she's destroyed the WT. She is one of the most devious of the Forsaken, in her own way. She seems unambitious and low-key.. but in the AOL she's managed to get in charge of "educating" all the youth in all the territories. Why fight against the other Chosen when she can have the "protection" of two of the most feared among them, and meanwhile work to secure the loyalty of all the next generation of DF? Once the WOS was won, Mesaana had herself, personally, the widest network of servants of all the Chosen, and they were brainwashed to share her goals and her beliefs. It was probably quite hard to make up "glory of the DO" and "loyalty to Mesaana" in her educational program. Mesaana in the WOS was in a way a step ahead of everyone. The others were fighting the war, but she was already hard at work establishing her supremacy over the servants of the Shadow once everyone was serving Shai'tan. Devious. I'm guessing she has the same interests and plans now. She's bidding her time finishing her WOS work to destroy civilization, waiting for the war to start. At most, she may have started indoctrinating a small group of young minds to her side - pawns that no Chosen know about, who don't obey any of them, not even Moridin - a group among the WT novices for instance, a group she maybe intends to use to strike at specific targets she cares about (libraries and academies, for instance - her old WOS obsessions in short) and from which she will extend her web of influence later (she will need loyal teachers, eventually). Halima had similar foolish goals: she intended to use the AS to establish herself an empire of some kind post TG.

Anyway... I get the feeling TOM will even things out a lot between Light and Shadow. For the final battle in the book, let's say Egwene and Logain have allied. Would Egwene send the whole WT with Logain against the BT? Unlikely, unless she learns the 200 BA are there too, and even then. More likely she'll send the whole Red Ajah, keeping the Green to defend the WT should the Seanchan attack again. The Light has only one OP warfare general, and it's Rand/LTT. LTT is probably a close match to Demandred, but he's neglected training his troops well, and has little control over the AS yet. Demandred should rather easily defeat Rand, especially that unlike Rand he couldn't care less about civilians in Caemlyn and so on. And that's without the foreshadowing that possibly Rand will be "incapacitated" in this battle. That leaves Mat, and Mat outgenerals Rand and possibly Demandred, but while this is probably true in "primitive" warfare, Mat has about zero experience of OP warfare, there will be no integrated structure of command in place, and he has not even thought of how to really use travelling, or faced an army using it. Mat would be overwhelmed by Demandred in no time, and forced to let the channellers "do their things" (and the dragons will be devastating against trollocs and such, but against channellers they're fairly useless. In short, the conditions for his military genius to show against Demandred (or even Taim) just aren't present. It's in a rematch, once/if Mat is officially put in charge of the Light's forces, including channellers, and he can set it up as a proper army and train it, and plan how to use everyone that he might be able to outmatch Demandred. In a way, Rand has seriously misused Mat. It's at the BT, developping tactics for the Asha'man he would have been the most useful to him - not escorting princesses around. It sounds to me like the battle that starts TG will seriously harm the Light and reduce quite a bit its advantage in numbers, and turn out into a huge victory for Demandred... but probably not the victory against Rand he wished, which will piss him off. It sounds like what might force Demandred to a tactical retreat before razing Caemlyn and exterminating all the forces around there could be the sudden arrival of the whole Tower, all the WO, a massive Windfinders contigent etc.

Funny Moridin has built himself a fortress to relocate the Shadow's armies, and his busy gathering food and so on. This too suggests strongly the Shadow is planning something with Taim soon, and the days of the BT near Caemlyn are almost over. It sounds to me like Moridin is planning to have Demandred set up his new headquarters in his backyard, right where he could watch him.