Lanfear was near them, since Rand, Moiraine and Lan could run to where Kadere's wagon was. However the following section is at odds with your description - Lanfear had to move a couple of times (I misremembered her walking towards him); once to get towards Rand after throwing Lan and Moiraine aside and then to get to the wagon with the angreal in it, so she didn't move back so much as changed her position.

"Fire rolled over them in waves. Arrows of it pierced those who came on with their clothes in flames. It was not as if Lanfear battled theme, or even paid them any real mind. She might have been brushing aside gnats or bitemes. Those who fled burned as well as those who tried to fight. She moved towards Rand as if nothing existed. Heartbeats only...Bodies lay inside, too, mounds of charred cloth, some stirring feebly, moaning."

It seems to me that within a few moments, she had killed or lethally injured most of the crowd that stood around and between her. From the description of people rushing away from a busy area of a city, it could have been hundreds (probably not thousands). We even get a few throwaway references to many people running towards the city while dockhands and sailors desperately jumped onto the ship. There were a lot more people in this scene than a few dozen.

Perhaps some of the Ashaman could do what she did - but they cannot without training. As was noted countless times before, what the Forsaken make fun of the Aes Sedai before is not their range of strength per se, but their overall lack of training and mastery.



Lanfear climbed the wagon bed to get the bracelet. No, we don't have a clear description of her reaching down to pick it up, but keeping in mind that Moiraine's foreknowledge is what lead her to leave it at the base of the ter'angreal in the first place, and it seems to me that Lanfears' Shields became stronger and faster after she climbed the wagon and was described as holding the angreal in her hand implies she saw drawing some strength from it.

Rand's POV: "

""

My point was that an Age of Legends channeler would have knowledge of weaves and techniques that made them able to kill or destroy large groups of people very quickly.

The instantaneous destruction BuddhaRand was pouring out reminded me of what Lanfear accomplished in a few heartbeats. His BuddhaRandDragonReborn powers never really came into it for me. My comment was more directed to the fact that Lanfear ignored the large crowd because she could easily weave enough things to destroy them. Rand did this on a much larger scale, but he also had more time. Once again, I'm not saying the two were identical, but if anything they were similar and Rand had the benefit of a multiplier.



We don't know how much of the angreal Lanfear was drawing on. She was playing with Rand, so she could have just been using enough of the angreals' addition amplifier for him to feel harried but not enough to instantly Shield him and be done with it.



The problem is Taim never did - from what we hear of his time as a False Dragon, he lead some Dragonsworn, defeated some Sisters, but neither he nor Logain decimated entire armies. Even Nynaeve and Egwene have trouble with fighting large groups of enemies, and the . Logain's performance at the manor argues my point - it was after he saw Rands' deathgates and started using them that he seemed to be most effective.

So that was my point - Age of Legends channelers had access to training that allowed them to use the full extent of their capability with minimal effort. Nothing more nothing less. And taken with nuggets from Westlands history, such as the example of Queen Eldrene who destroyed the remaining forces of an entire army of Shadowspawn presumably unaided before destroying herself, and it does seem as if this is an example of the lessened training and skills of this Ages' channelers.

Obviously you disagree, but IMHO Lanfear showed us what was possible for a strong channeler to do without even breathing hard, and Rand took it to an entirely different level because he is the Dragon Reborn.



I never suggested that Lanfear is strong enough to destroy an army in as massive numbers as Rand did. And as you yourself admit, the Ashaman were working together while Lanfear was alone, so comparing a military force to a lone channeler is an unfair comparison. Any one Ashaman might not be able to do what Lanfear did in the same time period - and my point was that it was her training that gives her such lethality.



My issue with your counter-argument is that it's a bit of a straw horse. I never said that Lanfear was more powerful than BuddhaRand; his treatment of those troops reminded me of what Lanfear did (destroying large amounts of them without a moments' thought or breathing hard at the time). My other point was that his knowledge of weaving is now not limited to his experiences in this lifetime, so he is showing us what an Age of Legends channeler was capable of.



I think the obvious issue is time and information. Would Semirhage know exactly where every member of the royal family is at a any given time? The way we were told this information was that it was a sudden attack, and that everyone was wiped out about the same time. The obvious thing to me would be that she wiped them all out at one time, which would imply she killed them all while they were in one place or at least in the same palace - given what we saw Lanfear do, it would be easy to imagine Semirhage doing the same to the nobles, their attendants and their guards.



No, remember that Rand was suffering from his psychotic issues at that point in time. That was Rand tapping into some of his old memories without meaning to. LTT didn't exist - it was just Rand's way of dealing with being the Dragon Reborn and what that implied. So this is the same deal as when Rand created the weave that searched for and destroyed the Shadowspawn in the Stone - Rand did something incredibly powerful that in hindsight was formed of instinctual remembrances of his past lives.



You are definitely missing my point here. I never said the Forsaken could match Rand's feat - that was why I call him BuddhaRand.

Note that I never said Lanfear could do what BuddhaRand did. The only thing I even talked about was that a channeler from the AOL had enough training to be incredibly destructive using Lanfear and Semirhage as examples, and that Rand used this knowledge to amplify what he was capable of to a new level.



I didn't say that the knowledge alone did it. I said that his connection to the Creator gave him the ability to exceed what he could do alone; I would suggest that he fed off of the determination of the warriors to fight for their homeland to do what he did.



But I never said it was "merely" LTT's skills that enabled him to do that.