In The Shadow Rising, Rand learns the history of the Aiel, and the prophecy under which they seek out He Who Comes with the Dawn. It states that he shall pour out the blood of the Aiel like water on sand, that he will take them back and destroy them, and that even though he will destroy them, he will save a remnant of a remnant, and that without him, not even that remnant will be saved. There have been theories, of course, as to what this means, and what a remnant of a remnant entails. Two of the most common theories about the destruction of the Aiel is the bleakness and culture shock he causes by revealing the truth of their history, or through attrition in the presumed heavy fighting to come. Yet there has been little mention of any attenuation of the disaffected for some time now, and some have even expressed the notion that he is inadvertently benefiting the Aiel by winnowing out the weak. Likewise, with the Last Battle close at hand and a single book left for the series, how much more fighting can there be to kill off the Aiel? And what about the millions of Aiel civilians back home in the Waste? Even if all of the fighting men and Maidens are slaughtered at Tarmon Gaidon, there is still a substantial noncombatant population. It was only the Shaido who committed the mass emigration from the Waste as alluded to in tFoH, and maybe not even then. Rand’s clans took only their military components. Alternative theories by some such as me, have theorized a massive geographical alteration as a consequence of some action of Rand’s which might result in the deaths of those who remained in the Waste, leaving the survivors of his army as the remnant of a remnant (and sure to be demographically hit hard later by the loss of the majority of women and children – even if the Maidens put away their spears and start making babies, and they begin taking wetlander wives, there will be a bit of a generational lag). Whatever the form this destruction will take, however, the reasons for Rand’s destruction become clear thanks to a second, and much less well-known (though more familiar), prophecy received in Rhuidean.

Aviendha’s forewarning of the fate of her descendants may, if this series is going to be REALLY lame and anticlimactic, actually be witnessing the remnant of a remnant, with that prophecy being fulfilled by the stragglers grubbing the garbage of passing travelers. That would actually be really funny and perverse, as Rand would enable that remnant to survive because he protected the Aiel and set them on the path of their dissolution and thus “destroyed” them, and especially if he gave them special status because the Wise Ones’ plot succeeded in making him care about their fates, but still anticlimactic and feeling kind of like a cheat, and a reversal of all the stuff asserted about how hard and tough the Aiel are. Is this what Aviendha has been shaped and tested and honed for? To whine for a special privilege like some wetlander courtier? To ask that Rand find their people a purpose so they don’t kick off a world war out of boredom? Bah. She’s been shaped and trained to give her the stones to make a tough choice. I’m talking really, really tough. The kind of choice that would tear out your guts and make going on from day to day a huge trial of guilt and self-recriminations. And what choice is that? Quite simply, she and/or Rand will choose to destroy the Aiel, or allow the destruction of the Aiel in order to allow only the remnant of a remnant to survive. That would also be suitably ironic for WoT in that the Wise Ones’ approach of maximizing the numbers of the remnant is completely off base and counter-indicated by the necessity, and that the remnant would HAVE to be very small so that it CAN be allowed to survive.

The necessity for that destruction would basically boil down to the nature of the Aiel, their society, culture and values. All of those have been shaped by their environment, and are intrinsic to their way of thinking and functioning and interacting. We have seen that when they start to let standards slip in a couple areas, as among the Shaido, all but the toughest or most personally disciplined, start to degenerate and they become a menace of such an order of magnitude that their total enslavement by the Seanchan is pretty much a “meh” issue. The Three Fold Land has shaped them into one thing and one thing only, and they cannot easily change. The Aiel are very hard, and much is made in the series about how true strength is different from hardness, because strength can endure change, while hardness shatters when pressure is put on it to change. One way the hard Aiel shatter is to become dissolute and draw too many enemies to handle upon themselves, as the Shaido did. Another way is what we see happen in Aviendha’s vision – they cannot find a place in the new world, so they revert to their old ways and pick a fight with the biggest and baddest bully on the block, and eventually shatter themselves by repeatedly bashing into an immovable object. The Seanchan can probably be beaten, but not by the Aiel as they are. Their insistence on maintaining the war against the Seanchan, even to the point of dragging in wetlander allies to gain an edge, leads to the whole world falling to their enemies, and the Seanchan becoming powerful enough to destroy the Aiel.

Alternatively, and possibly worse, they could have won. Then the whole world might become like Malden. The hostility to wetlanders has not abated by the time of the current characters’ grandchildren, and Malden and issues like Mangin’s act of murder, and even Egwene’s own scrapes while merely affecting the persona of a Wise One’s apprentice, indicate the incompatibility of wetlanders and the Aiel. Without Rand restraining them, and through no real malicious intent, the cultural clashes would generate eternal enmity between the Aiel and the wetlander subjects of the Aiel Empire they envision taking the place of the Seanchan as the world’s paramount power. One way or another, the Aiel would bring generations of war to the world, culminating in the rise of a tyrannical barbarian dominion or the Seanchan Empire wiping out the nations of the current day. Either way, the Aiel as Aviendha and Rand know them would be destroyed. Either wiped out by their enemies, or turned into monsters like Sevanna or Couladin in their conquests, and either way, the needs of the incredible scale of the struggle they would undertake would twist the pervert Aiel culture and values out of recognition. Aviendha notes some of this when she observes their practices at the point where they have all but lost the war and must flee to the Waste.

In order to prevent this coming to pass, Rand, with Aviendha’s help, advice or encouragement, will have to destroy the Aiel, so the remnant that is left will be forced to adapt to the new world of the Fourth Age, and as they rebuild, will be forced to change into something that can live at relative peace and in relative stability, if only because they lack the power and strength of the Aiel Aviendha sees in her children’s day, who believe themselves powerful enough to take on the Seanchan Empire. Just as we can hope for the nascent tyranny of Egwene to be ameliorated by alternative channeling traditions and organizations and influences arising and permeating the culture, and the accompanying attenuation of the power of the Aes Sedai so too can we hope that the reduction of the Aiel to mere remnant of their former might will prevent Rand’s children from setting the world on fire.