....you'd have seen Irene Gallo (the art director who worked with Sweet on this concept) confirmed it's a scene depicting Min, Avienha and Elayne on a battlefield, around a funeral pyre which we can assume is Rand's (it's Gallo who says "we can assume". She suggests (keeping in mind again she can pretend to "suggest" or "assume" all she wants, she knows and is unlikely to mislead) the symbol in the clouds symbolizes a newfound unity of the male and female Aes Sedai after 3000 years.


DM or SG or elsewhere? That she won't say and it's impossible to be sure, it's Sweet after all. Still, the ambiance and color scheme seem very wrong for a Sweet depiction of Shayol Ghul, (even after the DO's defeat) as it is a large desolate volcanic-style valley with a massive black volcano surrounded by red, black and silver clouds...., Here we rather have a distinctly hilly area, with a central mountain with a broken top and there's also grass of the foreground and the trees on the hills, which is close to the books's description and thus very strongly suggests this is supposed to depict Dragonmount, with the three women in funeral white (if we go left to right with Irene's order, the brunette on the left is Min, the woman in the middle who look quite a bit like her TGS depiction is Aviendha, and the woman whose pregnant belly woyuld be hidden by her sleeve is Elayne. Hard to tell how far in her pregnancy Elayne will be when this scene happens, she's not showing yet at the end of ToM.

So it's a scene connected to the "three in a boat" foretelling (but not the actual boat scene itself). There's weirdly water streaks around. Gallo mentions it's a funeral pyre, though that looks more like a weird stone cairn to me, unless that's supposed to be sung wood or something Aviendha or Elayne made with the power (kind of a miniature DM, on which Rand is placed). Typically, this will prove not that close at all to the description of this set up we'll get in the book

DM pointed out this early sketch is also full of mistakes (like the rotated yin-yang symbol in the back instead of the classic AS symbol or the hair colors) which typically would have been pointed out by Harriet to Sweet before he started on the final painting. In the early stages, he's concerned with the basic composition and the color scheme and mood. Once that gets approved by Irene Gallo and Harriet, the factual mistakes gets corrected (only vaguely and to an extent, as we know).

It was one of three scenes Harriet had pre-selected. It's the one Gallo and Sweet had settled on. Whelan and Gallo have finally picked another of the three scenes to work with for the final cover.

I'm really not a fan of Sweet's work, though I find this one is simpler and not quite as bad or "offensive" (to good taste) as many others were. It has a very Arthurian ambiance.