That's just as big, if not bigger, an extrapolation than the suggestion a Forsaken know how to operate this ter'angreal.

Aviendha realized that when she touched ter'angreal, she got intuitions about their purpose. There was never any hint in KOD that her Talent is not only passive but also active and linked to calibrating/reprogramming ter'angreal.

She touched the columns, her sensation was too vast to comprehend. She stopped touching the ter'angreal, moved a foot to leave, and new visions started. This may have nothing to do with her Talent at all - merely touching the ter'angreal she may have triggered something. Even many of those who believe the Shadow isn't involved, that it's part of the AS programming, suggest it's by contact with the ter'angreal Aviendha triggered that programming (that her lifethread got identified as linked with Rand's)

It's very obvious that what happened is supposed to be mysterious - RJ sure wanted us to believe this vision was the Future or to at least retain our doubts it might be. One of his devices to convince us was Min's viewing of Avienda's quadruplets. Another is her Talent's. It may turn out to be red herrings/devices, or not.

Perhaps Rand will reveal what Aviendha's Talent really is supposed to be, and it will clarify (or cloud further) what may have happened, but for now it's highly speculative that Aviendha reprogrammed by pure accident a ter'angreal that with her Talent she clearly didn't even begin to understand.



The thing is, we don't know for sure if this ter'angreal was created by the post-Breaking AS or if it was part of the ter'angreal given the Aiel and merely programmed by the Rhuidean Aes Sedai. Clearly they had the knowledge to program the device, at least. Given what we know of Lanfear's fields of competence, some of them fairly clearly linked with this ter'angreal, and given the fact she worked at the most high-tech OP research center of her Age, it's far from a stretch to suggest she may know this ter'angreal or has the skills to puzzle out how to operate it. I'm not suggesting Moghedien would be able to operate it, but Mierin Aronaille.

Again, it's clear to me that Aviendha can't be "THE future". We have way too many clues in the series that the future is formed of points great and small already planned by the Wheel (what can be prophecized, and the bigger the events the more obscure and vague the prophecy...) and everything else is determined by choices and free will. So Aviendha's visions were at best an extrapolation, a projection of a possible future based on the current variables in play, susceptible to be changed a lot by choices, which in turn will open up new options for choices. We can't know what are anchor points in those visions, but we can know it's near impossible to be everything shown or even close, based on all the prophecy characteristics we know (from the vagueness of foretellings, to Dreams as possibilities only, to the fact Min rarely has clear visions of importance to the massive amount of variants in the WO's Arches visions, eg: Moiraine was shown the least perilous path for her/the world, but also several other choices she had the free will to make.

So Aviendha's visions can't be THE future, it's an extrapolated future. There remains the question whether this was an extrapolation from how things really stood, or if this was an extrapolation tampered with. And if it was tampered with, by whom? The Shadow is and remains the option. The Rhuidean AS is the other, but there the tampering may well be restrained to the topic/nature of Aviendha's vision, and making sure the ter'angreal would have this response only for the Aiel wife of the Dragon Reborn.

If this ter'angreal could extrapolate possible futures, we can be fairly sure the first purpose the Rhuidean AS put it to, before they tuned it to read the past, was to send the Jenn Aiel through it to puzzle out the Aiel's future as they knew of Foretelling they'd important, and that's how they realized all Jenn lines that didn't join the warriors died, but there would come a time when the warriors would die in turn if they didn't return to the Way of the Leaf.

The big question remain: was this vision meant to guide Aviendha toward that choice, without imposing it to her or even presenting it as the solution, or was this vision an attempt to discourage and dispirit her and go back to the Aiel saying they were doomed? The WO Dreamers aren't likely to believe the future is all set in stone, for that matter all WO know their lives will be full of choices leading to open or close paths...

But all options remain open for now, and it's especially hard to explain Nakomi's role in all of this. She appears to be the third "divine intervention" in the series. She didn't say anything obviously tied to the Shadow's agenda. The second one is "the crone goddess of TAR", Silvie, who acted as Egwene's guide - and we know this was only Lanfear playing the role of a Crone, like she played Selene with Rand. The first one is for now as unexplainable as Nakomi, and was of course the "Creator's" voice in Rand's head in EOTW. Was Nakomi a ghost controlled by Shai'tan? Possibly, though she didn't seem a ghost like the others we saw. Was this Cyndane sent by Moridin/Shai'tan? Quite possibly. Did she assume the guise of a legendary/mythical Wise One of the Da'shain known in the AOL? Maybe... Nakomis is a mother goddess of the Amerindians to whom the Spider gave a special web to catch bad dreams. She was a shaman/dreamwalker - the mother of Dreamwalkers if you wish. We have so far very little clues about Da'shain Aiel myths. We know somehow they got coined "Children of the Dragon" and were tied to LTT in some way, which made people believe they served only him now.

We can surmise at some point the WO were far more powerful Shamans than they are now. Nowadays there remains the belief incarnated life is a dream, which supposes that at some point the Da'shain believed/knew somehow that real and eternal life was in so-called "death", as your complete self, that incarnated life were merely layers you added to your soul, and thus what you did, what happened to you, followed you forever. Thus the Way of the Leaf. That gives an idea of how much sorrow and empathy they would have for the Soul whose role in the Pattern is to fight and defeat the Dark One over and over... (I have this theory that the dead are all supposed to be in TAR or to touch TAR, that the wolves just don't know as they don't see them anymore they see the Heroes, and the Heroes don't know because they don't see the normal dead... but some Dreamwalkers once could. The dead no longer are in TAR because Shai'tan now controls the Afterlife, that the Bore was drilled in TAR on a perceived weakness in the Pattern that in fact allowed a small brushing from Shai'tan that is mean to allow physical death - for souls... and this weakness is also global as it allows everything to die and be reborn in the Pattern. By opening the Bore, Mierin and co. let Shai'tan grab control of the "soul pool".)

We don't know how the AOLers imagined the Creator. LTT pictured him as a Gardener.. a Green Man, a benevolent solar figure. Were Nyms, constructs who could make things grow, made according to ancient imagery of God? Perhaps. Did the Creator also have a mythical female aspect, being seen as both female and man? He was after all the sum of Saidar and Saidin. That would be a woman linked not to the sun but to the Moon. That could well be Nakomi. Was this part of a mythology that included Nakomi the Mother, the Green Man as her son and mate, the Great Serpent, a mythology that got displaced through the AOL by the more metaphysical and less anthropomorphized cosmology of the Wheel, Pattern and Creator which derives obviously from the apparition of channellers? Quite possibly. LTT would know. Aviendha's meeting with "Nakomi" might trigger a conversation that will reveal a few details we miss to understand the real relationship of LTT and the Da'shain (another possiblity is that we will learn all WO who go to Rhuidean the second time meet this Nakomi...) The big question: are those really divine interventions, and if so were they truly coming from "the Creator" or were they divine interventions by the one "hands on" God we know so far: Shai'tan, Father of Lies?