What a brilliant book. I suspect many of these issues will get threads of their own in due course and that this thread will get lost in the flood come Tuesday, but I thought I’d post my own list of questions and observations while I’m in the heat of the moment of just having finished, leaving out one or two of the most obvious ones.

- I wanted the three becomes one prophecy to refer to Rand, LTT, and Moridin merging, but 1) Rand and LTT (and no third person) seemingly do that at the end of TGS, and 2) that interpretation wouldn’t be compatible with Min’s viewing of just two men touching and becoming one. I doubt it refers to what Min thinks it does, which raises the question of what it does signify.

- Speaking of prophecies, I always imagined the one about Rand’s staff would come together with the ones dealing with his blindness: so much for that thought. Also odd that the blindness prophecy came up twice in the book. A memory of light indeed.

- It strikes me that the population of Hindistam would make an almost ideal fighting force for the DO at TG: trying to kill everyone in sight with an inhuman energy and regenerating on a daily basis.

- Why does SH leave the access terangreal behind for Rand? I thought at the time he might have tinkered with it in some way, but that doesn’t seem to have been the case.

- How/why does Rand initiate his meeting with Moridin? Although Rand views Moridin’s asking why Rand brought him there with suspicion, I can’t imagine what Moridin would have to gain from asking a question he knew the answer to in this case. Come to that, I can’t remember any prior scene in which Ishy asks Rand anything with the seemingly genuine hope of getting information from him. On the other hand, if Rand had initiated it, why would he have set it in the palace in which he had met with Ishy of all places?

- Knowing that Sheriam is a DF would seem to decrease the likelihood that Chesa would be one as well, at least in my mind. Between Aran’gar and Sheriam, one would think the DO would have had his bases sufficiently covered as far as Egwene was concerned.

- Surely it would have been far simpler for SH to have killed Egwene himself or ordered one of the Forsaken to do it than to order Sheriam to have her deposed? I suppose he might not have wanted to take the chance of the rebellion becoming so demoralized at her death that it would fizzle out altogether, but seeing to the work himself would have left a far greater possibility of success.

- I’m not sure what this says about me, but the passage in Perrin’s first chapter in which he muses on his almost anticlimactic situation following Faile’s rescue resonated strangely with my own reaction on finishing a new WoT book: months and months of anticipation, followed by a few days of excitement, followed by a sense of letdown at the prospect of having to wait more months still to find out what happens next. Did this parallel cross anyone else’s mind at the time?

- Is there any chance at all that Mat won’t read Verin’s letter? I mean, this is an epic fantasy series, after all!

More to come when I’ve had more time to reflect, I’m sure.