I was thinking about the dark prophecy given to us in TGH and what it might mean. More specifically, the 2nd to last line of the last paragraph. This could be something that has been thought of before but I have not seen it so I figured, what the hell.

Here is the whole prophecy copypasted from http://www.encyclopaedia-wot.org/



Now most of that prophecy is clear so I wont bother with that. My interest lies with the last paragraph.

It cannot be denied that much of what that says has been true, suggesting that perhaps this is a real prophecy.

The watchers and Toman's Head refer ofcourse to Falme and the events there. The seed of the hammer refers to the Seanchan and the ancient tree (tree of life) is the symbol used in the lands around Falme apparently. These are events that happened in TGH.

Next comes the three lines which predict events that will happen before the last battle, before "the Great Lord comes".

The summer burning no doubt refers to the Dark Ones manipulation of the weather, that happened. The bodies failing probably refers to what is happening in the books now, people are starting to die randomly from bubbles of evil.

But what about the next line.

We know that the seed refers to Seanchan in this, so the Seanchan will "slay an ancient wrong". Since you cannot physically kill something that is wrong, this is probably a metaphor suggesting that the Seanchan will do something to put a stop to this wrong.

The words used here (ancient and wrong) suggests that this is something that is both evil and has also been happening for a very long time. And since it is made clear that its the Seanchan who do this, the wrong probably relates to the Seanchan in some way.

I theorise that this line is a prophecy that suggests that the Seanchan will abandon the damane system very soon, before the DO breaks free infact. The ancient wrong is the slavery of innocent women and the "slaying" is putting an end to this practise. Most likely as a part of an agreement between Rand or the White Tower or something.

And ofcourse after the Seanchan do this, we reach to the final line of the dark prophecy "Now the Great Lord comes." The lines have happened in chronological order so far, suggesting that the DO will break free very soon after the damane system is abolished.

----------------------------------------------------------

Now, assuming this is true, and given how soon the last battle is going to happen (only two books left), I wonder what could possibly happen that would convince Tuon(or Fortuona or whatever) and the rest of the Seanchan to put a stop to the collaring of channelers so suddenly. In order to happen before the LB(When the DO comes), this needs to happen in the next book, or perhaps the beginning of the final book.

Could Tuon herself be collared and forced to channel. I assume that once she channeled just once even if it was forced with the a'dam, she would then be open to the OP and could no longer "choose not to channel" even after being freed. That would be rude awakening for her and might change her mind about the a'dam.

But would that convince the rest of the people? Seems more likely that if they knew, they would reject Tuon as an empress. Maybe the collaring will happen in secret and Tuon will hide that fact from the rest of her people and use some excuse (a tready with the Dragon Reborn for instance) to put a stop to the collaring in order to protect herself.

You know, I wonder why the WT has not done this to the captured sul'dam. We know that once you channel, you cannot stop. So why won't the WT institute a policy of capturing sul'dam, collaring them and forcing them to draw upon the power, and then releasing them. They have channeled themselves (if involuntarily) and the rules of OP state that they can no longer stop and must either learn to channel or die. A couple of raids where the WT do this to large groups of sul'dam could be devastating. Either the sul'dam dies, becomes a damane (meaning one less sul'dam) or joins the AS gaining them an extra recruit. It would also be a rather effective tool for terror. Each time the sul'dam attacked the AS, they would have to fear that they would be captured and turned into marath'damane. How long until the Seachan started running out of sul'dam through both capture/conversion and desertion. What would the Seanchan do once the amount of Damane(both sparkers and former sul'dam) started to exceed the amount of available sul'dam.