The Westlands

The Wheel of Time · an interactive map

Press a place on the map to read what is known of it. Names inside an entry are ways to those places too.

Nothing here runs ahead of your reading. Set where you are in the bar below, and every entry stops where you have stopped.

Alcruna

Village · Tarabon

A flyspeck Taraboner village at the edge of Almoth Plain — an inn, a bridge, a river, and Tanchico somewhere far downstream.

The Great Hunt · ch. 5 · The Shadow in Shienar

Geofram Bornhald brings two thousand Children of the Light across Tarabon by night marches to a rendezvous here, and finds a Questioner waiting with orders he despises: the leaderless towns of Almoth Plain are to be brought to the Light. What the Questioners’ methods leave behind floats downriver toward Tanchico.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Almoth Plain

Region · (unclaimed)

A grassy plain between Tarabon and Arad Doman where the nation of Almoth died in the War of the Hundred Years. Both neighbors claim it; neither holds it; its scattered white-plastered villages answer to no one. Rumor says Almoth’s banner bore a branch of Avendesora, the Tree of Life.

The Great Hunt · ch. 29 · Seanchan

Soldiers out of uniform quarter the plain: Whitecloaks in Taraboner cloaks to the north and Domani cloaks to the south, “bringing the towns to the Light” village by village with deniable hands — while the armies Tarabon actually sent against the invaders on Toman Head come back broken, when they come back at all.

The Great Hunt · ch. 50 · After

And then out of the setting sun rides a column under a banner no one has dared raise in three thousand years, heading east across the plain toward the mountains. The tale reaches Bandar Eban and Tanchico ahead of winter, growing with every league — and sets both nations sharpening knives over land neither owns.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 3 · News from the Plain

All winter the plain burns slow: Dragonsworn bands against Taraboner and Domani soldiers against each other, villages torched, Hunters of the Horn arriving to poke the ashes. Five thousand Whitecloaks quarter the plain loudly hunting the false Dragon — and somehow never find any band larger than fifty. And in villages along the courier paths, tall young men with light eyes are dying quietly, poison and knife, with no assassin ever seen.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Altara

Nation · capital Ebou Dar

The country between Illian and Amadicia, with the Eldar for its western border and its capital far south on the Sea of Storms. Two golden leopards on a field checked red and blue — a banner few Altarans could draw from memory, and fewer would follow.

Altara is a nation the way a bundle of sticks is a log. Great houses hold more power than the throne in Ebou Dar, the writ of a King or Queen stops at the horizon, and a village will name the lord it pays and shrug at the country it stands in.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Amadicia

Nation · capital Amador

Landlocked country in the southwest, running from the southern end of the Mountains of Mist down to the empty Shadow Coast. A King reigns in Amador, and everyone knows where the power actually sits: the Children of the Light keep their Fortress of the Light in that same city, and the Lord Captain Commander’s word carries further than the throne’s.

For a channeler it is the most dangerous ground in the Westlands. Aes Sedai are forbidden the country outright, and a woman even suspected of the Power can expect the Questioners rather than a trial.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Amador

Capital · Amadicia

Capital of Amadicia, and in truth the seat of the Children of the Light: the Fortress of the Light counts for more here than the king’s palace, and Aes Sedai enter the country on pain of death.

The Dragon Reborn · Fortress of the Light (prologue)

Inside the Fortress of the Light, the Lord Captain Commander holds audience over a sunburst of solid gold worn smooth by generations of penitents — and the Light’s own citadel is compromised. A Myrddraal comes and goes through its corridors as it pleases, and among the Questioners an Inquisitor of the Hand of the Light takes its orders. Where there is shadow, it boasts, there may it go.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

An Abandoned Stedding

Stedding · (free towns)

A stedding in the hills near the tip of Toman Head, deserted so long even its name is lost. The Ways remember it, though: outside its border a Waygate still stands for anyone who knows the trick of the leaf.

The Great Hunt · ch. 34 · The Wheel Weaves

Padan Fain walks out of this Waygate a bare day and a half ahead of his pursuers — then loses four months on them without knowing it. He feeds the last of his Darkfriends to the Trollocs, hides the rest in the hills, and rides for Falme alone with a golden chest on a stolen packhorse.

The Great Hunt · ch. 40 · Damane

Out of the same gate, two days from Tar Valon by the Ways, Liandrin delivers four women into a waiting half-circle of Seanchan soldiers and open a’dam. The High Lady Suroth knew to the hour who was coming. Egwene wakes leashed; Min is taken with her toward Falme; Nynaeve and Elayne scatter into the brush with lightning at their backs — and Liandrin steps back into the Ways alone, her part done.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Andor

Nation · capital Caemlyn

The strongest single realm in the Westlands, and one of the largest: rolling farmland and grazing country from the Mountains of Mist east to the Erinin, ruled from the Lion Throne in Caemlyn by Queen Morgase. Where every other fragment of Artur Hawkwing’s empire tore itself apart, Andor held — Ishara, first Queen, talked her husband out of the siege of Tar Valon and settled for a piece she could keep. The throne passes daughter to daughter, and the Daughter-Heir is sent to Tar Valon to be schooled by the Aes Sedai.

Andor claims west to the Mountains of Mist, and the claim thins as it goes. The Two Rivers has not seen a tax collector or a Queen’s Guard in living memory.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Arad Doman

Nation · capital Bandar Eban

The northwest coast, between the Aryth Ocean and the Mountains of Mist, with Almoth Plain below it and unclaimed country between it and Saldaea above. Bandar Eban stands at the mouth of the Dhagon and takes in the trade of half the western sea.

The King rules by leave of the Council of Merchants, who choose him and can unmake him, and who are almost always women — in Arad Doman commerce is a woman’s trade. Katar, up in the mountains, is technically subject to the throne, and its mine-owning nobles need reminding of that from time to time.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Arafel

Nation · capital Shol Arbela

The Borderland between Kandor and Shienar, ruled from Shol Arbela — the City of Ten Thousand Bells. The Blight runs along the north of it, and the watch on that border has not been lifted in three thousand years.

Arafellin men carry two curved swords crossed on the back, a hilt standing above each shoulder. Men and women both wear their hair in long braids hung with small bells, and put more bells on cuffs and bootlaces besides, so that an Arafellin is generally heard before seen.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Arien

Village · Andor

A village on the Caemlyn Road east of Whitebridge, one of the string of communities living off the traffic between the river and the capital.

The Eye of the World · ch. 31 · Play for Your Supper

Two footsore travelers discovered here that a flute and a bit of juggling buy supper, a bed, and a cart ride east come morning — the pattern that carried Rand and Mat inn to inn along the Caemlyn Road.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Aringill

Town · Andor

Andor’s great port on the Erinin, roughly halfway between Tar Valon and Tear, its long tarred-timber docks sheltered behind stone wing-walls. Ferries cross to the Cairhienin bank by Maerone, and everything Andor trades on the river passes its gates.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 40 · A Hero in the Night

Cairhien’s civil war has burst over the town like a levee failing: starving refugees sleep in the streets and under every hedge, horses are butchered for meat, and the ferries come across packed rail to rail. The Queen’s Guards hold order — barely — and word is the crossings will be closed and the boats turned back, kindness having run out before the war did.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Atuan's Mill

Village · (free towns)

A mill village on the Toman Head road, sails turning slowly over the peninsula’s sheep-cropped hills.

The Great Hunt · ch. 41 · Disagreements

Half its people are gone — east onto the plain, or west into occupied Falme on the theory that a held town is at least a fed one — and a charred patch on the square shows what the Seanchan do to villages that argue. Here the Horn’s hunters, four months behind their quarry, first hear the invaders named: Hawkwing’s armies come back across the ocean, with monsters out of nightmare and Aes Sedai on leashes.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Baerlon

Town · Andor

A mining town on the road from the Two Rivers to Whitebridge, and the biggest place most Two Rivers folk will ever see. The Stag and Lion inn stands inside its wooden walls.

The Eye of the World · ch. 15 · Strangers and Friends

Here the party first crosses paths with Min, who sees images around people that she cannot always explain, and with the Children of the Light in the streets.

The Eye of the World · ch. 17 · Watchers and Hunters

The party fled by night when a Myrddraal walked the inn’s halls: Whitecloaks barred the way to the Caemlyn Gate until Moiraine rose against the sky like a giant and stepped over the wall. Behind them the Stag and Lion burned — she has promised Master Fitch the gold to raise it again.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Bandar Eban

Capital · Arad Doman

Capital of Arad Doman on the Aryth Ocean, a merchant city famous for the Domani art of negotiation — and for the scandalous (say outsiders) dresses its merchant queens wear while practicing it.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Barthanes's Manor

Landmark · Cairhien

The country manor Lord Barthanes Damodred has just finished raising outside Cairhien — power made stone, walls and gardens sized to remind the King which House lost the throne and has not forgotten it.

The Great Hunt · ch. 31 · On the Scent

Hurin’s nose ends the city-wide hunt at Barthanes’s wall: the stolen chest went in through the back garden, trailed by furtive Trolloc stink, and never came out.

The Great Hunt · ch. 32 · Dangerous Words

At Barthanes’s fete, Loial feels what the grounds are: the old Ogier grove of Al’cair’rahienallen, royal forest until intrigue pried it loose — and somewhere behind the hedges, a Waygate still stands.

The Great Hunt · ch. 34 · The Wheel Weaves

The chest’s trail ends at that Waygate, gone into the Ways beyond following — and the morning after the fete, servants find Barthanes dead in his bedchamber, his head on a spike. Whatever compelled his service settles its accounts promptly.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Breen's Spring

Village · Andor

A village on the Caemlyn Road, one of the beads strung along it between Four Kings and Market Sheran. Close enough to the capital that farmers here still think of themselves as living in the Queen’s country.

The Eye of the World · ch. 33 · The Dark Waits

It is also about as far west as the Queen’s Guard bothers to ride. Carters on this stretch of road will tell you the Guards turn back at Breen’s Spring unless someone sends for them, that whole districts of the Realm go a year and more without seeing a white-collared coat, and that it was not always so.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Caemlyn

Capital · Andor

Capital of Andor and one of the great cities of the world, ruled from the Lion Throne by Queen Morgase. The Inner City, Ogier-built, rises in sweeping curves above the New City’s sprawl.

The Eye of the World · ch. 35 · Caemlyn

The city seethes — red for the Queen, white against her — over the false Dragon Logain, being brought through Caemlyn in a cage on his way to Tar Valon. Two Rivers boys on the run go quietly to ground at The Queen’s Blessing, under Basel Gill’s roof.

The Eye of the World · ch. 36 · Web of the Pattern

Loial, an Ogier out of Stedding Shangtai, tells what Caemlyn has forgotten: his people raised the Inner City after the Breaking, and the New City long ago swallowed the grove they planted.

The Eye of the World · ch. 44 · The Dark Along the Ways

Caemlyn’s Waygate stands yet, walled into a shop cellar in the New City where the Ogier grove once grew — a back door out of a watched city, for anyone desperate enough to use it.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 47 · To Race the Shadow

The Lion Throne has a new shadow on it. Riots flared at winter’s end while Morgase was away, and out of the west came a Lord Gaebril to put them down — now half the Queen’s Guards are his men, Captain-General Gareth Bryne rusts on a country estate, the city sleeps badly since he came, and the Queen hangs on his arm like a girl. From inside the Palace itself, orders go out that no queen of Andor would ever give.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Cairhien

Capital · Cairhien

Capital of the nation of the same name, on the banks of the Alguenya. A city of straight lines, hidden meanings, and the Game of Houses — Daes Dae’mar is played here the way other cities breathe. The Topless Towers, burned when the Aiel came twenty years ago, climb again on scaffolds; outside the square gray walls sprawls the Foregate, a raucous wooden warren of refugees, taverns and festival halls, kept fed by grain barges and quiet by the King’s Gift.

The Great Hunt · ch. 25 · Cairhien

The gate guards log “Lord Rand of House al’Thor, of Andor,” and the Game does the rest: sealed invitations from Houses he has never heard of, and watchers on every corner. In the Foregate’s din, a harp thought burned at Whitebridge is still playing — Thom Merrilin lives.

The Great Hunt · ch. 27 · The Shadow in the Night

East of the city the Illuminators’ Guild keeps a chapter house, its fireworks reserved for kings — until Trollocs chase Rand into the compound and a launch tube aimed level sets it ablaze. The Guild admits nothing, not even the fire.

The Great Hunt · ch. 38 · Practice

Grain fires put pillars of smoke over the granaries, the Foregate simmers, and before the first snow the rumor is everywhere: Galldrian Riatin is dead, and Cairhien has its war of succession. The Game of Houses plays on, with armies now.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 37 · Fires in Cairhien

By spring the war of succession has hollowed the country out. Along the Erinin the villages stand burned and empty with furniture strewn in the streets, smoke rises inland day after day, and brigands sink ships in the channel to loot what drifts ashore. The grain trade that fed the city is simply gone, and everyone who can walk is walking — toward the river, and Andor’s mercy.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Cairhien

Nation · capital Cairhien

East of the Erinin and hard against the Spine of the World, under a banner of a golden rising sun on deep blue. For four hundred years Cairhien alone held the right to cross the Aiel Waste and trade for Sharan silk, and grew rich enough on it to raise the topless towers of its capital.

That ended with a tree. The Aiel had given Cairhien a cutting of Avendesora, and Avendoraldera grew in the city for generations until King Laman had it cut down to make himself a throne. Four clans crossed the Dragonwall for him. They burned Cairhien on their way through, took Laman’s head, and went home — and the country has been eating itself over the succession ever since. Nowhere is the Great Game of Houses, Daes Dae’mar, played harder or with less mercy.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Carysford

Village · Andor

A neat, quiet village of vine-covered brick on the Caemlyn Road at the crossing of the River Cary, its ancient ford bridged these many centuries.

The Eye of the World · ch. 34 · The Last Village

Rand and Mat slipped through after dark, boots drumming on the bridge’s loose planks, and slept in a haystack beyond — one careful village at a time, with Caemlyn two days ahead and every inn on the road watching for them.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Chachin

Capital · Kandor

Capital of Kandor, a Borderland nation of merchants and soldiers in equal measure, on the hills below the Mountains of Dhoom.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Deven Ride

Village · Andor (the Two Rivers)

The southernmost of the Two Rivers villages, at the end of the Old Road — which is only the North Road under another name, south of Emond’s Field’s Wagon Bridge. Outsiders find it odd that one road wears two names; Two Rivers folk find it odd that anyone should care.

Close enough to Emond’s Field that its people take rooms at the Winespring Inn and court its girls, far enough that walking down to it counts as a journey.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Dorlan

Village · (Aes Sedai)

A village east of the Erinin, tucked below Eldone Market on the roads that feed Tar Valon from the south. Small enough that the maps give it a name and nothing else.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Dragonmount

Landmark · —

The broken, smoking mountain raised in the death-throes of Lews Therin Telamon, the Dragon, at the end of the Age of Legends. It looms over Tar Valon — a monument to saidin’s taint and to the man whose name is still used to frighten children.

The Eye of the World · ch. 14 · The Stag and Lion

In Rand’s first Ba’alzamon dream, the Father of Lies tells the mountain’s making almost fondly: Lews Therin Kinslayer, granted one clear moment to see what he had done, drew down enough of the One Power to make his own tomb.

The Great Hunt · ch. 8 · The Dragon Reborn

Moiraine finishes the story for the Amyrlin — and for Rand. The last battle of the Aiel War was fought below these slopes; Gitara Moroso Foretold at dawn that the Dragon had been born on the mountain; and a soldier of Illian named Tam al’Thor carried a newborn down from the snows where the boy’s mother died. The Karaethon Cycle said it would be so.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Dumai's Wells

Landmark · —

A cluster of wells on the road between Cairhien and Tar Valon — an unremarkable waypoint, until the day it became a battlefield whose name is spoken carefully ever after.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Ebou Dar

Capital · Altara

Capital of Altara, white-plastered and canal-cut, where every woman carries a marriage knife and duels are a courtesy. The throne holds little power beyond the city walls.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Eldone Market

Village · (Aes Sedai)

A market village on the far bank of the Erinin from Tar Valon, close enough to the island that the Shining Walls stand over it. One of the outlying settlements that live off the city’s trade and inside the Tower’s writ.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 11 · Tar Valon

The Children of the Light have started testing that writ. They moved on Eldone Market and the Tower’s guard put them straight back out again — the Amyrlin means it to stay that way. The outlying villages are harder: patrols ride in, the Whitecloaks withdraw, and the moment the patrol is gone they drift back. The guardsmen on the bridges read it as deliberate provocation.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Emond's Field

Village · Andor (the Two Rivers)

A quiet farming village in the Two Rivers, so far from Caemlyn that the Queen’s writ is a rumor. Its people are stubborn, close-mouthed, and prouder than they know. The Winespring Inn stands at its heart, and Bel Tine marks the end of every long winter.

The Eye of the World · ch. 7 · Out of the Woods

On Winternight, Trollocs put the village to the torch — the first such attack in the Two Rivers in living memory. Half the houses burned, and the lady Moiraine stood revealed as Aes Sedai, hurling fire at the attackers.

The Eye of the World · ch. 8 · A Place of Safety

The raid was no raid at all, Moiraine says: of all the farms in the district, only those of three boys born within weeks of one another were truly struck. The Shadow was hunting.

The Eye of the World · ch. 9 · Tellings of the Wheel

The village is older than it knows. It stands where King Aemon made Manetheren’s last stand, and “Emond’s Field” is “Aemon’s Field”, worn smooth by two thousand years of tongues.

The Eye of the World · ch. 47 · More Tales of the Wheel

In Fal Dara’s keep, Padan Fain confesses what the village never guessed: three years a hound of the Dark One, quartering the Two Rivers season after season, until the hunt narrowed to three boys of Emond’s Field.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Fal Dara

City · Shienar

A fortress city of Shienar, hard against the Blightborder below Tarwin’s Gap, held by Lord Agelmar of House Jagad. In the Borderlands every man goes armed, and no one may hide his face within the walls after dark.

The Eye of the World · ch. 42 · Remembrance of Dreams

Moiraine names what stood here before: Mafal Dadaranell, Ogier-built and razed stone from stone in the Trolloc Wars. Cities die; Waygates do not — and Fal Dara’s still stands.

The Eye of the World · ch. 46 · Fal Dara

The town is a war camp, packed with refugee farmers, every smith and fletcher readying the ride to Tarwin’s Gap. Padan Fain, caught scaling the wall, sits in the keep’s deepest cell.

The Great Hunt · ch. 6 · Dark Prophecy

With the Amyrlin Seat herself guesting in the keep, Trollocs walk Fal Dara by night — let in at the Dog Gate by a hand within the walls. The strongroom is looted of the Horn of Valere and a certain ruby dagger, Padan Fain’s cell stands open, and the dungeon wall carries a message in blood: a meeting promised on Toman Head.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Fal Moran

Capital · Shienar

Capital of Shienar, seat of King Easar. Like every Shienaran city it is a fortress first, for the Blight lies a hard ride north.

The Eye of the World · ch. 48 · The Blight

When the lances ride for Tarwin’s Gap, Fal Dara’s people stream south toward Fal Moran in hope that the capital, at least, can hold — while King Easar rides out from it with his sons to lead the Ingathering.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Falme

Town · (free towns)

Largest of the free towns of Toman Head, at the peninsula’s westernmost tip: cobbled streets sloping down a hollow between cliffs to a round harbor on the Aryth Ocean. From towers at the harbor mouth the Do Miere A’vron, the Watchers Over the Waves, have looked west for a thousand years, waiting for the armies Artur Hawkwing sent across the ocean to come home.

The Great Hunt · ch. 29 · Seanchan

The wait is over, and no one is glad. The Hailene — the Seanchan, Forerunners of the Return — hold Falme: a hundred great boxy ships ride the harbor, the First Watcher hangs caged on his own tower for watching for the wrong thing, and townsfolk bow to armored strangers whose leashed damane can crack a ship’s mast with a thought. High Lord Turak keeps the grandest house on the hill.

The Great Hunt · ch. 42 · Falme

On the heights above the harbor, five tall houses with their gardens knocked together serve as the damane quarters — kennels for leashed women who can channel. Egwene, collared and renamed Tuli, is held here.

The Great Hunt · ch. 47 · The Grave Is No Bar to My Call

Trapped between the Seanchan host and a Whitecloak legion, Mat sounds the Horn of Valere above the town, and the heroes of the Ages ride out of a fog that swallows Falme, Artur Hawkwing at their head — while over it all, mirrored in the sky for the whole peninsula to see, Rand duels Ba’alzamon.

The Great Hunt · ch. 48 · First Claiming

By sunset the harbor burns and the Seanchan run west over the Aryth Ocean with their collared prizes. Falme is left free and half-ruined, and what its people watched in the sky will be argued over from here to the Spine of the World.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Far Madding

City-State · —

An island city-state between Andor and Tear, run by the Council of Nine Sisters and closed tight to channeling: within its guardian’s reach, the One Power simply cannot be touched.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Field of Talidar

Region · (dead Hardan)

Here Artur Hawkwing broke the Trollocs in six days and nights of battle, his greatest victory. The spire he raised — a hundred spans of carved names — was torn down in the wars after his death, and only a long grassy mound is left.

The Great Hunt · ch. 16 · In the Mirror of Darkness

In a washed-out world of might-have-been, Rand, Loial and Hurin pass the spire’s dark twin: raven-crowned, cut with Trolloc script, raised over a hawk pierced by lightning. Somewhere, that other battle was lost.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Fingers of the Dragon

Region · Tear

The great delta of the Erinin below Tear, where the river splits into a maze of channels, reed banks, and shifting mud on its way to the Sea of Storms. Every ship trading upriver threads the Fingers, and Tear’s fishing fleet works its waters in all but the worst storms.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 49 · A Storm in Tear

The delta serves the High Lords as a punishment: offenders are sent in chains to dredge its silting channels, a sentence Tairens fear more than prison. And it keeps older secrets — a fisherman lately hauled up bowls and a cup of cuendillar in his nets, and half the fleet spent a season dragging for drowned treasure. Something from the Age of Legends lies under the mud.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Four Kings

Village · Andor

A hard-bitten wagoneers’ town where the highway carrying Lugard’s trade meets the Caemlyn Road — all taverns, mud, and teamsters, with no village green and none of the friendliness of the farming villages around it.

The Eye of the World · ch. 32 · Four Kings in Shadow

At The Dancing Cartman, the too-smooth Howal Gode cornered Rand and Mat as a storm broke; they escaped when lightning blew in the storeroom wall — a strange stroke of fortune, if fortune is the word.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Fyall

Village · Altara

A farming village where the Lugard road bends toward the Manetherendrelle, scratching thin harvests out of stony hill soil.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 33 · Within the Weave

Fyall’s crops failed — and Fyall doesn’t care. Digging a new midden pit, the Mayor’s men turned up rotted sacks of gold coin, enough to buy the village food for years. The coins show a woman’s face and an eagle no one recognizes: minted, though no one in Fyall knows it, in Manetheren, which was ash and legend two thousand years before Fyall laid its first stone.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Ghealdan

Nation · capital Jehannah

A small kingdom in the southwest, wedged between the Mountains of Mist, Amadicia and Altara, ruled from Jehannah. Its alum works are the reason the rest of the world remembers it is there — dyers from Tarabon to Tear buy Ghealdanin alum by the cartload.

It has the ill luck of lying where trouble goes. The country is small enough that one army on the move, from any direction, is a national crisis, and its crown has changed heads more often than any other in the Westlands.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Harad Dakar

Ruin · (dead Hardan)

Capital of Hardan, once, in the land between Shienar and Cairhien. The kingdom guttered out after the War of the Hundred Years, and three centuries of farmers’ wagons have carted the city away stone by stone — a gate frame and a scatter of rubble remember where it stood.

The Great Hunt · ch. 10 · The Hunt Begins

The Horn’s hunters ride south through Hardan’s bones on the thieves’ trail: ruined manors, walled villages built against brigands — and one village standing empty with supper still on the tables, a Myrddraal nailed alive to the meeting-hall doors.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Hawkwing's Statue

Landmark · Andor

North of the Caemlyn Road stands an abandoned stedding, and in it the toppled colossus of Artur Hawkwing — raised at the chosen center of his empire and pulled down in the wars that followed his death.

The Eye of the World · ch. 29 · Eyes Without Pity

Fleeing raven-swept country, Perrin and Egwene crossed the stedding’s border and felt it like a curtain drawn behind them: inside, the One Power cannot be touched and the Shadow’s creatures will not follow. They camped by the spring pool, beside the statue’s fallen, carved eye.

The Eye of the World · ch. 30 · Children of Shadow

The pool is the only water within a day’s ride — which is why a Whitecloak legion camped there too. Sheltering under the stone hand of Hawkwing’s statue, Perrin and Egwene were taken, and Hopper died coming to Perrin’s defense.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Illian

Capital · Illian

City of canals and perfume on the Sea of Storms, seat of King Mattin Stepaneos and the Council of Nine. Rising wall-less out of miles of salt marsh, its harbor guarded by a long breakwater, it is laced with as many canals as streets; in the vast Square of Tammaz the King’s Palace faces the Great Hall of the Council — an exact copy built two feet smaller in every measurement. Every few years Illian calls the Great Hunt of the Horn, and hunters swear the oath to seek the Horn of Valere.

The Great Hunt · ch. 9 · Leavetakings

The Hunt is sworn this season for the first time in four hundred years: Hunters, gleemen and Illuminators’ fireworks pack the city for the Feast of Teven. Bayle Domon does not stay to watch — a trail of dead crewmen and a letter that would hang him send the Spray west out of harbor by night, for coasts where nobody knows his name.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 44 · Hunted

Something has gone wrong in Illian since midwinter. A Lord Brend no one had heard of a year ago sits the Council of Nine and bends it like a reed; the whole city shares the same fogged dreams of him; the Nine have banned all sailing to or from Tear; and things that should not exist south of the Borderlands hunt the night streets — a Darkhound’s prints pressed into solid stone by an inn door. The truth is worse than the dreams: Brend is Sammael, one of the Forsaken, and Illian is his.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Illian

Nation · capital Illian

A merchant power on the north shore of the Sea of Storms, living on fishing, shipping, shipbuilding and a quantity of smuggling nobody troubles to count. The land runs from the marshes around the capital up into the Plains of Maredo, and the great oak forest men call the Shadow’s own timber yard supplies its shipwrights.

Power is split three ways — a King, the Council of Nine, and the Assemblage — and deadlocks between them are frequent enough that Illianers largely govern themselves and prosper doing it. The rivalry with Tear across the Plains of Maredo is a thousand years old and has never quite settled into peace.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Ionin Spring

Village · Altara

A village at a spring in the hills south of the Lugard road, off the main traffic; drovers moving stock between Altara’s grasslands and the road country know it, and few others do.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Jarra

Village · Ghealdan

A stone-and-slate village in southern Ghealdan, so close to the Amadicia border that Whitecloak patrols ride through as if no border existed. Houses climb a hillside above a small stream, and the one inn is Harilin’s Leap.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 8 · Jarra

The village is reeling from a week no one can explain: a two-day epidemic of weddings that left six flower-woven arches on the trampled green, and a Whitecloak troop that tore itself apart here — desertions, wild oaths, two men trying to burn the place as a nest of Darkfriends. The scorch marks behind the inn are still fresh. Something powerful passed through Jarra, and the Pattern bent around it.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Jehannah

Capital · Ghealdan

Capital of Ghealdan on the River Boern, seat of a throne that has proven uneasy in troubled times.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Jurene

Village · Cairhien

A small village of one-story wooden houses on the Cairhienin bank of the Erinin, with a single stone dock where river traders sometimes call.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 39 · Threads in the Pattern

The White Lion of Andor flies over Jurene on a tall staff: fifty Queen’s Guards hold the village as a haven funneling refugees out of Cairhien’s civil war. The stream of the desperate is thinning, the captain expects recall orders any day, and everyone knows what the brigands and the warring Houses will do with the place when the Guards row away.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Kandor

Nation · capital Chachin

The Borderland between Saldaea and Arafel, its capital set close under the northern border just south of the Plain of Lances — near enough the Blight that Chachin’s walls are not decoration.

Alone among the Borderlands, Kandor is known for trade rather than only for war. Kandori merchants carry goods the length of the Westlands and have a reputation for peculiar ideas about debt and repayment; they wear chains across the chest to show their standing, and Kandori men favor forked beards and a pearl in one ear.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Lugard

Capital · Murandy

Capital of Murandy, a dusty crossroads city of traders and smugglers. Murandy is a nation mostly in name, and Lugard’s loyalty is famously for sale.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Malkier

Nation · (fallen — taken by the Blight)

The seventh Borderland, and the one that is gone. Malkier held the ground north of Shienar and Arafel, hard against the Mountains of Dhoom, and was reckoned the fairest country in the north: a land of a thousand lakes, with the Seven Towers of Malkier standing over them and a king in the Golden Crane’s banner. Its people kept the hadori, the braided leather cord about the brow, and its women the ki’sain painted on the forehead, and they held the Blight back for as long as any nation has.

It fell in a single season, a lifetime ago, when treachery opened the way and the Blight came south over it. The lakes are drowned in it now and the Seven Towers are broken. What the map still calls Malkier is ground inside the Blight, and the only thing left uneaten is the name — carried by a handful of Malkieri born elsewhere, who by custom are not permitted to say their country is dead.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Manetheren

Ruin · (fallen nation)

Mountain home of a nation that died in the Trolloc Wars. When the Red Eagle banner fell, Manetheren was scoured from the world — but not, as Moiraine tells it, from the blood of the Two Rivers.

The Eye of the World · ch. 18 · The Caemlyn Road

Ambushed on the Caemlyn Road, Mat Cauthon shouted a warcry in a tongue he never learned — Carai an Caldazar! For the honor of the Red Eagle! — the cry of Manetheren’s last king. The old blood, Moiraine says, sings.

The Eye of the World · ch. 45 · What Follows in Shadow

Moiraine solves the riddle of Winternight: an Ogier grove stood at Manetheren, and a Waygate outlives its city. The Trollocs came to Emond’s Field through the Ways, under mountains no watcher ever saw them cross.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Maradon

Capital · Saldaea

Capital of Saldaea, northernmost of the Borderlands. Saldaean light cavalry is reckoned the finest in the world, and it needs to be.

The Eye of the World · ch. 20 · Dust on the Wind

River gossip from Bayle Domon, who wintered here: they say the Blight is visible from Maradon’s highest towers, and all winter Trollocs burned farms and came even to the city’s walls — while people whispered that the Dark One is stirring.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Marella

Village · Altara

The last village on the Lugard road before Remen, in the shadow of the bend where the road climbs to the Manetherendrelle’s bank. Remen-bound wagons water here rather than pay river-town prices.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Market Sheran

Village · Andor

A small village on the Caemlyn Road between Four Kings and Carysford.

The Eye of the World · ch. 33 · The Dark Waits

A too-friendly young Darkfriend named Paitr cornered Rand and Mat at breakfast here — and within a day the road buzzed with tales of Darkfriends in Market Sheran, twenty of them meeting in broad daylight, in the telling.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Mayene

City-State · —

A small city-state on the Sea of Storms east of Tear, kept independent by the skill of its Firsts and the secret of the oilfish shoals. The First of Mayene claims descent from Artur Hawkwing.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 56 · People of the Dragon

Independence hangs by a thread: Berelain, First of Mayene, has been a “guest” in the Stone of Tear since before winter — a hostage in all but name, made to bend her city-state’s neck to the High Lords. Mayene would sooner see its ships burn than submit, and it is submitting anyway.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Medo

Village · Shienar

A Shienaran river village on the upper Mora, hard against the Arafel border — two stone docks and a huddle of houses, the last landing before the river runs down to join the Erinin.

The Great Hunt · ch. 12 · Woven in the Pattern

The Amyrlin’s whole party crowds through by torchlight: cranes swinging warhorses aboard river ships, soldiers ferried out by boat, the River Queen waiting under the White Flame. Egwene and Nynaeve sail south on a wind that never falters — while Moiraine, Lan, Verin and Liandrin have each quietly vanished from the column, and the Amyrlin’s fury could strike sparks.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Murandy

Nation · capital Lugard

Landlocked and hemmed in on every side — Andor north, Ghealdan northwest, Altara southwest, Illian south, and beyond the Cary the Hills of Kintara, which belong to nobody. A nation on the map more than on the ground: Murandians give their allegiance to a town or a local lord, and a King in Lugard has little say past his own walls. They close ranks readily enough when a neighbor comes over the border, and squabble again the moment it leaves.

Lugard sits on a crossroads, which is the whole of its fortune. Trade moves through it whatever the politics, and the city has more inns and stables than houses and shops. Its wall has been left to crumble, and its thieves count any foreigner fair game.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Remen

Town · Altara

An Altaran river town where the Lugard Road meets the Manetherendrelle. The river runs better than half a mile wide here with no bridge; oared ferries and river traders work the long stone docks, and gray warehouses screen the water from streets of yellow, red, and purple tile roofs.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 34 · A Different Dance

Remen has hosted Ogier before — Wayland’s Forge keeps a sung-wood bed a thousand years old in honor of it — but nothing like this spring: Hunters of the Horn holding court in the common room, an Aiel warrior displayed in an iron cage over the square, and Whitecloaks combing the countryside. Then one night the cage hangs empty, a dozen Whitecloaks lie dead on the stones, and the town tells the story a different way by every telling.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Saldaea

Nation · capital Maradon

The westernmost of the four Borderlands and the largest — bigger than Shienar and Arafel together — running from the Aryth Ocean east to Kandor with the Blight along its whole northern edge. At its far western end the land simply stops: World’s End, a sheer cliff over the ocean, with ice peppers growing on the fields behind it.

Saldaeans are horse soldiers before they are anything else, and their light cavalry is reckoned the best in the world. The country is known too for its women, who are expected to have as much fire as the men and generally have more.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Samaha

Village · Altara

A small village on the Lugard road in Altara’s northwest corner, watering road traffic between the Eldar country and Remen.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 33 · Within the Weave

Every well in Samaha went dry in a single night — not low, dry, as if the water had simply decided to leave. The village hauls barrels from a stream two miles off and argues about the cause: bad digging, say some; the Dark One walked through, say others, and fewer laugh at them than would have a year ago.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Shadar Logoth

Ruin · (dead city)

A ruined city on the River Arinelle, shunned by Trolloc and human alike. Once it was called Aridhol, an ally of Manetheren in the Trolloc Wars.

The Eye of the World · ch. 19 · Shadow's Waiting

Aridhol devoured itself from within: the suspicion and hatred it turned against the Shadow became a thing called Mashadar, a mist that kills. “Where is Shadar Logoth” — Where the Shadow Waits. Nothing here may be touched, least of all by Mordeth’s treasure.

The Eye of the World · ch. 20 · Dust on the Wind

Trollocs driven inside the walls learned why their kind fears this place: Mashadar walked, and a tendril of glowing fog devoured Trollocs and Myrddraal alike.

The Eye of the World · ch. 41 · Old Friends and New Threats

A piece of the city is loose in the world: a ruby-hilted dagger from Mordeth’s hoard, carried off in Mat’s keeping. Moiraine names it a seed of Mashadar — the hunger that once swallowed a whole invading army, now killing its bearer by inches and calling to every Halfman within miles.

The Great Hunt · ch. 49 · What Was Meant to Be

The ruins made a second thing and let it go: Padan Fain, the Darkfriend the Dark One touched, and the hunger that was Mordeth, fused here into a single creature — more dangerous than either half, and loose in the world with a grudge.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Shayol Ghul

Landmark · —

A mountain in the Blasted Lands, past the far side of the Great Blight, and the one place every child in every land can name without ever having seen a map: the site of the Dark One’s prison, sealed by the Creator when the world was made. The catechism against the dark is recited by rote from the Two Rivers to the Aiel Waste, and it names this mountain.

The Eye of the World · ch. 8 · A Place of Safety

A fog-bound valley called Thakan’dar lies under its slopes, and the forges there are where Trolloc steel is beaten out. Some of what comes off those anvils picks up a taint from the ground it was made on: a wound from such a blade will not close on its own, and what kills the victim in the end is rarely the cut.

The Eye of the World · ch. 50 · Meetings at the Eye

The seals are failing. Moiraine puts it plainly to the Lord of Fal Dara — they weaken desperately, and there is no time left to be careful with. Then two of the Forsaken walk out of the Blight in the flesh and say it themselves: they were bound here once, and some of them are bound no longer.

The Great Hunt · ch. 26 · Discord

The Prophecies of the Dragon end at this mountain. Red on black, they say, the Dragon’s blood will stain its rock, and in the Pit of Doom that blood will buy mankind out from under the Shadow. Thom recites it the way gleemen recite anything — as a verse he cannot make scan — and it lands on Rand like a stone.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 56 · People of the Dragon

Falme changed nothing here. The man who wore the name Ba’alzamon is dead, but he was never the Dark One, and what is imprisoned under this mountain is untouched by his dying. The Shadow still lies across the Pattern.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Shienar

Nation · capital Fal Moran

The easternmost of the Borderlands, holding the ground between Arafel and the Spine of the World — and holding Tarwin’s Gap, the pass through the Mountains of Dhoom by which the Blight comes south. Fal Dara sits square in front of it, and the fortress towns behind fall back on one another in depth, built so that a place overrun still costs an army something.

Shienaran soldiers shave the front of the scalp and bind the rest in a topknot, and are raised to a code that treats the watch on the Blight as the only inheritance worth having. Aes Sedai are honored here as they are nowhere in the south.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Shol Arbela

Capital · Arafel

Capital of Arafel, the City of Ten Thousand Bells. Arafellin ride with silver bells in their braids — so the Shadow hears them coming.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Sidon

Village · Ghealdan

A mill village on the River Boern below Jehannah, downstream of the stone bridge that carries the eastward road over the river’s cliff-walled gorge.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 33 · Within the Weave

Sidon is ash. A lamp dropped in a barn, they say, and then a hayloft, and then a dozen small misfortunes stacking one on the next until nothing with a roof was left standing. No one died, which the villagers call the Light’s mercy — but ill luck that thorough has a shape, and it walked through here heading east.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Stedding Shangtai

Stedding · (Spine of the World)

A stedding high in the Spine of the World, cool under the peaks even in high summer. Its border announces itself the way every stedding’s does — one step, and the One Power is simply not there to be reached — and inside it the word of the Elders is the only law. Great Trees stand over the Ogier mounds, and what tree-singers are left sing to them.

The Eye of the World · ch. 42 · Remembrance of Dreams

Humans reach it rarely, and Tuatha’an oftener than most, coming to learn the songs sung to trees in the hope one of them is the song they are looking for. Twenty years ago, with the Aiel War driving refugees up into the mountains, a man was carried in dying without a wound on him and mended for no better reason than being inside the border. He left one moonless night without a word, carrying to Tar Valon a tale the Elders judged the sound word of a sound man: that the Dark One means to blind the Eye of the World and kill time itself.

The Eye of the World · ch. 45 · What Follows in Shadow

A Waygate stands outside its border, as one stands outside every stedding, and the Guidings in the Ways still carry directions to it. No Ogier has come home that road in a hundred years.

The Great Hunt · ch. 10 · The Hunt Begins

Aiel walk in out of the Waste now and again to trade for sung wood. The stedding keeps books as well as trees, and old ones: a map of Mafal Dadaranell, razed in the Trolloc Wars and not rebuilt since, can still be found on its shelves.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Stedding Tsofu

Stedding · Cairhien

A stedding in the forested flats south-east of Cairhien, lost in the Breaking and found again a bare six hundred years ago. Its border is a chill you feel and cannot mark; within, the One Power cannot be touched, and Great Trees stand a hundred paces tall over the Ogier mounds.

The Great Hunt · ch. 35 · Stedding Tsofu

The Horn’s hunters ride in and the armed men are politely asked to wait Outside. Three Maidens of the Spear are in the stedding trading for sung wood, veiling at the sight of Shienaran lances until the Pact is invoked — and eyeing Rand with something between hunger and offense: “He is wearing a sword.” Loial, for his part, fears the Elders more than the Trollocs behind him.

The Great Hunt · ch. 36 · Among the Elders

The Elders show the party why no one has entered the Ways in a hundred years: Trayal, an Ogier the Black Wind left breathing and empty. They grant the Waygate outside the stedding anyway, for the Horn’s sake — and Machin Shin is pressed against the opening, waiting, here as it waited at Cairhien. Verin begins to wonder what, exactly, it follows.

The Great Hunt · ch. 37 · What Might Be

By Alar’s leave the party gathers instead around a Portal Stone standing in the forest nearby. Rand channels — the world flickers through a hundred lives that might have been, every one ending the same way — and they are on Toman Head with autumn wind in their faces, four months gone from the Pattern in a single step.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Tallan

Village · Altara

A road village a few miles east of Samaha, close enough that the two share a market day and a long-standing rivalry over whose inn brews better.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 33 · Within the Weave

In one day, every grudge in Tallan came up out of the ground at once — boundary stones moved decades ago, dowries never paid, words said at someone’s wedding. By nightfall three people were dead and half the village was not speaking to the other half. No one can say what set it off; only that the day before, everything had seemed ordinary.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Tanchico

Capital · Tarabon

Capital of Tarabon on the Aryth Ocean, a city of veils on three peninsulas, ruled — in theory — by King and Panarch together.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Tar Valon

City-State · (Aes Sedai)

The island city of the Aes Sedai, Ogier-built and unconquered, on the Erinin in the shadow of Dragonmount. The White Tower at its heart has steered thrones for three thousand years, and the Amyrlin Seat rules from it.

The Eye of the World · ch. 29 · Eyes Without Pity

Elyas tells it plain beneath Hawkwing’s broken statue: the High King besieged Tar Valon for twenty years and priced every Aes Sedai head at a thousand gold crowns — and the city never fell.

The Great Hunt · ch. 23 · The Testing

The River Queen brings the Amyrlin home, and two Two Rivers women step onto the long wharf — one bound for novice white in a Tower grown strangely empty, the other for the silver arches deep beneath it: a ter’angreal that gives back what you fear, and makes Accepted of those who walk through all three.

The Great Hunt · ch. 39 · Flight from the White Tower

Outside Tarlomen’s Gate the city’s Ogier grove runs down to the river, and hidden in it stands a spike-fenced Waygate. At dusk Liandrin of the Red leads four young women through it into the dark, telling no one.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 26 · Behind a Lock

The unconquered city learns fear from within: thirteen sisters have fled in a night with murders behind them and the pick of the Tower’s ter’angreal storerooms in their baggage, a Gray Man walks Tower galleries for the first time since the Trolloc Wars, and Whitecloaks prowl every village within ten miles of the bridges. The library — pale stone shaped like waves frozen mid-crash, the greatest hoard of books in the world — keeps the thieves' leavings in a chained basement room.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Tarabon

Nation · capital Tanchico

The far west coast, between the Mountains of Mist and the Aryth Ocean, with its capital built over three peninsulas at the mouth of the Andahar. Rugs, dyes and carved work go out of Tanchico to every port that will have them.

Tarabon is ruled by two at once — a King and a Panarch, each holding a share of the authority the other lacks, an arrangement set at the founding and kept ever since. Taraboners hold themselves the oldest blood in the world and call themselves the Tree of Man; men and women both go veiled to the eyes, and wear their hair in long braids.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Taren Ferry

Village · Andor (the Two Rivers)

The northernmost of the Two Rivers villages and the only way across the River Taren. Its folk have a reputation among other Two Rivers people for slyness — they deal with outsiders, after all. Its houses stand on high redstone foundations against the Taren’s spring floods.

The Eye of the World · ch. 12 · Across the Taren

Master Hightower’s ferry carried the party over in a fog no weather made — and broke apart behind them in a whirlpool where no whirlpool had ever been, leaving the hunters a river with no crossing.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Tarwin's Gap

Landmark · Shienar

The pass through the Mountains of Dhoom where the Blight funnels down into Shienar. When the Trolloc hordes come south, they come through the Gap, and the lances of Shienar ride to meet them.

The Eye of the World · ch. 46 · Fal Dara

The lances gather: every fortress of Shienar empties toward the Gap to meet the Trolloc host massing in the Blight — outnumbered ten to one, with no help coming. Perhaps, Agelmar says, the last Ingathering of the Lances.

The Eye of the World · ch. 51 · Against the Shadow

Agelmar rode into the Gap expecting to die well. Instead lightning fell on the Draghkar, wind-driven fire broke the horde, and the earth itself swallowed Trollocs by the thousand — and at the heart of it, drawing more of the One Power than any man since the Breaking, stood a shepherd from the Two Rivers.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Tear

Capital · Tear

Great port at the mouth of the Erinin, ruled by the High Lords from the Stone of Tear — a fortress said to be the first ever built, raised by the One Power, and never fallen. Within it lies Callandor, the Sword That Is Not a Sword, which no hand but the Dragon Reborn’s may touch. Channeling is outlawed in Tear, and Aes Sedai are barely tolerated. Paving ends at the city wall: the dockside Maule and the farmers’ Tavar outside it make do with mud and clogs.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 49 · A Storm in Tear

A hard season has knocked the swagger out of the city: the grain trade up the Erinin died with Cairhien’s civil war, war talk with Illian fills the inns, and the whole town sleeps badly — the same sour dreams, night after night, that no Wise Woman’s herbs can touch. In the Maule they will tell you plainly that mudfish don’t school with silversides, and that the Defenders serve the silversides.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 56 · People of the Dragon

Tear wakes to a changed world: the Stone taken in a night, a banner out of prophecy streaming from its highest tower, and the streets full of weeping, chanting crowds who all dreamed the same battle. The city of the High Lords — where owning the Prophecies of the Dragon was a prison offense — is now the seat of the Dragon Reborn.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Tear

Nation · capital Tear

The richest land in the world, and it holds the reason for it at the mouth of the Erinin: the greatest port on the Sea of Storms, where the grain of the Plains of Maredo and the olive oil of a thousand Tairen farms go out and the world’s coin comes in. Fish, spices and the Fingers of the Dragon delta fill in the rest.

No king sits in Tear. The High Lords rule together, jealously, and one of the things they are jealous of is the One Power — channeling is outlawed within the nation’s borders, and Aes Sedai are unwelcome in a city built around the Stone.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

The Aiel Waste

Region · (the Aiel)

The harsh land east of the Spine of the World, called the Three-fold Land by the Aiel who live there. No outlander crosses it freely save peddlers, gleemen, and the Tuatha’an — and Cairhien learned in blood what breaking a promise to the Aiel costs.

The Eye of the World · ch. 25 · The Traveling People

Trollocs name the Waste Djevik K’Shar, the Dying Ground, and will not enter it — yet Raen’s Tinkers tell of Trollocs hunting a party of Maidens of the Spear a hundred miles into it, and of a dying Maiden’s last message about the Eye of the World.

The Great Hunt · ch. 28 · A New Thread in the Pattern

An Aiel far west of the Three-fold Land: Urien of the Reyn, a Red Shield, searching Kinslayer’s Dagger as others of his kind search elsewhere — for He Who Comes With the Dawn, a marked man of Aiel blood born west of the Spine, who will go to Rhuidean and lead them out of the Waste. He names Verin “Wise One,” and leaves as quietly as he came.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 56 · People of the Dragon

The Waste’s oldest secrets crack open with the Stone of Tear. The Aiel say they once served the Aes Sedai and failed them, and dread destruction if they fail again; their prophecy holds that when the Stone falls they will leave the Three-fold Land at last, changed, to recover what was theirs. And in Rhuidean, in the lands of the Jenn Aiel — the clan that is not — those who survive the choosing come back marked on the forearm with a four-clawed serpentine creature: the same one on the Dragon banner. They are the People of the Dragon, and always have been.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

The Black Tower

Landmark · Andor

A farm outside Caemlyn that became something the world had not seen in three thousand years: a place where men who can channel are gathered and taught rather than hunted.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

The Blight

Region · —

The corrupted land north of the Borderlands, where everything that grows is twisted and everything that moves may kill. It creeps a little further south in bad years, and only the Borderland armies stand against what comes out of it.

The Eye of the World · ch. 48 · The Blight

Past the borderpost the air turns hot and rotten-sweet, and the fringe of the Blight is dead Malkier: a necklace of a hundred lakes around the broken Seven Towers, and things stirring in the water that were never fish.

The Eye of the World · ch. 49 · The Dark One Stirs

The true Blight fights back — trees that seize, flowers that kill, and Worms hunting in packs that even Fades avoid. Running ahead of a Wormpack, the party crossed one hillcrest too many and rode into a place of perfect spring that could not be there: the Green Man’s garden.

The Eye of the World · ch. 53 · The Wheel Turns

After the Eye, the Blight lies stunned: nothing hunts, the sun hangs less red, and new growth crowds the corruption. Moiraine calls it a reprieve, not a victory — the forges of Thakan’dar still burn below Shayol Ghul.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

The Caemlyn Waygate

Waygate · Andor

The Ogier who raised the Inner City planted a grove beside it, and the New City grew out over the grove until nothing of it was left but the wall it was entered by. That wall stands in a shop cellar now, unused long enough for the lock to rust through: worked stone pale under the dust, leaves and vines cut into it, older than the brick laid around it and older again in the panel at its middle. Behind the panel lie the Ways, which the Elders forbid to Ogier and human alike.

The Eye of the World · ch. 44 · The Dark Along the Ways

The carving is its own key. One trefoil leaf of Avendesora lifts out of the stonework and sets back into the pattern a handspan lower, and then the leaves seem to stir in a wind nobody feels and the two halves swing inward on a dull silver shimmer. What stands behind them is not the next cellar along.

The Eye of the World · ch. 45 · What Follows in Shadow

No Ogier has walked out of here in a hundred years, and now there is a name for why: Machin Shin, the Black Wind, loose in the dark beyond the gate. Caemlyn keeps a back door out of a watched city, and it opens on a road that has been rotting since the War of the Hundred Years.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

The Eye of the World

Landmark · (the Blight)

A place of the Age of Legends hidden in the Blight, guarded by the Green Man, that is found only by those who need to find it — and rarely twice.

The Eye of the World · ch. 25 · The Traveling People

Around a Tinker fire, an old warning resurfaces: years ago in the Waste, a dying Maiden of the Spear spent her last breath on a message — Leafblighter means to blind the Eye of the World.

The Eye of the World · ch. 46 · Fal Dara

Moiraine has stood before it once, and says the way cannot be taught: the Eye is found only by those who need it, when the Green Man wills, and almost no one finds it twice.

The Eye of the World · ch. 50 · Meetings at the Eye

Beneath the Green Man’s garden, behind an arch bearing the ancient symbol of the Aes Sedai, lies an eye-shaped pool: saidin made pure by a hundred male and female Aes Sedai working together, at the cost of every life among them. Two of the Forsaken, loosed by the weakening of the seals, came for it — and the Green Man, faithful for three thousand years, destroyed Balthamel and died of his burns. An oak stands over his grave.

The Eye of the World · ch. 52 · There Is Neither Beginning Nor End

The pool is spent, and the Eye gives up what it truly guarded: the Horn of Valere, a shattered cuendillar seal from the Dark One’s prison, and the ancient banner of Lews Therin Telamon, the Dragon.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

The Fallen Stone in Kinslayer's Dagger

Portal-Stone

A Portal Stone lying against the mountainside high in Kinslayer’s Dagger, half buried in the loose rock of an old fall, its symbols worked past reading by wind and water. The hollow around it is littered with pieces of stone too smooth and too brightly coloured — reds and blues — to have come off these mountains.

The Great Hunt · ch. 17 · Choices

Those pieces were stairs once. Standing in the same hollow in a world laid over this one, the stairs are whole, seven of them and wide, around a pale floor with the column upright in the middle of it — and a man who can channel and cannot say how he does it can bring four people and every horse across from the one to the other. It is a hundred leagues from the hollow above Oak Water where that crossing began, and it took under two days.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

The New Braem Waygate

Waygate · Andor

A Waygate on the open hillside north-east of Caemlyn, below New Braem, with no grove standing around it and no stedding for it to stand outside of. Waygates outlast whatever they were grown to serve; the town and the wood that carry the name Braem are the only reminder left that anything here was worth an Ogier planting.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

The Oak Water Stone

Portal-Stone

A worked column half swallowed by the ground, in a hollow in the hills south of Oak Water and the Shienaran border. Weather has taken most of what was cut into it; what is left reads as markings rather than ornament, and an Ogier tracing them with a pipestem will find them familiar without being able to say from where. Nothing else stands nearby. It is unremarkable enough that a company of lancers can bed down against it without looking twice.

The Great Hunt · ch. 13 · From Stone to Stone

It still works, and it does not need to be understood to work. Two men, an Ogier and their horses sleep beside it and wake in country with the same hills and the same rivers under a duller sun, empty of every road and every roof that should be there. The markings are not ornament: they are destinations.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

The Seven Towers

Ruin · Malkier (fallen)

Seven towers stood over the heartland of Malkier, and the kings of that nation were raised to the throne beneath them. What stands now is seven broken stumps on a hill north of Shienar, and the Blight comes a little nearer every year.

The Eye of the World · ch. 47 · More Tales of the Wheel

Malkier did not so much fall to the Blight as open the door to it. Envy in the royal house, and a Great Lord loved second only to the King who had given himself to the Shadow, drew the lances back off the Borderforts to take the Seven Towers — and the Trollocs came through the emptied line like a flood. Al’Akir and el’Leanna rode out to die at Herat’s Crossing, and the towers came down behind them. Fifty years on, the Blight has eaten most of what they held, mile by mile.

The Eye of the World · ch. 48 · The Blight

From the Blight they hardly read as towers at all: jagged tops ringed by a necklace of dark lakes, mistakable for hills until a low sun catches the shattered crowns and holds them for the length of a breath. Nothing about the site invites a camp. Something rolls under the lake water at dusk, long enough to send ripples across the whole of it.

The Eye of the World · ch. 53 · The Wheel Turns

Coming south past the lakes after the Eye, the towers look wrong — taller than they were, the broken tops further off the ground, and above them at the very edge of sight something seamless and whole, flying Golden Cranes. They will not quite vanish when you stare at them.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

The Stone of Tear

Landmark · Tear

The oldest fortress in the world, raised by the One Power in the years after the Breaking: a man-made mountain of seamless rock rising from the Erinin’s bank through Tear’s wall, besieged a hundred times and never taken. Prophecy says it will stand until the People of the Dragon come, and within its Heart hangs Callandor, the Sword That Cannot Be Touched.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 29 · A Trap to Spring

Callandor is more than a symbol: a sa’angreal, with only two more powerful things ever made — and the High Lords, who outlaw channeling and ship every girl with the spark to Tar Valon within a day, guard it with a hoard of ter’angreal nearly the Tower’s equal, as if enough captive power could smother the thing they cannot move. Four times a year they walk the Heart in the Rite of the Guarding, in a fortress built of the very Power they hate.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 56 · People of the Dragon

The Stone has fallen. In a single night a few hundred veiled Aiel came over walls no army ever passed, the Sword That Cannot Be Touched left the Heart in the hand of a shepherd from the Two Rivers, and dawn raised a banner over the fortress that has not flown since the Breaking. The Defenders’ invincibility died with the age that believed it; prophecy walks the corridors now.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

The Toman Head Stone

Portal-Stone

A fallen Portal Stone in the hills above Atuan’s Mill, rounded by weather and lying where it came down, with the road west to the Aryth Ocean below it. Of the thousands of leagues between here and the Spine of the World, this Stone and the ones out east are the same age and the same work, and nobody on Toman Head has any use for either.

The Great Hunt · ch. 37 · What Might Be

It is one of three Stones whose symbol Verin Sedai can read — two wavy lines crossed by a squiggle, cut low on the column outside Stedding Tsofu — and the only one of the three she has ever stood at, having crossed the Mountains of Mist ahead of the snows and frozen her way over Almoth Plain to learn precisely nothing from it. The Horn’s hunters come out of one step at its foot, a season’s ride from where they started and four months late.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

The Traveling People's Camp

Landmark · (the Tuatha'an)

Bright wagons drawn up in a ring in the southern Caralain Grass, where a band of the Tuatha’an has halted on its endless road. The Traveling People follow the Way of the Leaf — no violence, whatever the cost — and have searched three thousand years for a song lost in the Breaking.

The Eye of the World · ch. 25 · The Traveling People

Raen’s band takes in Perrin, Egwene, and Elyas, mastiffs and all courtesy. Around the fire the Mahdi tells of a dying Maiden of the Spear met in the Waste, and the message she gave to people she despised; Aram courts Egwene through every dance; the wolves will not come near the wagons.

The Eye of the World · ch. 27 · Shelter From the Storm

The farewell is spoken in full ceremony, guest to Seeker, and Elyas’s ritual answer about the song startles even Raen. Reading wrongness in the sky, he turns his wagons east toward the Spine of the World — while his guests strike south, hard, for the Caemlyn Road.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

The Tsofu Portal Stone

Portal-Stone · Cairhien

A grey column standing upright in the forest a short ride outside Stedding Tsofu, under a beech a hundred feet tall and four paces through. It is weathered, but what is carved on it is still plain to read: one set of symbols down the top half, another down the bottom. Nothing marks it off — no coping, no wall, no path — and the leaf mulch is left to lie where it falls.

The Great Hunt · ch. 36 · Among the Elders

The Eldest of Tsofu names it, and says what everyone in the stedding takes for settled: the Portal Stones have not been worked since the Age of Legends, and no Ogier believed anyone alive still knew how. The nearest other Stone an Aes Sedai can name is in the Aiel Waste, unless you count the fallen one back in Kinslayer’s Dagger.

The Great Hunt · ch. 37 · What Might Be

The symbols along the top stand for worlds — not all of them, since not every Stone touches every world — and those along the bottom for other Stones, in this world and in the others. A Stone never carries the symbol of the world it stands in. Working one takes more of the Power than an Aes Sedai would survive channelling, and the cost is not paid in distance: a party steps off this mulch, walks a hundred lives that might have been, and arrives on Toman Head with four months of the world gone by behind them.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

The Two Rivers

Region · Andor (nominally)

The district between the Taren and the White River, west of the Waterwood: Emond’s Field, Watch Hill, Deven Ride, and Taren Ferry. Famous for exactly two exports — fine wool and Two Rivers tabac — and for being impossible to govern.

The Eye of the World · ch. 9 · Tellings of the Wheel

Moiraine names the truth of it: the Two Rivers is all that remains of Manetheren, and the old blood of that fallen nation runs deep in its stubborn people.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Tifan's Well

Village · Arafel

A farming hamlet deep in Arafel’s grassy plains — wells, barley, and nothing that would ever draw a second look.

The Great Hunt · ch. 22 · Watchers

Which is precisely why Moiraine chose it. Two elderly sisters, Adeleas and Vandene, keep a book-filled house at the village edge, forgotten even by the White Tower; Moiraine and Lan arrive unannounced to dig through their library — the Horn, the Watchers Over the Waves, dark prophecy. A Draghkar finds the garden anyway, warded so nothing sensed it coming, and Moiraine draws the only conclusion: someone of the Black Ajah told it where to hunt. She and Lan saddle their horses the same night.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Toman Head

Region · (free towns)

The long headland running west into the Aryth Ocean between Arad Doman and Tarabon, dotted with small towns that hold themselves free of any nation. Both neighbors claim it; neither has made the claim stick in three hundred years of squabbling over the peninsula and Almoth Plain behind it.

The Great Hunt · In the Shadow (prologue)

In a chamber that could be anywhere, a hundred masked Darkfriends receive their orders — and among the secrets kept even from most of them: someone has landed on Toman Head.

The Great Hunt · ch. 29 · Seanchan

The Seanchan work the coast town by town: everyone swears the oaths — to obey, to await, to serve — young women are lined up and tested, and any who can be taught to channel are collared and taken. Then the ships sail on, leaving sworn mayors and watched councils behind. Only Falme is held for good.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Tower of Ghenjei

Landmark · (unclaimed)

A spire of gleaming steel rising two hundred feet over the Arinelle — big around as a house, without a mark on it, and never an opening to be found. Untold years of rain have left no rust. River traders steer by the glint: sighting the tower means ten slow days upriver of Whitebridge, and no boat puts in here.

What it is, who raised it, or how anything gets inside, no captain on the river will guess aloud. Only the chart-makers offer a name.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Tremonsien

Village · Cairhien

A Cairhienin hill village below Kinslayer’s Dagger, its terraced fields and arrow-straight streets cut square out of the slope, as if the hill had been measured before it was allowed to exist. The Nine Rings is the inn.

The Great Hunt · ch. 20 · Saidin

Rand, Loial, Hurin and the Lady Selene ride down off the mountains past the diggings outside the village: five hundred laborers uncovering a colossus — a stone hand at the bottom of a hundred-foot pit, holding a crystal sphere twenty paces through, and a bearded face the size of a house. When Rand looks too long, something in the sphere looks back.

The Great Hunt · ch. 21 · The Nine Rings

Captain Caldevwin, over wine at The Nine Rings, calls the statue a relic of the Age of Legends: King Galldrian means to haul it whole to Cairhien for a monument. Loial doubts every Ogier alive could move it. In the morning the party rides south under a fifty-lance “honor” escort — and Selene is gone in the night, leaving a note under a crescent-moon seal.

The Great Hunt · ch. 31 · On the Scent

Verin is blunter than the captain: the statue is the male half of the two greatest sa’angreal ever made, its female twin buried on Tremalking, and together they could crack the world like an egg. Digging it up is merely foolish — no one alive could use it, and Light send it stays that way.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Watch Hill

Village · Andor (the Two Rivers)

The Two Rivers village north of Emond’s Field on the North Road, its houses clustered on a prominent hill overlooking the surrounding farms.

The Eye of the World · ch. 11 · The Road to Taren Ferry

The fleeing party galloped past in the dark and Watch Hill never knew: its windows still glowed with Bel Tine dancing, untouched by any Trolloc, and only the Draghkar’s shriek overhead stilled the fiddles — for a single beat.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Whitebridge

Town · Andor

Andor’s great river town, named for the impossible bridge that crosses the Arinelle in a single white span — glassy, harder than steel, older than any record. Every riverboat headed downstream puts in here.

The Eye of the World · ch. 26 · Whitebridge

A Myrddraal was waiting for the Spray’s passengers. Thom Merrilin threw himself at it so Rand and Mat could run, and they last saw him vanishing beneath it.

The Eye of the World · ch. 28 · Footprints in Air

Days behind, Moiraine, Lan, and Nynaeve found the bridge square half-burned and the town lying to itself about why — a spilled lamp, bandits, anything but the truth. Two of the boys, her tokens told her, left afraid but alive.

The Eye of the World · ch. 45 · What Follows in Shadow

A thin hope from Moiraine: Whitebridge talks of everything, and it does not talk of a gleeman’s death. Thom Merrilin may yet be alive.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.

Willar

Village · Ghealdan

A village in the hill country under Garen’s Wall, on the road that runs from Jehannah down to Remen. Willar lives and dies by its spring — the only sweet water for a day’s ride.

The Dragon Reborn · ch. 33 · Within the Weave

For a year the spring gave nothing, and Willar was quietly emptying out — families loading wagons, fields going to weeds. Then one morning this spring it simply flowed again, clear and strong as anyone can remember, and the village has been celebrating ever since. The old folk mutter that luck like that doesn’t come from nowhere; the young ones are too busy dancing to care.

Read on — more about this place is revealed in later chapters.