The reality of the Empire's conditioning was not a simple knot that could be sliced with a blade. It was a poison that had seeped into the marrow, a psychological rot that demanded a slow, agonizing purge.
When Aran first asked her to embrace the Source, Runa did not tentatively reach for the Power. She violently recoiled, scrambling backwards until her spine hit the earthen wall of the dugout. Her breathing turned shallow and frantic, her eyes wide, staring at a phantom sul'dam only she could see. She babbled apologies to the dead, her hands clawing at her own throat where the silver collar used to rest.
Aran sat back, his crystalline eyes absorbing the horrific depth of her psychological mutilation. She truly believed she was less than human—a rabid dog that deserved to be chained, terrified of her own teeth.
Aran sighed.
"Very well," Aran said quietly, withdrawing his hand. "We will not rush."
He understood then that returning to her free life - without her leash would be impossible. Most likely she would be leashed again. Even if she is taught to mask her ability from the other damane, it wouldn't save her if a sul'dam simply slapped an a'dam on her neck to physically check.
The Empire tested every woman they could lay hands on who was of age or even in the chance of suspicion.
If she could not survive as a girl, the girl had to die.
Aran went back to Vaelen to buy provisions and exchange raw scavenged materials for Imperial currency. Riding into Vaelen atop Vani, he played the part of a reclusive, eccentric scholar and warrior of open familiarity. He met with the village elders in the smoke-filled common room of the inn, sliding a heavy gold mark across the scarred wooden table. The coin—minted in an era they could not comprehend, taken as a nugget of gold—made the men's eyes bulge. It was more than enough to secure the unquestioned, long-term use of an abandoned logger's cabin high on the forested, jagged ridges overlooking the valley.
Over the next weeks, he made frequent, casual trips down into the village to trade for provisions, establishing his cover, mixing with locals while preparing his sanctuary.
During one of these trips, he purchased a bundle of rough-spun garments from a local weaver. When he returned to their secluded cabin, the wind howling through the chinks in the timber, he dropped the bundle at Damane's feet. Out tumbled a pair of thick, mud-brown canvas trousers, an oversized wool tunic, and heavy leather boots. He set a rusted shearing knife on top of the pile.
"I know the Empire has taught you that women who can channel need to be collared, child," Aran stated, his voice devoid of pity but absolute in its certainty. "They lied. It is the gift of the Creator, given to help the world, to serve it with your own heart and mind. But to do that, you need to venture into the world alive. If they see a girl, they test you. If they test you, you burn in fire of slavery. Therefore, you will become a boy, and you will learn how to hide your spark. To do that, you need control."
Damane stared at the clothes. A strange, bitter laugh scraped its way out of her throat—the first real sound of defiance she had made since he freed her and she has tried to run to find a suldam. "They aren't stupid, my lord. If they catch me in these, they won't just collar me. They will flay me alive for pretending to be a man and for fooling the empire."
"Then do not get caught," Aran replied coolly.
With shaking hands, Damane took the knife. Aran watched dispassionately as she hacked away her matted, dark hair. It fell to the dirt floor in heavy, dirty clumps. When she stood, drowning in the oversized clothes, the fragile, weeping damane was gone. She looked like a starved, cornered rat, shivering in the drafty cabin.
"My name is Rune," she whispered, her voice cracking.
"Rune," Aran agreed. "Now, we teach you how to bite."
To break a lifetime of submissive conditioning, Aran knew he had to completely sever her relationship with the world as prey, and rebuild it as a predator. The next two months were brutal, designed to strip away the ingrained helplessness of a slave. Aran refused to let her huddle by the hearth while he provided. He handed her a crude hunting bow scavenged from the battlefield, a quiver of warped arrows, and a skinning knife.
"The sul'dam fed you when you pleased them," Aran instructed, standing behind her in the freezing underbrush, the winter breath curling from their lips. "I will not. If you want to eat, you must hunt. Nature does not care if you apologise. It only respects action and those action you will take of your own free so go , hunt"
At first, she was a disaster. She moved with the hunched, shrinking posture of a slave trying to avoid a beating, constantly looking over her shoulder for approval or punishment. She snapped twigs, breathed too heavily, and spooked every deer and snow-hare within a mile. She went hungry for three days, weeping in frustration by the fire, waiting for Aran to take pity on her.
He did not. Starvation is a ruthless, impartial teacher.
By the end of that month, the weeping stopped, and a hardened, jagged edge began to form in Runa. She stopped cowering when she missed a shot. Instead, a dark, simmering frustration took over. One evening, after her arrow sailed inches wide of a snow-hare, she didn't collapse in apologies. She slammed her fist into the frozen bark of an iron-root tree and let loose a string of blistering, filthy Seanchan street slang that would have made a harbour sailor blush.
Aran, watching from a high branch, entirely concealed by the shadows, merely offered a tight, approving smile. The dog was remembering it was a wolf.
A week later, she finally made her first kill—a small, silver-backed boar. When Aran found her, she was standing over the bleeding carcass in the snow, her hands covered in warm crimson. Aran saw the precise, profound moment the conditioning cracked. She had taken a life. she had imposed her will upon the world without a silver leash pulling her neck, without a voice in her ear telling her to strike. She looked up at Aran, her chest heaving, her eyes burning with a fierce, possessive triumph. The meat was hers because she had earned it.
Only when this submissive rot was entirely burned out of her did Aran introduce the Power.
In the third month, as the deep snows finally began to melt into muddy streams, Runa sat cross-legged on a flat rock behind the cabin, sweating despite the alpine chill. She had the natural spark; damane could touch saidar intuitively. But touching the Source while collared was merely acting on the order's or damane. It was the sul'dam who drew the flows through the leash, the sul'dam who wove the elements into destruction. For Runa, voluntarily opening herself to the Power without a command carried a phantom pain that acted as a towering psychological block.
Aran could not teach her how to weave directly—saidin and saidar were fundamentally opposed forces. He could only teach her the architecture of absolute mental stillness and the theoretical physics of creation.
"You are anticipating pain," Aran said, pacing slowly around her. The Atherion was drawn, its glass-like, Power-forged steel resting lightly across his shoulder, humming a faint, lethal note. "The Empire taught you that channeling is agony without a master. You must unlearn the lie. You must understand the nature of what you touch."
"It feels like... like my throat is closing," Runa gasped, clutching her bare neck, her knuckles white.
"Because you are trying to force it," Aran lectured, his voice carrying the calm, absolute authority of a scholar. "You are reaching for it like a desperate woman grasping a blade. That is not you way. But you are a woman. Saidar is a vast, roaring river. You cannot wrestle a river, Rune. You must surrender to it. You must open yourself like a flower to the sun, step into the current, and let it guide you so that you may guide it. become a single flower in this vast nature of your mind"
He stopped directly in front of her. "If you lose control," Aran warned, his crystalline eyes locking onto hers. "If you draw too deeply and there is a chance you burn out, I will save you. I will cut your connection. It will feel like hitting a wall of solid iron, and it will knock the wind from your lungs. But you will be safe. Now, stop fighting it. Concentrate, Surrender, Reach."
She screamed in frustration, a raw, entirely human sound, dropping her hands from her throat. She closed her eyes and threw her spirit open to the Source.
The rush of pristine, female power exploded into the clearing. Because Aran was a man, he could not see the glowing threads of saidar, but he felt the sudden, massive drop in atmospheric pressure. The air crackled, the hairs on his arms standing on end. He watched her metaphysical matrix light up like a beacon. The sheer volume of the Power she drew was staggering; she possessed a raw strength that, in the High Age, would have marked her as very usable.
But the rush of it terrified her. She had never felt the full breadth of her own strength without a sul'dam's mind acting as a buffer. She panicked, losing her grip on the current, and the weave began spiralling toward a catastrophic backlash.
Aran moved with blinding speed. The Atherion hummed a lethal, resonant note as he brought the flat of the pale blade down through the empty air directly in front of her face. The Power-forged steel sheared cleanly through her connection to the Source with a deafening crack, snapping the invisible tether.
Runa was thrown backwards into the dirt, gasping for air, clutching her chest as if she had been punched. But she was alive. She was unburned.
"Again," Aran ordered relentlessly, not offering a hand to help her up.
They did it fifty times over the next month. With every failure, Aran caught her, the Atherion acting as an absolute safety net. With every success, the phantom collar loosened its grip.
During these sessions, when she finally managed to hold saidar steadily, Aran would close his eyes and delve into her metaphysical structure. What he observed was a horrific perversion of High Age artifice. The a'dam did not just restrain; it operated on a deeply parasitic matrix. Aran mapped the resonant frequencies of the lingering scars on her soul. He noted how the ter'angreal used corrupted threads of Spirit to bypass the brain's natural defences, directly wiring the damane's ability to channel into her pain receptors. It created a forced, artificial circle, locking the damane in a passive, agonising feedback loop, allowing the sul'dam to entirely hijack the flow of saidar. The leash left microscopic, metaphysical calluses on Runa's spirit, conditioning her to associate the Five Powers with subjugation. By meticulously analysing these frequencies, Aran began to formulate the precise counter-resonances needed to shatter any a'dam he encountered in the future.
By the fifth month, holding the Source was no longer the issue. The challenge was the weaving.
Aran explained the fundamentals: the Five Powers—Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Spirit. A channeler wove these threads to affect the physical world. But because Runa had been a damane, her development was entirely lopsided.
When Aran asked her to weave a simple thread of Air to lift a dried leaf from the ground, the leaf didn't float—it violently exploded, shredded by a chaotic, compressed burst of wind. When he asked her to weave a tiny flow of Fire to light a candle, the resulting blast scorched the ceiling of the cabin and nearly set Aran's coat ablaze.
"Control, Rune," Aran sighed, patting out a smoldering ember on his sleeve.
"I can't!" she yelled, pacing the floor. "When the sul'dam linked with me, they didn't ask for a candle! They asked for a fireball to melt cavalry armour! I only remember how to break things!"
Aran realised that instructing her to merely "imagine" the outcome was insufficient. She needed boundaries. She needed the clinical precision of science to replace the blunt-force trauma of Seanchan military conditioning.
"You are treating the Power as a miracle or a chaotic force of desire," Aran lectured, drawing diagrams in the dirt floor of the cabin with a stick. "It is not. It is a tool that manipulates physical laws. If you wish to create a small fire, you must not just 'want' fire. You must understand combustion."
He spent weeks acting as a tutor, explaining the fundamental principles of the physical world. He taught her that fire required heat, fuel, and air. He made her weave incredibly fine threads of Fire, directing them not to burn, but simply to excite the invisible particles in the air, creating friction.
"Do not think of a flame," he instructed, walking her through the visualization. "Think of the molecules vibrating. Faster. Faster. Just enough to reach the ignition point of the wick, and no more. Then apply the exact volume of energy required to put thread of flame into it to get the desired effect."
It was a grueling process of trial and error. Runa's raw strength and destructive habits made delicate work infuriatingly difficult, like trying to thread a needle while wearing iron gauntlets. But as she began to understand the physics of what she was doing, her mind anchored the weaves. She stopped relying on the traumatic muscle memory of the sul'dam's artillery barrages and started building the weaves logically, thread by thread. By the time the spring rains arrived, she could light a candle without detonating the room, and weave Water to draw pure moisture from the humid air into a cup.
By the end of the sixth month in channeller training, Runa was no longer the girl who had wept in the mud. She had physically and mentally transformed. Dressed in her rough-spun boy's clothing, her hair cropped short and messy, she walked with her shoulders squared, mimicking the slightly arrogant, loose-limbed swagger Aran had deliberately modelled for her.
She had learned to lower her vocal register, speaking in a gruff, clipped cadence. She learned to spit in the dirt, to eat with a knife, and, most importantly, how to hold a gaze.
The Blood look at the dirt, Aran had told her during their lessons in Imperial sociology. Slaves look at feet. Men look at chests. If you look a soldier in the eye, you challenge him. If you look at his chest, you acknowledge him without submission. Master the gaze, and they will never question your gender.
But the disguise was only physical. The final, most perilous test remained: the metaphysical mask.
"The damane in Imfaral are sensitive as women who can channel the one power instinctivaly sense with the spark," Aran explained, tracing a complex, spiraling diagram on a slate board. "Even if you do not embrace the Source, they can feel the spark of the Power in you if you walk past them. It is a resonance, a vibration in the fabric of creation. To hide it, you must invert your own spiritual signature."
Runa stared at the diagram then gave the exassprated expression. "Invert it? How? I have just learned to use the threads with some precission."
"You will draw a thread of Spirit, purely Spirit, and weave a shell around your own ability," Aran explained, tapping the centre of the spiral. "You must turn the flow inward, folding it over yourself so tightly that not a single drop of resonance escapes into the world. It is like wrapping a lantern in thick, black wool. The light remains, but the world sees only shadow."
Of all the weaves Aran had taught her, this required the most excruciating precision. It was not destructive; it was purely defensive, requiring a delicate touch she historically lacked.
She practised for weeks and weeks. Often, the shell would form, only to unravel moments later, the threads of Spirit slipping from her mental grasp. Sometimes she wove it too tightly, cutting herself off from the Source entirely and causing severe headaches. Without the visual aid, doing something new was always a huge risk of cutting oneself off from the Source, but this was the only option they had.
After seven weeks of error, Runa sat by the crackling hearth, her face screwed up in absolute, sweating concentration. Aran stood on the opposite side of the room, expanding his High Age senses, sweeping the cabin for the tell-tale hum of a channeler.
For a long time, the hum vibrated in the air, a constant, low-frequency buzz that defined her existence.
But slowly, agonisingly, it began to dim. The weave of Spirit folded inward, a perfect metaphysical origami.
Aran stepped closer, his boots silent on the floorboards, to sense the resonance if the Runa was successful. Runa was actively holding the Source, the power churning inside her, yet to his augmented senses, she projected the absolute, mundane stillness of a peasant boy. There was no spark. There was no resonance. The weave was inverted perfectly; the shell was flawless.
Aran stood in silence for a long moment, assessing the absolute completeness of the disguise.
"Satisfactory," he murmured. Coming from an ancient, uncompromising artificer of the High Age, it was the highest praise he could give.
Runa opened her eyes, letting the Source slip away as the invisible shell dissolved. She looked up at him and flashed a sharp, genuine grin, entirely devoid of the terror that had once defined her every waking moment. She was 'Rune' now—an apprentice with dirt under her fingernails, a hunting knife in her boot, and a lethal, hidden secret buried deep in her soul.
Aran walked to the corner of the cabin and picked up his long coat, slipping his arms into the sleeves. He secured the Atherion at his hip, the lock's sharp snick echoing in the quiet room. He walked to the fire and methodically kicked dirt over the flames, suffocating the light, turning his gaze southward, toward the coast.
"Gather your things, Rune," Aran commanded, adjusting his high collar. "We have lived in the mud and the woods long enough. It is time we visited the High Lord."