Chapter 50: Meetings at the Eye

The Green Man leads the party through his spring forest to a stone arch and a corridor descending into the hill. He will not enter himself, saying his end is bound to what lies within, and that he has kept faith long enough.

Inside, a vast cavern holds the Eye of the World: a clear pool that Moiraine names the essence of saidin, the pure male half of the True Source. A hundred Aes Sedai, men and women together, died in the Breaking to make it, leaving it for a need they foresaw but could not name. Only a man can wield it, to mend the seal on the Dark One's prison or break it open.

When the party emerges, two of the Forsaken are waiting: Aginor, withered to a husk by his long imprisonment, and the masked Balthamel. Aginor hurls Lan into the arch with a flick of his hand, and Balthamel seizes Nynaeve.

The Green Man returns and crushes Balthamel in his arms, smothering him under fungus, lichen, and rot. The wound kills him, and an oak rises over his body. Moiraine opens the earth beneath Aginor in a pillar of fire, but he walks through it. She screams for the others to run.