More Thoughts On Time
Some random thoughts related to time tumbling around my head as I try to better understand this mythology.
*The Dark One has stated to Rand, on multiple occasions, that they have been through this a thousand times. If true (he IS the Father of Lies, after all), this would mean he had broken out of his prison at least a thousand times, making it the LEAST effective prison ever.
At that point, does the creator really want him bound at all? And why does everyone seem to take so much comfort in this prison, and talk about the creator “binding him at the moment of creation”? It’s not like he stayed in the prison the entire time.
*The Dark One has also repeatedly said that this will be the last time they go through this, that the wheel will stop spinning and whatever happens will be forever. Again, if true this would give a lot more weight and consequence to the story, but we have no way of knowing if it IS true. For all we know, he says that every time.
*This planet is REALLY old. If the cycle has really repeated itself a thousand times, then this has to have been going on for at least a few hundred thousand years, if not a couple of million years.
*I’m still trying to work out the ages and the numbers. It appears our story takes place at the end of the (a) third age. There’s no way of knowing when any of the others took place. I’m wondering if Lews Therin ALSO lived in the (a) third age.
We don’t actually know (at this point anyway) how long an age is. We know that the prophecies of the Dragon’s return happened in the 4th age, and it seems like it makes the most sense for them to have been made AFTER the Dragon’s death, but BEFORE his rebirth.
If the Dragon last lived in the third age, that would mean that the prophecies were made not long after the last Dragon died, which makes sense, since I get the indication that these prophecies are really old. So did the wheel complete an entire cycle in the time jump between the prologue and chapter 1 of the first book?