The Wheel of Kin: A Daughter's Journey

Pattern Undone

The sky over the Tower was just beginning to bruise, a wash of deepening blue fading into ash-colored clouds. Bells rang in the distance, their tones soft and slow, tolling the passing hours as if they mourned what was coming.

But time was no longer moving in only one direction.

Elara entered the Tower unseen.

She moved like a whisper between stone walls, invisible, untouchable, a shadow walking inside memory. Her cloak shimmered faintly—not just invisibility, but something older, woven from the True Power and the ache of what might've been. Her steps left no sound. Her breath left no trace.

She was not a ghost.
She was a correction.

Elara passed Sisters in the hall—Yellows, Whites, a pair of Reds—none of them knowing that their world was about to change. Their faces held no cruelty. Only confidence in the Pattern. In the Hall. In the vote already cast.

They would remember it differently soon.

She reached the antechamber of the Hall.

The room hummed with threads of old power. Echoes of decisions and judgments still lingered in the stone. The place where Siuan Sanche had been condemned to die.

And here, Elara stopped.

The air was heavy. It resisted her. The Pattern shuddered beneath her feet like a beast recognizing an intruder.

Time held its breath.

She closed her eyes.

And reached into the minds of the Sitters.

Not like a hammer, but a needle. Each thought was a strand. Each belief, a knot to be loosened. Not destroyed. Redesigned.

She didn't make them love Siuan.

She didn't erase their doubts.

She merely bent their memories toward mercy.

"You never truly believed she was a Darkfriend."
"The Tower is fragile already. A public execution would shatter it."
"Her secrecy was wrong... but it was not Shadow."

Elaida.
Alviarin.
Even two of the Blues who had stayed silent. One who had hesitated.

Elara folded her Compulsion into them like a breeze beneath parchment—gentle, barely felt, but strong enough to turn the page.

And then—

She stepped into the memory of the vote.

A thousand threads shimmered before her, some led to death, some to silence.

And one single strand, almost invisible, frayed and buried, led to life.

Elara reached out with trembling hands and cut the thread that led to death.

She watched the timeline recoil, twitch, and slowly rebraid itself around a different truth.

Instead of fire

Banishment.
Stilling.
Shame.

But life.

Siuan Sanche would live.

Her name would be cast out of the Tower. Her title would be taken. Her power severed.

But she would live long enough to cast her nets again on the river. To hold Moiraine's hand at dusk. To hear Elara's laugh echo across the water.

The Pattern shivered.

And accepted the change.

Elara stood motionless as the world shifted around her. Silent. Unseen. She had not destroyed the weave—only stitched a new one beneath the surface, where love and grief had made room for a miracle.