A Wheel of Time inspired short story

!!!SPOILER WARNING FOR EVENTS IN THE EYE OF THE WORLD BY ROBERT JORDAN!!!

“A Cry in the Cold” is a (hopefully) lore-faithful short story set in the world of The Wheel of Time, told from the point of view of Tam al’Thor. Originally titled “A Cry in the Snow” it reimagines the moment, briefly alluded to in the main series, when Tam finds an Aiel woman dying on the slopes of Dragonmount and chooses to take her newborn child into his arms.

Written in a style designed to echo and honor the spirit of Robert Jordan, the story aims to highlight the deep humanity behind Tam’s choice. Tam does not know the child’s destiny. He sees only a life in need, and in that moment, he becomes not just a soldier, but a father.

Author’s Note: I wrote this story for Father’s Day as a tribute to the quiet, often overlooked influence that good fathers can have. Not through power or prophecy, but through patience, compassion, and the values they pass on. In The Wheel of Time, Tam al’Thor is not a king, or a noble, or a wielder of great magic. But he was a good man and he raised the Dragon Reborn to be a good man too. And that, more than anything, may be why Rand succeeded where Lews Therin failed.

This is Tam’s story. And it belongs to every man who becomes a father, not only those by blood, but by choice.

_{Editor’s Note: A section of this story has been revised to more accurately reflect the established backstory of Kari al’Thor. According to approved companion material, Kari was born in Andor to a wealthy merchant family that later settled in Illian. There she met Tam al’Thor, who had left the Two Rivers as a young man to see the world and seek his fortune. He joined the Illianer Companions and rose through their ranks. Kari accompanied him during his years of service, though not in battle. After the Aiel War, Tam returned to the Two Rivers with Kari and the child they adopted, Rand.}

A Cry in the Cold

Tam al’Thor’s hands ached from killing. The heron-mark blade at his side was slick with blood, and his breath came labored, deliberate and slow. His arms were heavy. His legs barely obeyed. He had not stopped fighting since sunrise, and now the light was dying.

The breastplate he wore was dented across the ribs, one edge curled sharply where a spear had struck too near. Blood streaked the metal, almost black in the fading light. His green cloak, the mark of the Companions of Illian, hung in tatters from one shoulder. His helmet had vanished hours ago, lost in the white chaos of a sudden winter storm. The wind now chilled the sweat on his scalp and stung his face where a glancing blow had split the skin. Blood seeped down his leg and into his boot from a spear thrust to the thigh that fortunately, had not struck anything vital. Deep snows covered the ground east of the solitary peak of Dragonmount. Where the snow wasn’t broken in churned blood and mud, stained red, it glittered softly, untouched. The battlefield sprawled in broken silence. The city of Tar Valon stood far to the east, its high walls pale in the dimming light. From the thick of the battle below, they had loomed across the Alindrelle Ernin river, the city vast and unreachable, isolated on its island; safe from Aiel assault behind those shining walls.

But here, on the slope of the mountain that had once broken the world, it seemed small. Distant. Fragile.

Tam limped across the slope alone.

He should have been with his men. What was left of them. Second Company had held the line near the western rise, shoulder to shoulder with men from Ghealdan and Murandy. Good men.

Fewer than half remained now, and those were scattered like seeds on windblown soil. Though the last remnants of the Aiel had disengaged and the battle ended, there would now be roll calls soon, and lists of the dead, and questions that no one could truly answer; letters to send to wives that would never again feel the embrace of their husbands, and children that would never know the kind words or firm guiding hand of their fathers.

Earlier, his small group of the Companions had broken off the main force, under heavy pressure when the black veiled Aiel poured over the ridge, silent and swift in the snow. Tam’s men had turned to regroup, blades up, calling to one another over the wind, and the din of sword against spear, the screams and shouts of the skirmish, but it had been no use.

Tam remembered slashing through the flank of a veiled spearman, before being buried in a wave of brown clad spear wielding warriors, only to find himself cut off. No time to turn. No time to signal. One moment he had been fighting side by side his men. The next, he had been alone fighting for his life, pressed against the foot of the mountain.

Now he was climbing higher, using the broken terrain of the mountain slope to get a better lay of the land. From above, he hoped to spot a signal, a banner, or smoke from a campfire. Anything that could lead him back to what remained of his company.

They, the defenders, his Companions, had won the day, though no man would sing about it except in mourning.

Victory, such as it was, came with too steep a cost. Amidst unforgiving snows and tumultuous wind. The snow had, Creator be praised, worked in their favor. The blizzard slowed the Aiel, hampered their footing, dulled their edge, their speed.

Tam doubted the foreign invaders had ever fought in weather or conditions like this before, Aiel being nomadic desert tribes. Certainly not with drifts waist-high and chest-deep in some hollows, and wind like razors cutting through the lines. Did it snow in the Waste?

Tam did not know.

Still, while the snow had been misery for all, it had made all of the difference.

Without it, the defenders might not have held. Without it, Tam wasn’t sure any of them, Illianers, Murandians, Ghealdanin or otherwise, would have survived the day.

He had fought harder than ever before. Not just for himself. Not just for the men beside him. In truth, when the blood came fast and the blades rang against spears and bucklers, his thoughts had narrowed to a single truth: stay alive.

But beneath that call to duty, steady and unspoken, there had been another reason.

Kari. His wife.

Being wed to a soldier in wartime was never easy. She had accompanied him during his years with the Companions, traveled with the camp, endured the marches. Not as a warrior and never into battle, but through rain and rations, through the stink of men and the dread that settled over every camp before a fight. She had followed him from Illian, leaving behind her family and the soft life they offered, trading comfort for canvas walls and uncertain tomorrows.

Through the years, they had buried two children. One lost to fever before she could walk. One stillborn. And still Kari stood beside him.

He fought for duty, for honor, for coin when it mattered. But he endured for her. She was his calm in the madness, his breath when the smoke choked the sky. He would come back to her. That had always been the promise.

Each time he kissed her goodbye before a march, she whispered the same prayer. That the Light would illumine his path and keep him sheltered in the palm of the Creator’s hand. And each time, he believed it might be enough.

Now, the light was fading fast, and the temperature plummeted with it as the sun was entirley behind the mountain now; the jagged peak high above, silhouetted against the sun’s last light. The mountain, Dragonmount, threw its long shadow over the plain below. Tam trudged within that shadow.

A faint sound caught him.

He stopped dead in his tracks, listening.

The wind tugged mercilessly at his cloak. All around was silence, except the wind and the creak of snow laden branches, Tam could hear the the distant call of crows, no doubt already feasting on the spoils of the day’s battle. But no, perhaps he’d only imagin-

But then it came again; a cry.

Thin. Ragged.

Alive.

Tam stood still, every muscle tensed. At first he thought it might be a wounded man. He had heard hundreds of those cries over the years, and all too many this very day. Some gasping, some gurgling, some screaming for mothers they would not see again.

This was not one of those.

It was smaller. Higher. A sound too soft for the battlefield, and too persistent for the wind. Somewhere ahead amidst the trees, here on the snow covered slopes of this Light blasted mountain.

It was a child.

Tam moved, slower now, stalking.

Careful steps.

The snow crunched beneath his boots, brittle and uneven across the rugged slope. Jagged rock jutted from the earth in places, volcanic and dark against the snow. Wind-warped trees leaned overhead, their limbs sagging beneath a weight of ice and silence. Low brush clawed at his legs through the powder. The air smelled faintly of old fire, the scent of earth long scorched, now buried beneath a frozen hush.

Tam ducked beneath a heavy branch and stepped across a gully where the snow had drifted thigh-deep. His hand stayed tight on the hilt of his sword, not yet drawn, but ready.

No birds called. No voices carried.

Only the wind and the narrowing sound of that cry, now just ahead. He angled toward it, cautiously rounding a small rocky outcrop, and stopped.

Tam stared.

She lay beneath a barren tree, itself rising from a snow drift, she slumped against the trunk, one leg twisted beneath her.

Her battle garb, the gray-brown clothing worn by all Aiel, the kind Tam had heard called cadin’sor, clung to her like frostbitten skin, soaked through with blood.

Her veil had been pulled down, her wrapped head covering dislodged. Red-gold hair spilled across her shoulders and onto the snow like a fall of sunlight where none remained in the waning evening hours.

Her chest rose and fell in ragged, shallow breaths. Not many left.

No bodies lay near her. No signs of struggle but her own, and Tam noted a pair of short Aiel spears, laying cast aside in the snow beside her; bloodied and nicked. She had not come here untested, but she had come alone.

A wide bloom of blood stained the snow beneath her, the crimson standing stark against the white. It had spread far, dark at the center and crusting at the edges where the cold had begun to claim it. The stains led beneath her legs and thighs, where Tam saw the unmistakable signs of childbirth and he understood. Her lifeblood had drained into the snow, marking the ground in the way this battle would be remembered, quiet, crimson, and final.

Blood in the Snow.

Whether it was wounds from the fight, the effort of birth, or both, he knew she would not survive. Impossibly, in her arms, wrapped in a strip of cloth torn from her own clothing, too thin to keep out the cold, was a child.

A newborn.

A boy, no older than minutes.

The boy’s skin flushed red from the cold and his crying, tiny fists waving weakly in the frigid air.

This woman, this Maiden of the Spear, the child’s mother, she was Aiel! A black-eyed, black-veiled savage!

Tam? He was a Companion of Illian, forged by discipline and blood. Their people’s had fought and killed each other for days now, during this protracted and vicious battle. There was no quarter given on either side. And yet, he was also a Two Rivers man, and that meant something.

As he cautiously approached, she did not reach for a weapon. She did not lift a hand. Her eyes met his, weakly, and there was no hatred in them.

At her side, Tam dropped to one knee, his body and armor groaning. His sword hung still sheathed, forgotten for the moment.

Blood had dried on her cheeks, trailing from a split at her temple. Dried tear tracks ran wild rivers through the blood on her face. Her lips moved. Not words. Just breath. Her arms shifted, slowly, shaking. She held the child out to him.

Tam’s hands hovered for a moment, unsure. He was a soldier. She was the enemy. And the child…Light, what was he supposed to do?

But the snow kept falling. And the child kept crying.

The look in the Maiden’s eyes was not begging. It was not fear or desperation.

It was certainty.

This was her last act.

She had nothing else left but this one impossible hope.

Tam took the boy carefully into his arms.

The woman exhaled one final time, the smallest breath he had ever heard. Her eyes dimmed, her arms dropping as her head tilted back against the tree. The wind stirred gently, drifting snow over her lap.

The world was still for a moment. Above them, the gray clouds parted slightly and golden light slipped through, soft and narrow, brushing the child’s face in the crook of Tam’s arm before fading just as quickly as it came. Tam glanced upward, noting the break in the clouds, but thought little of it. The last light of the day, perhaps, slipping through the clouds before the night sky closed in for good.

He bowed his head.

For her. For all of them. For just a moment.

The boy shifted, squirming in Tam’s arms. He had gone completely silent the moment Tam lifted him, the sudden absence of sound almost more jarring than the cry that had first drawn Tam to him. His tiny body was cold even against Tam’s chest.

Tam assessed the tattered remnants of his Companion’s cloak. It was bloodstained, torn, and barely serviceable. Still, it was wool, and it was warm.

He unclasped what was left of it from his shoulder and carefully wrapped it around the infant, shielding him from the wind. The green fabric, once worn with pride in battle, now swaddled the child like a soft shield. Tam looked at the boy again. Pale skin reddened by the cold. A thick fuzz of reddish-golden hair. Eyes like blue steel, blinking up at the dimming gray sky, staring straight into Tam’s own.

The child gave a soft, shuddering sigh, and nestled deeper into the crook of Tam’s arm.

Tam stood.

The woman’s body lay still beneath the tree, the falling snow already claiming her. She had not spoken, but she had said enough.

Tam looked east, down the mountain, toward the distant lights of Tar Valon, flickering and faint in the growing dark. The White Tower rose like a monolith glowing serenely in the dusk. Indifferent to all that had passed this day. Tam had men to rejoin. Orders to give. A war to finish. Duty to uphold and carry.

But now he carried more than a sword. Now he carried something far heavier.

He began to walk.

Kari had always hoped for a child.

Epilogue

On the slopes where the world once broke,

In blood and snow, a cry rang out.

Not from war, nor wrath, nor flame,

But life, cold-born, without a name.

And he who bore the heron blade

Took up more than steel that day.

He bore the weight the Dragon could not,

And taught the flame to hold its shape.

The sword may shatter, kings may fall,

The Light may flicker, faint and pale.

But mercy’s hand and father’s voice

Made strong the heart that could not fail.

Not crowned in gold, nor sung in Hall,

No lord, no king, no soul reborn.

Yet he who raised the mountain’s child

Stilled the madness with a simple shepherd’s life, and a father’s guiding hand.

From the Prophecies of The Dragon -fragment from the Karaethon Cycle

Attributed to The Lost Stanzas, recovered from the Dust Hills fragments, untranslated until the Fourth Age.

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References & Acknowledgments

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This story is a non-commercial fan work inspired by The Wheel of Time series, created by Robert Jordan. All characters, settings, and lore referenced herein are the intellectual property of the Robert Jordan Estate and Tor Books. This piece was written out of deep respect and admiration for the world Jordan built, and for the impact his work has had on generations of readers.

Information regarding Kari al’Thor’s background, including her origin in Andor, her time in Illian, and her life with Tam al’Thor during his service in the Companions, was drawn from canon material as well as companion sources. Additional details were referenced from the community-curated article available at:

https://wot.fandom.com/wiki/Kari_al%27Thor

Special thanks to the Wheel of Time fan community for their dedication to preserving the accuracy and depth of Jordan’s work. This story seeks to remain faithful to the spirit and tone of the original series, while offering a deeper look at one of its most quietly pivotal moments.