Balefire

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For a fire made of bales of straw or wood, see Bonfire. For the book series by Cate Tiernan, see Balefire (book series)

Balefire, in the world of the Wheel of Time, is a weapon created with the One Power.

[edit] Description

It has only one known weave, and when evoked, summons a blindingly bright beam of "liquid light" that is capable of destroying nearly every known substance. When it encounters anything living, that thing is instantly destroyed. The real danger of balefire, however, is that it can undo any actions in the past committed by its victim; when Rand killed Rahvin with balefire, for instance, it undid the deaths of Aviendha, Mat, and Asmodean, who had died under Rahvin's channeling earlier.

Balefire dates back in its use to the War of Power, when it was used to destroy entire cities. It is implied that the channelers of the age did not entirely understand what they had discovered, and that the realization that they were un-weaving entire swathes and days of the Pattern, and in fact threatening the very fabric of Creation, led to both sides abandoning its use.

Cuendillar is the only material known to be resistant to balefire. However, Rand al'Thor parted a stream of balefire with (or through) the sa'angreal Callandor in the Stone of Tear. Whether or not this is an integral quality of Callandor (or, for that matter, what The Sword That Is Not A Sword is made of) has yet to be addressed.

It is possible that the intersection of two beams of balefire can cause adverse effects in the casters. When Rand and an unknown male channeller (who was almost certainly Moridin) cast balefire at the same time and the beams touched, both were nearly knocked unconscious by the backlash. Some regulars in Wheel of Time newsgroups consider this to have cause in temporal paradox: because both beams try to destroy each other in the past they could not have existed in the present, which would mean that they could not have destroyed each other after all and should still exist! However, this may also be because the other channeller was most likely using the True Power rather than saidin.

The means to use balefire remains known only to the Forsaken, Rand al'Thor, and a few of his associates.

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"When anything is destroyed with balefire, it ceases to exist before the moment of its destruction, like a thread that burns away from where the flame touched it. The greater the power of the balefire, the further back in time it ceases to exist. The strongest Moiraine can manage will remove only a few seconds from the Pattern.... For as far back as you destroy [something], whatever it did during that time no longer happened. Only the memories remain, for those who saw or experienced it." [The Fires of Heaven: 6, Gateways, 119]

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