Special Powers
Some men and women are able to use something known as the One Power; using the One Power is called channeling. The One Power is split into two sections: saidin and saidar. Men channel saidin, and women channel saidar. Not all people can channel. Specific flows of saidin or saidar are called weaves. Women can join together and form circles, but without a man, which only a woman can bring into it, the circle is restricted to thirteen members, with one person maintaining control by directing the weaves.
At the start of the series, saidin has been tainted by the Dark One for over three thousand years. Any man who channels it will eventually go insane and die. Because of this, the female Aes Sedai hunt down men who can channel and if they cannot gentle them (cut them off from saidin) they kill them.
There also exists a power of evil, dubbed the True Power. The tapping of this power caused the bore into the Dark one's sanctum in the first place. Some higher levels of authority in the shadow have been granted access to this power by Shai'tan, and explain its use less as graceful, and more as ripping through the seams of fate and time itself, to force one's will on nature.
Read more about this topic: Tarmon Gai'don
Famous quotes containing the words special and/or powers:
“And weren’t there special cemetery flowers,
That, once grief sets to growing, grief may rest:
The flowers will go on with grief awhile,
And no one seem neglecting or neglected?
A prudent grief will not despise such aids.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Dear to us are those who love us, the swift moments we spend with them are a compensation for a great deal of misery; they enlarge our life;Mbut dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life: they build a heaven before us, whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)