One archer wouldn’t make a battle. But the small things piled up, one atop another, until they became large things. He finished the armguard by affixing a few permanent ties to its back, so one could bind it in place on the arm.

He took his black coat off the back of his chair. The silver sword pin on the high collar glimmered in the window’s sunlight as he did up the buttons. He glanced at himself in the glass’s reflection, making certain the coat was straight. Small things were important. Seconds were small things, and if you heaped enough of those on top of one another, they became a man’s life.

He put the armguard on his arm, then pushed open the door to his small workshop and entered the outskirts of the Black Tower’s village. Here, clusters of two-storied buildings were arranged much like any small town in Andor. Peaked roofs, thatched, with straight wooden walls, some stone and brick as well. A double line of them ran down the center of the village. Looking only at those, one might have thought he was strolling through New Braem or Grafendale.

Of course, that required ignoring the men in black coats. They were everywhere, running errands for the M’Hael, going to practice, working on the foundations of the Black Tower structure itself. This place was still a work in progress. A group of soldiers—bearing neither the sword pin nor the red-and-gold Dragon—used the Power to blast a long trough in the ground beside the road. It had been decided that the village needed a canal.

Androl could see the weaves—mostly Earth—spinning around the soldiers. In the Black Tower, you did as much with the Power as you could. Always training, like men lifting stones to build their strength. Light, how Logain and Taim pushed those lads.

Androl moved out onto the newly graveled roadway. Much of that gravel bore melted edges from where it had been blasted. They had brought in boulders—through gateways, on weaves of Air—then shattered them with explosive weaves. It had been like a war zone, rocks shattering, spraying chips. With Power—and training—like that, the Asha’man would be able to reduce city walls to rubble.

Androl continued on his way. The Black Tower was a place of strange sights, and melted gravel wasn’t nearly the strangest of them. Neither were the soldiers tearing up ground, following Androl’s own careful surveying. Lately, the strangest sight to him was the children. They ran and played, jumping into the trough left behind by the working soldiers, sliding down its earthen sides, then scrambling back up.

Children. Playing in the holes created by saidin blasts. The world was changing. Androl’s own gramma—so ancient she’d lost every tooth in her mouth—had used stories of men channeling to frighten him into bed on nights when he tried to slip outside and count the stars. The darkness outside hadn’t frightened him, nor had stories of Trollocs and Fades. But men who could channel…that had terrified him.