“No! It didn’t happen like that!”

It is a dream, Hopper sent.

“But I didn’t kill him,” Perrin protested. “Some Aiel shot him with arrows right before….”

Right before Aram would have killed Perrin.

The horn, the hoof, or the tooth, Hopper sent, turning and ambling toward a building. Its wall vanished, revealing Master Luhhan’s smithy inside. Does it matter? The dead are dead. Two-legs do not come here, not usually, once they die. I do not know where it is that they go.

Perrin looked down at Aram’s body. “I should have taken that fool sword from him the moment he picked it up. I should have sent him back to his family.”

Does not a cub deserve his fangs? Hopper asked, genuinely confused. Why would you pull them?

“It is a thing of men,” Perrin said.

Things of two-legs, of men. Always, it is a thing of men to you. What of things of wolves?

“I am not a wolf.”

Hopper entered the forge, and Perrin reluctantly followed. The barrel was still boiling. The wall returned, and Perrin was once again wearing his leather vest and apron, holding his tongs.

He stepped over and pulled out another figurine. This one was in the shape of Tod al’Caar. As it cooled, Perrin found that the face wasn’t distorted like Aram’s, though the lower half of the figurine was unformed, still a block of metal. The figurine continued to glow, faintly reddish, after Perrin set it down on the floor. He thrust his tongs back into the water and pulled free a figure of Jori Congar, then one of Azi al’Thone.

Perrin went to the bubbling barrel time and time again, pulling out figurine after figurine. After the way of dreams, fetching them all took both a brief second and what seemed like hours. When he finished, hundreds of figurines stood on the floor facing him. Watching. Each steel figure was lit with a tiny fire inside, as if waiting to feel the forger’s hammer.

But figurines like this wouldn’t be forged; they’d be cast. “What does it mean?” Perrin sat down on a stool.

Mean? Hopper opened his mouth in a wolf laugh. It means there are many little men on the floor, none of which you can eat. Your kind is too fond of rocks and what is inside of them.

The figurines seemed accusing. Around them lay the broken shards of Aram. Those pieces seemed to be growing larger. The shattered hands began working, clawing on the ground. The shards all became little hands, climbing toward Perrin, reaching for him.

Perrin gasped, leaping to his feet. He heard laughter in the distance, ringing closer, shaking the building. Hopper jumped, slamming into him. And then…

Perrin started awake. He was back in his tent, in the field where they’d been camped for a few days now. They’d run across a bubble of evil the week before that had caused angry red, oily serpents to wiggle from the ground all through camp. Several hundred were sick from their bites; Aes Sedai Healing had been enough to keep most of them alive, but not restore them completely.