The Wheel of Time turns and Ages come and go, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth return again. In the Third Age, an Age of Prophecy, when the World and Time themselves hang in the balance, a wind rises in the mountains of mist . . .

. . . and Rand al'Thor is cold. Though the spring festival of Bel Tine comes tomorrow, it is a year without spring, a year when green things fail and hope is dying.

It is a year of strangers; of a lady; and a gleeman with his tales of heroes; and a peddler with news of the present -- of war with Ghealdan, far away, and of the rising of a false Dragon -- the savior whose coming, foretold and dreaded, will bring a new Breaking to the World. But the worst strangers are monsters Rand thought only legend -- the bestial Trollocs, and the horrifying Halfmen, whose eyeless gaze is fear.

They want a boy on the brink of manhood, born within a certain span of months. They want Rand himself, or his burly, deliberate friend Perrin, or the prankster Mat.

It is a world where nothing is what it seems. Not Nynaeve, the village Wisdom, who can Read the Wind. Not Moiraine, the lady from outside, whose beauty hides a terrifying identity and a Power that seemed only yesterday to be the stuff of legend. Not the lady's companion, Lan, whose chameleon cloak is stranger than the fluttering, multihued garment that proclaims the gleeman's trade of old Thom Merrilin. And not Egwene, the innkeeper's dark-haired daughter, caught between childhood and womanhood, between love of Rand and determination to become all that her destiny would make her.

The villagers know only that Trollocs hunt them. They have no way of knowing that the Dark One, imprisoned by the Creator at the moment of creation, is stirring in Shayol Ghul.

It is a time for prophecies to be fulfilled. The Wheel of Time is weaving a Web in the Pattern of Ages, a Web to entangle the World. It is a time when Time itself may die, when the Eye of the World may be blinded. What was, and what will be, and what is, may yet fall under the Shadow.