The peddler ROLLS into town and now I gotta flip back and forth from the Glossary. Ugh. Should’ve just stay away from Two Rivers, you lousy piece of shit.

This peddler guy, Padan Fain — he’s a big ol’ attention whore and he simply cannot wait to tell an entire village some awful, apocalyptic news. News so devastating that the Village Council all but grabs this guy by the ear and drags him into their closed-doors meeting, leaving the rest of the people seething with anxiety and curiosity.

Anyway, since nobody in the Two Rivers tri-country area gets the Internet, they need a world traveler like Fain to bring the juicy gossip. Today, it’s about a war going on in Ghealdan. As he puts it, “the standard of the Dragon has been raised”. And this is scary for a lot of mouthbreathers in Emond’s Field.

The Dragon, as mentioned in the Prologue, was Lews Therin. A madness that overtook him and all the rest of the Aes Sedai men during the, uh, Time of Madness was so great that it caused Lews Therin to kill everyone in his bloodline! That’s some dark shit.

Oh, the Aes Sedai? They are the Wielders of the One Power. They’re all women now, duh, because the Time of Madness purged the men from their little clan. People blame them for Breaking the World.

Slow down, Tom, you motherfucker. What this Time of Madness stuff? Breaking the World? Sounds overdramatic! And it is! Lews Therin helped seal up the Dark One, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, and this somehow tainted saidin. That’s the male half of the True Source, if you’re out there only half-paying attention like I am. This tainted saidin led to the madness of the male half of the Aes Sedai and the world got all crazy fucked up. Sudden mountains, 9,000,000 mph winds, sands in everyone’s face, lots of death and destruction. It’s like if Y2K really happened! Why the women are to blame, I have no idea!

OK, Wielders of the One Power? Aes Sedai! I already answered that!

The townsfolk are all hoping, praying, that this is just some another false Dragon. These false Dragons pop in every few years, amass a following, a bunch of people drink the Kool-Aid and we all move on. Peddler Padan Fain smirks at this naiveté! Winters have been sucking harder lately. Crops aren’t growing has high! Global warming, people?? Do you think the world isn’t starting to break all around you?? This Dragon is the real deal!

So that’s where we’re at. War is breaking out and the world is breaking out and so is Rand’s acne-riddled face. The peddler’s news is way better than anything some dirtbag gleeman has in store for them, and everyone has been fawning over the gleeman for three chapters now. It’s getting sickening.

Chapter 3 ends with Rand embarrassing himself in front the girl he has the hots for, Egwene. She gets mad at him. She’s ripe for marrying age now, and she’ll be dancing around the Marriage Pole (which sounds hilariously like a strip club to me), which makes Rand’s ears go all red! It’s little taste of levity before the gleeman finally shows up to stink up the place in Chapter 4.