Storm Clouds
The title of this volume is the agent which engenders the controlling imagery. The gathering storm is situated right from the beginning as both deeply metaphorical and intensely literal through imagery which subtly conveys the danger inherent in both.
“But the clouds were still distant. That strike couldn’t have been on his property. The silver and black thunderheads rolled and boiled, feeding and consuming themselves…Those clouds churned, dark black and silver thunderheads shaking with white blasts. They suddenly boiled downward, like the funnel cloud of a twister, coming for him. He cried out, raising a hand, as a man might before a powerfully bright light. That blackness. That endless, suffocating blackness. It would take him…He understood the weather as well as a man could. Those clouds weren’t natural. They rumbled softly, like an animal growling on a dark night.”
The Alpha and Omega Male
The heroic protagonist at the center of the series is undergoing some substantial changes in this volume. He is struggling to come to grips with his role and everything it entails with problem being just how much it entails. At one point he seems on the verge of lapsing into a Fisher King/Colonel Kurtz kind of narcissistic self-awareness and the imagery indicates that a storm is also gathering within our hero:
“Lightning cracked above, thunder buffeting him. Rand closed his eyes, perched above a drop that plummeted thousands of feet downward, in the middle of a tempest of icy wind. Through his eyelids, he could sense the blazing light of the access key. The Power he held inside dwarfed that light. He was the sun. He was fire. He was life and death.”
Dialogue
Occasionally, imagery is introduced in the form of dialogue. This is not a typical way of using imagery in fiction because by the nature of imagery is descriptive and what may sound perfectly natural as narration can send out a harsh edge of the artificial when put into a character’s mouth. One of the smoothest ways of facilitating imagery into conversational discourse is through humor relying on figurative language like metaphor, similes, and assorted other figures of speech:
“My dragons, they will be a great power for a man of war. You claim what I have given you is extravagant. It is only needed.” She eyed him. “I will not lie and say I didn’t expect this dismissiveness from you, Master Cauthon. Pessimism, she is a fond friend of yours, yes?”
“That's uncalled for,” Mat grumbled, glancing back at the drawings. “I barely know her. Mere acquaintances, at best.”
Battlefields
One of the most emotionally moving examples of imagery in the book also occurs early enough to set itself up as an example of foreshadowing. The haunting “interpretation” of a battlefield carries an ominous and somewhat sinister undertone that suggests this need for interpretation will be revisited at a later date and under intense circumstances:
“Each battlefield also had its own individual print. You could read a battle like the trail of passing game. Corpses lying in rows that were disturbingly straight indicated a charge of footmen who had been pressed against volleys of arrows. Scattered and trampled bodies were the result of infantry breaking before heavy cavalry…One section of wall was completely torn away where some damane had tried to escape into the city. Fighting in streets and among homes would have favored the Seanchan. They hadn’t made it in time…What would be written of this battle? It would depend on who was writing. They would neglect to include the blood, pounded into the earth to make mud. The bodies, broken, pierced and mangled. The ground torn in swaths by enraged damane.”
