Yes, but they are indeed drones. It is a horrific thing to contemplate.

Imagine having your mind raped so badly that you had no free will of your own. You could not choose anything, you were just a mindcontrolled puppet with each action you made somethin Graendal wanted you to make.

If you were lucky, you would be totally dead, as the puppet Rand created in Tear was.

If you were unlucky, there would be a part of you, under all that compulsion, buried deep, SCREAMING!

I don't know about you, but if I had been one of those people in Graendals palace, the tiny part of me would have been very gratefull for Rand for putting an end to that kind of utter torture.

We know there was no way to fix the damage Graendal had caused. No way to heal those innocents. I guess whether you think this bad or not depends on the difference between living and existing.

Imagine that you suffered severe brain damage. You were left paralysed, blind and mute. Now imagine you are in a hospital, hooked to machines keeping you alive. There is no way for the real you to communicate. The only thing you could do is just lie there, trapped within your own mind, unable to talk, unable to walk, unable to do anything that makes life worth living. With the knowledge that you have nothing to look forward to, except just lying there, with no input or output. Only desperately looking forward to death which would release you from the living hell your life has become. Now imagine realising that you are young that you will be trapped in this existence for 50 more years. How long until madness sets in? In that situation would you really not pray with all your strength that someone would pull the plug? I know I would.

This is in some ways a situation similar to Graendals drones. Even if there was something left, buried deep. They were as unable to do anything they wanted. They were programmed robots obeying Graendals whims. An existence far FAR worse than death.

Rand was right. It was a mercy. Those drones may have been existing, but they were not alive. Graendal was the only living thing to die there that day.



True. And as I said in my original post, I don't deny that Rand went crazy. I mean we see that in the fact that he was about to rain fire on that army, or the fact that he nearly killed Tam and most certainly when he nearly blew up the world. I was focusing on this particular incident however. The rest have not happened yet.



Hmm. That is actually a good point that could explain it. If balefire destroyed the soul, what Rand did would have been terrible. But balefire does not do that.

Still maybe Min and Nynaeve do think that.

Wait, how can Min think that? She has been reading Herids books. She knows that time is cyclical and that souls are constantly reborn to create new threads to the pattern as time goes on.

If Balefire were to destroy souls, and if the wheel has turned as long as it has, surely the usage of balefire would have destroyed all possible souls many many turnings ago. Min should be able to realise that considering the little philosopher she has turned into.