Aran'gar
Last Chance:
The Resurrection of Aran’gar
Over the endless turnings of the Wheel, the Dark One has been called by many names; perhaps none is more apt than the Lord of the Grave. For indeed, so long as death was not due to balefire, the Dark Lord had an ability to defeat death, called transmigration. He could pull the souls of his servants from death sleep and place them within bodies, often stolen from the Borderlands.
Through this process Aran’gar was born. Just as the name Eval Ramman lost all meaning in place of rebirth into the Shadow, the name Balthamael was also gone forever, once rebirth was again achieved. The Dark Lord renamed Balthamel Aran’gar, after the right-hand dagger in an ancient and deadly form of dueling popular just before the War of Power. Paradoxically, although nothing has truly changed about Aran’gar, at the same time everything seems to have changed.
If the Dark One proved himself to be the Lord of the Grave, he also proved to have a cruel sense of humor. In seeming mockery of Balthamel’s past life, the Dark Lord transmigrated him into the body of a beautiful woman, the kind that Balthamel would have desired. Though the soul would adapt to the body, and Aran’gar would still be able to channel saidin, the joke seemed bittersweet and infuriating to Aran’gar. In the end, though, she decided that life as Aran’gar was better than the alternative, and soon Aran’gar became as lecherous a woman as she had been in her previous life.
In actuality, the Dark One’s motive in transmigrating Balthamel into a woman’s body was not completely frivolous. Osan’gar and Aran’gar were the Dark Lord left and right hand daggers, secret agents that only the Dark One and a select few even knew existed. Osan’gar's task was to infiltrate the Black Tower, while Aran’gar was assigned to do the same in the rebel Tower headed by Egwene al’Vere.
Though the efforts of Semirhage, Aran’gar was given an identity with which to infiltrate the rebel Tower, Halima Saranov, a supposed traveling companion to an Aes Sedai named Cabriana Mecandes. Aran’gar employed a member of the Black Ajah, Delana Mosalaine, as her operative and was nominally promoted to her "secretary."
Aran’gar’s original orders were quite simple--promote chaos within the Salidar Tower. Employing Delana, Aran’gar attempted to set every faction within the rebel Tower against each other and keep them that way.
Over time, however, Aran’gar was able to manipulate her way into the graces of their Amyrlin, Egwene al’Vere. With the use of Compulsion, Aran’gar slowly began exerting control over Egwene. As a woman employing saidin, the risk of discovery seemed minimal so long as it was done discreetly. The only threat came from the presence of the false Dragon Logain Ablar among the rebels. Aran’gar pressed to have Logain killed, but that problem was solved when Egwene herself allowed Logain to escape.
Sometime later, Aran’gar’s relationship with Egwene became somewhat more formal. Likely coinciding with the rebirth of Moridin, previously the Dark One’s captain-general and now anointed officially as his Nae’blis, Egwene was officially assigned to Aran’gar as a "charge."
Aran’gar was last seen at Shadar Logoth, trying to stop Rand’s attempt to cleanse the male half of the True Source. At the present time, Aran'gar is alive and at large.
