If you have to ask, do yourself a huge favor and quietly click on another thread. The rest of us have, so far, read 10,000 pages (sic) of a fantasy novel series for which the principal author died two volumes ago. Speaking for myself, I just want this monkey off my back, I just wanna know how it all ends. Amazon has announced A Memory of Light, the 14th and final volume of The Wheel of Time, will be published on January 8. Who (if anyone) will survive?* Will the Dark One be put back into his hole for another age, will something else happen to him, or will he turn out not to be what we have been told? Will there be a new edition of the Prophesies of the Dragon, or will the old one work just as well for another age? *Always keeping in mind that, this being a fantasy novel, "dead" is an ambiguous term. Discuss! I will toss out one prediction: the massive battle of humans and their friends against creatures of the Dark One, like trollocks, in Tarwin's Gap, will merely be a bloody sideshow, an otherwise pointless way to provoke the real fight between the most powerful wielders of The One/True Power, at a time of the Dark One's choosing. Unless the whole point of the Last Battle is the Creator's testing of humans, and not to see if the Dark One can escape and rule.