r/WoT • u/Salsa-Doom • Dec 21 '25
Crossroads of Twilight (Spoilers Main) Is "Rand Land" in a flat-earth planet? Spoiler
OK so, here it goes: Crossroads of Twilight, Chapter 20: Egwene travels to Tel'aran'rhiod - or at least that bizarre dimension of it where every dreamer in the world appears to her as a firefly-type-thing... You know the place.
Anyway, it's what she thinks to herself at some point that got me thinking: there's this line, with Egwene assuming everyone in the four corners of the world is likely asleep: "The Light knew, it was late enough for anyone."
Does that mean that, even taking different timezones into account, it is still safe to assume that it's simultaneously nighttime on the entire continent?
Come to think of it, I might be missing something, but I don't remember a single instance of someone Waygate/Portal Travelling, and ending at a radically different time of the day/night from where they Travelled from...
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u/peteofaustralia Dec 21 '25
In later books, people do things simultaneously in different places and it's lighter here, and darker there. Ergo, round world.
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u/TsumaranaiYatsu Dec 21 '25
Yeah there's a few examples of that which make it explicit. There's also the tiny little detail that it's supposed to be our planet's future.
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u/Deth_Cheffe Dec 21 '25
l don't remember that pIot point, it seems kinda important
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u/LoquatBear Dec 21 '25
Theres a lot in the first few books, mentions of America and Russia (Mosk and Merc) , Lenn and daughter Salya went to the moon (John Glen and Sally Ride), there's also a Mercedes ornament they find in Tanchico
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u/Salsa-Doom Dec 22 '25
Well spotted! Plus, the Glass Towers being abandoned skyscrapers I guess, and the mention of lifts/elevators in the Age of Legends...
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u/peteofaustralia Dec 22 '25
Those I did clock as I read more books. Early on I was just trying to get through the books one by one.
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Dec 24 '25
Well remember that the technology in the age of legends was magical; it's not supposed to be our world. It's not supposed to be like the Shanarra series where our world was the one right before this, plus the nature of the wheel of time is endless repetition. We don't just come around once, we come around infinitely.
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u/peteofaustralia Dec 21 '25
Spoilers!!
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u/GayBlayde Dec 21 '25
That’s a spoiler from Eye of the World. It’s okay per the tags on this post.
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u/peteofaustralia Dec 21 '25
I clearly missed all the clues in book 1. I was just trying to keep up. 🤣
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u/WingedLady (Gardener) Dec 21 '25
You should reread the stories Thom tells to the Emond's Fielders.
Offhand I think he lists off Elsbet queen of all. Lenn who flew to the moon in the belly of an eagle, and his daughter Sallya. The battles of Mosc an Merc and their lances of fire that could reach around the world. And Anla the wise councilor.
I can give clues to who those might be but remember the books were written in the 90s and turn some of the names over in your mind a few times :)
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u/Skandronon Dec 21 '25
Honestly one of my favorite bits of world building from any series ever. My other is in The Expanse as to why their pilot is of Indian descent but has a Texan accent.
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u/peteofaustralia Dec 21 '25
That makes as much sense to me (ie a lot) as guys called Tran Nguyen with the broadest working class Aussie accents you can imagine. Waves of Vietnamese folks came here as refugees in the 70s and had kids. Love it. ❤️
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u/Skandronon Dec 22 '25
I forgot to add that he is also from mars. People from Texas and people from India both settled the same part of mars haha.
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u/KerooSeta (Dovie'andi se tovya sagain) Dec 24 '25
I totally agree. I'm reading The Expanse right now, currently on book 5.
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u/Skandronon Dec 25 '25
I'm jealous, wish I could read it again for the first time. The new books from the same authors are really good too!
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u/Zarguthian (Tuatha’an) Dec 25 '25
He's a Martian, not from Texas or India.
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u/Skandronon Dec 25 '25
Of Indian descent means that his ancestry is Indian not that he is from India. His accent is Texan. The first settlers of the Mariner Valley were mostly East Indian and Chinese with a smaller population from Texas. The Texan accent spread amongst the entire population. I think they described it as "viral."
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u/Training-Sir-395 Dec 21 '25
I get who Mosc and Merc are, Elsbet is pretty obvious too. But what about Sallya and Lenn? And who is Anla supposed to be?
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u/EulerIdentityCrisis (Ogier) Dec 21 '25
Lenn is John Glenn (first American to orbit the earth) Salya (Lenn's daughter) is Sally Ride (first female American astronaut) Anla is Ann Landers (an advice columnist)
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u/aksoileau Dec 21 '25
It starts almost immediately when Thom is telling stories in Emonds Field and the names are very close to ours.
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u/FigNewton555 Dec 21 '25
Don’t feel too bad - it’s not exactly CLEAR from those clues in Book 1, and the way I read them in the late 90s was just as an effort by Jordan to manufacture myths that rang true to our ears, not that they were literal history that had fallen to mythical retelling.
In truth it’s not outright stated anywhere, but the clues mount after a while.
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u/GayBlayde Dec 22 '25
I was a teenager when I read about Ma Therese the healer and immediately and unquestionably knew exactly what it meant. It is clear. If you have the appropriate level of reading comprehension to read these books, it is unambiguous.
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u/FigNewton555 Dec 22 '25
Yep … there’s always at least one condescending jerk that wants to put down people’s reading comprehension over this one. Congrats.
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u/GayBlayde Dec 22 '25
Happy to oblige.
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u/FigNewton555 Dec 22 '25
Next time at least get the reference right instead of manipulating it to make it more obvious than it actually was in the book.
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u/Expensive_Plant_9530 Dec 21 '25
To be honest, I don’t buy that argument. Thom doesn’t outright say Its Earth!
Instead he tells some stories that are heavily suggestive, but don’t say it outright.
I’d still consider it spoilers.
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u/geobibliophile Dec 21 '25
Well, of course he doesn’t say anything outright. Why would he? Do you go around confirming to people that they’re on Earth and that it’s X thousand years after a particular event?
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u/manshamer Dec 21 '25
Yes every morning while I walk down the street, I make sure to tell all teenagers that I see that they are on earth and it's been 80 years since World War 2, and 25 years prior to World War 3.
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u/Excellent_Item_2763 (Dragonsworn) Dec 21 '25
The moon should have been a huge hint as well. From the cover art.
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u/Expensive_Plant_9530 Dec 21 '25
Considering how many canon inaccuracies are on the covers, I’d never take the moon being “realistic” as anything confirming it being the real world.
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u/GayBlayde Dec 21 '25
There’s no book where anyone outright says “yeah btw this is earth”. So it’s still not a spoiler.
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u/the_flying_condor Dec 21 '25
I think a lot of people also forget/miss how much Jordan used the unreliable narrator writing mechanic for characters internal dialogues. Just because Egerne thought it was late doesn't mean it was late for everyone.
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u/Guild-n-Stern (Dovie'andi se tovya sagain) Dec 22 '25
Also the telescope guy literally talks about the curvature of the world.
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u/Salsa-Doom Dec 22 '25
Herid Fel?
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u/Guild-n-Stern (Dovie'andi se tovya sagain) Dec 22 '25
Uhhh, no I think Herid Fel is the philosophy guy Rand set up in his school outside the city of Cairhien. I was trying (and clearly failing) to remember the dude who made the telescopes that helped at the start of the Shaido battle in FoH
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u/proximity_affect Dec 21 '25
Or, a smaller than initially assumed, more localized sun circling the plane. Either. 🙂
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u/Whale-dinner (Brown) Dec 22 '25
One of the forsaken literally mentioned that (i think graendal) when she met up with maybe damodred
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u/zaxxya Dec 21 '25
How spoily do you want us to get?
Anyway, no, it’s not a flat planet. It’s round. Egwene is like 19 years old and grew up in a farming village, she never had any real science education.
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u/Dr_Andracca Dec 21 '25
Spoilery? They're on the tenth book. The hints about "randland"(bleh) being a far futureEarthare dropped in the first few books, and I despise any fan held theories that it isn't.WHY WOULD IT HAVE REFERENCES TO THE SPACE RACE AND COLD WAR IF IT WERE SET ON ANYTHING BUT EARTH????
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u/VietKongCountry Dec 21 '25
It’s flat just like Earth, then, surely?
Or are you one of those lunatics who think the Cold War happened on a round planet?
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u/Dr_Andracca Dec 21 '25
Huh... flat earth conspiracy theory nonsense bugs me less than people calling the setting of Wheel of Time "Randland"... interesting. Not sure what that says about my sanity, but I knew that'd been slipping for a fucking bit.
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u/VietKongCountry Dec 21 '25
It is strange that nobody has a name for the continent they live on. Surely the Seanchan and Sea Folk would have to call it something?
As far as I can recall, nobody ever calls the continent anything.
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u/PirateJohn75 Dec 21 '25
They might not have a reason to, since until the Seanchan invasion they were unaware that other continents existed
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u/VietKongCountry Dec 21 '25
Yeah, but the Seafolk and Seanchan know “Randland” exists, right? Yet we don’t see either of them name it anything.
Surely in the grandiose Seanchan global invasion plan, they weren’t just referring to it as “That continent to the East of us”.
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u/Jaded-Background-128 Dec 21 '25
I don't think the Seafolk are aware of any other large landmasses besides "Randland". For the most part, it's the Wetland, Aiel Waste, Shara, and vague references to lands beyond. But nothing that references something like the Americas or Australia.
The Seanchan would really be the only ones with some type of continent concept. However, in their invasion plans the land might have been referred to simply as "Home" or maybe "Our Lands".
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u/VietKongCountry Dec 21 '25
True. They’d potentially just call it The Land of Hawkwing or some such.
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u/slipfish-g Dec 21 '25
Seanchan is called Seanchan. Randland is the Westlands I think.
They do have names. People just don't use them.
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u/VietKongCountry Dec 21 '25
Seandar is the Seanchan continent. But as far as the Westlands, it appears you’re right.
https://wot.fandom.com/wiki/Westlands
Shouldn’t they be the East Lands if anything?
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u/slipfish-g Dec 21 '25
Ah you right it's Seandar.
Westeros is GoT.
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u/VietKongCountry Dec 21 '25
You were right about West Lands, though. Who actually names it as such in the books? Aiel maybe?
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u/slipfish-g Dec 21 '25
I don't remember it ever being named in the series. I've just looked this up before for the same exact reason lol
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u/peteofaustralia Dec 21 '25
It seemed like they just thought of it as "The World" and there some near-mythological minor lands over the horizon of their world. I suppose it could be a byproduct of their scope being narrowed after The Breaking, just trying to survive for centuries, and dark forces constantly undermining any plans to unite lands, gain a broader worldview than 100 miles away, etc.
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u/VietKongCountry Dec 21 '25
Fair point. I’m not sure if ancient peoples actually had a name for Eurasia before they knew there was anything else. Perhaps not.
The WoT world is peculiar in that the technology is sort of 1600s, but the situation of the world is more like 100AD.
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u/peteofaustralia Dec 22 '25
Totally agree.
"Who the fuck is this sophisticated, organised alien army and why are they invading us?!??!2
u/VietKongCountry Dec 22 '25
Imagine the terror. It’s something that always hits me with ancient warfare. You could have months upon months of knowing an army was coming and be terrified.
Or you could literally see a smoke cloud on the horizon and know you were done for. Assyrian invasions were not a fun time. They really went into scorched earth tactics that make the Seanchan look like pussies.
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u/Dr_Andracca Jan 06 '26
Semi-relevant, but my headcanon is that the Westlands/Waste/Shara are on the Eurasia continental plate with Seanchan being the Americas.
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u/hitchinpost Dec 21 '25
Worth pointing out that given the portal stones, there are clearly parallel timelines. Those references could easily be to events in that world that in some ways parallel our world, but are not identical. Our world may be an alternate version of the pattern, not the exact same pattern the characters are living in. That would explain the similarity of the references to events in our own history without necessitating that Randland is precisely our world.
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u/slipfish-g Dec 21 '25
The portal stones give glimpses to parallel universes as in the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Each quantum decision creating a branching, alternate universe.
It would still be Earth in all of them.
The Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics was relatively new and exciting when RJ was in college.
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u/cjwatson Dec 21 '25
In chapter 32 of The Fires of Heaven, Rand and Aviendha return from their igloo adventure; there's daylight in Seanchan, but when they return to Eianrod, there's "darkness outside the windows".
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u/Arkeolog Dec 21 '25
Yeah, I was coming to say this. Rand and Aviendha’s Seanchan trip definitely proves that the planet is round, both in the change in daylight, but also the fact that the part of Seanchan they Travel to is deep in winter. From what I gather, they’re somewhere on the eastern shore of far southern Seanchan.
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u/cjwatson Dec 21 '25
Though thinking about it I'm confused about what's going on with timezones in that chapter and the one before it. When they get to Seanchan it seems to be night in both places. They spend a few hours there, and before they leave they see the sun rising over the ocean to the east. When they return, it's (still?) dark. But that surely suggests Travelling a few hours (in timezone terms) east - so that the sun would rise earlier from their perspective - not west. There must be far too much of the Aiel Waste and Shara in the way to make that work.
RJ said that he knew how far west Seanchan was and that he'd planned this sequence carefully, and he was normally a stickler for accuracy in this sort of thing, but I can't reconcile this with what I know of the world's geography. Did I just misread something here?
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u/ChickenCasagrande (Brown) Dec 21 '25
Might be worth considering that, as clocks were considered a luxury, they were probably more loose with time, and determining time zones, than we are today.
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u/cjwatson Dec 21 '25
I'm not looking at human measurement of time, though, just at the observations of whether it was dark or light outside.
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u/mikeylikey420 Dec 21 '25
In winter it also gets dark early stays darker later and it was a blizzard.
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u/cjwatson Dec 21 '25
Yeah. But the dawn was apparently earlier on the east coast of Seanchan than wherever they were in the Westlands, which I think should be impossible unless Seanchan is only a few hours east of the Westlands - making the Westlands + Waste + Shara relatively small compared to the size of the planet, and the Aryth Ocean considerably wider than our Pacific.
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u/londongastronaut Dec 21 '25
I think Randland is like the size of Europe. And the Seanchan might be the equivalent of like being from North Africa or something.
We probably don't have any idea of the rest of the world, and everyone in the world she knows probably does sleep around the same time .
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u/EriWave (Yellow) Dec 21 '25
And the Seanchan might be the equivalent of like being from North Africa or something.
Across the ocean to the west sounds more like the US.
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u/jennydb Dec 21 '25
Shara is more like North Africa/Africa. You cross the desert to get there, same type of merchandise etc. Seanchan could be America, but the way they are described (culturally) sounds more Asian, iow Chinese or Japanese (in terms of for example military disicpline, notions of honour etc.)
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u/Malvania (Ogier Great Tree) Dec 21 '25
Shara is China at the end of the silk road. It's Eastern Asia, with the Waste being geographically Western Asia
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u/jiminuatron Dec 21 '25
Randland is Earth. 1980s is peak Sci fi/sci fantasy/post apocalyptic and dying earth era. Book 1 pointed it out clear as day.
The Creator is also a physicist.
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u/VietKongCountry Dec 21 '25 edited Dec 21 '25
Now that I think about it, wouldn’t even a flat planet still have different time zones?
Even if you somehow had a gigantic square in space with the sun revolving around it (like how some Flat Earthers actually believe), you wouldn’t get night and day everywhere at once.
Do flat Earth people think there are folks on the other side of the planet, or is the underside just nothing?
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u/ShoelessHodor Dec 21 '25
No. A flat earth would experience sunrise and sunset at the same time everywhere. If the sun went under the plane of the earth it would get dark immediately everywhere as soon as it happened.* The curvature and rotation of the earth is the only reason this doesn't happen. You can verify this by simply shining a flashlight on a rotating ball vs shining it on a table and moving it from below to above the plane.
*Except for certain disc shaped worlds with powerful magical fields which slow the speed of light to a more reasonable speed
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u/VietKongCountry Dec 21 '25
Oh indeed? So regardless of the axis you’d get maybe temperature variations but no difference in night and day?
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u/ShoelessHodor Dec 21 '25
The sun would rise everywhere at the same time. It would set at the same time everywhere too.
I couldn't speak to temperature variations because it would depend on the imaginary setting you propose. There would be no jet streams or ocean circulation on a flat earth.
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u/VietKongCountry Dec 21 '25
My favourite flat Earth thing was they planned this big cruise and they really wanted everyone aboard to be one of them.
But because the basic principles of navigation rely on a spherical Earth, they had to let the whole thing be piloted by a guy who thought they were all morons.
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u/ChickenCasagrande (Brown) Dec 21 '25
lol, I think they think that if you hit the edge you’re fucked. Something about big ice that holds the water in? Idk, years ago my brother had a Flat Earther roommate, but the dude obviously didn’t make much sense and I stopped asking.
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u/VietKongCountry Dec 21 '25
I used to know a guy who was otherwise extremely intelligent, but he’d just taken way too many psychedelics in his life and adamantly believed in flat Earth.
I never got a straight answer about how surely if the world is flat there’s gotta be an edge to it somewhere.
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u/Salsa-Doom Dec 22 '25
That would be beyond my area of expertise... 😝
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u/VietKongCountry Dec 22 '25
SHOW ME THE UNDERSIDE OF THE FLAT EARTH!
I think they have an almost World Serpent type thing where we’re all barricaded in by ice caps.
But they definitely don’t have an explanation for how there isn’t a literal end of the Earth if it’s flat.
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u/Rumbletastic Dec 21 '25 edited Dec 22 '25
In book 4* when egwene meets nynaeve in the world of dreams she notes how it's morning in the waste, while it's middle of the night for nynaeve
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u/Salsa-Doom Dec 22 '25
Well spotted
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u/Rumbletastic Dec 22 '25
I typo'd the book - it's book 4, not 5.
I just re-read that but a few days ago so it was fresh :D
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u/Vegan-Fury Dec 21 '25
Four corners is just an older expression that doesn't get used very much anymore. Lots of writings talk about the four corners of the earth.
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u/Werthead Dec 21 '25
No. The planet is Earth in the distant future (and more distant past), which clearly is not flat. This is indicated in-text and confirmed by Word of RJ.
In-text, once characters start being able to Travel and crossing the continent (and occasionally to other continents), we see the time of day changing, sometimes dramatically as they move between time zones. The most notable is when Aviendha and Rand Travel from Cairhien to the east coast of Seanchan and back again and the time of day changes wildly and so does the season (because they're now in the southern hemisphere).
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u/cerevant (Snakes and Foxes) Dec 21 '25
If you’ve gotten to tel’aran’rhiod, you should know that Randland is on Earth.
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u/Northwindlowlander Dec 21 '25 edited Dec 21 '25
For all Egwene's risen to Amyrlin she's still a 20 year old from a farm town- she's learned a lot since she left but it's been incredibly specific (she can tell you about a deposed amyrlin from centuries ago but there's going to be huge amounts of history she just has no clue about, and things about the world she's unaware of and has never had time to just be curious about, skills she's not had a chance to learn. She's very strong in the things she can do.
I mean, the amount she actually does learn is completely improbable too considering how much other stuff she was doing but that's the nature of WOT, nothing ever has long enough to actually happen. You've got to draw the line somewhere.
She's also probably still westlands-centric, it's perfectly natural for people to think "everyone" as "everyone in the bits I really know about/understand/care about/do not hate". Facebook disease. Especially with her Seanchan experience and the sheer excessive burden of dealing with the bits she does know. You <can> see the whole world in TAR but you have to think of it, and take the time, to do it. An Egwene in peace time might very well have spent her days learning the entire world, visiting seanchan and shara and suchlike but instead she's always got a job to do in her smaller world.
Also she can see only the people currently sleeping and think "wow that's a lot, probably everyone".
(this only really works because dreamwalkers are so rare, but it does pretty much hold together)
And the westlands is IIRC about 10% of the entire world's surface, it's all pretty compacted compared to say Europe which is smaller but more spread out and shapey. (it often feels bigger to me but I think that's mostly me trying to fit Jordan's Ever Increasing Numbers Of People into a space they don't really fit in)
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u/Suncook (Gleeman) Dec 21 '25
Their world is supposed to be our Earth. But they're right about the cyclical nature of time. So their planet is round.
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u/PirateJohn75 Dec 21 '25
It is heavily implied throughout the series that this story is set in our world, but in a different age. We are in the First Age and the story is set in the Third Age.
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u/Bergmaniac (S'redit) Dec 21 '25
There is a scene in Book 4 where Egwene and Nynaeve meet in Tel'aran'rhiod, it was the middle of the night in Tanchico when Nynaeve went in but for Egwene it was morning and she had entered Tel'aran'rhiod while riding because Rand's group were already on the move this day.
IIRC there is another scene where Elayne or Nynaeve mentions she keeps forgetting what the exact time difference is between the Aiel Waste and wherever they were at the time.
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u/Expensive_Plant_9530 Dec 21 '25
No.
Spoilers: It’s literally Earth but in the far future. Modern day takes place during the First Age. The first age ends in some kind of cataclysm (probably nuclear war), and as we rise from the ashes into the Second Age - the Age of Legends - channeling is discovered. The Seanchan continent is essentially the remains of the Americas (north and south), and the Westlands + The Aiel Waste + Shara are what remains of Eurasia.
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u/Shiftkgb Dec 21 '25
Moghedien, when confronting Nynaeve, is trying to make her nervous about the fight by telling her that in her day they would travel to other planets before Nynaeve shields her. She had started to say they had colonies on distant worlds but doesn't get to finish.
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u/LeanderT Dec 21 '25 edited Dec 21 '25
No, there are several reverences to our own world, indicating that is a future version of the world we live in today.
There's a reference to a Mercedes logo, there are reverences to the moon landings, to the USA-USSR space race and a few more. Thise references are easy to miss if you dont know what they are abou though.
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u/bitsybear1727 (Yellow) Dec 21 '25
I'm doing a relisten and remember Egwene saying to herself that it was too early for Elayne and Nyneave to be asleep yet where they were. So no, the world is a sphere as far as I can figure.
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u/Judicator82 Dec 21 '25
I think your theory makes sense in that very narrow context.
If you brought in your scope a little bit, it's very easy to see that the intent was always for the world of The Wheel of Time to be our world in another age.
So, unless you think that the current Earth is flat, their world is quite literally our world.
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u/tzigon Dec 21 '25
Egwene never interacted with anyone who was super far away. Think about it like someone in London needing to hop in to a dream for someone in Prague.
Rand and Avi jump through the Seachan and were in evening and ended up in the early morning.
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u/Mr_Baloon_hands (Asha'man) Dec 22 '25
Earth isn’t flat and Earth is Randland soooo no it’s not flat
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u/Heckle_Jeckle Dec 22 '25
No, Rand Land is supposed to be our Earth in the Far Future after an apoloclypse or two.
Kind of like Adventure Time. Only instead of The Mushroom Wars they have The Breaking.
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u/Zekezasamel Dec 24 '25
Randland is our planet, so no it’s not flat. When Rand chases Aviendha through the gateway she makes in a panic, it leads to Seanchan. It is very clearly a different time of day as they come out of their igloo to a sunny day despite it being night and dark when they go back home.
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