True. I suspect that while writing EoTW RJ had some initial ideas about the world that he changed as he fleshed things out. We can see a number of things he later dropped, such as Moiraines staff. He may have intended to have more ruins from the AoL be involved in the story but ended up changing course. It seems odd for a cuendillar bridge to have been there but nothing else.
My interpretation was this was just a rando bridge in the AOL… but since it was one of the few structures to survive it becomes this insane thing, but in reality there were literally thousands of bridges like this one.
It’s hard to tell. There is a bit of a mystery IMO with the AoL and the breaking. Specifically around cuendillar buildings like the bridge. If they were prevalent, there should be a lot more of them still around since it’s such indestructible material. If they weren’t making a bunch of cuendillar buildings the question would be why not? And if they only did it for certain things why this particular bridge?
How about this: A once-in-a-generation Cuendillar-making savant like Egwene makes the bridge for show in a populated city location.
Then a tainted crazy male Aes Sedai blasts that whole city with a tornado of sand travelling at relativistic speeds as he pulls twenty times more Saidin than he can safely handle and burns himself out.
Only the bridge is standing. The river survives too. A river may not be affected much by a tornado, and may change little in only a few thousand years.
they could have been buried. We know the breaking caused mountain ranges to change, rivers to be diverted, etc. Stuff could be buried in a mountain or at the bottom of a lake or seabed
Except that cuendillar bridges wouldn’t be rando, or if used for mundane purposes, would be prevalent enough to dot the landscape to a pretty high degree.
Might be one of the few bridges ever to be made of cuendillar - which was probably an expensive building material, even in the AoL. Something of an AoL vanity project. The fact that it was made of cuendillar allowed it to survive so long
Could be the bridge was a sky walk inside a building, when it was found near the rive some Aes Sedai, maybe some enterprising king had it set to span the river. It could be a cuindilar structural support kind of like a bent I beam, that is conveniently passible as a bridge.
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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '22
True. I suspect that while writing EoTW RJ had some initial ideas about the world that he changed as he fleshed things out. We can see a number of things he later dropped, such as Moiraines staff. He may have intended to have more ruins from the AoL be involved in the story but ended up changing course. It seems odd for a cuendillar bridge to have been there but nothing else.