Balefire

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For a fire made of bales of straw or wood, see Bonfire.

Balefire, in the world of the Wheel of Time, is a weapon created with the One Power.

It has only one known weave, and when evoked, it slices through all normal material with a brilliant beam leaving a searing aftermath akin to looking at the sun for too long. When it encounters anything living, that thing is instantly destroyed, and depending on the strength of the beam, the thread of that thing is burned back in time, which may result in undoing things which it has done. When Rand killed Rahvin with balefire, for instance, it undid the deaths of Aviendha, Mat and Asmodean. Balefire dates back in its use to the War of Power, when it was used to destroy entire cities. It was this that caused both sides in the war to reach an independant truce to stop using balefire, as its continued use would have destroyed the pattern and thus the world.

Cuendillar is the only material known to be resistant to balefire. However this is debatable as Rand al'Thor parted a stream of balefire with (or through) the sa'angreal Callandor in the Stone of Tear.

The means to use balefire remains known only to the Forsaken and to Rand al'Thor and a few of his associates.

"When anything is destroyed with balefire, it ceases to exist before the moment of its destruction, like a thread that burns away from where the flame touched it. The greater the power of the balefire, the further back in time it ceases to exist. The strongest Moiraine can manage will remove only a few seconds from the Pattern...For as far back as you destroy something, whatever it did during that time no longer happened. Only the memories remain, for those who saw or experienced it." [The Fires Of Heaven: 6, Gateways, 119]