When Herid Fel discussed the Wheel of Time with Rand, he stated that the DOs prison would need to be made whole again, as opposed to being re-patched; as he did not think that the Creator would have made a prison for the DO with a patch already in it. This got me thinking about the nature of the Wheel of Time, and how this relates to the moment of creation, and the relationship of the seven Ages to each other. As the introduction to each book states:- "The Wheel of Time turns, and ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the age that gave it birth comes again" This strongly suggests that in the normal turning of the Wheel, as the Seventh Age passed; it would leave memories in the first age that became legends, and subsequently myths. But what about in the initial turning of the Wheel? Was Randland made by ‘Intelligent Design’, and did the Creator create the initial First Age with a ‘history’ that was fabricated by of future ages? There seem to be two possible answers, BOTH of which suggest that the DOs prison could be patched-up without contravening the Creators intent. The first possible answer is that the Creator did fabricate an accurate pre-history history for the intial First Age, based on prescient knowledge of how future history would be repeated. I want to be very clear here, and specify that I don’t necessarily mean history in the truest sense of the word i.e. written records of the past. I don’t even mean history as an cultural recollection of the previous Age(s). I mean that regardless of these conditions something will have existed prior to a standard First Age, and events will have conspired during a standard Seventh Age to return the world to the state of being found at the start of the First Age. An example of how this could happen would be the decay and/or destruction of all artefacts, immense cataclysmic events that would reduce mankind to a point at which history of any kind had been forgotten, the folding of the land in such a way as to return processed materials to a state in which they are indistinguishable from ore deposits beneath the ground etc. If the Creator did create the Wheel of Time in this way, then Fel’s theory that the DOs prison wouldn’t have been created with a patch doesn’t really hold up… it doesn’t actually prove that it WAS created with a patch, but it certainly proves that creating it with a patch is consonant with the process of Creation. The second possible answer is that the Creator did not fabricate a pre-history for the initial First Age. In this scenario, the initial turning of the Wheel would have been slightly different to the standard turnings… it would be a kind of preparatory turning of the Wheel, in which there would be no history (of the type described above) during the initial First Age. In this Scenario, the Creator could have initially made the DOs prison without a patch; but this patch-less prison would have existed only during the initial preparatory turning of the Wheel. If the Creator did make the Wheel of Time in this second way, then Fel’s theory that the DOs prison wouldn’t have been created with a patch is more correct... however, in this scenario, just because it wasn’t created with a patch (during the preparatory turn of the wheel); doesn’t preclude it from existing with a patch in each subsequent First Age.