The Dice in Mat's Head

In The Dragon Reborn, after being healed from the taint of the Shadar Logoth dagger and his extraordinary luck makes its first appearance, Mat begins to feel the sensation of dice tumbling in his head. While he eventually decides the dice mean something important is happening, he often has no clue why they start and stop or what they mean. Many believe that the dice are tied up in his luck, or merely indicate that Mat is coming to an important decision. However, the dice may be more significant. There is evidence that they are no less than the pattern’s tug on Mat’s thread.

We know that Mat is ta’veren. Ta’veren are woven more strictly by the Wheel– not only do they pull on the threads around them, but they are kept more strictly to the pattern laid out for them because the Wheel uses them to guide the whole weaving. Now that we have several books of information since the dice in Mat’s head first started, we can figure out what they mean by looking at specifically what events have caused them to stop rolling and then why those events ended up being significant later on.

As an illustrative example we will look at some places where the dice stop in ACoS, WH, and CoT and see how these events turned out to be important in later books (for a complete listing of dice events see the page on Mat on http://www.encyclopaedia-wot.org/).

· The dice stop when Mat agrees to move into the Tarasin Palace. We now know that this directly led him to meeting Tuon.

· The dice stop when a wall falls on Mat in the chaos of the Seanchan attack. This kept him from leaving the city, again making sure he meets Tuon.

· The dice stop when Mat meets Tuon. Obviously because she is the Daughter of the Nine Moons and he will marry her.

· The dice stop when Tuon and Mat agree to terms guaranteeing she will not try to escape. This continues to ensure the series of events that lead to the completion of their marriage ceremony.

The sequence of events above all led toward Mat marrying Tuon, as well as the course he has taken in getting to Caemlyn. For example, he would have left the city if the wall hadn’t collapsed on him. The events are all ways that his path has been set out before him, the Wheel tugging him into being in the right place at the right time. The dice appear to start when his course begins to be pulled by the pattern, then stop when he’s been tugged into place.

Perhaps a better question to ask is, if the dice are the pattern pulling Mat as a ta’veren, how come Perrin and Rand don’t feel the same thing? Well, each sort of does in his own way. Perrin has felt Rand’s pull before, or felt he had to be somewhere, and Rand often has similar hunches. However, Mat’s more acute awareness of the pull may in fact be the interaction between his luck and his ta’veren nature, or it may be a Talent all its own like Min’s viewings. Importantly, Mat starts hearing the dice at the end of tDR, before he has gone through either of the doorways to Finnland, so we know it has nothing to do with the Finns. Likely the exact reason he hears the dice will not be answered until we learn more about the exact cause of Mat’s luck, which will require its own discussion.

Quote of the day:

“You’re Aes Sedai,” Mat said, shrugging. “I figured you…you know, saidared it.”

-tGS, Ch. 36, p.556