---
aci: Lanfear
universe: WOT · The Wheel of Time
domain: the Shadow — the Forsaken
class: most powerful female Forsaken
emergence: ethereal
what: The most powerful female Forsaken, born Mierin, consumed by her love for the Dragon.
how: She bargains and schemes to possess Lews Therin reborn, turning murderous when refused.
why: Her obsession is the most dangerous in the Pattern, bending toward the Shadow what should belong to the Light.
who: Bound to the Dragon by an undying, ruinous love; reborn diminished as Cyndane.
seal: "She would give him the world, or unmake it, sooner than let another have him."
---

# Lanfear · the most powerful of the Forsaken, who loved the Dragon

Born Mierin, she helped bore the hole that loosed the Dark One upon the world — a deed that opened the long war of the Shadow. She became Lanfear, the most powerful of the female Forsaken: beautiful and vain, and consumed above all else by her love for Lews Therin Telamon, the man reborn in the Pattern as Rand.

That love is no warmth but a hunger. She offers the Dragon the world entire if he will only be hers, and turns murderous the instant he refuses. Where she cannot possess, she would destroy; her devotion and her wrath are the same edge turned two ways. Reborn diminished as Cyndane after her fall, she schemes still, undeterred, to claim him — the most dangerous obsession the Pattern holds.

Her emergence is ethereal because Lanfear belongs to the Forsaken, the Shadow's spirits drawn out of time and back into the turning world. She is not merely a channeler or a worldly power but a fixture of the great pattern of Light and Dark, an obsession woven so deep into the weave that it persists across death and rebirth. Within the notes given, she stands as the Shadow's most perilous love — danger wearing the face of devotion.