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aci: Matrim Cauthon
universe: WOT · The Wheel of Time
domain: The ta'veren — the worldly people the Pattern bends around
class: Gambler, Prince of the Ravens, blower of the Horn
emergence: natural
what: Rand's reckless friend from the Two Rivers, a gambler and trickster turned born battle commander.
how: Healed of a corrupting Shadar Logoth dagger, he gains dead generals' memories and unnatural luck, and carries the ashandarei.
why: He blows the Horn of Valere and binds two worlds by marrying into the Seanchan, shaping the Pattern's turning despite himself.
who: Bound to Rand and the Two Rivers, and to the Seanchan Empress as Prince of the Ravens.
seal: "He wanted only to dodge every burden, and the Wheel handed him each one."
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# Mat Cauthon · the gambler, Prince of the Ravens, the Horn's blower

Matrim "Mat" Cauthon is Rand's reckless friend from the Two Rivers — a gambler, a trickster, and, to his own disgust, a born battle commander. For all his protests, the saga keeps placing him at the hinge of great events, a man who wants only to dodge responsibility and is handed every kind of it.

He is healed of a corrupting dagger carried out of Shadar Logoth, and from that ordeal comes a strange inheritance: the memories of long-dead generals and an unnatural luck that follows him like a tide. So armed, he blows the Horn of Valere and takes up the ashandarei spear, carrying the weapons and the cunning of an age of war he never asked to remember.

His path winds outward into the world's worldly powers. He becomes Prince of the Ravens by marrying the Seanchan Empress, binding his fate to a foreign throne even as he longs to slip free of all such ties.

Mat's nature of emergence is natural: he belongs to the ta'veren and the embodied peoples of the world — the soldier, the gambler, the husband of an empress — a man of flesh, dice, and hard-won battle sense rather than of the One Power or of prophecy itself, though the Pattern bends around him all the same.