One of the many ways the The Dark One attempts to unmake the world in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series is by influencing the weather. When the series begins an unnaturally long chill has pressed itself over the land, and it is broken only by the emergence of the series’ savior, The Dragon Reborn. Later on in the series, the world (or at least the part of the world that we see) is beset by an endless summer. Heat pervades, drought persists, and there is no doubt that The Dark One is doing so in an attempt to smother the denizens of the world into submission. The threat is considered so great that the advancing plot of the entire series is eventually called to a halt so that this “endless summer” can be thwarted.

In our world, summer temperatures are reaching record highs across the northern hemisphere; this seemingly endless steamroom of a season was probably what Rand, Mat, Egwene, and company had to suffer in The Wheel of Time. But our summer can’t actually last forever, right? As half the world gears up for more heatwaves through August, I got to wondering: just how long did the world of Jordan’s Wheel of Time have to hold out?

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