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"When anything is destroyed with balefire, it ceases to exist before the moment of its destruction, like a thread that burns away from where the flame touched it. The greater the power of the balefire, the further back in time it ceases to exist. The strongest [Moiraine] can manage will remove only a few seconds from the Pattern...For as far back as you destroy [something], whatever it did during that time no longer happened. Only the memories remain, for those who saw or experienced it." [TFOH: 6, Gateways, 119]
That pretty much explains it. Something that is BFed is erased backwards in time; the amount of erasing depends on the amount of Power put into the BF. Rand, at full power, with an angreal, managed to erase Rahvin back about half an hour. Note that Balefire does NOT erase every single action the victim performed in his life. When Rahvin was BFed, Morgase did not become un-compelled, sitting back in the Caemlyn palace. If Lanfear were balefired, the Bore would not cease to exist, since it was created over 3000 years ago, and I doubt that the capacity for creating that strong a beam of BF exists. (Plus, if it WAS done, the poor Pattern would probably unravel completely. See below.)
Balefire: I'm right. (This was my question) What this means is, if someone is Balefired, the Dark One can't reincarnate them. But they CAN be spun back out into the wheel as normal. Balefire is NOT the eternal death of the soul. He also made a comment to the effect that even in the absence of balefire, there may be circumstances where the Dark One cannot bring someone back.If this is the case, then why is BF so bad? It must be a question of scale. If lots of BF is used on many targets, as it was during the War of Power, the Pattern will become quite ragged and begin to unravel, like an old pair of jeans. If large quantities of BF are used, then there will be obvious problems with causality, as there were in the aftermath of Rahvin's death. Thus, it's not a good idea to use strong BF, and it's not wise for many people to use it regularly.
John Walter Biles explains: The pattern unravels permanently because in a war of mass destruction with balefire, you can yank threads out of the pattern faster than they can be replaced. Yeah, they can EVENTUALLY be reborn, but unless the total population of all of creation is static, then they won't be reborn instantly. More importantly, it screws up causality. That's why the Pattern can unravel; it's not that you run out of threads, it is that if you nuke an entire city, every consequence of every action by everyone in the entire city is suddenly undone back to point X. Given the amount of balefire nuking a city takes, you can make quite a mess. Do enough damage to the Pattern faster than it can repair itself, and it still comes apart.
Remember that the DO is the source of the whole history of the 3rd Age. Everything everybody has done for the past 3500 or so years has been affected in some way by the DO. Why is Joe Al'Schmoe of the 2 Rivers a farmer in a forgotten province of Andor, and not a citizen of one of the most powerful, strongest nations in Randland? It's because Manetheren was destroyed in the Trolloc wars, which were initiated by Ishamael, who was the DO's right-hand-man throughout the 3rd age.
Another point (via G.G. Kay) is that maybe the DO doesn't even have a thread to balefire. After all, the DO's prison exists "outside the Pattern." Perhaps the DO itself does, too. (NB: the no-body/no-thread argument applies to "Why doesn't somebody BF the DO," no matter if you try to BF him back 3500 years or 3 seconds. The "Pattern" argument does, as well--if there is no DO, what happens the next time the Wheel comes around to the AOL/3rd Age again?)
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The Wheel of Time FAQ. Copyright 1999 by Pamela Korda and Erica Sadun. HTML implementation by Matthew Hunter. This site maintained by Matthew Hunter (mhunter@andrew.cmu.edu). Comments and questions regarding the content itself should be directed to Pam Korda (kor2 @ midway.uchicago.edu).