Rand reaches the room with Callandor, where Be’lal meets him and they have an epic duel using every bit of his training. Except then Moiraine comes in and kills Be’lal with balefire. That was anticlimactic. That feeling continues when Ba’alzamon appears, so Rand grabs the sword…and he runs away through a portal. So Rand uses the sword to open it again and follow him.
Egwene finds the dungeons in the dream world, and since the Black guarding them is starting to nod off, she’s able to do the air trick, essentially giving her old hag syndrome in the real world. That’s when Mat arrives, and he opens the door after another idiot moment when he’s absolutely sure the Black guard has to be a prisoner herself, until Sandar speaks up. And luckily, the girls aren’t inclined to hold a grudge when he explains how he was under a spell.
Rand has entered the dream world, where his own amplified Power combined with Callandor lets him negate everything Ba’alzamon throws at him. Unfortunately, it goes on a bit too long and by the end it’s just tedious to read about the latest thing he plows his way through, so no Crowning Moment Of Awesome here. That happens when it finally ends, and he stabs Ba’alzamon in the heart, which sends him back to the real world, where he stops the battle by proclaiming himself the Dragon Reborn.
A lot of the climax works very well, and even features some amusing touches when we’re reminded of how little the various heroes know about what each other have been up to. Unfortunately, Be’lal’s very underwhelming death and the endless parade of stuff Rand effortlessly fights past drag it down, plus it’s hard to take Ba’alzamon’s death seriously given how the ends of both previous books have tried to convince us he was dead. Plus, now we know he’s not even the Dark One.
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