As the whole city wakes up to cheer on Rand, now openly the Dragon Reborn, everyone compares notes on what they’ve been up to. Moiraine has found another seal in the Stone, this one still intact, which leaves just two unaccounted for. And Egwene has figured out that Ba’alzamon was actually the Forsaken Ishmael, though seeing as he’s dead I don’t see how that means much. And we get the expected Prophecy Twist on how the Stone could have fallen: the Aiel are the “people of the dragon” it was talking about. I didn’t see that coming. Finally, Lanfear compels one of the high lords to deliver a message that she’ll still be coming for Rand, sometime in the next eleven books.
This one is a good deal meatier than the previous two final chapters, enough that I have a separate review paragraph for it. Of course, the reason for that is that the story is now so complicated that we need everyone to sit around and sort things out before moving on to the next part. So far it’s all hanging together pretty well.
The Dragon Reborn gets off to a very slow start, but once the story does get moving it’s quite engaging as we see everyone in new circumstances, struggling to adapt while unknowingly heading toward the same goal. As in the last book, it feels pretty natural that the different plot threads all converge in one place for the ending, though I have my doubts about how many times that can be pulled off. The choice to keep Rand off-page for the vast majority of the book despite it being named after him was very risky, but the results justify it. The various other characters get their time to shine without Rand as the one true hero distracting from them, and we get to see him more from others’ points of view as the legendary hero after knowing him so well as just a normal guy. This is another improvement on the last book.
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