Rand, everyone’s favorite Who-Cares, enters the Heart of the Stone and sees Callandor. A man spies from the columns and goads Rand to take the sword, calling him Lews Therin. Rand recognizes him; the man calls himself Be’lal and continues to urge the lad to take the fucking sword. Instead of taking the sword, Rand channels saidin and makes a sword of red fire to counteract Be’lal’s sword of black fire. Be’lal is better at swordplay, though, and threatens to kill Rand unless he takes Callandor. This guy really wants Rand to take the sword, man. But Rand doesn’t even really know if he’s the Dragon Reborn or not.

Rand refuses — REFUSES — to take the sword. At this point Moiraine shows up, which Be’lal finds amusing… until Moiraine shoots white hot fire from her hands and disintegrates the nerd. Now it’s Moiraine’s turn to tell Rand to take the fucking Callandor, and since Moiraine is a pretty lady, Rand obliges this time. He touches it and becomes overcome with saidin. Glowing white with brilliant power. Get some sunglasses.

With Callandor in hand, Rand steps through a doorway. And we’ll check back on him in a few moments. Egwene is running through Tel’aran’rhiod looking for the dungeon cells. She finds Amico and neutralizes her but good. After finding a cell, Egwene busts open the lock with some good old-fashioned forbidden Tel’aran’rhiod channeling, returns to the real world, and discovers the lock is still fastened to the door. Shit! Dreams aren’t real! She’ll just have to try again, won’t she? *snore*

Now it’s Mat’s time to shine! He discovers the Aes Sedai that Egwene took care of in the last chapter — I already forgot her stupid name — sitting in a trance on a bench. He steals her key, opens up a cell door, and discovers the bruised and battered Egwene, Nynaeve and Elayne sitting there all bruised and all battered. Mat’s all like “Oy, what’s all this then?!” and offers to carry the supine Egwene while the other two stumble and bumble their way out of the dungeons with him. They reach the catatonic Aes Sedai on the bench, and Nynaeve punches her right in the face. Mat doesn’t know what the fuck is going on, so Nynaeve tells him to shut up then until he does know what’s going on.

Perrin’s turn. He’s still looking for Zarine, and he’s got Hopper by his side. He keeps finding ghostly apparitions of her instead of the genuine article, which is starting to annoy him something foul. He eventually finds a door covered in little falcons; he smashes open the door, which leads to a room filled with real falcons that start pecking his goddamn eyes out, and he reaches a lock and chain with the hedgehog ter’angreal. Perrin breaks open the chain and immediately wakes back up at the inn with Zarine, who is tending to his weird unconsciousness.

Back to Rand, who is now chasing Ba’alzamon through the Stone like Speedy Gonzales. He eventually stabs the Satan-like being with Callandor and Ba’alzamon goes “nooooooooo” and for the third time in three books, Rand thinks he’s dead.

The Dragon Reborn has (maybe) (but not really) succeeded!