This section begins with Rand, dreaming a sexually charged dream about Min and Elayne. Berelain enters his room and he snaps awake. Rand is standing and holding his sword of fire in the span of a breath. He's becoming more paranoid by the hour, and we'll spend a lot of time discussing Rand's slow descent into madness. She wants to seduce him, but Rand is having none of it. He does try to remain polite through most of the encounter, even when Berelain refuses to take no for an answer. Luckily for her, Rand loses his patience, and slowly pushes her out of the room with a wall of air. Before she's out of the door, a cock crows in the distance, a widely known omen of death; the moment that ties each of the boy's timelines together for us. In that moment, Rand's own reflections in the mirrors step out into the room. In a beautifully dark action scene Rand fights many copies of himself in a long drawn out battle while Berelain watches safely shielded behind the wall of air. It takes him quite a while to find the answer, that he must absorb them into himself. The Dragon is one with the land, and so to ground this bubble of Evil Rand must touch the copies of himself with is own body, rather than with dirt or wood which is what worked for the other boys. His training with Lan is likely what keeps the Dragon alive.