Re: The wheel of time and other fantasy books
Okay, so, obviously some spoilers for the Wheel of Time, even though that book is pretty old by now.
When Perrin goes to rescue Faile, no, she is not controlling the falcons. He's essentially in a dreamworld "nightmare" or trap set by one of the darkfriends. It's all meant to be symbolic. But it's also only the third book in the series, and Jordan's magic system wasn't as thoroughly fleshed out as it later got. There were holes even at the end, but in earlier books, explanations for some stuff really were flimsy. Chalk this Faile and Perrin thing up both to flimsy construction and to symbolic representation in the dreamworld.
Us not getting a whole ot of Rand's POV here is probably for two reasons. First, I'm pretty sure Robert Jordan wasn't planning the series to be fourteen books at this point, and in the few Rand POVs we do get, he seems pretty unhinged at times. I believe that Jordan was trying to play tricks and remove us from the perspective of the main hero precisely to give us a backseat view of what was going on. Personally, this is one of the things I liked best about this particular novel. It is high time we got a lot of Perrin, Mat, Egwene and other points of view. This absolutely needed to happen if the series was going to expand, which it very much did in later books. Because yes, I care about Rand, but I also care about all the other people in the world. This story is far, far bigger than Rand alone, even if he stands at the center of it. I dunno, but personally, too much emphasis on Rand at this part of the story probably would have soured me on it. There are a lot of things Jordan gets wrong at different points in the series, but this is one that he nailed squarely.
Ishamael had tried and failed three separate times now to kill Rand. The Dark One probably got tired of his failures and let him die because, while he is the self-titled Lord of the Grave, he can't control everything, and if he could just resurrect his non-Balefired servants over and over, that's kind of boring and not cool and destroys the series. also? It's supposed to kind of make Rand think he killed the Dark One, even though he didn't come anywhere near that. As far as his body splitting in two, I'm not a hundred percent sure there, but that could be foreshadowing about his soul, or whatever might be left of it. It's been awhile since I read the end of The Dragon Reborn, but it's one of my favourite books in the series.
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