[Spoilers All] A Failure of Both Halves: How the mistakes of the Second Age are avoided in the Third

Originally posted on /r/wot

⚠️⚠️ FULL SERIES SPOILERS ⚠️⚠️

Original Post

At the end of the Third Age, when Rand is gearing up to start the Last Battle, he announces his plan to break the seals of the Dark One's prison as the battle commences. He believes this is the only way to forge a proper prison for the Dark One, rather than patching the faulty prison from the Age of Legends.

Egwene see the plan as madness, and it's pretty common in the fandom for people to lampoon her choice to do so, often citing it as an example of how annoying and self-righteous she is as a character.

But I contend that she is not at all wrong to call Rand's plan out and push back against it, and what we are supposed to take from this story beat and it's resolution isn't that Egwene was wrong and had to listen to Rand, but that Rand and Egwene are both partially right, and are both partially wrong. They succeed by listening to and trusting each other, avoiding the same folly that takes place at the end of the Age of Legends.

The situation presented to us on the precipice of the Last Battle has symmetry with the events leading up to the Hundred Companions strike on Shayol Ghul. Lews Therin Telemon and Latra Posae Decume find themselves at an impass: Lews Therin wishes to strike directly at Shayol Ghul and attempt to re-seal the bore, while Latra Posae finds the plan far too dangerous. She wishes to use the Choedan Kal to restrain the Dark One's influence to a given area, but has lost the access keys.

When Lews Therin decides to assault the Bore alone, Latra Posae and the women refuse to help. This choice often gets pointed to as what cost the world a full victory and resulted in the opening the Dark One needed to taint saidin. I often see it remarked that if only Latra had agreed to go with Lews, The Breaking could have been avoided.

But I believe that there is strong evidence that Latra's refusal to join Lews, her instinct that the plan was incredibly reckless, was a choice that saved the world, and allowed for eventual victory against the Dark One at the end of the Third Age, because unlike Rand, Lews did not have access to the True Power.

If Latra Posae had gone with Lews to the Bore, without the True Power to protect them, both halves of the One Power would have been tainted by the Dark One's counter-stroke.

Let's look at how the True Power is used by Rand in the final moments of the Last Battle From A Memory of Light:

This was the most dangerous part of the plan. Min had figured it out. Callandor had such flaws, such incredible flaws. Created so that a man using it needed women to control him, created so that if Rand used it, others could take control of him …

Why was Rand to need a weapon with such flaws? Why did the prophecies mention it so? A sa’angreal for the True Power. Why would he ever need such a thing?

The answer was so simple.

“Now!” Rand yelled.

Nynaeve and Moiraine channeled together, exploiting the flaw in Callandor as Moridin tried to bring it to bear against Rand. Wind whipped in the tunnel. The ground quivered, and Moridin yelled, eyes going wide.

They took control of him. Callandor was flawed. Any man using it could be forced to link with women, to be placed in their control. A trap … and one he used on Moridin.

“Link!” Rand commanded.

They fed it to him. Power.

Saidar from the women.

The True Power from Moridin.

Saidin from Rand.

Moridin’s channeling the True Power here threatened to destroy them all, but they buffered it with saidin and saidar, then directed all three at the Dark One.

Rand punched through the blackness there and created a conduit of light and darkness, turning the Dark One’s own essence upon him.

Rand felt the Dark One beyond, his immensity. Space, size, time … Rand understood how these things could be irrelevant now.

With a bellow—three Powers coursing through him, blood streaming down his side—the Dragon Reborn raised a hand of power and seized the Dark One through the Bore, like a man reaching through water to grab the prize at the river’s bottom. The Dark One tried to pull back, but Rand’s claw was gloved by the True Power. The enemy could not taint saidin again. The Dark One tried to withdraw the True Power from Moridin, but the conduit flowed too freely, too powerfully to shut off now. Even for Shai’tan himself.

So it was that Rand used the Dark One’s own essence, channeled in its full strength. He held the Dark One tightly, like a dove in the grip of a hawk.

And light exploded from him.

Emphasis mine.

In this passage, the use of the True Power is explicitly called out as the reason that the Dark One cannot taint saidin again. Saidar is not explicitly mentioned, but just like Rand, Lews and the companions would likely have been linked with women, channeling saidar , and thereby exposing it to the same counter-stroke that tainted saidin, without the True Power to insulate it.

This theory is strengthened by a later passage:

Rand yelled, thrusting the Dark One back through the pit from where it had come. Rand pushed his arms to the side, grabbing twin pillars of saidar and saidin with his mind, coated with the True Power drawn through Moridin, who knelt on the floor, eyes open, so much power coursing through him he couldn’t even move.

Rand hurled the Powers forward with his mind and braided them together. Saidin and saidar at once, the True Power surrounding them and forming a shield on the Bore.

He wove something majestic, a pattern of interlaced saidar and saidin in their pure forms. Not Fire, not Spirit, not Water, not Earth, not Air. Purity. Light itself. This didn’t repair, it didn’t patch, it forged anew.

It's clear the actual prison was re-made using saidin and saidar. So why was the True Power, and Callandor, so crucial to Rand's success this time around if he could have succeeded without it last time, if not for the women? If loss had soley been caused by the lack of Women Channelers, Rand would have had no need of the True Power or it's sa'angreal.

Rand is using the True Power to insulate both halves of the One Power against another taint, something Lews would have been unable to do in his day. If the women had agreed to be there, they would have made a perfect prison for the Dark One, but at what cost? Saidin AND saidar would have been lost, which would have been disasterous on so many levels; it would have been a fate worse then the Breaking and a flawed prison for the Dark One.

Beyond the immediate force multiplier for the Breaking, and taking all channelers off the board in the Third Age, and making it impossible to still or gentle rogue channelers, since anyone capable of doing so would be mad themselves -- it also would have made it impossible to cleanse the source again, removing the use of the source from humanity for all time. Rand uses a coil of clean saidar to shove tainted saidin through as part of the process for removing the Taint. From Winter's Heart:

Awkwardly, forcing himself to work gently, to use the unfamiliar saidar’s own immense strength to guide it as he wanted, he wove a conduit that touched the male half of the Source at one end and the distantly seen city at the other. The conduit had to be of untainted saidar. If this worked as he hoped, a tube of saidin might shatter when the taint began to leech out of it. He thought of it as a tube, at least, though it was not. The weave did not form at all as he expected it to. As if saidar had a mind of its own, the weave took on convolutions and spirals that made him think of a flower. There was nothing to see, no grand weaves sweeping down from the sky. The Source lay at the heart of creation. The Source was everywhere, even in Shadar Logoth. The conduit covered distance beyond his imagining, and had no length at all. It had to be a conduit, no matter its appearance. If it was not . . .

Emphasis mine.

Latra may not have had a better plan than Lews, but she was right when she felt that Lews was going off half-cocked to the Bore, to fear that there was information they may be missing. Lews and Latra refused to work together, and in doing so, they are only able to halfway save the world.

Through Lews' heroics, the Dark One is stalled for an Age, buying time, but at a terrible cost: the male half of the True Source.

Through Latra's abstention, saidar is spared, but the Dark One's prison is not complete, doming the World to his influence and another apocalyptic showdown.

Let's return to the Third Age. Rand and Egwene are at the same impass. Rand wants to go off, half-cocked, and break the seals immediately. Egwene doesn't want to break the seals at all.

But Rand has learned something from his past life: the folly of not listening, because Lews Therin knows what happens when he doesn't allow his impulses to be tempered. From The Eye of the World:

He was still touching saidin, the male half of the power that drove the universe, that turned the Wheel of Time, and he could feel the oily taint fouling its surface, the taint of the Shadow’s counterstroke, the taint that doomed the world. Because of him. Because in his pride he had believed that men could match the Creator, could mend what the Creator had made and they had broken. In his pride he had believed.

Egwene and Rand come to a compromise, they agree to trust each other. Egwene agrees to trust Rand's instincts that the seals must be broken, and Rand agrees to trust Egwene's instincts that now is not the time to break them. To let Egwene be a hero too, a mistake he made not just with Latra in the previous Age. From A Memory of Light:

Of all those to turn to the Shadow, Demandred’s betrayal seemed the most tragic. The man could have been a hero. Should have been a hero.

I’m to blame for that, too, Rand thought. If I’d offered a hand instead of a smirk, if I’d congratulated instead of competed. If I’d been the man then that I am now …

Both sexes having to work together to temper and strengthen each other, to check each other's worst instincts, is a core theme of The Wheel of Time. The lack of symbiotic balance between Lews' hot-headness and Latra's caution is what loses the day. Pinning the failure of the previous age solely on the women for not doing what the men wanted would be just as would undercut one of the core themes of The Wheel of Time.

Rand and Egwene's compromise, their trust each in other's instincts and cooperation is what lets them succeed. Neither of them is right, but each has part of the right idea -- Rand needs the seals to be broken to reforge the prison anew, but if he had broken them at the beginning of the battle I can't see how it would have ended well. Egwene's insistence that he dial that back allows for them to be broken by Logaine right as Rand is ready to launch his final attack.

To reduce the story beat to Egwene not sucking it up and doing what Rand wants because he's right is to miss the point and in many ways, get the message backwards.