"To go into the mist and return, that is the end of exploration," Greyoc explained, when Rillop asked him why he didn't go adventuring anymore. The old man had been a renowned explorer in his day: He had traversed the Phantoms' forest, bringing back previously unknown animals and plants, specifically the molgrehu snail, or the Healer, as it came to be known because it fed on disease and injury, sustaining itself while healing the sick. (These discoveries may have made up for the sixty men he lost to the Phantoms, but they could never allay his terrible memories of those shapeless shadows. You couldn't distinguish them from the shadows of trees, he said, until they were nigh upon you, and they had the strength of rushing water, the glinting stare of a yelg wolf, claws like daggers, teeth like needles, and an ultrasonic whine that paralyzed you with indecision as they fell upon you.) He had scaled the Kalavan Mountains; he had skirted the southern coast of Bahadwea, the great continent; he had brought back gems and trinkets and herbs and spices and secrets from cities and cultures thousands of leagues in all directions. He had sailed far out upon the sea, returning with magnificent catches of fish, and stories of gigantic sea monsters and unending schools of sharks. At last, he had gone into the mist at the edge of the world, and returned to a hero's welcome; but after that, he never explored again — and Rillop wondered why.

"So what was there?" he asked, "In the mist, I mean."

"Nothing; it was just mist. Thick white mist, more like fog."

"So, why...?"

"It was more of a feeling," the old man told him, earnestly, "As if there was nothing more to see, nothing more to do..."

That feeling was shared by all the great explorers: once they made it into the mist, they never went any farther; they never went beyond the mist to the edge of the world; and once they had returned from the mist, they never traveled again. Well, Rillop wasn't a born adventurer, and he never got the wanderlust; and when he went into the mist, it wasn't as an explorer.

"Teelia's a cold woman... well, more just impersonal, if you know what I mean, but she means you no offense, I can assure you," Grandpa Jonnod often told people who had been turned off by the young woman's style of communication; and he was right. She was a serious, often severe and somewhat humorless person among her fellow adults. She only laughed at jokes when she thought they were funny, which wasn't very often; and if she thought you were stupid, she would tell you, "I think you're stupid." If she thought you were smart, she would tell you that, as well, but she wouldn't make a big deal about it. She would just say, "I think you're smart," and go on about her business; she wouldn't act impressed by your genius. "It's as if she's saying, 'Maybe you're smart, but I'm smarter!'" Gorbrin, the neighborhood chemist, complained.

Among children, she changed. Among them, she was gentle and mild and bright- eyed. She smiled at them, she teased them, she delighted them, she laughed and played and danced with them; when they came to the apothecary for an inoculation, or some other treatment, she made them feel unafraid and comfortable. And they loved her; she was 3rd or 4th in the minds of her young patients, behind Mom and Dad and maybe a favorite grandparent or uncle. It is common among Pearthorners to say someone goes "beyond the mist" when they do something nobody would ever have thought they could do, or act in a way nobody would ever have believed they could act. When Teelia went among the children, it was said she was going beyond the mist.

In the shadow of the Kalavan Mountains, deep among the giant white oaks of the Valley of the Silver Star, the city Pearthorn stands time-immobile, cradled in the arms of the great Moose River.

It is a farming community, as well as a trading community; and late in the summer, children and old men flood into the valley to pick the fruit from the pear and apple trees that dot and splotch the fields of wheat and corn and oats that roll gently downhill from Pearthorn to the oak forest, and to gather berries from the thousand bushes that crowd between the forest's great kings like so many worshippers. Blueberry, blackberry, raspberry, boysenberry, and of course the delicious blusterberry, whose juices explode from its fibrous shell and coat your mouth with a purple film of wild flavor, are all plentiful in the Valley of the Silver Star.

The valley is alive with deer, elk, rabbit, squirrel, bear, fox, wolf, and bobcat; and of course moose, who haunt the deepest regions of the wood like dark ghosts, and Moose River is teeming with fish, especially the red-hued razorfish, which cut the crystal water all of a summer evening like streaks of blood; but the people of Pearthorn are not hunters. That is not to say they are particularly gentle people, or animal lovers necessarily (although many Pearthorners are), or even that they are vegetarians. (They do raise sheep and cattle, after all, grazing them in the transitional stretches of scrub and hawthorn and oak that slope down to the wild valley between fields of wheat.) No, they are as savage and predatory as any of us; it's just that they feel that the valley is not theirs to do with as they please. The beasts were here before them, surviving, hunting each other, living and dying in an ancient pattern that, though not immutable, was and always would be changing only very slowly — and to rupture this pattern, the Pearthorners believe, would be to invite disaster both upon themselves and the valley itself; and so they disturb the ecosystem as little as they can.

Two cobblestone roads, fading gradually to dirt, emerge from the city, solitary and forlorn, like two old lizards. One goes east, to other villages of other sorts. It is the path the artisans, the mayor's agents, and others traders use to complete their jobs. The other goes west, disappearing into the wilds. The oak forest is deep and dark in that direction, and transitions into an ancient spruce forest beyond which lies the cold gray ocean. Many an explorer has traversed that forest, and sailed across the ocean, to see the sea monsters, to behold the golden horizon at the edge of the southern sea, to go into the mist at the edge of the world. North of the valley, the Kalavan Mountains rise familiarly, like two colossal grandfathers, and to the south is Black Cypress Forest, where the Phantoms lurk. Within the city, wide cobblestone roads sweep around and between small stone huts, horse barns, quiet groves of pear and hawthorn and apple trees, tidy shops where artisans, clothes makers, smiths, shoemakers, weavers, butchers, apothecaries, alchemists, furniture makers, and so on ply their trades.