Thing is, Teelia took sick and died within a few days of their final rescue mission. She caught something from a sick child, and though the child lived, she caught a more virulent strain of the illness, and died. Simple as that: thwarted plans, shattered expectations.

Rillop was at first stunned to the point of disbelief, and then, when his belief caught up to reality, sad to the point of being unable to rise from bed in the morning; but he did not dishonor Teelia with anger or hatred. He did not yell at the sky, at the Creator, "After all she did for you!" or "You bastard!" or any such thing, though such thoughts did pass through the basest regions of his mind. At night, he asked the Creator, "Why? She was the noblest of us all. Why her?" but that was as close to true rage as he would allow himself.

After an uncounted number of days of grieving, he decided he must sail to the edge of the world and confront the Creator. Not to avenge himself upon him, or to convince him to kill him, Rillop, instead of Teelia, or to otherwise change things — that would be silly and juvenile — but simply to ask why. Why had he taken Teelia? Her life, her intelligence, her beauty, her service to her people, demanded that much.

He made it through the western forest easily. He who had traversed the abode of the Phantoms unscathed so many times had no problems with the relatively tame Western Woods. There, one only had to be aware of the occasional bandit, yelg wolf, or falling tree, nothing supernatural or purposefully malignant. Even the weather posed little threat to him, summer being but in its infancy when Teelia died, and just coming into its own when he set upon his trek. Once through the woods, he secured a large sturdy rowboat of polished spruce from the trading post in the coastal town, Saltkirk, stocked the craft with cheese, salted meats, hard bread, and as many gallons of water as he could fit in it, and set out across the open sea.

For thirty days, he bounced upon the vast plain of water, warmed by the sun and chilled by the stars, his only companions the moon, the warm ocean spray, and an occasional sea monster that surfaced briefly to blow a fountain of water high into the air. For longer than he had expected, he could discern the coast he had left behind, the green of the distant forest; but around mid-day of his second day out, he lost sight of land altogether. In effect, he was as utterly alone, then, in body as he had always been in spirit until the day he met Teelia.

With no children to rescue, no missions to accomplish, aye, no sheep to tend, indeed, with nothing to do but row, he kept reliving his life in his mind, or trying to. Ninety-five percent of what he could readily recall was his experiences with Teelia — the rescue missions; the treks through Black Cypress Forest to retrieve supplies; the evenings helping her experiment with chemicals and such in her lab; the long talks; the nights of silent passion and companionship. The rest of his life was a misty dream. He turned words this way and that way in his head, and even spoke aloud, trying desperately to articulate, to give substance to, his feelings for her and about her death, and about his own thirty-two years of life; but he failed utterly. He tried to describe the uplifting joy of simply looking into her eyes, how simply watching her made him happy, how rooting for her, trying to make her happy, made him feel at peace with existence; but he was not a bard, and as we all know, he could not have done much better even if he had been. Rain came and went, wind came and went, heat and chill and darkness and light came and went, and still only the water and the horizon and the sun and the stars told him he was still upon the earth; until on the morning of the 31st day, he came to the mist, the mist at the edge of the sea.

He awoke at dawn, in the clammy arms of a thin mist. His heart pounding, he stabbed the dark sea with his oars, and rowed wildly on, skipping breakfast. Soon, the mist thickened, becoming a deep fog, just like Greyoc had described, and finally a virtually impenetrable whiteness, that ate his vision as fully as pitch blackness, making his eyes seem like pocks.

He had expected the legendary mist to be a relatively short band of enchanted air and water that he would traverse in a morning's row, perhaps, but no, it went on and on. He couldn't tell night or day, there, but he judged his time in the mist to be several days. The wetness that seemed to soak all the way to his bones, the mold that ate at his toes, the relentless whiteness that eventually made it seem to him he was in another world, a surreal place of half-existence, all made it easy to despair, to want to give up, to accept what the Creator had chosen as his fate; but the images and memories of Teelia, both alive and healthy, and sick and dying, that remained in his mind, burned away whatever lethargy might otherwise have settled upon his soul, and he rowed on. He developed a new routine, of eating when he was hungry, and drinking when he was thirsty, instead of at set times of day; and he rowed on, and rowed on, wondering when he would fall off the edge of the world, and where he would fall. Into the Creator's lap? Into an abyss of nothingness, what?

Then, without warning, and quite abruptly, the mist broke. Warm sun, or what seemed like sun after his long interment in the mist, fell upon Rillop's wind- and sunburned face. (In actuality, clouds still shielded the sky; but the horizon was clear, and the sea was bright, and of course, the boring whiteness of the mist was gone. Indeed, the world seemed to revel in the light of day.) He glanced back; the mist towered behind him, a wall of impenetrable white. Returning his gaze forward, he scanned the distant horizon. This was definitely not the edge of the world: The sea went on and on.