The man came, they say, from the north. Borne on a canoe down the flank of the Silver Sea with its tides, grievously wounded, a man named Tiris Essiba was found. By all rights the journey to find aid should have killed him, yet he clung to life stubbornly until reaching the hamlet of Alaynayn from which he had set out nearly two years before. None of the porters he had taken with returned, nor did his guide, one Farciya Riodeoro.

Znaga, one of the old trappers that also served as priest and historian when need be, tended to the man’s wounds. He had been, this Tiris, a scholar of the great explorer Le Aauin, and his ravings bore some resemblance to her own. Tiris had, he claimed, ascended to the Dreaming Moon even as he lay on the north shore of the end of the world. He spun a vivid travelogue, full of danger and bestial despair, which he hungrily recorded with the paper and ink Znaga provided him.

“I feel I must soon depart, or to fade away, or to be made to disappear,” he said at length to the old man, once his writings neared their end. “Perhaps it is the will of Vloles that whispers be preserved, and for that we explorers are permitted to tell our stories.”

“And then, having told them, to vanish?” asked Znaga.

“Perhaps,” Tiris said. “Perhaps.”

The day after completing his writing, Tiris vanished from his room. There was no sign of struggle, but all his possessions were missing, as was the canoe in which he had arrived. All he left was his book, and a small amount of payment to old Znaga for his ministrations.

With little use for such a book, Znaga gave it to a friend, who bore it hence to Korton-beneath-Køs, there forever to reside in the Dark Library. Those who, in latter days, consulted the nameless volume called it by many names, but the Moon of the North is perhaps its best-known and most evocative.

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