They always do. A dead king, a living boy, a Norseman who had been looking for a ship to the end of the world for eleven years and had finally found the right port to go looking in. You can start there if you like. Most accounts do.
What they don't tell you is where it goes. Through the Indrawing Sea, through the place where compasses stop believing in north, through the hole in the world that every tradition has a name for and nobody has agreed on. To the shore at the crown of everything, where the oldest tree in the world touches the stars with its branches and the deepest lake in the world holds something it was told to hold until the right person arrived to ask for it correctly.
This is that person's story.
It is also the story of the men who went with him, and what the going made of them, and what it cost, and what was understood on the shore of the oldest place in the world that could not have been understood anywhere else.
Somewhere in the sixteenth century, a Flemish cartographer named Gerard Mercator drew a map of the Arctic that contained a mountain where no mountain should be, four rivers running inward, a whirlpool at the crown of the world. He got his information from a Dutchman who got it from a friar who got it from a traveler who sailed north and wrote down what he found. The book was called Inventio Fortunata. Every copy is lost.
