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I do not have a Sailor's love for Thassa, nor a Pirate's lust for her wide-open potentialities, but I do have an abiding admiration and respect. It is difficult to quantify how vast, how foreboding and yet, at the same time, how beautiful she is. No one knows just how far, nor just how deep. Mad shipbuilders conjure visions of a craft that sails to the World's End, but is it really the 'End?' Is there not another side to her? How many in Kassau or Laura or some other northern port have set sail, determined and hearty, only to end up on the well-mapped shores fronting the Ta-Thassa Mountains or, perhaps, landed on the beaches of Ianda or Anango? If anyone has made it to the other side, assuming there is another side, he has kept this knowledge to himself. We often tease our children with tales of what lies beyond the World's End; notions such as primitive cultures and wild, dangerous beasts. Some speak alternately of the beauty or hideousness of the people one might find there, if there are people at all. Some believe, even, that beyond the World's End is the place called 'Earth.' I have owned enough barbarians and read enough to be convinced this is not the case, but it is easy to see where the origins of such a thought might derive. Whether it is the World's End or another world altogether, both are strange, foreign concepts to most. I imagine there are people beyond the World's End. I think they must be quite similar to us. 'Us,' of course, being a relative term. Are the men of Ar not very different than the men of Torvaldsland? And are they, in turn, quite different from those of Schendi? Those of Schendi would not be mistaken for those of the Barrens or the Tahari regions. I think, perhaps, the people beyond the World's End are just another variation of 'us.'
It is easy to lose one's thoughts to such ideas where the land meets the sea. "Where the boneyard meets the mountain," I once penned. "An eroding faith survives. It thrives on hunger, feeds on swell, sustaining peace and a beat-down pride." It is here, in these unconquered places, these untamed wildernesses, that we truly live. Outside our zone of comfort, our scope of existence, where majesty and bewilderment taunt us, this is where we thrive.