SPACEBOAT EDDIE CALLS THE GROWN-UPS

At the mouths of the river Riverside there was a refugee camp pretending to be a kingdom. Two great Elven cities had already been burned off the map, and whoever crawled out of the wreckage ended up here on the wet sand, living in tents and salvaged boats. Their lord was a half-Elf named Spaceboat Eddie, son of Toby Tourguide (a Man) and Ingrid Escape-Plan (an Elf princess), which made him the most genetically complicated person in the story so far.

He married Ellie Birdwife, who had her own tragic résumé: granddaughter of Lucy Slay, daughter of Dio Drama, and the only reason the Shiny Rock still existed outside McEvilface's crown. She had escaped the sack of Doorlatch Forest as a child with the jewel in her hands. They had twin sons, Elliot Called-It and Elliot Mortalbro. Hold onto those names. I am serious, write them on your hand. One of them ends up extremely important and the other one ends up being an entire civilization.

And Spaceboat Eddie could not sit still. Boatman Kier the Shipwright — the guy who has been quietly running the coastline this whole time while everyone else lost wars inland, and my personal theory is that he simply never opened a single letter — helped him build a ship called Spaceboat Deluxe, and Spaceboat Eddie started sailing. Not for trade. Not for exploring. He was looking for two things: his missing parents, and the West.

The West means Valinor: the continent where the Valor Squad live, the world's boss zone, walled off from Middle-earth after the Nerdor stormed out in a rage several hundred pages ago. Spaceboat Eddie's plan was to sail there and ask the gods, out loud, politely, to please come help, because McEvilface had won basically everything and Bellyland had about three free towns left. That was the whole plan. There was no step two.

It did not work. Valinor was hidden behind enchanted mists and shadow-seas and currents that quietly turn you around without telling you, which is worse than a wall. A wall at least tells you. Spaceboat Eddie sailed until the stars were wrong and his crew stopped talking, and every single time the ocean handed him back. Eventually the dread got too heavy and he turned for home with nothing.

Ellie Birdwife never went with him. She stayed on the shore at Riverside, watching an empty horizon for years, holding a jewel that had already gotten her great-grandfather Theo Gatekeep killed and her father Dio Drama killed. The people at the Havens genuinely believed the Shiny Rock was why they were still alive — why the harbour prospered, why the fish came, why McEvilface's attention had drifted elsewhere. It was their good-luck charm.

It was also, unfortunately, a tracking beacon for the worst family in the history of Elves.

They came to the Havens of Riverside with an army, and the third Kinslaying happened — the third time in this book that Elves have massacred Elves over one specific rock. Riverside was a fishing town full of survivors of two earlier massacres. It did not last long.

Here is how much the Oath was steering and how little anyone was enjoying it: most of the Finn Stan host didn't even want to fight. Some of them turned on their own leaders. Two of the remaining brothers, Twin Rod and Twin Ras, died in the streets of a town they were attacking for no strategic reason whatsoever. Out of the seven sons of Finn, that left two: Max Onehand, who had begged himself not to do this, and Mags the Bard, who wrote the poetry.

The survivors escaped by ship to Boatman Kier and young Gilbert Glowstick on the isle of Safe Isle, and the news they carried was the worst possible version of the truth. Elliot Called-It and Elliot Mortalbro, taken. Ellie Birdwife, cornered at the cliff's edge with the Shiny Rock at her throat, had chosen the sea. She jumped.

Spaceboat Eddie was somewhere out on the water at the time, sailing home from another failure, with absolutely no idea that his home, his wife and his children were gone.

Except Uncle Ocean was watching. Uncle Ocean is the Valor Squad member of all water, the one member of management who never stopped meddling in Middle-earth, and I am convinced he had been trailing that little ship for years waiting for an excuse. He caught her. Ellie Birdwife went into the waves as a woman and came out as a great white bird with the Shiny Rock blazing on her breast, and she flew — not knowing how, just doing it — until she found one small ship on an enormous dark ocean and dropped onto the deck in front of her husband.

So their reunion was also the moment he found out. Their town was ash. Their boys were prisoners of the people who had burned it. They both assumed the twins were already dead, because that was the observable pattern.

They were wrong, and this is one of the strangest mercies in the whole book: Mags the Bard, standing in the wreckage he had just made, looked at two four-year-olds and could not do it. He took Elliot Called-It and Elliot Mortalbro and raised them. Not as hostages. As his own. The text says love grew between them, and it means it. The man who helped destroy their family also taught them to read.

Grieving, homeless and out of options, Spaceboat Eddie bound the Shiny Rock to his forehead and turned Spaceboat Deluxe west one more time. Same ocean. Same enchantments. Same route that had beaten him every single time before.

This time the mists opened.