Farthest Shore, Le Guin opted for the second ending when she continued the story in Tehanu. Major characters Cob A sorcerer whom Ged has met before. Ged Archmage of Roke. Called Sparrowhawk. Kalessin The eldest dragon. Lebannen Young prince of Enlad. The name means "rowan tree" in the Old Speech. Called Arren. Orm Embar A powerful dragon of the West Reach descended from Orm. Themes Power and responsibility Like both previous books in the trilogy, The Farthest Shore is a bildungsroman. The story is told mostly from the point of view of Arren, who develops from the boy who stands overawed in front of the masters of Roke, to the man who addresses dragons with confidence on Selidor, and who would eventually become the first King in centuries and unify the world of Earthsea. Ged has also matured. He is no longer the impetuous boy who had himself opened a crack between the worlds in A Wizard of Earthsea, or the foolhardy young man who sailed the Dragon's Run and went alone into The Tombs of Atuan. Though the task before him is every bit as difficult and dangerous as any he had attempted before, necessity alone guides his actions now. Ged chooses between exercising power over others and power over himself, the latter revealing itself as a reluctance to resort to magic, as Arren asks: Ged replies "do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way." Confronting one's shadow In a sense, Cob is Ged's alter ego – a Ged who did not turn back from the dangerous road of summoning the dead, in which Ged dabbled in his youth, but continued along it to the ultimate conclusion. Thus, Ged's final confrontation with Cob and the closing of the hole between the worlds of the living and the dead is in fact a kind of repetition of his confrontation with the Shadow in the first book, who was Ged's alter ego in a more explicit way. Ged's closing of that evil hole, at the cost of completely losing his magic power (and very nearly his life), can also be considered as finally fulfilling his wish "to undo the evil" which as a youth he had expressed to then-Archmage Gensher (and which, as the Archmage told him, he was at the time not capable