Embar tells Ged that the dark wizard is there, and the dragons are powerless to defeat him without Ged. Ged and Arren set out to Selidor in Lookfar. They come to the Dragons' Run, a series of small islands south of Selidor, encountering dragons flying about in a state of madness. They manage to survive the Dragons' Run, and land in Selidor. Orm Embar is waiting for them, but he too has lost the power of speech. After a search, they find the wizard in a house of dragon bones at the extreme western end of Selidor – the end of the world. Ged recognises the wizard as Cob, a dark mage whom he defeated many years before. After his defeat, Cob became an expert in the dark arts of how to cheat death and live forever. In doing so, he has opened a breach between the worlds, which is sucking all the life out of the world of the living. Cob and Ged confront each other, and Cob gains the upper hand. With the last of his wits, Orm Embar destroys Cob's physical body, but is killed in the process. The remains of Cob's body, which cannot be killed, crawl into the Dry Land of the dead, and Ged and Arren follow. In the Dry Land, Ged manages to defeat Cob and closes the breach in the world, but sacrifices all his magic power in the process. When they return to the world of the living, after a dreadful journey over the Mountains of Pain, the dragon Kalessin carries them back to Roke Island. Kalessin leaves Arren on Roke and flies on with Ged to Gont, Ged's home island. Arren has fulfilled the prediction of the last King of Earthsea many centuries before: "He shall inherit my throne who has crossed the dark land living and come to the far shores of the day." In the intervening time, the realm had broken up into smaller principalities and domains, with little peace between them. Now that Arren will be crowned as King Lebannen (his true name), they can be reunited. Le Guin originally offered two endings to the story. In one, after Lebannen's coronation, Ged sails alone out into the ocean and is never heard from again. In the other, Ged returns to the forest of his home island of Gont. In 1990, seventeen years after the publication of The