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He rose with the sun. The sun seemed to rise on this day with new vigor and hope. Sunrise on Glorion was beautiful, but he wondered if the sunrises on distant shores were even brighter and more beautiful. He wondered, and the rising sun was mirrored in his wondering eyes. Eyes full of vigor and hope—because today, he was to set out on a journey seeking answers to everything he’d ever wondered.

“Crion.”

From where he sat upon the sands, he turned his head and met a beloved sea-blue gaze.

“Crion,” she repeated, kneeling fluidly beside him, reflecting his soft spousal smile. “I’ve always wondered what you see, when you look out upon the sea like this. Do those visionary eyes of yours see the horizon, or what lies beyond it?”

Crion’s smile subtly widened. He leant in to kiss Anorrah’s pale, smooth forehead. “I see both, love.”

She shifted nearer to him, her movements nimble with affection. Resting her chin on his shoulder, she followed his gaze out onto the vast open ocean. “Then tell me, Crion,” she breathed. “Beyond that bright horizon, tell me what you see.”

He laughed a silent, loving laugh. “I see a great many things. I see a world that seems straight out of a storybook.”

“Oh, but the storybooks,” Anorrah lifted her head from its perch on her husband’s strong shoulder, drawing back a bit to look at him, her face downturned in an exaggerated pout. She spoke in a purposely puerile voice, widening her blue eyes for effect. “The stories are not always so beautiful, you know. Some of them are horrifying! Do you think there might be monsters past the sea, and wars and kings and evil things?”

Another silent laugh, which twinkled in his eyes like distant starlight. “I do not think that anything upon this earth is truly evil. Even if there may be monsters past the sea, I would think that every monster, at bottom, is really just a man.”

“Or a woman,” Anorrah posited.

An audible laugh, this time. He kissed her again on the forehead. “Yes. Or a woman.”

The couple now shared in a pensive and serious silence. She encircled her lithe arms around him, her chin on his shoulder again. He embraced her halfway, one arm cradling her waist. She saw his other arm at his side, his left hand busy sifting sand between his fingers.

This was not the silence of Crion’s silent laughter. It was the silence of impending separation. For Anorrah, it was the silence of a soundless, tearless sob. Already Crion felt so distant, even when he was so near. He loved her, as well as he could ever love a woman, and she knew it well. But his heart was not content with the blue sea that lay in his wife’s loving eyes. That ocean was not vast enough for him. Those eyes did not hold a horizon, a horizon beyond which there awaited an unknown, exciting world. His wife would never be enough for him, not quite enough; this world would never be enough for him.

For Anorrah, this world and this man had always been more than enough. This was all that she needed. She loved him dearly, as much as she could love a man like Crion. She knew that there was more beyond the sea. More worlds to see. Mayhap more love to give, and to receive.

But this was enough, for her; he was enough.

“Don’t go,” she whispered at length. “If you can already envision what lies across the sea, already see what kinds of storybooks are brought to life, then why must you go? You can see everything from these very shores! And I can see you. If you stay, then I can see you.”

“And why is it important that you see me? What is so great about this face of mine?” he queried playfully, trying and failing to make light of something heavy. “Have you not seen enough of it, for all these years?”

She did not even half-smile at his half-joke. Enough. Yes, she had seen enough of it, she supposed. But somehow, enough was not always enough. She sighed and laid a hand upon his cheek. With Crion, mayhap it would have to be. “I’ve seen almost twenty years’ worth of this face, but only two years’ worth of it as my husband’s.”

“Oh, that oughtn’t make a difference,” he answered, his tone still uncomfortably playful. “We loved each other long before we wed; you know that. Making you my wife was just a label.”

Anorrah withdrew her hand from his face, then withdrew her arms from around his shoulders. Her end of the embrace now broken, she settled her right hand in the sand, which she began to sift. The way it slipped so swiftly from her fingers made her shudder—it felt too much like her marriage, like her life. After two rounds of sifting, she found that her hand had rolled into a fist.

She reluctantly reopened it, eventually. The sands fell from her with inevitable eagerness. She felt, though, that a few grains had lingered stubbornly and sweetly on her palm.

“If you will not stay, then I will go,” she vowed. “If we have loved each other so much, for so long, then we ought not be so far apart.”

“Anorrah,” he sighed, abandoning his attitude of evasive play, his voice now heavy with apposite weight. “You know that I do not wish to be parted from you. But the worlds beyond these shores are so unknown to us; we cannot tell what dangers might await.”

“But you’re so sure that nothing evil lies upon this earth.”

“I am not sure. That is my guess, but I would not wager your life on it,” he defended sternly. “And the ocean itself is dangerous. Even if we don’t reach any faraway lands full of monsters, you could be swallowed out at sea. It is dangerous for you, and especially dangerous for Kevriel. I will not let either of you fall victim to those dangers.”

“Is that not for us to decide? Together?” she urged, her navy gaze relentless. “As man and wife, and as his parents? I would not have you fall victim to those dangers, but that is a wish you refuse to respect. If I cannot hold sway over you, then surely I will at least maintain my sway over myself. And my son.”

“Our son.”

“And is he yours at all, when you are leaving him so eagerly, and so damned soon?”

He paused, visibly stung. “That is cruel, Anorrah.”

“It’s cruel because it’s true,” she stated. “It’s been so few moons since he was born. And how many moons will pass ere your return, if you return at all? You will leave him as a newborn boy, and return home to find him suddenly a man. A man who never knew his father.”

“A man! You know that I would not be gone so long—”

“When you get carried away, Crion, with these visions of yours, there is no stopping you. There is no telling how far they will take you. How far you will follow them, away from here, until you find whatever it is that you so desperately seek. Whatever it is that Kevriel and I cannot provide for you,” she uttered, a fragile tremor entering her voice.

“That’s not what it is, love.”

“Then what is it? Tell me, Crion, what it is.”

He could not tell.

“I doubt that it even exists, this thing that you seek. I doubt you even know just what it is that you are seeking,” his wife expressed.

Crion doubted it himself. And yet he knew that, for whatever reason, he would never feel complete until he ventured past these shores. He told himself that it would be better for Anorrah and for Kevriel if he could be a complete man to them, a complete husband and father. He told himself that he would return soon, a complete man, and a better man. And he would return in time to watch his son grow into such a man himself. This voyage would be for the good of his wife and his son; this was not selfish and loveless. He was doing this out of love for them.

That was what he told himself, willing himself to believe it. That was not what he told Anorrah. He knew that she would not believe him—he could fool himself, sometimes, but never her.

“You know that I love you, Anorrah, and our son, above all things,” he professed. “I would give all the world to have the both of you come with me on this voyage.”

Anorrah’s eyes dimmed, and she faintly shook her head. “That’s the very thing, Crion,” she spoke. “You would not give up the world for us. You are giving up on us, to see the world.”

She sighed, the soft sands sifting from between her toes as she rose and turned to leave.

Crion felt another familiar presence behind him soon afterwards.

“Another of your arguments?” Gorovan surmised as he settled on the shore beside his closest friend. “She returned home quite unhappy. She knows we’re set to leave today; this must have been her final effort to convince you.”

“The last of many efforts,” Crion affirmed. He was still sifting sands. “But she is right. It’s not entirely up to me. If she insists on coming, I have no right to forbid it.”

“And yet she would not join us unless she were welcome. You know that, Crion. If what matters to her is being beside you on this voyage, then it would be settled—she would come with us, against your will, and that would be the end of it,” Gorovan asserted. “She asks you, Crion, because she loves and respects you. What matters to her isn’t the idea of physical separation; it’s the emotional distance between you. She doubts whether you love and respect her. She will not join us on this voyage unless she knows you do.”

“But how can she doubt such things?”

“How could she not?” Gorovan countered. “You don’t respect her wishes very much. And as for love… you love her, and I think she knows it well. But you often seem to love the world across the sea more than the wife and son in your own home.”

“But it’s not a contest of love!” Crion resisted. “Of course I love my family more than anything. I do not love the world across the sea. It is just… just as if there’s some magnetic pull, some force I cannot understand, that binds and draws me there. I’m powerless against it, and I cannot feel complete until I follow it.”

Gorovan fastened his keen auburn eyes on his friend.

Crion’s own gaze remained riveted on the horizon, striving to see ever further past it.

Gorovan stared at the side of that far-gazing face.“Sounds like love,” he pronounced.

Several hours later in the day, Gorovan was readying the ship when Crion’s two sisters came aboard and unexpectedly approached him.

“Trisde is coming with us,” Gloriel announced.

Gorovan looked at her critically. “Trisde is with child.”

“Yes,” Gloriel recognized, her bright brown eyes unyielding. “And she is coming with us.”

Gorovan could not withhold a smile. It was impossible not to smile at Gloriel’s always high and resolute spirit, impossible not to yield to those unyielding eyes. Gorovan had fallen in love with that spirit and those eyes as a young boy, but Gloriel had never fallen in love with his in turn. He had always been her brother’s dearest friend, and so she loved him as a brother. Gorovan had tried often in his youth to persuade her that he was no brother to her, as they shared none of the same blood. He’d hoped that if she let go of this sense of brotherhood, she could mayhap look upon him as a lover. But Gloriel would always blink at him, her adolescent eyes the hue and sweetness of dark honey, and insist unwaveringly: “But you are my brother.”

It was with that same unwavering staunchness that Gloriel now made her insistence about Trisde. She would not give way. Gorovan still loved that about her, but he was glad to have found love elsewhere in his more recent years. Crusea was every ounce the opposite of Gloriel, with her azure eyes and docile heart. But she was easier to love, and able to love Gorovan in return, as a man rather than as a brother. Gorovan found happiness and comfort in Crusea’s willowy arms. That was love. He would always be drawn to Gloriel like gravity—and that was also love, a very different love, and in some ways much stronger. But unilateral gravity was a dismal, dangerous thing, and Gorovan was wise enough to know it.

Crusea was not coming on the voyage. Her protective father, terrified of everything beyond the sea, had exhorted her to please remain at home. Despite her love for Gorovan, she was unwilling to cause her father such deep grief. The two lovers had bidden one another farewell earlier that morning. It was not a happy thing, the prospect of being parted by such great divides of time and distance. Crusea had wept bitterly; Gorovan had shed a tear or two. But this love was not magnetic, nor was it a force of gravity—and so the distance would put no strain on his heart. He would miss Crusea, with every fiber of that heart. But those fibers would not be broken and pulled in two.

He wondered, for a brief subliminal moment, whether they would break and split in two if he were to be parted for so long from Gloriel.

“She does not want to stay behind alone,” Gloriel claimed on her sister’s behalf. “And she should not have to. Her own fate and that of her unborn child are hers to decide, after all.”

Gorovan sighed softly through his nose. Trisde implored him as well, wordlessly, her eyes echoing her sister’s every claim. Those vulnerable violet eyes! Those made it easier, for Gorovan, to refuse. While Gloriel’s eyes were unyielding, Trisde’s expressed all the fragile youth and meekness that made her seem so unfit for this voyage. She had only just barely become an adult. The weight of motherhood had been thrown upon her early, when she fell too fast in love. It had not been a mistake; the love was no less genuine for its youth. But it had turned out to be a tragedy, when her young lover—a sailor from the city of Trobilium—had perished recently in an accident at sea.

“Alone?” Gorovan echoed with a raised brow. “But all of Daerion would be happy to support her with the child! And she has so many friends here.”

“But she wants the child to be raised among family,” Gloriel insisted.

“Your parents, then. They will be here.”

Gloriel laughed, a melodic laugh that still made Gorovan’s knees a little weak. “You know our parents. They love us, and they mean well, but they are always so terribly busy,” she reminded him. It was true; their mother and father were very involved with life in the city center. “They would be happy to help Trisde in theory, but in practice, they could only be with her for one or two hours a day. Whereas Crion and I—well, perhaps I’d best not speak for my brother—but I would be with Trisde constantly, truly a second mother to this little unborn angel!”

Gorovan objected that the little unborn angel would be safest on dry land, and on known land. The perils of seafaring had killed the child’s father, after all. And across the sea, far worse and far less foreseeable dangers awaited.

Trisde was allegedly ready to face those perils. Gloriel reasoned, on her behalf, that if she could subject her own dear, beloved siblings to these perils, hoping and trusting that no harm would befall them, then it seemed she could do the same for herself and her child.

Well, Gorovan mused as he listened to their reasoning and their pleas, it was not his place to decide on this matter, in any event.

“You’ve spoken to Crion?” he asked them.

Trisde lowered her eyes, her amber curls catching the sun as she wagged her head meekly.

Gorovan laughed lightly, in good humor.

“We don’t need Crion’s approval!” Gloriel protested. “Trisde is a woman in her own right, by now. And this is her unborn child, not his.”

“So why do you seek my approval?”

“Oh, we don’t,” Gloriel denied with a luminous smile. “I made it quite clear straightaway that Trisde is coming with us. I just wanted you to understand the reasons why, and hoped that we might have your endorsement. So that you could persuade Crion not to be too upset with us.”

“Upset?” Crion presently cut in as he approached the scene. “Whatever about?”

Anorrah was beside him, Kevriel in her arms, a full travel sack slung over her shoulder.

At this sight, Gloriel immediately rushed to Anorrah and threw her arms enthusiastically around her neck. “You’re coming, then?” she asked her breathlessly.

Anorrah nodded, her smile somewhere between half- and wholehearted.

“Well, then, dear brother—if you’ve allowed your own wife and son on board, then certainly you will have no objection to Trisde,” Gloriel gathered.

Crion had his objections, but he did not voice them. This—this fateful day of departure for the greatest and farthest adventure on which any Glorian had ever been—was a time for respecting the wishes of those he loved. He told himself that his love for these dear people was so much deeper and stronger than the pull he felt toward the world toward which they were now venturing. For all intents and purposes, he believed it.

He had not tried, and would not try, to make his wife believe the same.