It was early morning, and a thick, heavy mist had set itself upon the waters surrounding the ferry as it sat, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, about thirty nautical miles off the coast of the Isle of the Crown. By personal invitation, I was accompanying King Alexander, a small contingent of guard dogs, a few dignitaries, and a strange unidentifiable animal from the Isle of Wonder that had reportedly stowed away on the one o'clock stop the previous week and refused to get off since. We stood uneasily aboard the ferry, gazing out at…nothing but the mist, actually.

"Try not to fidget, Mr. Rayner," the king said to me in his commanding yet compassionate voice, "I promise you, it will appear." My attempts to inquire further into our journey here were met with stoic silence.

"Before the ferry was shut down, I used to run trips here sometimes," the ferryman confessed. "I remember King Caliphim made a point to visit at least twice a month. No one outside of the highest court officials were supposed to know. But see, that's how this place became myth and legend. A few

blokes who couldn't remember their head when they got into their cups, talkin’ mysteriously about ‘privileged information,’ and the next thing you know there’s whispers all over the Isles. Seems like that’s how these folk wanted it, though.”

The hour wore on and I was beginning to get a little skeptical. Just as I began to suspect that I, or possibly all of us, was the butt of a joke seriously lacking in humor, something changed. The mists began to move.

Every single particle, even those that had soaked into to my clothing, stirred in the air around us and rushed straight out over the port bow at an incredible speed—but there was no wind! Hurrying to the side of the ship, I eagerly looked out over the horizon. Suddenly, I found myself the wide-eyed youth of yore at my grandfather's knee being told the legends of the land. My skeptical reporter's mind had long since dismissed most of these

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