A strange, inexplicable malaise is spreading throughout Earthsea. Magic is losing its power; songs are being forgotten; people and animals are sickening or going mad. Accompanied by Arren, the young Prince of Enlad, the Archmage Ged leaves Roke Island to find the cause. After a journey fraught with many missteps, they travel to the end of the earth, and beyond, into the land of the dead. There they confront and defeat the mage Cob, who had opened a breach between the worlds in an attempt to cheat death and live forever. In order to shut this breach, Ged sacrifices all his magic.
When they emerge back into the world of the living, Arren realizes that he 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 they can be reunited.
Le Guin offers us two endings to the story. In one, after Arren'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 Farthest Shore, Le Guin opted for the second ending when she continued the story in Tehanu.
