know now why he wanted not to accompany us, guide us: because he was sure that after our leap from the ledge into death we wouldn’t be able to enter there where we hoped to go, where I had made him promise to take us. Not because that land was closed to us; in a sense we reached it easily enough. No: what he’d tried to make me see is that the only ones who can go to the land of dead People—Ymr—are living ones. Only the living can travel there from here, cross the river, see and speak to those they know or know of, take away its treasures. The living create the Land of Death and its inhabitants
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