"Will," she said decidedly, "is rather an old eleven. Ageless even, you might say."
Will is short and stocky, with a round solemn face. He has messy brown hair and longish bangs. He has acquired a recognizable habit of pushing his hair out of his eyes with one hand. Most of the time he appears to be completely unremarkable. Other characters have remarked that there is something absolutely reliable and comforting about his ordinariness. But at the same time, there is always a strange distance and oddness about him. As if he didn't quite belong to the same world as everyone else. He has serious grey eyes that seem oddly older than his appearance would suggest. Will often wears clothing typical of a rural English boy from the 1970's. His favorite jacket is a battered sheepskin jacket that he received as a hand-me-down from his brothers. He has one noticeable scar located on the inside of his right forearm just above the wrist. It is a shiny hairless burn scar shaped like a perfect circle quartered by a cross.
For the first eleven years of his life Will believed himself to be an ordinary child. He was born in a small village called Hunterscoombe in Buckinghamshire, England. He lived in a large farmhouse on the outskirts of the village with a very large family.
His father owns a jewelry shop in the nearby town of Eton. Will loves visiting the shop and has been learning to engrave gold there.
His mother raises chickens and takes care of the family.
Stephen, his oldest and favorite brother. A sailor with the merchant marines.
Max, his second oldest brother. An art student at a nearby university.
Gwen, one of his older sisters.
Barbara
Paul and Robin. The twins. Robin likes sports and Paul is a talented flutist.
Mary
James
Will himself is a talented singer. He sings in both the local church chior and in the school choirs. He has won several choral festivals in London, although he is somewhat embarrassed by it. He is fond of animals, and enjoys nature. Since he was very small he has had a habit of sneaking onto the local manor grounds just as the snow starts to melt to watch the snowdrops grow. He loves history and his favorite language is Latin.
On the eve of his eleventh birthday Will began to notice something strange. Animals became frightened in his presence. The television and radio went staticky when he came close to them. He was given a strange iron ornament by their neighbor along with a vague warning. And WIll himself began to feel like something was coming to make him over into something different.
After a night filled with terrors Will awoke into a time several hundred years before his own. For a time he wandered through the immene forest that would one day become his village, until he came across a great set of doors standing alone on a hill. Inside he found a grand stone hall wih strange tapestries on the wall. And two people waiting for him. Merriman, once called Merlin. And an old woman known only as the Lady.
The two of them proceed to tell Will of his true identity and duties. That he is the last of the Old Ones, and the first to be born in five hundred years. There will never be another Old One after him.
Merriman tells Will that his first task will be to reunite the six signs of the Light. He names Will Signseeker and gives him a prophecy.
When the Dark comes rising six shall turn it back
Three from the Circle, Three from the Track.
Wood, Bronze, Iron; Water, Fire, Stone.
Five shall return and one go alone.
Iron for the birthday, Bronze carried long.
Wood for the burning; Stone out of song
Fire from the Candle-ring, Water from the thaw,
Six signs the circle and the grail gone before.
Fire on the mountain shall find the harp of gold.
Played to wake the sleepers, oldest of the old.
Power from the Greenwitch, lost beneath the sea.
All shall find the light at last, Silver on the Tree.
Over the next week Will dedicates himself to locating the six signs and fighting off the attacks of the Dark while participating in all the usual christmas celebrations of his large family. While caroling at the manor-house he travels with Merriman back to a Christmas party that took place a century before. There, in a moment of suspended time, he reads the Book of Gramarye and is gifted with all the knowledge of the Old Ones. He learns to speak with the stars, ride the wind like an eagle, and command the elements.
On Twelfth Night he collects the last sign. A flood is rising, and Will rides to Herne's Oak carrying an immense West Indian Carnival head. There, he returns the head to Herne the Hunter. For it is Herne's head. And uses the six signs to call forth the Wild Hunt to chase the Dark to the very edges of time.
Several months later it is summer and Will is alone in the house and bored. Until his Uncle from America arrives with an invitation to spend a week in a small Cornish Village called Trewessick. There, Will meets Merriman once more along with three human children. Simon, Jane, and Barney Drew. Events begin to move rapidly. The grail, discovered the year before and mistakenly assumed to be merely a bronze age chalice by scholars, has been stolen from the museum. The Greenwitch, a creature of the Wild Magic and the sea, has been remade in the annual ceremony and taken the lost code to the grail for its own treasure. A race begins between the Old Ones and an agent of the Dark to retrieve both the grail and the code key before the code can be taken to the depths of the sea. The agent of the Dark attempts to command the Greenwitch, and is taken away by the ghosts of the ocean. Will and Merriman ask Tethys, Lady of the Sea, for permission to speak to the Greenwitch and are granted permission. The Greenwitch refuses, but gives the code key to Jane before it leaves. They retrieve the grail, left behind by the agent of the Dark, and use the code to read a prophecy written in Ogam on the side of the grail.
On the day of the dead, when the year too dies, Must the youngest open the oldest hills Through the door of the birds, where the breeze breaks. There fire shall fly from the raven boy, And the silver eyes that see the wind, And the Light shall have the harp of gold.
By the pleasant lake the Sleepers lie, On Cadfan’s Way where the kestrels call; Through grim from the Grey King shadows fall, Yet singing the golden harp shall guide To break their sleep and bid them ride.
When light from the lost land shall return, Six Sleepers shall ride, six Signs shall burn, And where the midsummer tree grows tall By Pendragon’s sword the Dark shall fall.
Y maent yr mynyddoedd yn canu, ac y mae’r arglwyddes yn dod.
A few months later Will becomes deathly ill. He has a very bad case of Hepatits and comes very close to dying. He cannot die, of course, But when he awakens from his fever and hallucinations he has no memory of his life as an Old One. Only an absolute conviction that he had lost something important, an odd feeling of urgency and a few half-remembered scraps of verse. On the advice of the family doctor his parents send him to stay with an old friend in Wales to recover.
There, Will spends a few days wandering the hills until he literally stumbles across and strange white-haired boy with golden eyes and his dog and remembers everything as he looks into their eyes. This is Bran Davies, the adopted son of a shepherd who works at the farm. Who will quickly become Will's best friend. He is the Raven Boy mentioned in the prophecy. And as Will will soon discover, he is the pendragon and Arthur's legitimate heir. Guinevere feared that Arthur would not accept him because of her affair with Lancelot and so asked Merriman to bring him to a safe place. And so Bran was brought to Wales in the twentieth century and adopted by a shepherd. Together the pair work together to recover the golden harp and wake the sleepers. And Will accepts his duty to become Bran's guide and advisor, just as Merriman was guide and advisor to Arthur.
The next summer Will returns to Wales to accompany Bran on their last and greatest quest. The Drew children meet them as well. Together, Bran and Will enter the Lost Land to find a sword. Eirias, a crystal sword made for the pendragon. After many dangers they acquire the sword and meet up with the rest of the Old Ones at the Tree of Mid-Summer for the last battle. The Drew Children, Bran, Merriman, and Will use the signs to hold off the Dark as a single spring of silver mistletow blooms on the tree. Bran uses Eirias to cut it, and in that moment all of the magic of the world turns against the Dark and they are cast out beyond time.
But it is not over yet. Arthur arrives in a white ship and asks Bran to go with him to the castle behind the North Wind. But Bran, who still has ties to the human world, refuses and chooses a mortal life with his adoptive father. Merriman removes all knowledge of the Old Ones and the great battle from all the mortals present. And then all of the Old Ones save Will board the ship to leave the world. Only Will will remain as the Watchman of the Light.
The future cannot blame the present, just as the present cannot blame the past. The hope is always here, always alive, but only your fierce caring can fan it into a fire to warm the world.
For ever and ever, we say when we are young, or in our prayers. Twice, we say it. Old One, do we not? For ever and ever ... so that a thing may be for ever, a life or a love or a quest, and yet begin again, and be for ever just as before. And any ending that may seem to come is not truly an ending, but an illusion. For Time does not die, Time has neither beginning nor end, and so nothing can end or die that has once had a place in Time.
So the Dark did a simple thing. They showed the maker of the sword his own uncertainty and fear. Fear of having done the wrong thing--fear that having done this one great thing, he would never again be able to accomplish anything of great worth--fear of age, of insufficiency, of unmet promise. All such great fears, that are the doom of people given the gift of making, and lie always somewhere in their minds.
Will picked a single blossom from a gorse bush beside him; it shone bright yellow on his grubby hand. "People are very complicated," he said sadly.
"So they are," John Rowlands said. His voice deepened a little, louder and clearer than it had been. "But when the battles between you and your adversaries are done, Will Stanton, in the end the fate of all the world will depend on just those people, and on how many of them are good or bad, stupid or wise. And indeed it is all so complicated that I would not dare foretell what they will do with their world. Our world."
But those men who know anything at all about the Light also know that there is a fierceness to its power, like the bare sword of the law, or the white burning of the sun." Suddenly his voice sounded to Will very strong, and very Welsh. "At the very heart, that is. Other things, like humanity, and mercy, and charity, that most good men hold more precious than all else, they do not come first for the Light. Oh, sometimes they are there; often, indeed. But in the very long run the concern of you people is with the absolute good, ahead of all else. You are like fanatics. Your masters, at any rate. Like the old Crusaders -- oh, like certain groups in every belief, though this is not a matter of religion, of course. At the centre of the Light there is a cold white flame, just as at the centre of the Dark there is a great black pit bottomless as the Universe." His warm, deep voice ended, and there was only the roar of the engine. Will looked out over the grey-misted fields, silent. "There was a great long speech, now," John Rowlands said awkwardly. "But I was only saying, be careful not to forget that there are people in this valley who can be hurt, even in the pursuit of good ends."
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