Profile

"I will tell you only this: that you are one of the Old Ones, the first to have been born for five hundred years, and the last. And like all such, you are bound by nature to devote yourself to the long conflict between the Light and the Dark... For the Dark, the Dark is rising."

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.

The Dark and the Light are essentially cosmic good and evil, without any connection to an afterlife or a God. Will is in some respects an ordinary human boy, but he is more deeply and fundamentally an Old One, a servant of the Light.

To quote Will's own explanation: "This where we live is a world of men, ordinary men, and although in it there is the Old Magic of the earth, and the Wild Magic of living things, it is men who control what the world shall be like. But beyond the world is the universe, bound by the law of the High Magic, as every universe must be. And beneath the High Magic are two... poles... that we call the Dark and the Light. No other power orders them. They merely exist. The Dark seeks by its dark nature to influence men so that in the end, through them, it may control the earth. The Light has the task of stopping that from happening. From time to time the Dark has come rising and has been driven back, but now very soon it will rise for the last and most perilous time. It has been gathering strength for that rising, and it is almost ready. And therefore, for the last time, until the end of Time, we must drive it back so that the world of men may be free."

And so the Dark did rise in power, and at the last was turned back, though the victory was hard-won. And of all the Old Ones, only Will Stanton remains, a watchman for the Light in the world that now belongs wholly to humans, who must now shape their own destinies for good or ill.

Physical appearance and demeanor

The final battle between the Dark and the Light (which ended the series of books) was three years ago, and Will is now 15 16 years old. He generally looks like, and in many (but not all) ways is, a normal boy from England of 1976. He is of medium height, round-faced, athletic and a touch stocky. His eyes are blue-grey, and his hair is brown, thick and straight and a touch long; it has a tendency to fall into his eyes. He has a pale scar on the inside of his left forearm, shaped like a quartered circle, which is usually covered by his sleeves. He is quiet and polite, seeming mature for his age, and looks friendly but rather solemn until he smiles -- which he does fairly often.

When he is thinking as an Old One, his physical appearance does not alter, but he seems somehow much older, graver and with a bearing of unconscious authority and wisdom.

Will's powers are not very combat-oriented. He can read minds (though he does not, without permission or need), put illusions and messages into a person's head, get a sense for someone's trustworthiness and sometimes their general personality, and tell immediately (at least with a bit of attention) if someone is allied with the power of the Dark or the Light, and, for the purposes of Milliways, something of a sense of whether or not they have magical power. He can control nature and the weather, and move freely through time without regard for normal rules about causality and paradox.


(This is an IC journal used at milliways_bar. Will Stanton is played by genarti; the character belongs to Susan Cooper, and is taken from her The Dark Is Rising sequence. No copyright infringement is intended, and no money is being made; this is simply for fun.)