Oh young mariner, launch your vessel, and crowd your canvas
Hisoka is driving the wagon back through the woods with a load of firewood, whistling softly or occasionally talking to the horses. And then, he reins them in and sits with a startled, watchful expression on his face. A listening expression, as though someone were speaking to him. Yet, it is not a voice...or if it is, it speaks in no language known to humankind. But he understands it perfectly; he has heard it before. On the morning of the day he left his last world, when his ship went down in the icy waters of the Sea of Cloud.
The snow falls lightly, in big soft flakes that cling to his hair and sleeves. The two horses shuffle their hoofs a little, and he speaks a soft word to them. But his eyes are focused in the far distance, their intense green color muted in the reflected light of the snow. He gives the reins a shake and continues on his way. After he has delivered the wood, he puts the horses in the stable, rubs them down, feeds and waters them. Then he packs up his few belongings and goes down to the dock, where strangely, his canoe is waiting for him.
He casts off and guides the boat through an ice channel to the river's mouth. The lake should be entirely frozen, but it seems it is not. The river is open, too. He thinks, I can do this. Even so, his attention is tugged backwards to those he is leaving behind. So powerful is the pull, and so charged with feeling, that it knocks the breath out of him. But he cannot stay; he can only choose to go forward. To go on, with a willing spirit, to whatever awaits him.
He follows the watercourse to the point where it rushes down into the country south of the lake, into the sparsely wooded valley whose seasonal changes he has watched for two years. Now, it is a wide white expanse with the dark ribbon of the river threading through it. The dark delicate silhouettes of trees dot its slopes.
He paddles steadily and strongly, and the current helps him.
Time passes, and then he is approaching the falls, whose roar he can now hear, and soon he shoots into the mist that is flung up over the lip of the waterfall. There are rainbows all around him in the white spume. His heart beats wildly with fear, anticipation, sorrow and euphoria. Goodbye, Mansion!
And suddenly, he is through the invisible, inexorable Gate...
If anyone searches for him, they will find his canoe floating in the shallows many miles below the falls, caught in the reeds of a stream inlet. But Hisoka they will not find. He has gone elsewhere.
{And here is Hisoka's farewell music: Gary Allen's "Every Storm (Runs Out of Rain)" and Loreena McKinnett's "Dark Night of the Soul." And the post title is taken from Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem, "Merlin and the Gleam."}
{Note: This is a true death; Hisoka asks that those who loved him not trivialize his going by pretending otherwise. Unlike some characters who leave the Mansion, he will not be returning to his original world. Five years ago, in his first game, Glaxcin Prison, he came to understand that the return route was closed to him forever. In order to survive the prison, he had not only to grow up but to outgrow the old world. When he fell into the Blue Sun, he found his way across the Dark to be reborn into a new world, The Sky Tides, and he lived a life in which he loved but knew how to stand on his own, and his independence had its satisfactions. No doubt that was a problem when he arrived at the Mansion as a man and not as a boy, but he is who is is. And wherever he has gone, it is forward, and not back.}
The snow falls lightly, in big soft flakes that cling to his hair and sleeves. The two horses shuffle their hoofs a little, and he speaks a soft word to them. But his eyes are focused in the far distance, their intense green color muted in the reflected light of the snow. He gives the reins a shake and continues on his way. After he has delivered the wood, he puts the horses in the stable, rubs them down, feeds and waters them. Then he packs up his few belongings and goes down to the dock, where strangely, his canoe is waiting for him.
He casts off and guides the boat through an ice channel to the river's mouth. The lake should be entirely frozen, but it seems it is not. The river is open, too. He thinks, I can do this. Even so, his attention is tugged backwards to those he is leaving behind. So powerful is the pull, and so charged with feeling, that it knocks the breath out of him. But he cannot stay; he can only choose to go forward. To go on, with a willing spirit, to whatever awaits him.
He follows the watercourse to the point where it rushes down into the country south of the lake, into the sparsely wooded valley whose seasonal changes he has watched for two years. Now, it is a wide white expanse with the dark ribbon of the river threading through it. The dark delicate silhouettes of trees dot its slopes.
He paddles steadily and strongly, and the current helps him.
Time passes, and then he is approaching the falls, whose roar he can now hear, and soon he shoots into the mist that is flung up over the lip of the waterfall. There are rainbows all around him in the white spume. His heart beats wildly with fear, anticipation, sorrow and euphoria. Goodbye, Mansion!
And suddenly, he is through the invisible, inexorable Gate...
If anyone searches for him, they will find his canoe floating in the shallows many miles below the falls, caught in the reeds of a stream inlet. But Hisoka they will not find. He has gone elsewhere.
{And here is Hisoka's farewell music: Gary Allen's "Every Storm (Runs Out of Rain)" and Loreena McKinnett's "Dark Night of the Soul." And the post title is taken from Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem, "Merlin and the Gleam."}
{Note: This is a true death; Hisoka asks that those who loved him not trivialize his going by pretending otherwise. Unlike some characters who leave the Mansion, he will not be returning to his original world. Five years ago, in his first game, Glaxcin Prison, he came to understand that the return route was closed to him forever. In order to survive the prison, he had not only to grow up but to outgrow the old world. When he fell into the Blue Sun, he found his way across the Dark to be reborn into a new world, The Sky Tides, and he lived a life in which he loved but knew how to stand on his own, and his independence had its satisfactions. No doubt that was a problem when he arrived at the Mansion as a man and not as a boy, but he is who is is. And wherever he has gone, it is forward, and not back.}