Status Updates From Will Poole's Island

The parallels to Walter Raleigh are just now sinking in--well done.

A touch of Peter Pan.

I spit in the eye of the bloodthirsty villain you call God.

He kept himself steady by clutching a sheet line as he gazed back at the island, a diminishing strip of sand crested by the low green haze of the moorlands, and tried not to think about the fact that he would almost certainly never set foot upon those shores again. He took a small measure of solace in the knowledge that Natoncks, after coming so close to losing his head, had a new chance at life now.

He didn’t understand how he had arrived at this pass, where he was apparently required to put aside the best things he’d ever encountered in life. He had the sensation of being carried downstream on a fast current, away from everything he’d come to love, toward an abyss of emptiness, loneliness, and danger. And there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it.

Extra points for a reference to Walter Raleigh's search for El Dorado.**

“It’s no great trick to discover an Englishman in the forest, Will. And it’s easy for a person to believe he is alone in a tree when in fact he is not. Do you understand?”

The memory of flight remained—the ecstasy of swimming weightless through the air—but the secret of how it was done escaped him as quickly and completely as water sinking into sand.