Highlander: the series Introduction
My Introduction to the show, immortals, and watchers
You sit down at a table in a deserted section of the library. You open a book about mythology, smiling as your imagination fills of the deities, creatures, epics. As you turn to the next chapter, a piece of aged, yellow paper flutters to the ground. Curious as always, you pick it up and give it a read:
A tale of legend, of history, of love and war, good and evil, and one that cannot be told and even then is seldom believed.
It is a tale of a person, who looks just like you. Perhaps a different hair color, perhaps a larger nose, perhaps eyes that slant more at the corners, but a person none-the-less. However, this person is not like you. He or she is immortal.
Immortal. He or she does not age, despite the passing of years, decades, centuries. He or she does not die, despite a dozen gun shots to the head or a dozen daggers to the heart. In fact, the only way this person can be killed is if his or her head is severed from his or her body. If such happens, the life force which made this person immortal drains out in a surge of power and bright display of blue lightning, known as a Quickening.
There are more immortals than just this one. There is a whole race living in secret among we mortals, leading lives like your but with, yet, another difference. With the gift of immortality comes a price. What is this price? By name, it is The Game.
One immortal man walks along the street, as one normally would, but then is suddenly hit by a rush, a sensation that mere mortals cannot understand. He has sensed the presence of another like him. Another immortal, who has felt the samerush, sensed him, too. This is how they prepare. They know what they must do. Without a word, the two immortals, the man and now the approaching woman, steal away into the shaddows, away from the prying eyes of mortals. They introduce themselves to eachother, and then they draw their swords. They battle... to the death. One wins only by taking the others' head, cutting it clean with a swipe of his sword. And then comes the Quickening, the release. The energy from the looser spills out and into the winner. And when the pain and destruction that accompanies a Quickening is over, only one immortal remains. It is the game they all play. They fight and kill until there is but one. There can only be one.
And this one, what does he win? The Prize. No one knows what this prize is, no one will know until it has been won; until there is only one left.
How do we know this? How can we be sure these legends and stories are more than just dreams and figmants of a wild imagination? We know because we have seen it. We are the ones who stand back, hidden further back in the shadows, watching each battle, immortal against immortal. We record who lives and who dies. We record what each does, where they go, what they see, how they live. We observe and record their histories, and we wait silently for the time of the Gathering, when only a few immortals are left to fight for the prize, to win the Game.
Who will be the one to win it? Perhaps you will never know. Or perhaps you would like to watch, too?
You put the paper down, not quite sure what to believe, when you feel a hand on your shoulder. You rise out of your seat and turn around.
A man stands there, a bit taller than you, perhaps, with a long, raven-colored hair pulled back into a ponytail. He wears a long, tan trenchcoat and hold in his hand an extension of his arm that is a dragon-headed Katana sword. His eyes are smiling and his mouth does the same as he states with an almost-impossible-to-trace accent, "I am Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod. I was born over 400 years ago in the Highlands of Scotland. I am immortal."
And, as you notice a grey-haired, bearded man walk with a slight limp from behind a bookcase you realize that the stories are true. Every word. And now your world will never be the same again.
Highlander is Forever