“‘Double-ones tomorrow, Will,’ said Mr. Stanton from the head of the table. ‘We should have some special kind of ceremony. A tribal rite.’ He smiled at his youngest son, his round, rather chubby face crinkling in affection.”

Though Will doesn’t know it yet, this birthday has a special significance: He is coming into his birthright as an Old One, and a coming-of-age should be marked by “ceremony.” When the snow that Will has been wishing for begins to fall, his father says, “There’s your ceremony, Will, […] Right on time” (14).

“On a bookcase in one corner of the room now stood a portrait of Lieutenant Stephen Stanton, R.N., looking rather uncomfortable in dress uniform, and beside it a carved wooden box with a dragon on the lid, filled with the letters he sent Will sometimes from unthinkably distant parts of the world. They made a kind of private shrine.”

Stephen would have been 20 years old by the time Will was old enough to remember him clearly, and they have a special relationship. For Will, Stephen represents adulthood and all its mysteries: the faraway, the strange, and the wonderful.

“Will tossed uneasily. He had never known a feeling like this before. It was growing worse every minute. As if some huge weight were pushing at his mind, threatening, trying to take him over, turn him into something he didn’t want to be. That’s it, he thought: make me into someone else. But that’s stupid. Who’d want to?”

Will doesn’t simply wake up with new powers. He undergoes a transformation that he does not want. He struggles out of the cocoon of childhood, illustrating Coming of Age As a Leap Into the Adult World. In the story, he is also making a much greater and more terrifying transformation from 11-year-old boy to immortal and immensely powerful Old One.