Maybe there were Watchers in Kipling's family ...
I felt like posting a little poetry spam tonight - so I went and trawled various poetry sites (as one does), and was led - I suppose inevitably for me - to the works of Rudyard Kipling, who, despite some very suspect Imperialism (the product of his time), still manages to produce some stirring verse. The sort you can declaim - which I guess makes him the pop lyricist of his day.
Anyway, while looking for something I could quote, I came across this - one of his chapter headings from the Naulahka ...
We meet in an evil land
That is near to the gates of hell.
I wait for thy command
To serve, to speed or withstand.
And thou sayest, I do not well?
Oh Love, the flowers so red
Are only tongues of flame,
The earth is full of the dead,
The new-killed, restless dead.
There is danger beneath and o’erhead.
And I guard thy gates in fear
Of words thou canst not hear,
Of peril and jeopardy,
Of signs thou canst not see-
And thou sayest ’tis ill that I came?
To me, that sounds suspiciously like a Watcher, his Slayer, and life on the Hellmouth.
And that's a collision of fiction with reality that I really don't want to contemplate too closely ... *g*