 Van's beginning to find that the downside of his link to Escaflowne is affecting his will to fight - and a journey to the Mystic Valley, once the home of the powerful Atlanteans, doesn't do anything to help him. But with the Empire constantly on their trail, does he really have any choice..?
15 - Lost Paradise
Once again, Van pushes his connection with Escaflowne too far, despite Hitomi's pleas for him to hold back - but at the height of her cries, Escaflowne stops dead, its armour turning a deep black and leaving both Van and Hitomi unconscious. In her dreams, Hitomi sees herself awakening in a green and pleasant land - her ideal of heaven, really - where she's able to find Van once more. But he's not himself, sitting hunched up under a tree with a look of sheer terror in his eyes, terror that soon comes to the world around them as it bursts into fire and begins to fall apart around them. They're inside Van's mind, of course, but that doesn't make the danger any less real - can Hitomi find a way to bring Van around and get them back to the outside world before it's too late..? Meanwhile, Dilandau's trip over the edge of sanity continues, with the voices in his head driving him onwards...
16 - The Guided Ones
Volken's two catgirls return to him to report on their mission, and it becomes clear that their bond to him is beyond mere duty or loyalty - having saved them from a gruesome fate when they were younger, love and adoration would be far better terms. But that level of loyalty carries its own problems. Van and the others, meanwhile, begin their journey to the Mystic Valley, where Van is hoping to learn more about his own ancestry and the bond that exists between him and Escaflowne, while back on Earth Hitomi's friends are growing ever more concerned about her disappearance...
17 - The Edge of the World
Turns out that it's not the Mystic Valley that Allen's ship has arrived in, but some sort of gateway to it - a powerful beam of light breaks from the ground, opening what appears to be a hole in the sky and carrying the ship with it - and into the Mystic Valley. Once there, Hitomi and Van simply disappear from the ship's bridge, having been teleported down to the ground, and it's a place Hitomi recognises - she's seen it before in her visions. Not only that, but she can read the ancient writings on the ruins around her, and soon learns of the intimate connection between Gaea and Earth. But there's no sign of Van or Allen, who appear to be trapped in worlds of their own making, born from thoughts of the past...
For most of this volume, Folken is simply on the gang's trail, and not directly harassing them. Instead, the focus of these episodes is on the past, in the shape of the past connections that Hitomi unwittingly has with Gaea and some of the people there thanks to the visit of her grandmother many moons ago, where it seems she met up with Allen's missing father; and on Van, and his growing unwillingness to fight. The price he's having to pay to control Escaflowne is becoming ever greater, ever more dangerous, and he's just about reached the point where he doesn't want to pay it anymore.
For Allen, there are also spectres from the past to deal with, in the form of how he's handled his father's disappearance. He's always seen it as a betrayal, an abandonment, but through the flashback scenes here you get to see that there's possibly more to it than that.
The key to unravelling all this lies in the Mystic Valley, where Hitomi, Van and Allen are all spirited away to deal with their separate issues in some very interesting scenes. There's a feeling now that the people around Hitomi and Van are being drawn together by forces greater by them, and that destiny is one of them. Destiny never seems to be a good thing to have working on you, though, and certainly in Van's case it looks at though he's going to have a hard time escaping his, no matter how hard he may try.
While all this is going on, the Empire is still on the move, of course. Dilandau has been removed from the front lines for 'treatment', and is going ever more crazy; the Emperor is beginning to see his ideal future more clearly; and Folken has the tools to finally get to Van and the others, which gives the disc its one real action scene towards the end of the final episode.
Add it all together, and it's another good batch of episodes - in some ways the story doesn't progress much, but thanks to the fleshing out of some of the show's history, and the filling in of the connections between the characters as a result, there's no feeling that you didn't learn anything or that the episodes weren't worthwhile. The next volume looks to be heading back into more action-based territory, though, so here's hoping the show can keep the interest through that.
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