The Story of the Dark Crystal
The Crystal Cracks
Many, many trine later, as I near the end of my living freedom and long to lie again in the rocks, I can see that in the twisting of thought into knots was the urSkeks' weakness, that their sorrow was locked into the spirals.
The urSkeks would never reveal the history of their past or all their thoughts for the future, but I learned more than they thought I knew. I saw that they had left their former world to follow a great design that their fellow urSkeks thought a dangerous folly. They could not use the Crystal that was at the heart of the urSkeks' world, so they came to ours.
They spoke to me often of the nature of the Crystal: the spiral climbing through its heart, the planes within it; its great size; and of how it could reside outside space, yet in many worlds at once and worshipped in them all. Yet only in our World do the Suns shine upon it to cause it to give out light, so that in all other worlds the Crystal glows and sings less powerfully than here. The urSkeks came here to use the power of the Great Crystal; they came during one Great Conjunction to use the next, nine hundred and ninety-nine trine and one trine later, to achieve their work.
In the heart of the castle they had made a trap for light, a net of crystal and golden mirrors. They caught the light that had passed through the Great Crystal, the light that fell to the Lake of Fire deep in the World. They placed carved mirrors into the beam of light, they shone it into the Chamber of Life. For nine hundred and ninety-nine trine and one trine they made ready, from the moment they arrived until the moment of the next Great Conjunction. The Three Suns moved over the Great Crystal, the Eye looked down, and the shining mirrors of the urSkeks sent a path of trapped light through the chamber. Then one by one in a long procession, they walked into its brightness.
They entered the bright light each as a single being; but as they left the path of light, each had become two: to the left, the Skeksis; to the right, the urRu. The Great Division of the urSkeks had been achieved.
On that day, the Harmony of the World shattered. The Skeksis woke from the shock of division, and they woke full of violence and anger. They stormed into the Crystal Chamber staggering with the strain of their new bodies, grasping each other in order to stand yet hating each other's touch. There was a loud argument, they struck blows, one hit the Crystal. A shard broke form the Crystal and flew up the shaft, out onto the mountainside. And the light left the Crystal.
Brian Froud, The World of the Dark Crystal [ISBN: 1 86205 624 2]
Henson Organization Publishing / Harry N. Abrams, New York 2003
Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1982
