The Story of the Dark Crystal
The Prophecy
Seven circles of seven Gelfling lay on the hilltops all night, their faces to the stars. Their dreams were made stone; the Wall of Destiny still stands. There the Gelflings were shown the Quest for the lost Shard, and they were shown the healing of the Crystal by the hand of a Gelfling, replacing the Shard by the light of a Great Conjunction. And there too they were shown the ruin of the Gelfling, the fall of their houses. And the Wall stood for all to see.
When single shines the Triple Sun,
What was sundered and undone,
Shall be whole - the Two made One,
By Gelfling hand or else by none.
The Skeksis saw it too; and with bold cruelty resolved to foil the prophecy. Rage brought them cunning. Their first thought was to confuse the search for the true Shard; and for many years they sought to make a crystal of their own. They had made the great Haakskeekah Stone, which outdid the darkened Crystal in impenetrable blackness; and they made fragments of artificial crystal without the higher virtues of the great original but not easily distinguished in appearance. (Had they quarreled less among themselves, they might have made a crystal of greater power; had they been less evil, they could have done more harm.) Of their artificial crystal they made five copies and scattered them on the slopes of the mountain beneath the castle, near where the Shard had fallen, so that the Gelfling would not know which to place in the wound in the Crystal. The Gelfling found all six and brought them to me, hoping one was the true Shard; but not effort of mine could make it reveal itself. And it was better to live with the Crystal dark but nearly whole than to place the creation of the evil Skeksis in a position of such power.
Then the Skeksis made the Garthim from the memories of sea creatures in their first world. Foremost among the enemies of the Garthim were the Landstriders, beasts of swift passage for the Gelfling.
Then the Skeksis exulted in the deaths of the last Gelfling and of the prophecy. They had been much afraid; they had even killed their Gelfling prisoners quickly, preferring safety to pleasure. They cared little that some Landstriders still hid and fought in the mountains; the loss of a few Garthim (I will not say their deaths) meant nothing to them. They thought the path to further darkness lay straight before them.
These terrors drove me away from all. I fled to my mountaintop; I studied the Three Suns above, and chose not to see the hordes of Garthim marching across the plains and the clouds of smoke behind them. I would have lived among the orbits of the Suns. I became one with them; I seemed to move in their great courses thorough the sky. The song of the Suns became my song, and I sang it to the rocks that they might vibrate to it as they had to the Crystal. At each conjunction I felt the song in my heart, pain and torment, yet beautiful. The rocks felt the pull of the Suns; and as the Suns combined in conjunction, the seams of the World were stretched. I was, at those moments, the fabric of the World.
Two Gelfling survived the slaughter, two infants unknown to the Skeksis. Jen was found and fostered by the urRu, Kira by the Pod People.
This then, is the beginning of the Journey of Jen.
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
