by James Comins
"Up!" Aughra snapped, pointing to the door. Three blue circles seemed to quaver in front of her heart, but they didn't funnel into the Dark Crystal. She grimaced and dashed toward the stairs, waving for him to follow.
Through high doorways and around winding staircases Yrn carried the Dark Crystal. Skeksi-shouts were matched by Aughra-shouts, and somehow the way was cleared for him. Into a great hall without windows he traversed, step by deliberate step, his strong arm straining under a weight he could not have lifted yesterday. The Dreamthing still hung around his neck, and when--if--when he revived Loora--however he revived Loora--he would give the black amulet back to her, and she would know he loved her, and someday they would be married--
The enormous throne room housed eighteen screaming, squawking, manic, beaked creatures roaring their displeasures and their petty thoughts. Aughra parted the way and pointed to a statue of the Emperor. After some angry words, the Skeksis snorted and hissed and finally knocked the statue off its bronze legs. Yrn placed the Dark Crystal between the crooked feet, which remained behind like the ruin of an ancient city.
"Our last chance," Aughra roared. "Open the porticos!"
Surrounded on all sides by murderous Skeksis, Yrn collapsed at the rim of the pedestal. Twenty windows began to open in the ceiling and darkness streamed in.
"No use!" Aughra screamed as the three blue lights in her chest grew brighter. "No sunlight! Storm blocking it out. Not even a glimpse. All life--done!"
"D'you need to break frough the Perpetual Storm, then? That fing you've stuck on your nose could do it. Jus' shine a light on it--I seen it! Oof, might be naptime--" and Gobber fell and said nothing else.
Aughra pinched the prongs inside her odd-looking false nose and pulled it out gooily. "Just shine a light on it," she murmured, and took a small yellow crystal from her sleeve. Shaking it, a yellow beam glowed--
Nothing.
There was nothing. Yrn observed as Aughra began dying.
And yet--
She scratched an oily resin away with a thumbnail--
Purple spat like a bleeding sneeze. Circling the Dark Crystal, the purple rammed into the nose and upward through the windows, shattering glass outward from the Castle's roof. The burst of purple light was followed seconds later by black light channeled from the Dark Crystal into the false nose, up and out.
"And so the weapon that first cracked the Crystal," murmured Aughra, "restores it to the suns' life."
Shocks of lightning began to crackle within the Perpetual Storm. As the Dark Crystal's poisoned power shot up, the Dark Crystal seemed to grow faint, as if the dark hand of death inside was overpowering it . . .
The lightning storm burned across the sky, its electric weight dwarfing the world below it.
And at last, at last, golden sunlight poured down in thin speckled dusty beams through the twenty porticos and into the Dark Crystal.
An ear-rending convulsion, and the darkness left the Dark Crystal. Yrn saw the dark shape flit toward him, but a new blackness--the dark shape changed direction--
* * *
"I can feel it!" the Emperor roared. "Eternal youth! It IS possible! SkekTek! Ensure that this sunlight always shines on me!"
The skinny Gelfling leapt to his feet. SkekSo shielded himself, terrified of the menacing creature, but all that happened was that the Gelfling pulled Aughra's nose from her hands and stared directly into the black-purple beam.
"Your dream, Yrn!" the frightening woman cried. "Where's your--"
Around the circle, each of skekSo's subjects cried out, then collapsed. A barely visible dark flicker entered through their eyes, then departed again.
As the flicker reached skekSo, the Emperor scrabbled at the air, shut his eyes, ducked, began running out of the circle, but stumbled and felt the bottom drop out of his life. His mind stopped communicating to his feet, and the world tipped into him, and he curled his four arms around himself and shouted "DON'T LOOK AT ME!" and felt shame overtake him.
But the shame was overwhelmed by a deathly fatigue. The Emperor felt his strong, glorious, powerful limbs shrivel and shake. His rule would pass to another, lesser subject, and his name would be spoken of alongside insects and grubs and groundworms and other pathetic, weak things--
A cry of war, and the Emperor dismissed the dream--
The punishment club came to his hand, and he began striking without looking--
From afar, one word:
"Conclude!"
* * *
"UrNol--sing!"
The voices of Aughra and the Mystic carried through the great hall of the Skeksis. Yrn held up the black amulet. Receptive white light once again strung between the spokes. The song grew, filling the sunlit room.
The dark flicker roared. It struggled against the song, but the three descending notes--
"Yrn! Hold !'rm%htht'4@th*'blr@m!"
Two flickers now, tangled, howling high-pitched howls of two different insanities.
The words made no sense. Yrn hunched in the shadow of the Dark Crystal and pulled his bandanna off. His empty socket was warm with life, and crusted skin was flaking off, replaced by new brown skin tufted with fur. His dream was there above him, but without it he felt cheerless and empty. It had been his reason for fighting. For living.
The Dreamthing's white light caught long strands of dream from the two thrashing flickers, dragging them both inside. Disinterested, Yrn held up the amulet on its short string around his neck and watched. The two voices continued, and the two dreams fought, and Yrn felt nothing.
Loora was dead.
A barking snap. The Dreamthing shuddered and began to spin like a potter's wheel until the rope's twists started climbing up his neck. Hurriedly he pulled the choking string off and set it down. He watched along with the assembled, moaning Skeksis as the Dreamthing burned a black ring in the surface of the floor.
Two colors, magenta and death-black, fought inside the spinning cage. Optical illusions swirled.
A last howl of rage.
The magenta was extinguished. The cage filled with death-black.
"And it is over," Aughra said, lifting the now-silent Dreamthing and its angry black occupant.
The blue lights no longer shone from the old woman's chest, nor from Gobber's. Both seemed awake and more alive than Yrn had ever seen them. The Dark Crystal shone beams of light--not healthy light, but living light--from its facets.
"Is--is the Light Sickness cured?" Yrn said, squeezing sweat from his bandanna.
"It is," said Aughra, dropping the Dreamthing into her pocket. "And you Skeksis? See! See that troubles of Gelf and Pod are not always unimportant to you. Hmp! Keep your eyes open. You see a lot more that way."
"And Loora?" said Yrn.
Aughra's eyebrows folded together. "Wherever Cory went," she said, "Loora has followed. Hmp. Not in vain. Not at all in vain."
"Loora's dead," said Yrn.
"And you," Aughra said to him. "You are alive. More alive than you've ever been. Alive enough for two. Is the village of the Spritons where you will stay, Rot?"
"Everyone my age has someone to love already," he murmured. "I loved Loora, she loved Cory, and none of us were old enough to marry. No, I think I'll leave. Raunip spoke of a village beside a Shining Sea. Boats that sail over oceans to other places that might as well be on other worlds. Boats with no limits. With only skies holding you down. And without skies, perhaps we'd fly."
* * *
"Well, boys," said Lemny, spitting out a cluster of barnfruit seeds. "I'd say you have a bit of a dilemma there."
A few trines had passed.
"Right under the field, too. The land's useless now. Useless! Just caves for miles. No telling what'll collapse next."
"I've give you four yentis for the land," said Lemny. "That'll be enough to start your breadcorn up down the way, wouldn't it?"
The farmer spat and nodded. "Busted my plow, though. Not much more'n a bunch of chisels, these scraps are--"
"I'll take t
he scraps, too."
Climbing into the stone caves, Lemny began to carve.
* * *
"Need someone to look after the new tree?" urNol asked cheerfully.
"You're welcome to help," a Worshipper said, patting a mound of ground-up stone bark over a turbla-seed. "But we already have a first-class gardener." The Worshipper pointed.
UrNol found the Gelfling gardener at the foot of the stem, shoveling mulch mixed with spit.
"Looks just like him," murmured the Mystic, and went to help.
* * *
"Just like children!"
The Song of Mourning finished, and the solemn procession moved from the heady highroads of Quillpine to the foot of Aughra's observatory.
"On this day, the one hundred twelfth of the Second Conjunction," a melodious deep voice began, "we honor the lives lost in the time of the Plague of Light, and the lives of the hero and heroine who--"
Aughra shut the window. Something cold was inside her heart, and old tears were threatening to scuttle down her flat face. The bonestone nose remained in a hidden drawer, and she had no desire to pull it out and wear it. No desire at all. Vain. Vanity, hmp! Dissatisfying. Aughra removed her hand from the secret latch and left it unopened.
Somewhere, still lost to her far-seeing eyes, the other nose remained in the bogplant-purple claws of Raunip. Someday she would need the bundle of crystals inside it.
But not today. There would be other stories, someday. But not today.
* * *
"It's been a long time, Keirkat."
Gobber tickled the long nose as the flouse climbed onto his shoulder.
"Good to see you again, my sniffy girl. And where've you been?"
The flouse cheeped.
"Have--have you?" said Gobber. "Is--are things--?"
Again the flouse cheeped.
"Show me. Where is he?"
Gobber left the cart behind him, left the yentis, left his little gallery-maullery of nonsense and odds.
Gobber ran, and the flouse ran ahead, to a cathedral in caves.
* * *
And so, my friends, my audience, our story ends here. If there is grief, let us feel it, and if there is joy, let it grow. Our world is filled with stories small and large.
Let us live them.
Blue fur vanished under the cloak, and with a glitter of tossed crystal sand, the fire was snuffed.
Above Pafaul the Storyteller, three suns rose in morning.
And the attentive dancerflies took to the air, finished with the story.
About the Aughra Author
James Comins is a fiery blaze of a thousand snarling suns. Actually, he made that up. He's terribly tall, startlingly handsome, and sometimes he lies about stuff. Do not trust him to tell you stories. He lives in Denver with a houseplant named Bernice.
Acknowlogies and Apoledgements
First, a big shoutout to my friend Lauren, who got me started writing this book. Second, a big shoutout to the Jim Henson Company for holding the Author Quest contest and to Anna Jordan for allowing me to share my entry.
I have chronic fatigue, and I decided it was high time I wrote a story about the experience. The Dark Crystal: Plague of Light is first and foremost a story about a disease. It's a story about not knowing what's wrong with you or what you can do about it, and it's the story of a disease whose primary result is suicide. People with chronic fatigue are twenty times more likely to commit suicide than the general population, and the drive to keep living despite an inability to live the life you had in mind is something all the protagonists of this book have in common.
Obviously, the world of the Dark Crystal is inspired by the movie. But there are a few other influences as well. The idea of dreams that get loose and have to be tended is loosely inspired by both a Neil Gaiman story called "The Sweeper of Dreams," and a Stephen King movie called The Langoliers, in which there's a world that gets left behind as time moves ahead, complete with a gradually fading reality.
Cory's personality is fairly similar to my own. Loora is inspired in part by my friend Lauren, and in part by a girl I once dated who was a mechanic.
Yrn is, in part, inspired by the protagonist of Gene Wolfe's fantasy classic, The Book of the New Sun, one of the finest books ever written. One of his speeches in this book is fairly similar to a speech that the protagonist gives to Dorcas about not wanting to marry a scary person.
Gobber is a little bit Gobo from Fraggle Rock, a little bit Wilkinson, the rat in the fedora from Neil Gaiman's Sandman: A Game of You, and very much like Corporal Nobbs from Terry Pratchett's Discworld. As far as I can tell, Lemny is mostly my own.
Telling the story from the point of view of two minor characters comes from Shakespeare.
The Skeksis are essentially as they are in the movie. Most of the ur-Mystics are, too, although urNol the Herbalist borrows somewhat from Beauregard, the bumbling Muppet Show janitor.
The cave-eater is probably inspired by the rock giant from The Never-Ending Story, which may well be influential in other ways, too.
The story of the Parthim is my folk retelling of The Diary of Anne Frank. Parthim, of course, reproduce through parthenogenesis.
Raunip belongs to the authors of The Dark Crystal: Creation Myths.
Cory's vision of the future is probably influenced by David Lynch's Dune. The second moon . . .