by Michael Ende
The clock in the belfry struck eight.
The werewolf had been watching Atreyu closely.
“Now you know how you can get to the human world,” he said. “Do you still want to go, sonny?”
Atreyu shook his head.
“I don’t want to turn into a lie,” he said.
“You’ll do that whether you like it or not,” said Gmork almost cheerfully.
“But what about you? Why are you here?”
“I had a mission,” Gmork said reluctantly.
“You too?”
Atreyu looked at the werewolf with interest, almost with sympathy.
“Were you successful?”
“No. If I had been, I wouldn’t be lying here chained. Everything went pretty well until I came to this city. The Dark Princess, who ruled here, received me with every honor. She invited me to her palace, fed me royally, and did everything to make me think she was on my side. And naturally the inhabitants of this Land of Ghosts rather appealed to me, they made me feel at home, so to speak. The Dark Princess was very beautiful in her way—to my taste at least. She stroked me and ran her fingers through my coat. No one had ever caressed me like that. In short, I lost my head and let my tongue get out of hand. She pretended to admire me; I lapped it up, and in the end I told her about my mission. She must have cast a spell on me, because I am ordinarily a light sleeper. When I woke up, I had this chain on me. And the Dark Princess was standing there. ‘Gmork,’ she said. ‘You forgot that I too am one of the creatures of Fantastica. And that to fight against Fantastica is to fight against me. That makes you my enemy, and I’ve outsmarted you. This chain can never be undone by anyone but me. But I am going into the Nothing with all my menservants and maidservants, and I shall never come back.’ Then she turned on her heel and left me. But all the spooks didn’t follow her example. It was only when the Nothing came closer that more and more of them were unable to resist its attraction.
If I’m not mistaken, the last of them have just gone. Yes, sonny, I fell into a trap, I listened too long to that woman. But you have fallen into the same trap, you’ve listened too long to me. For in these moments the Nothing has closed around the city like a ring.
You’re caught and there’s no escape.”
“Then we’ll die together,” said Atreyu.
“So we will,” said Gmork, “but in very different ways, you little fool. For I shall die before the Nothing gets here, but you will be swallowed up by it. There’s a big difference. Because I die first, my story is at an end. But yours will go on forever, in the form of a lie.”
“Why are you so wicked?” Atreyu asked.
“Because you creatures had a world,” Gmork replied darkly, “and I didn’t.”
“What was your mission?”
Up until then Gmork had been sitting up. Now he slumped to the ground. He was plainly at the end of his strength, and he spoke in raucous gasps.
“Those whom I serve decided that Fantastica must be destroyed. But then they saw that their plan was endangered. They had learned that the Childlike Empress had sent out a messenger, a great hero—and it looked as if he might succeed in bringing a human to Fantastica. They wanted to have him killed before it was too late. That was why they sent me, because I had been in Fantastica and knew my way around. I picked up his trail right away, I tracked him day and night—gradually coming closer—through the Land of the Sassafranians—the jungle temple of Muwamath—Howling Forest—the Swamps of Sadness—the Dead Mountains—but then in the Deep Chasm by Ygramul’s net, I lost the track, he seemed to have dissolved into thin air. I went on searching, he had to be somewhere. But I never found his trail again, and this is where I ended up. I’ve failed. But so has he, for Fantastica is going under! I forgot to tell you, his name was Atreyu.”
Gmork raised his head. The boy had taken a step back.
“I am Atreyu,” he said.
A tremor ran through the werewolf’s shrunken body. It came again and again and grew stronger and stronger. Then from his throat came a panting cough. It grew louder and more rasping; it swelled to a roar that echoed back from the city’s walls. The werewolf was laughing.
It was the most horrible sound Atreyu had ever heard. Never again was he to hear anything like it.
And then suddenly it stopped.
Gmork was dead.
For a long time Atreyu stood motionless. At length he approached the dead werewolf—he himself didn’t know why—bent over the head and touched the shaggy black fur. And in that moment, quicker than thought, Gmork’s teeth snapped on Atreyu’s leg. Even in death, the evil in him had lost none of its power.
Desperately Atreyu tried to break open the jaws. In vain. The gigantic teeth, as though held in place by steel clamps, dug into his flesh. Atreyu sank to the grimy pavement beside the werewolf’s corpse.
And step by step, soundless and irresistible, the Nothing advanced from all sides, through the high black wall surrounding the city.
ust as Atreyu passed through the somber gateway of Spook City and started on the exploration that was to end so dismally in a squalid backyard, Falkor, the luckdragon, was making an astonishing discovery.
While searching tirelessly for his little friend and master, he had flown high into the clouds. On every side lay the sea, which was gradually growing calmer after the great storm that had churned it from top to bottom. Suddenly, far in the distance, Falkor caught sight of something that puzzled and intrigued him. It was as though a beam of golden light were going on and off, on and off, at regular intervals. And that beam of light seemed to point directly at him, Falkor.
He flew toward it as fast as he could, and when he was directly over it he saw that the light signal came from deep down in the water, perhaps from the bottom of the sea.
Luckdragons, as we know, are creatures of air and fire. Not only is the liquid element alien to them; it is also their enemy. Water can extinguish them like a flame, or it can asphyxiate them, for they never stop breathing in air through their thousands of pearly scales. They feed on air and heat and require no other nourishment, but without air and heat they can only live a short time.
Falkor didn’t know what to do. He didn’t even know what the strange blinking under the sea was, or whether it had anything to do with Atreyu.
But he didn’t hesitate for long. He flew high into the sky, turned around, and head down, pressing his legs close to his body, which he held stiff and straight as a telegraph pole, he plummeted. The water spouted like a fountain as he hit the sea at top speed. The shock was so great that he almost lost consciousness, but he forced himself to open his ruby-red eyes. By then the blinking beam was close, only a few body lengths ahead of him. Air bubbles were forming around his body, as in a saucepan full of water just before it boils. He felt that he was cooling and weakening. With his last strength he dived still deeper—and then the source of light was within reach. It was AURYN, the Gem. Luckily the chain of the amulet had got caught on a coral branch growing out of the wall of an under-sea chasm. Otherwise the Gem would have fallen into the bottomless depths.
Falkor seized it and put the chain around his neck for fear of losing it—for he felt that he was about to faint.
When he came to, he didn’t know where he was, for to his amazement he was flying through the air, and when he looked down, there was the sea again. He was flying in a very definite direction and very fast, faster than would have seemed possible in his weakened condition. He tried to slow down, but soon found that his body would not obey him. An outside will far stronger than his own had taken possession of his body and was guiding it. That will came from AURYN, the amulet suspended from a chain around his neck.
The day was drawing to a close when at last Falkor sighted a beach in the distance. He couldn’t see much of the country beyond, it seemed to be hidden by fog. But when he came closer, he saw that most of the land had been swallowed up by the Nothing, which hurt his eyes and gave him the feeling of being blind.
At that p
oint Falkor would probably have turned back if he had been able to do as he wanted. But the mysterious power of the gem forced him to fly straight ahead. And soon he knew why, for in the midst of the endless Nothing he discovered a small island that was still holding out, an island covered with high-gabled houses and crooked towers. Falkor had a strong suspicion whom he would find there, and from then on it was not only the powerful will of the amulet that spurred him on but his own as well. It was almost dark in the somber backyard where Atreyu lay beside the dead werewolf. The luckdragon was barely able to distinguish the boy’s light-colored body from the monster’s black coat. And the darker it grew, the more they looked like one body.
Atreyu had long given up trying to break loose from the steel vise of the werewolf’s jaws. Dazed with fear and weakness, he was back in the Grass Ocean. Before him stood the purple buffalo he had not killed. He called to the other children, his companions of the hunt, who by then had no doubt become real hunters. But no one answered. Only the giant buffalo stood there motionless, looking at him. Atreyu called Artax, his horse, but he didn’t come, and his cheery neigh was nowhere to be heard. He called the Childlike Empress, but in vain. He wouldn’t be able to tell her anything. He hadn’t become a hunter, and he was no longer a messenger. He was Nobody.
Atreyu had given up.
But then he felt something else: the Nothing. It must be very near, he thought. Again he felt its terrible force of attraction. It made him dizzy. He sat up and, groaning, tugged at his leg. But the fangs held fast.
And in that he was lucky. For if Gmork’s jaws had not held him, Falkor would have come too late.
As it was, Atreyu suddenly heard the luckdragon’s bronze voice in the sky above him: “Atreyu! Are you there, Atreyu?”
“Falkor!” Atreyu shouted. And then he cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted: “Falkor! Falkor! I’m here. Help me! I’m here!”
And then he saw Falkor’s white body darting like a living streak of lightning through the square of darkening sky, far away at first, then closer. Atreyu kept shouting and Falkor answered in his bell-like voice. Then at last the dragon in the sky caught sight of the boy down below, no bigger than a bright speck in a dark hole.
Falkor prepared for a landing, but the backyard was small, there was hardly any light left, and the dragon brushed against one of the high-gabled houses. The roof collapsed with a roar. Falkor felt an agonizing pain; the sharp edge of the roof had cut deep into his body. This wasn’t one of his usual graceful landings. He came tumbling down on the grimy wet pavement next to Atreyu and the dead Gmork.
He shook himself, sneezed like a dog coming out of the water, and said: “At last!
So this is where you are! Oh well, I seem to have got here on time!”
Atreyu said nothing. He threw his arms around Falkor’s neck and buried his face in the dragon’s silvery-white mane.
“Come!” said Falkor. “Climb on my back. We have no time to lose.”
Atreyu only shook his head. And then Falkor saw that Atreyu’s leg was imprisoned in the werewolf’s jaws.
“Don’t worry,” he said, rolling his ruby-red eyeballs. “We’ll fix that in a jiffy.”
He set to with both paws, trying to pry Gmork’s teeth apart. They didn’t budge by a hairbreadth.
Falkor heaved and panted. It was no use. Most likely he would never have set his young friend free if luck hadn’t come to his help. But luckdragons, as we know, are lucky, and so are those they are fond of.
When Falkor stopped to rest, he bent over Gmork’s head to get a better look at it in the dark, and it so happened that the Childlike Empress’s amulet, which was hanging from the chain on the dragon’s neck, touched the werewolf’s forehead. Instantly the jaws opened, releasing Atreyu’s leg.
“Hey!” cried Falkor. “What do you think of that?”
There was no answer from Atreyu.
“What’s wrong?” cried Falkor. “Atreyu, where are you?”
He groped in the darkness for his friend, but Atreyu wasn’t there. And while the dragon was trying to pierce the darkness with his glowing red eyes, he himself felt the pull that had snatched Atreyu away from him. The Nothing was coming too close for comfort. But AURYN protected the luckdragon from the pull.
Atreyu was free from the werewolf’s jaws, but not from the pull of the Nothing. He tried to fight it, to kick, to push, but his limbs no longer obeyed him. A few feet more, and he would have been lost forever.
In that moment, quick as lightning, Falkor grabbed him by his long blue-black hair, and carried him up into the night-black sky.
The clock in the belfry struck nine.
Neither Atreyu nor Falkor could say later how long they had flown through the impenetrable darkness. Had it been only one night? Perhaps time had stopped for them and they were hovering motionless in the limitless blackness. It was the longest night Atreyu had ever known; and the same was true for Falkor, who was much older.
But even the longest and darkest of nights passes sooner or later. And when the pale dawn came, they glimpsed the Ivory Tower on the horizon.
Here it seems necessary to pause for a moment and explain a special feature of Fantastican geography. Continents and oceans, mountains and watercourses, have no fixed locations as in the real world. Thus it would be quite impossible to draw a map of Fantastica. In Fantastica you can never be sure in advance what will be next to what. Even the directions—north, south, east, and west—change from one part of the country to another. And the same goes for summer and winter, day and night. You can step out of a blazing hot desert straight into snowfields. In Fantastica there are no measurable distances, so that “near” and “far” don’t at all mean what they do in the real world. They vary with the traveler’s wishes and state of mind. Since Fantastica has no boundaries, its center can be anywhere—or to put it another way, it is equally near to, or far from, anywhere. It all depends on who is trying to reach the center. And the innermost center of Fantastica is the Ivory Tower.
To his surprise Atreyu found himself sitting on the luckdragon’s back. He couldn’t remember how he had got there. All he remembered was that Falkor had pulled him up by the hair. Feeling cold, he gathered in his cloak, which was fluttering behind him. And then he saw that it was gray. It had lost its color, and so had his skin and hair. And Falkor, as Atreyu discovered in the rising light, was no better off. The dragon looked unreal, more like a swath of gray mist than anything else. They had both come too close to the Nothing.
“Atreyu, my little master,” the dragon said softly. “Does your wound hurt very badly?” About his own wound he said nothing.
“No,” said Atreyu. “I don’t feel anything anymore.”
“Have you a fever?”
“No, Falkor. I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”
“I can feel you trembling,” said the dragon. “What in the world can make Atreyu tremble now?”
After a short silence Atreyu said: “We’ll be there soon! And then I’ll have to tell the Childlike Empress that nothing can save her. That’s harder than anything else I’ve had to do.”
“Yes,” said Falkor even more softly. “That’s true.”
They flew in silence, drawing steadily nearer to the Ivory Tower.
After a while the dragon spoke again.
“Have you seen her, Atreyu?”
“Who?”
“The Childlike Empress. Or rather, the Golden-eyed Commander of Wishes. Because that’s how you must address her when you come into her presence.”
“No, I’ve never seen her.”
“I have. That was long ago. Your great-grandfather must have been a little boy at the time. And I was a young cloud-snapper with a head full of foolishness. One night I saw the moon, shining so big and round, and I tried to grab it out of the sky. When I finally gave up, I dropped with exhaustion and landed near the Ivory Tower. That night the Magnolia Pavilion had opened its petals wide, and the Childlike Empress was sitting right in the middle of it.
She cast a glance at me, just one short glance, but—I hardly know how to put it—that glance made a new dragon of me.”
“What does she look like?”
“Like a little girl. But she’s much older than the oldest inhabitants of Fantastica. Or rather, she’s ageless.”
“Yes,” said Atreyu. “But now she’s deathly sick. How can I tell her that there’s no hope?”
“Don’t try to mislead her. She can’t be fooled. Tell her the truth.”
“But suppose it kills her?”
“I don’t think it will work out that way,” said Falkor.
“You wouldn’t,” said Atreyu, “because you’re a luckdragon.”
For a long while nothing was said.
When at last they spoke together for the third time, it was Atreyu who broke the silence.
“Falkor,” he said, “I’d like to ask you one more thing.”
“Fire away.”
“Who is she?
“What do you mean?”
“AURYN has power over all the inhabitants of Fantastica, the creatures of both light and darkness. It also has power over you and me. And yet the Childlike Empress never exerts power. It’s as if she weren’t there. And yet she is in everything. Is she like us?”
“No,” said Falkor, “she’s not like us. She’s not a creature of Fantastica. We all exist because she exists. But she’s of a different kind.”
“Then is she . . .” Atreyu hesitated. “Is she human?”
“No,” said Falkor, “she’s not human.”
“Well then . . .” And Atreyu repeated his question. “Who is she?”
After a long silence Falkor answered: “No one in Fantastica knows, no one can know. That’s the deepest secret of our world. I once heard a wise man say that if anyone were to know the whole answer, he would cease to exist. I don’t know what he meant. That’s all I can tell you.”
“And now,” said Atreyu, “she’ll die and we’ll die with her, and we’ll never know her secret.”
