Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal Author Quest by J. M. Lee Read Free Book Online Page A

asked.
    â€œNo, not yet. A minstrel passed through this wasteland yesterday. He had just visited Hallis, and though he was too polite to ask my tale, he told me the situation. Queen Silva summoned representatives from our village, maybe from other villages, too. It’s all rumors, but something is afoot.”
    Kairn stood up and looked down at his father, whose armor hung loose around his thinning frame. “Very well. I will go to Hallis, and I will make our will known to Elmi and Soven.”
    Kiff stood up, and Kairn saw that malnutrition and exile could not strip him of his warrior’s bearing. “Kairn, you cannot go. It is not safe. They may not have decided their precise course, but they are set against the Skeksis and the castle. You will fare no better than I. Stay here with me or seek safety with a friendly village, but do not sacrifice yourself for a lost cause.”
    â€œFather, I must go. I must try to preserve peace.”

Greg Coles
    Rebels of the Dark Crystal

Chapter One
    The Unexpected Dreamfast
    I still remember the look in his eyes that night; the stunned, hollow look of a Gelfling who had seen something too horrible for words.
    He rocked slowly back and forth, shivering despite the heat from the furnace, gazing into the dancing flames. I draped a thick blanket around his shoulders, but he barely seemed to notice. He hadn’t said a word since coming in—not even a greeting. He just reached for my shoulder and collapsed onto me. I staggered under his weight and guided him to a three-legged chair. We sat in silence together and listened to the wind that howled through the trees of Shadowwood and shook the walls of my little blacksmith shop.
    â€œRian,” I said gently. “Rian, what happened?”
    He answered with heavy, ragged breaths. I studied him as he studied the fire, watched the yellow and orange flicker in the pupils of his bright blue eyes.
    Rian was everything a Gelfling lad was supposed to be. Like me, he grew up on the plains of Skarith, not half a league from the Castle of the Crystal. The Harath clan was proud to call him one of their own; powerfully built and adventurous, he had been hired as a guard by the Skeksis as soon as he was old enough to shoot a bow. Gelfling girls swooned over his strong jaw and deep voice and firm muscles. In their eyes, he was the embodiment of perfection.
    But Rian had never cared about perfection. The clearest proof of that was his choice of a best friend: me. I was his opposite, as imperfect as he was perfect. When I was an infant, a Landstrider crushed my right leg, crippling me before I learned to walk. Unable to farm and unable to fight, I was an embarrassment to my parents. As soon as I was old enough they apprenticed me to Kratos, the blacksmith, to learn a trade that even a second-rate, one-legged Gelfling could manage.
    Working for Kratos was a kind of banishment from the rest of the Harath clan. The blacksmith shop, because of its noise and heat, was built along the boundary of Shadowwood, far from the Gelfling dwellings on the plains. Aside from the occasional customer, my only company was old Kratos, who didn’t talk much and listened even less. When he died suddenly of the coughing sickness, I was left to run the smithy alone.
    But even though I lived and worked alone, Rian refused to let me be lonely. From the time we were young, he insisted on dragging me along on his grand adventures: him charging through the forbidden Shadowwood with a stick or a pair of forge tongs as a weapon, me hobbling gamely behind on my crutches. I was always slowing him down, but he never seemed to mind. He knew how to make even a cripple feel like a hero.
    As we got older and the pressures of blacksmithing became greater, I learned to live my adventures through Rian. I would make tools and weapons for him free of charge. He would go out and use them to hunt and fight off predators in the forest, then return to the smithy in the