The Book of Habidabad - The Castle of the Dark Crystal

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The Castle of the Dark Crystal

Click on a section of the Castle to explore its rooms!!!

In a distant land, the Skeksis took control of the brooding castle.

The castle stands on a bleak crag, along ley-lines of energy. These ley-lines connect to the deserts, forests, ravines, craters, rivers, and mountains of Thra. They even connect to the Standing Stones in the valley of the urRu.

At the highest point of the castle tower there is a triangular portal which allows the beams from the three suns to enter the Crystal Chamber.

Throughout the castle, along its dark passages, through arches and aisles, in chambers large and small, in the filthy dungeons and cells drenched in death, a triangle containing three concentric circles, the icon of the Great Conjunction, can be seen, a pilgrim's talisman, a hunter's supplication, a prisoner's reckoning.

The complex pattern on the ceremonial floors of the castle of the Dark Crystal represented a path. No one who saw it could doubt that. What was open to interpretation was where the path had started, where it might end, and, indeed, what the purpose of the journey might be.

With its forks and intersections, its arcs and spirals and spheres, leading from room to room, it would probably have been seen by one of a transcendentalist cast of mind as a pilgrims's path, the way of enlightenment, leading from station to station of ascending consciousness. Originating in brute, dark matter, the traveler would, metaphorically, rise towards pure spirituality, though never in a straight progression but always circuitously, even after the journey had apparently been accomplished. (For even the purely spiritual soul has unfinished work to do. The cycle of the floor's pattern extended infinitely.)

The Skeksis interpreted the pattern on the floor as a path to the throne.

A long time ago, the Castle was a mountain. The urSkeks cut the castle out of the mountain rock.

The massive bulk of the fortress is made up of craggy battlements. It's immensity is dramatized by the ravine, which runs all the way around the base of the castle buildings.

This stronghold of the Skeksis is colossal, black and malign, as forbidding as the rock from which it was hewn.

The castle is encrusted with centuries of filth which covers the pure, crystalline beauty of the original fabric, the living stone of the mountain.

Thra

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