Pan's Labyrinth: The Labyrinth of the Faun

by Guillermo del Toro

There once was a forest in the north of Spain, so old that it could tell stories long past and forgotten by men. The trees anchored so deeply in the moss-covered soil they laced the bones of the dead with their roots while their branches reached for the stars.

“As white as snow, as red as blood, as black as coal,” Ofelia’s father used to say when he looked at her mother, his voice soft with tenderness.

They had been driving for hours, farther and farther away from everything Ofelia knew, deeper and deeper into this never-ending forest, to meet the man her mother had chosen to be Ofelia’s new father. Ofelia called him the Wolf, and she didn’t want to think about him.

Her mother said fairy tales didn’t have anything to do with the world, but Ofelia knew better. They had taught her everything about it.

Carmen Cardoso believed the most dangerous tale of all: the one of the prince who would save her.

Only her master knew her true name, for in the Magic Kingdom to know a name was to own the being that carried it.

Evil seldom takes shape immediately. It is often little more than a whisper at first. A glance. A betrayal. But then it grows and takes root, still invisible, unnoticed. Only fairy tales give evil a proper shape. The big bad wolves, the evil kings, the demons, and devils .

In consiliis nostris fatum nostrum est, the words read. “In our choices lie our fate.”

Ofelia didn’t remind her mother that for her, there was nothing better than a book. Her mother wouldn’t understand. She didn’t make books her shelter or allow them to take her to another world. She could only see this world, and then, Ofelia thought, only sometimes. It was part of her mother’s sadness to be earthbound. Books could have told her so much about this world and about places far away, about animals and plants, about the stars! They could be windows and doors, paper wings to help her fly away. Maybe her mother had just forgotten how to fly. Or maybe she’d never learned.

the creature Ofelia called the Fairy spread her wings and followed the sound of the girl’s voice, the words building a path of bread crumbs through the night.

who wouldn’t trust a Fairy, even when she showed up in the middle of the night? They probably always did. And you had to follow them. That’s what the books said, and didn’t their tales feel so much truer than what adults pretended this world to be about? Only books talked about all the things adults didn’t want you to ask about—Life. Death. Good and Evil. And what else truly mattered in life.

The Pale Man came to life. His black fingertips, pointy like thorns, cracked into motion with a spasm. His gaping mouth drew a tortured breath, and his right hand grabbed one of the eyeballs from his plate in his right hand, as his left turned, spreading its fingers like a terrible flower. The eyeball fit perfectly into the hole gaping in his left palm, and when his right hand had received the second eyeball, with a pupil as red as the grape Ofelia had eaten, the Pale Man raised both hands to his eyeless face to find out who had woken him. Ofelia hadn’t noticed what she’d done.

“To obey . . .” Ferreira chose his words carefully. “. . . just like that, for the sake of obeying, without questioning . . . that’s something only people like you can do, Capitán.”