Free The Neverending Story by Michael Ende

because things were getting a little rough. What I’ve started I must finish. I’ve gone too far to turn back. Regardless of what may happen, I have to go forward.”
    He felt very lonely, yet there was a kind of pride in his loneliness. He was proud of standing firm in the face of temptation.
    He was a little like Atreyu after all.
    A time came when Atreyu really could not go forward. Before him lay the Deep Chasm.
    The grandiose horror of the sight cannot be described in words. A yawning cleft, perhaps half a mile wide, twined its way through the Land of the Dead Mountains. How deep it might be there was no way of knowing.
    Atreyu lay on a spur at the edge of the chasm and stared down into darkness which seemed to extend to the innermost heart of the earth. He picked up a stone the size of a tennis ball and hurled it as far as he could. The stone fell and fell, until it was swallowed up in the darkness. Though Atreyu listened a long while, he heard no sound of impact.
    There was only one thing Atreyu could do, and he did it. He skirted the Deep Chasm. Every second he expected to meet the “horrors of horrors”, known to him from the old song. He had no idea what sort of creature this might be. All he knew was that its name was Ygramul.
    The Deep Chasm twisted and turned through the mountain waste, and of course there was no path at its edge. Here too there were abrupt rises and falls, and sometimes the ground swayed alarmingly under Atreyu’s feet. Sometimes his path was barred by gigantic rock formations and he would have to feel his way, painfully, step by step, around them. Or there would be slopes covered with smooth stones that would start rolling toward the Chasm as soon as he set foot on them. More than once he was within a hairbreadth of the edge.
    If he had known that a pursuer was close behind him and coming closer by the hour, he might have hurried and taken dangerous risks. It was that creature of darkness which had been after him since the start of his journey. Since then its body had taken on recognizable outlines. It was a pitch-black wolf, the size of an ox. Nose to the ground, it trotted along, following Atreyu’s trail through the stony desert of the Dead Mountains. Its tongue hung far out of its mouth and its terrifying fangs were bared. The freshness of the scent told the wolf that its prey was only a few miles ahead.
    But suspecting nothing of his pursuer, Atreyu picked his way slowly and cautiously.
    As he was groping through the darkness of a tunnel under a mountain, he suddenly heard a noise that he couldn’t identify because it bore no resemblance to any sound he had ever heard. It was a kind of jangling roar. At the same time Atreyu felt that the whole mountain about him was trembling, and he heard blocks of stone crashing down its outer walls. For a time he waited to see whether the earthquake, or whatever it might be, would abate. Then, since it did not, he crawled to the end of the tunnel and cautiously stuck his head out.
    And then he saw: An enormous spider web was stretched from edge to edge of the Deep Chasm. And in the sticky threads of the web, which were as thick as ropes, a great white luckdragon was struggling, becoming more and more entangled as he thrashed about with his tail and claws.
    Luckdragons are among the strangest animals in Fantastica. They bear no resemblance to ordinary dragons, which look like loathsome snakes and live in deep caves, diffusing a noxious stench and guarding some real or imaginary treasure. Such spawn of chaos are usually wicked or ill-tempered, they have batlike wings with which they can rise clumsily and noisily into the air, and they spew fire and smoke.
    Luckdragons are creatures of air, warmth, and pure joy. Despite their great size, they are as light as a summer cloud, and consequently need no wings for flying. They swim in the air of heaven as fish swim in water. Seen from the earth, they look like slow lightning flashes. The most amazing thing