Fantasia Has No Boundaries

How “The Never Ending Story Inspired My Love of World Building”.

There are stories that do not simply entertain, they awaken something long asleep inside us. For me, that story was The NeverEnding Story.

I was a child when I first watched Atreyu ride across the dying land of Fantasia. Even then, I sensed that the Nothing wasn’t a monster, it was meaning collapsing. It was the slow death of imagination, the silence that follows when humanity stops creating, when the spark of wonder is replaced by apathy.

That truth struck deeper than any sermon ever had.

Yet what haunted me most wasn’t the Childlike Empress or the luckdragon gliding through the clouds. It was Gmork, the black wolf that hunted Atreyu through the ruins. He wasn’t evil in the cartoonish sense. He was something far more familiar. He was the voice of surrender, the whisper that says, Why fight it? This is the way of things. He was despair with teeth.

Years later, when I began writing The Guardian, The Angel, and The Goddess, I realized I had carried Gmork with me all along. He had simply changed form. He had become Dark Wolf.

But my wolf is no servant of oblivion. He is its keeper. He knows the language of shadow but does not kneel to it. He stands between chaos and despair, a sentinel who understands that darkness is not corruption, it is contrast. It is the crucible where light learns what it is made of.

Where Gmork pursued Atreyu to drag him into nothingness, Dark Wolf walks beside me when the void calls my name. He is a reflection of the part of me that learned to harness the dark instead of being consumed by it. He reminds me that strength born of awareness is more enduring than any comfort found in ignorance.

The NeverEnding Story taught me that worlds are not built from belief, but from imagination shaped by will. Fantasia had no boundaries because consciousness has none. Every story we tell, every act of creation, pushes back against the slow erosion of meaning.

When I write now, when I build the mythic world of Where Ravens Wait, I still see that boy in the attic, reading through the storm. The book trembles in his hands; the lightning outside mirrors the awakening inside. That boy learned something vital that day: that imagination is not escape, it is rebellion against the Nothing.

Because the Nothing is real.

But so is the storyteller.

Creation does not rise from faith—it rises from will. From the relentless spark that refuses to die, even when the world grows dim.