Capricorn's Village



Capricorn's Village is the name of a small abandoned town somewhere in Italy taken over by Capricorn, upon arriving in the real world. This is the place that he takes Meggie and Mo as prisoners. It is also the final climatic battle with the Shadow began at his castle.

After Capricorn and his faithful minion Basta entered the real world, they went to search for another Silvertongue to call forth more of his followers. While they've found Darius and force him to summon his army, they came across and overtaken a small village and taken residence in an abandoned that now Capriocorn calls home.

Dustfinger appears again, but this time having informed the book's villain Capricorn and bringing his minion Basta to capture Mo and his family and take back the book, in the meantime destroying Elinor's valuable collection of books.

The trio are taken to Capricorn's castle in his village and imprisoned in the stables, which house various creatures from storybooks, such as the ticking Crocodile from Peter Pan, flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz, and the title character of The Hound of the Baskervilles, as well as the minotaur from the story of Theseus and a unicorn. Mo explains his gift to Meggie and Elinor, stating that when he reads a person out of a book, someone from the real world is sent into it, hence the disappearance of his wife. They are abruptly taken to meet with Capricorn, and meet his current reader Darius, whose perpetual stutter had caused those he had read out of the book to only come halfway out of the story, with various deformities and the words of the stories written on their faces. Capricorn breaks his promise to Dustfinger to have him read back into the book, and throws it onto the fire, burning it. In his despair, Dustfinger leaves the group and runs to the kitchen, where he learns that one of the servant girls, a trusted friend of his who is constantly attempting to escape, is in fact Mo's lost wife Resa, whose halfway transition from the book she was trapped in has left her without a voice. He gives her the access to escape and departs.

After reading from The Arabian Nights and giving Capricorn a stash of treasure, one of Ali Baba's thieves, Farid, is summoned from the story and joins the storyteller and his family in imprisonment while one of his minions named Fulvio was trapped in The Arabian Nights and met his unfortunate end. Dustfinger opts not to tell Mo that his wife is in the village and prompts a quick escape using the famous cyclone from The Wizard of Oz. After they escape, Meggie offers the idea that only the author of Inkheart, Fenoglio may have access to a copy of the rare-to-find book.

Meanwhile, Meggie learns that she has inherited her father's gift when she accidentally summons Toto from The Wizard of Oz. Basta comes and takes Meggie and Fenoglio back to Capricorn's village. Capricorn intends to use Meggie to read the Shadow, Inkheart's supernatural and most deadly villain, out of the book and into the real world, using a copy of the book he had secretly kept to himself. After a brief reunion with her mother, Meggie is coerced into cooperating or risk Capricorn killing Resa. Elinor in the meantime discovers Fenoglio's ransacked apartment and rents a motorbike to save her family. As Mo, Farid and Dustfinger work on a plan of burning down Capricorn's castle, Dustfinger is captured. After escaping his cell, he attempts to free Meggie and Fenoglio who is working on a way to rewrite the ending of the Shadow for her to read. He is unable to free them, and flees, only to return at his conscience (or perhaps Meggie's) beckoning.

Meggie is escorted out to read the Shadow out of the book, and Fenoglio and Resa are caged to be his first meal. Fenoglio manages to use Toto to give her a page that he had written, and she manages to call off the Shadow. In the scuffle, she loses the rewrite and Shadow attempts again to kill Resa, Fenoglio, and Mo, who had intervened in the fight. Mo gives Meggie a pen to write her own ending, and using her arm, Meggie manages to send all the book characters back to their own stories, and at Fenoglio's request, sends him into the Inkheart world as well. Dustfinger misses his chance to return, and departs when Elinor, Resa, Mo and Meggie embrace, where Meggie discovers that Inkheart had been taken (only this time by Farid) before everyone along with Darius escaped the crumbling castle and fled the village.