Chapter 1

Jareth sat draped across his throne, one leg up over the side, staring deeply into a crystal he held in his gloved hand. He was intently focused on what he saw, and was unusually deaf to the cacophony of goblins which surrounded him. He was watching Sarah again; only this time was slightly more disturbed with what he saw. In the past, Sarah come in quite clearly in the crystals, but for the last few years the images he saw had grown increasingly out of focus, fading in and out sometimes with slightly bleeding colors.

The Goblin King had kept a close eye on Sarah ever since their last meeting ten years ago when he had offered her everything and she had rudely thrown it back in his face. How he loathed her in that moment! He was a king and used to getting what he wanted, when he wanted it, and oh how he had wanted Sarah. She was stubbornly strong-willed and more beautiful than anyone he had ever seen. She had the ability to ignite a latent passion inside him which either drove him to angry frustration or animal desire. No other woman would ever make him feel as fervent as Sarah. Oh yes, he would have her. However when he had offered her the world, her dreams, and his love and she had brutally rejected him and his kingdom. He had gone through so much trouble to reorder time and create a fantasy to fulfill the greatest stretches of her imagination while she ran his labyrinth to save her brother, and yet she wasn't even in the least bit grateful. She would pay dearly for this.

Ever since that rejection, Jareth would watch Sara in his crystals every night until she would fall asleep. That's when he would seek his revenge; he would visit her in her dreams. Most often he would simply reconstruct a scene of the labyrinth and use basic scare tactics like trapping her in an oubliette filling with water to drown her, having the cleaners chasing her and slowly ripping her limb from limb, or even just pushing her out of the highest tower of his castle. Occasionally he would even make her watch him change Toby into a goblin and her not be able to save him. However, when his pride would get the best of him, he would force her to submit to him fully, and take what was his. These were always his favorite nightmares. In recent years, as Sarah became increasingly fuzzy in the crystals, however, and her dream-self seemed to lack substance as well. It was as if she was not fully there. In most children this would just mean that they were growing up and found it harder to believe in magic any longer, but Jareth knew the size of Sarah's imagination and that this could not possibly be the case. Something had to be wrong.

In the thousands of years he had been spying on the Aboveground via crystal, he had only known colors to blend and merge when a person had an illness of sorts. Tonight when he called upon Sarah's image, she was surrounded with a halo of darkness and her eyes were no longer vibrant green. They were black.