Summary: When a new book about the Labyrinth appears in Sarah's possession without her memory of acquiring it, Sarah determines to fight whatever the Goblin King is plotting.
Warnings: This story will be somewhat dark and will contain mature themes. If you are not over eighteen, this story is not for you. (A note, however: all sex will be consensual— I will not write rape in any form or amount.) Because of this website's policies in regards to violent and sexual themes, I will likely be moving this story to a different site as the story progresses. If and when I choose to do so, I will make a note of it in a chapter, leading you to its link on my profile, should you wish to continue reading.
Disclaimer: I do not own the realm in which I am writing, and I do not make any claims upon it.
Chapter One:
When Sarah found the small leather bound book, a sense of fond nostalgia swept over her, bringing a soft smile to her face. Its covering blue with gold lettering, the book was supple and warm. Seemingly without thought, she had sat upon her bed and pulled the book open, gently coaxing the pages apart despite the creaks of the binding. As Sarah settled against her pillows, she began to read.
And so it came one day in the Underworld that the mistreated, unappreciated, and altogether miserable Sarah made a deal with the Goblin King, a fierce and stupendous monarch— a fair, handsome, roguishly masculine royal.
At this sentence, Sarah furrowed her brows. It… did not sound right. Yet it seemed so familiar. Despite struggling to think past the strong sense of acquaintance, she ultimately continued reading.
Sarah cried out in anguish as her wicked stepmother and her neglectful father left her alone once more to clean the vast house and watch her screeching infant of a brother.
Sitting upright and ignoring the pillows tumbling behind her, Sarah reread the sentence and then glanced back through the words again. As the haze of nostalgia began to shudder, she swiftly flipped through pages, catching brief sentences as alarm began to thrum in her veins.
As Sarah danced with the Goblin King, soft flutters scrambled about in her stomach, and where soft leather grasped her hands, a tingling sensation began to numb her hands. A giddy laugh broke past her lips, and her King smiled indulgently at her.
Absolutely not, Sarah barked inwardly. That caricature of her dream made the entire escapade sound positively romantic, rather than dizzying and frantic. She skipped a small chunk of pages forward, her eyes alighting upon the final confrontation between her and the Goblin King.
When Sarah stepped beyond the castle doors, the King stood awaiting her. His throne room was resplendent with shimmering jewels and fantastical objects, ones that she could scarcely comprehend—
Scoffing, Sarah tossed the small book away from her, resisting the urge to toe the monstrosity off the side of bed. The Goblin King was certainly painted in a lovely manner in the book—a book she had no recollection of acquiring. Suspicion flaring, Sarah wondered how the leather bound book of lies had found itself nestled between her alarm clock and lamp. She had told no one of that night over ten years ago, preferring to forget the event altogether. Although she had occasionally called upon her friends, the times had grown fewer as she aged, and most days, she was content to pretend the Goblin King and his world had been naught but a dream.
Yet setting innocently upon her bed was her entire story within the Labyrinth, edited to sound as though the entire ordeal had been a pleasant escape from her arduous life. Rolling her eyes even now, Sarah despised looking back upon her actions so many years ago. An overdramatic girl, she had given away her brother because her father and stepmother wished to get out of the house one night a week. Even if her relationship with her stepmother had merely settled into cool familiarity, the companionship she shared with Toby was well worth all she had been through.
And none of it had been as bad as that blasted book claimed, she thought with a pointed, distasteful glance.
She was acutely aware that the book had outlined in specific detail how to make a deal with the Goblin King, a fact that hinted towards her fears. Although she certainly questioned why, Sarah recognized what the book was doing. Her main concern, however, was quickly realized when the first words out of Toby's mouth that night during their phone call were, "Remember that book we used to read when we was younger? Well, I found it in the living room, right under some of them magazines Dad's always bringing in from work—you know, the ones with the woodworking stuff? He always says he's gonna build a deck, but I haven't even seen him build a bird house, so I don't know if—"
While normally Sarah would have let him ramble as twelve year olds are wont to do, she instead found herself asking if he found anything strange about the book, a quiet urgency bleeding into her voice.
"Well… no. It's funny, though, when I was skimming through it, I kept getting these flashes, something almost like a memory but that's not right…—probably from when you used to read it to me! That's it. You've always been so good at describing things—hey, you should write a book! You studied English in school, right?"
Nauseated and lightheaded at the news that Toby, too, had the book, Sarah begged off the phone, citing a long day a work for her quiet demeanor and short conversation. As she started to rest the phone in its cradle, she paused before quickly bringing it back to her ear.
"Hey, Tobe—will you do me a favor?"
"Sur—waaait, what'll ya give me for't?" Mischievousness coloured his tone, and Sarah knew exactly what he wanted—and knew that she would have to do exactly that.
With an over-exaggerated sigh, she said with a small, hidden smile, "You want pizza?"
Karen was strict about what Toby could eat, enforcements that had carried over into her father's diet over the years. Thankfully, Sarah had retained her gluttonous ways in spite of years of opposition Still, Toby loved pizza, as it was something he only experienced at friends' houses and parties (of which there were too few, in his opinion), and so he always begged her to purchase the food for dinner when he visited without Karen and their father. Most times, she abided by Karen's wishes and fixed him a relatively healthy dinner, full of ripe vegetables and hearty fibers and meaty proteins, and she cackled gleefully as he pouted around the vibrant meal he had stuffed petulantly into his mouth.
"SHH—don't let Mom hear you." His voice had taken on a wispy quality as he lowered his voice conspiratorially. "But yes, for the next fifteen times I visit."
Barking out an abrupt laugh, Sarah wheezed for a second, drawing out the noise to notify Toby what would not be happening. Still slightly breathless, she responded, "Toby, I'll get you pizza the next three times you come over, and that's the best you're going to get."
With his promise of securing the newly arrived book in a box immediately after hanging up, with the intent to be mailed out the following day, Sarah softly returned the corded phone to its home, the small smile drooping into a grimace.
Days had passed since the discovery of the book in her bedroom, and though difficult to determine, it appeared that despite the books' appearance in most everyone's homes, no one was discussing it. Beyond Toby, no one seemed to even be affected by the existence of the blue book.
Aware that this observation meant nothing, she could not dispel the disquieting sensation that fell upon her when looking at the book, of which she now had two. Sarah flicked a glance at the two blue bound books sitting atop her coffee table and clenched her fists. She knew that only the creatures of the Labyrinth and herself could recall the story, and only one besides herself could actually pen it. Dread mixed with the nostalgia she still could not fully shake nestled in her belly as she struggled to determine why the Goblin King would choose now to orchestrate a lavish tale of the wonders of the Underworld. Not to mention why he would deposit copies of it with Toby and her, yet somehow inhibit the ability within Toby to fully discuss it. Sarah had never read or told Toby any of those stories, but he remembered pieces of it. She did not know why her brother was unconcerned about their names in the book, and she wished she could blame it on typical teenage obliviousness, but Toby had always been a rather precocious child and less likely to fall into his age's mannerisms.
She was confused. She hated that even now, over a decade later, that blasted Goblin King could still spin her in circles.
Although months had progressed since the King had sent his book to the Aboveground, Sarah still was unable to accept its innocence. If it had not been for a troubling disappearance of one of her pupils to a scheduled tutoring session or the elder sibling's haunted stare or the parents' blissful conversations, Sarah would not have realized with a horrifying jolt what the King intended with his book.
He wants more children.
She had pulled the child into a darkened corner of the library, away from his tittering parents, as she tried to quell the rage thrumming within her.
"Give me the book, Louis." Her voice was cold—harsher than it should have been, as the thirteen year old immediately teared up, his face flushing a dull red.
"I didn't me-me-mean it! It's no-not fair—I couldn't beat i-it."
Gripping his arm tightly, she asked slowly, darkly, "Where is the book?"
"It's gone! Wh-hen I got back—" he stuttered to a stop here, great wailing cries falling out of his mouth.
"What did she do, Louis? Steal your toys? Hide in your room? What did Mary do that you wished your only sister away?" Her voice raised slightly, the anger seeping into her voice. Whatever else she might have said, though, was interrupted by the boy's parents, having heard their son's hysterics.
A fake, sympathetic smile turned up her lips as she murmured to the parents, having relaxed her grip on their son's arm upon their appearance, "He said he failed his last Math test—he was too afraid to tell you. But don't you worry, Mr. and Mrs. Blakely, we'll have his next score much higher if you enroll him in the library's free Math tutoring session. The details are at the front desk with Annette."
Sarah recognized that not many people were aware of the Goblin King anymore, outside of the superstitious circles dotted across the globe. She had simply been an intrigued child when she stumbled across the red book, and yet it had been enough to foster an obsession as she aged. But there were different children's tales now, ones that did not center on dark goblins and deals.
She wondered how many people had come through the Labyrinth after her, prior to the King's authorial debut.
Sarah already had a guess: too few for the Goblin King.
From the couch in her living room, Sarah stared down at the red and blue books, and she wondered, not for the first time, about the author of the former. With rising fear, she worried how many people now possessed the blue book and how many people had already made deals as she once did. She pulled her bottom lip into her mouth, gnashing down upon it and pulling at dried skin with her teeth. At the rush of blood onto her tongue, she flinched and licked tentatively at her ravaged lip, and when the taste of rust assaulted her senses, she stood abruptly. As she rummaged through her apartment for a tissue, Sarah thought upon the problem.
If those people really knew what the experience was like, they wouldn't be rushing to make any deals with that wretch.
Tissue in hand, Sarah stilled at the idea wriggling towards the front of her mind. Perhaps she could write what the experience had actually been like. Whatever magic the King used was not strong enough to allow discussion—to allow the ideas to grow into a worldwide phenomenon, and so it was simply an inkling, a kernel stuck in the teeth of a memory. But Sarah could write her story and publish it in the Aboveground, where the book would be real.
This action was all Sarah could do, short of wishing away her brother again and confronting the King, but that sort of decision was foolhardy—the kind she would have endorsed as the young girl who had walked the Labyrinth. Sitting back down absentmindedly, Sarah reached the only solution she could reasonably do: write her story. Write her story in such a manner that no one would ever wish away another child again, no matter how obnoxious, regardless of the pitch of its screams, and despite how unfair it all seemed.
She did not fear the Goblin King, for he had no power over her. She had taken that book away from Toby, and she was sure the boy had already forgotten it—the memory replaced with his last two visits (and therefore last two pizzas). Even her friends, though fond as she may still have been of them, had likely moved on and were less likely to face any punishment for her actions, should the Goblin King find out.
Plotting, Sarah pondered how to demonize an already terrifying experience. With regret, she realized she would have to cut out her friends, and a piercing longing shot through her as she calculated how very long it had been since she had called them to her. Over five years to her, but more than that in the Underworld. After all, she had been gone for thirteen hours in the Underworld, but upon arriving back home, only four had passed.
Oh, my… it's been over sixteen years to them.
She marveled at how long it had been to the Underworld since she first arrived—over thirty-two years. Sarah had felt the passage of time as any other human, but now she realized why her friends had always seemed sadder as the time lengthened between each visit. What had seemed to her only a few months had been almost years to them, and she had let over sixteen years pass between seeing them. How different they must all be—how much must have occurred to the Underworld, she thought.
How the Goblin King must have changed. Surely, she reasoned. But a glance at the blue bound book sitting atop her coffee table told her otherwise, and she heaved a heavy breath as she reached for a pad and pencil, scribbling down her memories.
It was almost a year before she had finished writing the story, madly pecking at the keyboard on the gloriously new, fabulously pricey Microsoft Windows Personal Computer, 1998 model, but on the eve of her brother's thirteenth birthday, she typed the final words to her journey. The tale she had written over the course of the past months was a gruesome one, far darker than anything she had experienced, and though she had changed many facets to her story, the most startling one was the outcome of Linda's journey: she failed.
After an arduous trek full of dangers and terrors, Linda did not reach the castle in time, and she was forced to watch as the horrendously ugly Goblin King transformed her baby brother into a goblin, a painful and cruel process. Admittedly, the decision to make the Goblin King an ugly monster had made her lips quirk with vindictive glee, as she could not imagine a man who changed outfits that many times within thirteen hours was not, in some fashion, acutely aware of his looks.
"As good as they may be," she muttered, thinking back on what could be categorized as her first look at the male anatomy, what with how tight his pants had been and how lithely he had moved… and how… close he had gotten. Breathing deeply through her nose, Sarah stood from her hunched position over her computer, saving her finalized work repeatedly until she felt content that it was safe.
She had approached several publishing houses with the idea of her book, and she figured that the natural recognition of the story from the King's magic had been the cause of so many acceptances. Sarah hoped that the same recollection would create readers out of the same people who might have wished away children to the Goblin King. She had purposefully slipped in certain amounts of humor, so that it could slide as a darker children's book but retain its warnings.
The first time her agent told her how her novel was selling, she was pleasantly surprised. She had guiltily accepted the advance check for signing on with her publishing house and had meekly taken the subsequent ones. Sarah's intent had been to reach as many people as she could, and she had been aware that she would make money off of those sales, yet the idea of keeping it for something that, for one, she had not truly earned, and two, was a lie, settled unhappily within her.
Still, she deposited the checks in a separate account, intending to do something good with the money once she had fully researched her options. Of course, Sarah would be a fool if she did not use the opportunity to pay off her student loans and buy a special gift or two for her family, but beyond such expenses, the money remained untouched. She kept her job at the library, and she ignored her agent's urging to write a sequel.
Life was… normal—as normal as it could be with hefty checks arriving quarterly, increasing in size as the months turned, and an increasingly rabid fan-base. She was glad she had written under a pseudonym—especially as the novel spread internationally. S. Hoggle was a tribute to her first and most dear friend in the Underworld, and she hoped he and her other friends would forgive her for how she had twisted their story.
Weeks had melted into months, which shifted into years, and after two of those, Sarah was ready to entertain the idea of writing an original novel—one not based on her adventure so many years ago.
Diane,
I think I'm onto another story. I'll update you once I have something more substantial.
- Sarah
Clicking send, Sarah straightened from her signature slouch over the keyboard and grasped the armrests of her computer chair, firmly twisting her torso round. Eyes slightly closed with satisfaction at the descending series of low cracks, she turned the other direction.
At the flash of white seen through her shuttered eyes, Sarah froze. Her eyes swept frantically about the room, cataloging everything from her swaying curtains, the piles of magazines and books scattered across her coffee table, to her own novel sitting innocently on the end table that stood proudly behind her couch.
Nausea flared in her stomach at the sight.
I only have one copy of that book, and it's on a shelf in the study, away from any prying eyes.
The moment her inner dialogue finished, a din of thunder rumbled. Shakily standing from her seat, Sarah clutched in her hand the butter knife setting beside her mouse—the aftermath of a slice of fresh bread and the overwhelming, insatiably frantic urge to write—and stumbled her way to the novel. Still clinging to her dull weapon, she held the book in trembling hands, ones which could barely open the front cover and instead grabbed a thick chunk of pages with their clumsy movements.
And the gaping jaw of the Goblin King fell open slowly in a sneering grin—letting show multiple rows of horrifically sharp teeth as he prepared to speak.
"Hello, Sarah."
Her fingers tightened upon the binding of the book, clenching about the thick material until her fingers paled in fierce tension and screamed at the pressure of the metal of her knife upon them. The voice was soft and dark—as deep as she had remembered, but with more clipped efficiency than her dreams had recalled over the years.
The Goblin King.
Mustering the courage that had led her through the Labyrinth so long ago, Sarah turned.
He was both exactly as he once was and utterly different. She was not surprised, and yet she was. Perhaps she had expected the King to change in thirty years, but looking upon the spiked and jagged hair, the free flowing shirt matched with the opulent dress jacket, the —Sarah's perusal stuttered to a brief halt—familiarly tight pants, he seemed to have swaggered out of her memories.
Sweeping her gaze to his eyes, she met his coldly amused, mismatched ones, watching as they dipped to her hands.
"Come now, Sarah, is that any way to greet an old friend?" His voice dropped on the final word, its timbre close to the rumbling of the storm above.
His presence made her feel every bit of the fifteen year old girl she had once been, and she struggled to fight past the urge to either cower or rage. Swallowing hard, Sarah slowly set the butter knife and the foreign copy of her book on the table. She ignored the feral glint gleaming in his icy eyes.
"Hello, Goblin King." Her voice had shaken only on the first syllable, after which it had strengthened into all that her twenty-nine year old self had become.
You have no power over me.
He grinned then, his pointy teeth shining in the dim light given by her computer. It was night, she realized suddenly. She had been writing the majority of the day, and she had not felt the passage of the sun as it had crossed the sky and dipped below the horizon. How strange, she thought, that the knowledge of nighttime made her more frightened. She stabbed her nails deeply into her palms, anchoring herself to the bites of pain, before she pulled her shoulders back.
You have no power over me.
"Are you preparing for battle, Sarah?" His voice was silky, no longer dark and thundering, but the stilted, cropped syllables characteristic of his speech remained.
"Should I be," she questioned, hard and short.
He laughed, sudden and sharp—forced and yet genuine. "Oh, Sarah," he brought his hands to rest upon his hips, "of course."
Jerking backwards, Sarah's hand swiped the knife off the table, gripping it tightly.
You have no power over me.
"In what manner?" Cold.
"In what manner should you be preparing or in what manner shall you be battling?" He spoke lazily, a grin alight on his face and obviously pleased at her visceral reaction. "Oh, dear Sarah, are you frightened?"
Grimacing in irritation at his condescension, she spoke, "I would be a fool to not be frightened of the monster that has terrified children all across the world." She nodded tightly to her book.
His smile dropped immediately, and his face darkened. "Yes, I am aware of that drivel of yours."
You have no power over me.
"Is that why you have come?" As the fear faded, Sarah's fiery temper began to ignite, emboldening her. "Do you wish to congratulate me on such success?" She spoke loftily, haughtily—as though the conversation were trite and he had really best be going, now.
Though he looked murderous—eyes flinty with rage and lips firmly set into a deep scowl, Sarah continued speaking. "It was kind of you to come such a distance to do so. I suppose you enjoyed it, then?" She smiled widely, showing too many straight teeth—too much gum—it was too much have revealed, in a disconcerting contrast to his tightly pressed lips.
You have no po—
With a blur of motion, Sarah was held tightly within his arms, his face towering over her. His teeth bared in a snarl, he looked more similar to the monster she had created than ever before, and with a squeezing, frightening sensation, Sarah and the Goblin King were vanished from her living room.
A/N: I'm still currently without a beta, as I've just returned to the world of writing fanfiction after some time, so if you would forgive any mistakes and kindly point them out to me, I would be eternally grateful.
Until chapter two—
