b Disclaimer: All Labyrinth-related anything is owned by Henson and Company. Not me. :) /b
It is a common malady among the wished-away, and a rare one among the wishers-away. The want- the need- to return Underground. The presence of the ever-circling magics and the auras surrounding every living object work their way into the bones of mortals who tread the ground, forcing the essence of those mortals' limited souls to bind to the trees and the strange orange sky. When and if the Earth-dwellers return Aboveground, their lives are never complete. Their body has felt the purest form of magic and now is riddled holes from which their being leaks through, into the ground and into the Underground. They yearn for the place where nothing ever hurts again.
Wishers-away do not feel this, usually. To them the Underground is, though alluring, a place associated with fear, worry, and the cruel smirk of the Goblin King. They see their siblings, friends and parents waste away and cannot figure out why. The poor souls throw up at the sight of dwarves, goblins and peaches. The running of the Labyrinth is akin to Pavlov's Ludovico technique for them. Their families disappear. Their lives crash and burn, so scarred they are. Most commit suicide soon after.
Sarah Williams, though a wisher-away, had all the symptoms of an average wished-away.
Her life after the running was a bleak, colorless hell. The first thing she'd done after the party was burn all of her fantasy memorabila. Even the canopy on her bed went up in flames. Her dresses and makeup were next, sold in a garage sae. Her walls were painted white. Her carpet was left alone, but after too many hours of staring at it lifelessly it, too, turned grey. Somehow her life had shrunk to the size of one house, one school and the path between. Her human contact also diminished until only her family and the blurs of teachers and students whirled around her. Her appetite was nonexistant.
Once a day, at the stroke of midnight, she'd call out. It would be the first and last unecessary words she spoke until the next night, and the night after that. She'd simply wish herself away.
No goblins laughed, no owls appeared. And certainly no blue-eyed Kings.
Her life was futile. Once her seventeeth birthday rolled around, after two years of monochrome oblivion, she swallowed an entire bottle of sleeping pills. And Sarah Williams was no more.