You know the story. I am the Goblin King. I saw a pretty young girl who, I confess, caught my eye and held it. And as she read about me, building all that I am and my domain into her fairytales, she fell in love with me.
But a fifteen year old cannot know true love. I am not at all convinced that I, many times that age, can know true love either. I will say that I was obsessed, though whether that went hand in hand with love, I can't tell any more than you can. As for her--she was more in love with what she thought I was than what I really am. When I showed her, when I came and tried to grant all of her wishes, she withdrew in horror--at what I was, at what she had done.
The problem became that I did not know how much I desired to give to her her dreams until she refused me. And until then what I had been feeling was mainly curiosity, not longing. With her refusal, however, I came to see that she was not as I had first supposed--which is to say, an entirely selfish creature, beautiful and caught up in her own fantastic world. No, she had two selves and one of them was a good bit stronger and also, sadly, much more realistic.
You see, the very reason that she did not love me, was the same reason that I began to fall in love with her. I was not as she imagined, she was not as I had imagined. We were at an impasse. As I had already committed myself into her scheme, and took it upon myself to give her the gift of her dreams, I could not back out. There are rules to be followed, nearly impossible to break. I tried to explain that to her several times, but she wasn't well enough versed in that sort of thing to listen properly.
"What's said is said," I told her. "I can give you your dreams," I told her. She had already seen through me, however, that her dreams were not what she really wanted--not if they were not how she'd imagined them.
What could I do? I had to take the child. I flatter myself that he would have had quite a nice life with me. Sarah had something of a misconception at that point that it was my practice to turn children into goblins. Really, the goblins are completely capable of producing new goblins without my help. No--I wanted an heir. Being king of goblins grows tedious after a few centuries. I wanted out, and I wanted to leave the Labyrinth in good hands. But it was not to be.