Disclaimer: Do not own anything of the Labyrinth.

Poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, „The Erl-King", Translation Edgar Alfred Bowring

Picture by Henry Fuseli, "The Nightmare"

"Oh, come, thou dear infant! oh come thou with me!
For many a game I will play there with thee;
On my strand, lovely flowers their blossoms unfold,
My mother shall grace thee with garments of gold."

It took exactly thirteen days for him to appear on her window sill after the little impromptu party in her bedroom.
For thirteen days after her adventure in the labyrinth she was allowed to enjoy the feeling of her victory and relief over having successfully won her brother back.
A mere thirteen days he granted her before destroying the illusion, that life could just go back to normal and the way it had been before.
On the thirteenth night after coming back from the Labyrinth he was there outside her window in the shape of a white barn owl.
Calmly he was perched on the window ledge, gazing at her through the glass with unblinking mismatched eyes.

If she had at first harboured doubts about his identity, they were soon dispelled, when the owl continued to appear each and every single night as soon as it became dark. No normal owl would behave like that after all.

Initially she had felt just bewilderment, slight amusement even, at the strangeness of the situation. Was it really possible, that her former adversary, and a powerful fairy king at that, would come to haunt her bedroom window in the middle of quite and boring suburbia and she was the only one who noticed?

But the flippancy wore off pretty quickly and was soon replaced with dread.
What was he doing there and why?
A trickle of fear started to creep up every time she came to her bedroom at night and found him sitting there staring at her before she had time to shut the curtains in his face.

Yes, these days she would always make damn sure the window was closed and the curtains drawn firmly. Not that this could appease her anxiety, when she remembered what a laughable obstacle a closed window had posed to him last time.
Even so she asked her father to add an additional lock on her window under the pretext of a fabled streak of burglaries in the neighbourhood and her feeling insecure.
Probably a futile attempt she fully realized, but then again it would at least prevent other well-meaning people from opening her window at nightfall.

When days became weeks and nothing happened, she began to relax slightly.
Obviously, he was not about to burst through her window shrouded in a cloud of magic and power and drag her off to his realm. Not that she was reconciled with the situation, but she was slowly getting used to the sinister sight, that awaited her every night.
It took some more weeks though, before she had the nerve to speak to him. The reassuring safety of the window pane between her and him, she approached the owl.

What do you want? What are you doing here? Why can't you just leave me alone? Go back where you belong; you have no power over me!

For many nights she would question him in this way, demanding answers and trying to make him leave at the same time.
He never even changed his position on her window sill but continued to fix her with his piercing glare. He showed no signs that he had even heard her questions and didn't deign to give an answer.
She was not sure what she had expected, but his stoic unresponsiveness creeped her out all over again and with a shudder she averted her eyes and decided to ignore him in the future.

That was until one night, when she forgot to close her curtains in time and started to get changed for bed.
Catching sight of her half undressed reflexion in the window, she remembered the owlish stalker who had just enjoyed an unexpected peep show.
In that moment she became furious, and in her rage she hurled every random object that was in range at the window, followed by a hearty string of curses.
He didn't even flinch when the objects bounced off the glass one after another.
She had to stop eventually, when her parents came to investigate the source of the noise, and with one last filthy look at the owl and a promise that she wasn't giving up so easily, she jerked the curtain closed.

Her anger took several weeks to abate, in which she left nothing untried to make his little owl life as miserable as possible.
First she tried every tactic she could think of, that would scare away a normal bird - from shooing it, to rapping the glass every time she came into her bedroom, to putting out cat hair onto the window sill.
She should have known in advance, that it would be to no avail.

Deciding that it was time for more drastic measures, she gathered up her courage one night and slowly opened the window while he was sitting on the ledge, all the while keeping a firm grip on the broom she had clutched in her hand.
She eyed his form warily and lifted the broom with both hands, daring him to come any closer. He watched her impassively until she swung the broom directly at his head.
In a flash he was gone and perched instead on the tree opposite her bedroom window, the broom ineffectively hitting the empty window sill.
With a huff of frustration she closed the window, and when she glanced at the glass five minutes later, he was back in his usual place.

She then gave up the attempts at chasing him away with any conventional methods and instead invested her time in research of ways to get rid of magical creatures.
But what were supposed to be effective remedies to ward off malevolent spirits and other bothersome creatures of the dark, proved to be woefully inadequate when applied to the creepy owl.
Neither the salt sprinkled on the window ledge nor the iron horse shoes she deposited there would deter him from taking his customary watch every night. Nor did holy water, sage or a specially blessed iron cross do the job.
In her desperation she even tried garlic, but let off this strategy pretty quickly, when her room started to reek of the smelly mess smeared across the window ledge.

Defeated in all her endeavours, she reluctantly came to the conclusion, that there was nothing to be done but accept the presence of the owl.

So far he hadn't given any indication, that he was out there to harm her and she decided therefore to establish a watchful cease-fire for the time.
She would acknowledge his presence with a - if not friendly - than at least polite nod of the head and occasionally would even throw in a few harmless comments about her day or the weather for his benefit.
Not that she ever got a reply from him, but as the months passed, she found something oddly comforting about his never varying presence outside her window.
In a life where the only constant variable seemed to be change, she sometimes thought him to be the only sure thing she could rely on.

And indeed, nothing ever changed about the now familiar sight of the white barn owl on her window sill. The tree behind him bloomed in different colours as the seasons went by, but he would be there, unmoving und unmoved by the passing of time.