She was standing in a ruin. Sarah blinked and glanced around; huge chunks of stone lay strewn about, crumbled from the once strong walls of an imposing castle. Dust and grit seemed to hang in the air and made her cough. What had once been a staircase lay across the ground at her feet, leading nowhere. She stared for a moment at the carved steps and involuntarily squeezed the smooth surface of the crystal, still clutched in her hand.
"Please be careful with that one, my dear. I'm not sure if I can conjure another one."
Sarah whirled around to gawk wide-eyed at the Goblin King. "Don't sneak up on me like that! And what do you mean you can't conjure another one? Where are we?"
He offered her a tired smile, but there was only sorrow in the expression. "Don't you recognize it?"
"But...surely this can't be the labyrinth. What happened?"
"You did."
She had started peering around the crumbling walls surrounding them, but that stopped her short. She looked at him again, more closely this time. He looked haggard, like he had aged years in a single night. His clothes were smudged, dirty, and disheveled. Grit clung to his hair, which somehow managed to look more unkempt than normal. But the real difference was in his eyes. His expression was sad, but his eyes spoke volumes of frustration, defeat, and loss. She never expected to see him in such a state. "You'd better start from the beginning."
"You know how it begins. You were there. What you don't know is what happens at the end." His voice was soft, and he regarded her with a curious expression. "When you said The Words, you took any power I had over you."
Sarah shivered a little as he took a few steps closer to her. Why did she have the feeling she wouldn't like where this was going?
"I am the Lord of the Labyrinth. My power is a fearsome thing. But now I have lost all but meager threads of it. And my labyrinth is being destroyed without it."
Sarah looked down at the crystal she still held. "What exactly are you saying? Sure, I beat the labyrinth, but what does this have to do with me?"
He closed the distance between them and pondered the green depths of her eyes for a moment. "I'm saying that the labyrinth has chosen you. And without you, it will die."
She tried to leap back from his closeness but found her back pressed against a chunk of stone. He was watching her, his eyes pleading. "Sarah, you must help me."
"Woah woah time out! Help you? I don't understand any of this! It was all supposed to go back to normal after I beat you!"
"So it should all be so because you wish it? And I thought you'd grown up during your time here." He narrowed his eyes and smirked, feeling more like himself than he had since his world began to unravel.
Sarah caught the sudden glint in his eyes and resisted tossing back a childish comment. She drew in a deep breath instead. "Okay, so help me out here. I'm trying to wrap my head around this. All this weird stuff has been happening since I came home and now you tell me that I'm supposed to be some labyrinth savior or something?"
That was enough to make him chuckle. "No, you aren't 'some labyrinth savior,' my dear. But the labyrinth has been trying to call you back. You simply did not understand. You have gained the power I have lost. And without that power, my labyrinth will continue to crumble."
Sarah didn't know what to say, so she just stared into the crystal in her hand. It had felt so easy to pick it up when she'd found it in her room, heard his ghostly voice, but now it felt.. different. "Why do I feel like I've been struck by lightning?"
"Because, as I said, you now possess my powers. There is magic coursing through your veins, though you don't yet know how to control it." As if to punctuate his statement, they heard a distant rumbling as the labyrinth continued to fall into ruin. "I can teach you, but there is the rather pressing matter of staving off the utter destruction of my world. It has slowed since you arrived, but without your help..."
She regarded him for a moment. They had been enemies so recently, and now he was asking her to save his kingdom. From a destruction she caused. "I'll do it."
