Enter the Age of Exploration
S
At last I arrived at a great stone wall. The air was damp and smelled of river clay and autumn fog. It was clearly some sort of keep. Perhaps this was one of the Goblin King's neighbors. I mentally thumbed through the names I could remember reading from the books in his library. I tried not to imagine the glowing kindness in his face as he showed me those first volumes, pushing from consciousness the gentle touch of his hand on my still trembling wrist. A monster had replaced my memory and now all I could picture was the glint of the unknown in his eye—the abyss of the unreadable, the void of the horrifically inscrutable. And what cannot be read by a fearful heart is doomed to be filled instead with fear. What did you want from me?! What did you do to me?! What have you done with my life?! I growled from the pits of my inner monologue. The images in my mind were all colluded and spinning around a few lines I happened to chance upon in a book the night before:
"The Kingdom of the Goblin City is an old and infamous one. Its ruler is the only monarch in the underground who can travel freely between this realm and our fabled sister realm. For many generations it has been understood that the function of the Labyrinth surrounding the city is to ensnare wished-away children, as the current King is ruthless in his design of procuring more goblin subjects. Of course, many are skeptical as to where the wished-away children come from, as most do not believe in the actual existence of our sister realm. This author has not excluded the possibility of such a realm, but has not in the course of her research come across any substantial evidence to argue for the actual existence of said realm. In any case, rumors of the Goblin King's depravity are widespread and probably grounded in some measure of truth. Several scholars of the Peripheral Lands have offered opinions as to the actual existence or provenance of trafficking youths and their subsequent transformation into sub-rational goblins…"
Such were the fateful contents of a seemingly innocuous but intriguing leather bound title, Curious and Mysterious: A researched account of the underbelly of the Underground. I don't remember the name of the author. I was too horrified to think of much else.
"Doctor Malleus holds that the children are whisked away from neighboring kingdoms, their memories erased, and are subsequently changed into goblins. Sage Fraticus critiques Malleus for not checking the records of the village populous in the surrounding kingdoms, but as most kingdoms are rather reticent to disclose such information, perhaps we can abstain from judgment either way. A most colorful suggestion comes from Queen Tirah who postulates the missing mermaids of her sea kingdom might account for the subsequent population growth in the Goblin City. Of course, Queen Tirah has never been on land to verify the identity of her alleged subjects, so this remains in some sense speculation. Nevertheless, general consensus seems to agree on the fact that the Goblin King does in fact abduct individuals from outside his own Kingdom and pitilessly forces them to relinquish their prior identity and subject themselves to the atrocious demotion of being transformed into unformly half-wits entirely eclipsed by his insatiable dominion. Why the Goblin King takes satisfaction from such cruelty we may leave to psychological speculation; however, it may be that the psychic energy lost by the individual in the transformation is used to fuel the power source of the Labyrinth itself, making his Kingdom essentially parasitic in nature…"
A kind of anxious anger coursed through my veins. I couldn't see it then, but I was pushing away every positive thing I could remember with a vengeance only the confused and wounded can muster.
It had been surprisingly easy to leave the Goblin City. The Labyrinth too only took several hours to navigate. I had looked down upon it many a morn and watched its little fairy lights through numerous nights, and had always assumed it would be a formidable chore to find one's way in it. Strangely, though, my instincts never seemed to fail me. I even had the sense that the Labyrinth was allowing me to progress outward to its outermost bounds, as if it could feel the strength of my own desire to quit it.
I had spent the night several miles outside the labyrinth walls. At first I had been frightened, but somehow the fear did not last. The wonder of exploring the unknown gripped me, and I smiled as the tree leaves bent down to whisper at me. I even took what the little ground bats brought me at sundown (to be honest, I recognized them from Jareth's library), though I understood nothing of their chatter. Apparently they ate tree nuts and were summary experts at distinguishing the bitter poisonous nuts from the sweet and nourishing variety—something no creature with eyes can manage. Perhaps I was reckless, but I wasn't hungry. A young one even nested in my hair as I tried to sleep. I felt…accompanied. It was pleasant.
And now I combed my memory for maps and names before gathering the gumption to call upon the master of the keep now standing before me.