The Bird-King never thought much about the way he smelled. He was aware that it must have been a fairly rotten stench, something like rust and meat. It was the cleanliness of the snow that made him consider it, as he walked on his terribly dirty feet through its whiteness he left tracks, and trails of mess behind him.

He was not sure when he landed in the snow, somewhere not far from where the Story-Teller had been walking and he followed the tracks she and Hog left. He had feasted casually not far from the labyrinth and now, still covered in the remains of the meal he felt a new consciousness of his general appearance. He was messy, his hair was a tangle of feathers, he was sure there was a bone from some wisp of a meal that had gotten lost up there. He felt it scratching at his skull occasionally, but never troubled himself to remove it. The feathers across his chest were white-gold... but only under the layers of dried flaking gore that had accumulated over years. He brushed it with a claw and grimaced as it made a horrible scratching sound, the mess was so thick. He tried to scratch it off, but ended up removing more feathers from his chest then cleaning them. A wretched scream from his mouth when the feathers came out shocked himself into realization and he promptly gave up. What good would sprucing do him? Rolling his tongue over his sharp jagged teeth he smiled. Though he may be covered so grossly with his old meals, he was still a handsome bird.

The feathers circling his face were clean and long, soft and dark. Permanently stained, but clean for the most part. His wings he never cared much for, they were elegant, wide and thickly feathered and equally as gory as the rest of him. More dirt and grass and clumps of sand had gathered in the folds of the feathers on his wings more than anywhere else on his body, mostly because he rarely folded his wings up nicely, but rather dragged them behind himself, collecting all kinds of grubby things as he walked.

The ends of his wings were freezing now, dragging through the snow. They were damp after so much snow and itching. Forcing the irritation of the wings aside Jareth followed blindly the scent of the girl. It was sweaty and muggy in a very pleasant way. Soothing too for his nose to feel the tang of her inside, rushing past his throat and filling his lungs with the smell of a flower in a winter storm. He caught a new smell at one moment that made him pause, and he opened his eyes for the first time in a while of trailing her.

There was a splash of color on the snow, bright red and violating to his eyes. He crouched on his legs precariously then stretched to bring his pointed beak to smell the puddle of blood. At first he hoped the Story-teller had killed Hog in some furious revenge, but he found himself quite wrong when the overwhelming scent of her blood took over him. His eyes shot up. His blood was electric in his veins, moving through him violently, he felt rage inside him growing. He shot into flight spiraling through the halls of the maze, searching for her. He would find her, and he would... Do what? He slowed and settled suddenly.

Why had he been so enraged? What madness had sent him into fury, where the scent of her spilled life should have instead made him delightfully hungrier?

Shaking his head, he let the questions go, he was too aware of her now to care what his usually submissive mind was feeling. He flew slowly this time, savoring the seconds of his hunt.

Cerah had never known what pain was like for a very long period. She had been hurt before certainly badly hurt. Burned once in an accident, but was healed very quickly. She had never let herself bleed for a long period of time.

Hog was making terrible moaning sounds and fidgeting with every cut she made and every drop of blood that darkened the snow. But she was persistent. She had settled in her heart that dying by her own hand as gently as she could perform, would be better than in the mouth of the Bird-King. Her soul was at stake here, she wanted to be free.

"Hog," Her voice was a whisper. Her arms and legs had been slashed many times, and many bloody rivers ran down her pale skin, she had drawn the sharp twig over her forehead and blood had shaded her eyelids and dried there, partially frozen in the chill. "Hog, should I tell you another story? It's a lovely one, a love story."

The man looked very small, like he was shrinking. "Yes," He said. "Yes, tell me the story."

"This," She whispered and gasped as she cut her arm quite close to her wrist. "This is a story... a story of two lovers, who weren't really lovers. The man you see loved the woman quite a lot. But the woman was not quite sure...

When she was just a girl, the man tended to her every wish, most in secret, but her greatest desire he sought to fulfill by means of trickery. Her dreams were quite fantastical. She saw things behind the eyelids of her dreams knew things and longed for these things. But she lived in a world where magic was considered a fable, just a story with no truth. When she met this magical man who loved her, she learned how real things could actually be. Magic too found her and fell deeply in love with her and trailed behind her heels always.

The man who loved her, was really a monster in disguise, who was trying to heal himself with the love he felt. And there were many gods, and Fae and men who did not want him to reach this salvation. Legend said that once he did, all creatures, gods, humans, Fae, monsters, everyone would become equal beings and natural love would be restored to an unbalanced world. There are those who seek inequality, not for its evils but for the good it reaps them alone. There are many selfish creatures that live on this world, all parallel to each other, seeing but never touching, never loving.

So the gods fought to separate the two of them, planting a seed of mistrust in her heart, and turning her from him and all that he offered. The girl soon forgot everything about him. One night, when she stepped out into the lonely streets of her village, two demons dressed as men tore her to pieces, deflowering her and leaving her to die in the street. Her spirit sought freedom and her dreams carried her to her home, her forgotten man in the far away world of magic…

"The story has no ending." Cerah said. "Or none that I have known yet. Sometimes I feel as though I know the end, can see it… But it never appears, not completely." Her voice was soft as new falling snow, touching Hog's ghostly heart.

She was swaying as she walked, bled, breathing raspy and sadly. Hog tried to stop her, wanting to reach out to embrace her and lay her down to rest, but he was too afraid to hurt her thrashed skin. If she managed to survive she would forever be scarred by this ordeal. She would not survive however, this they both knew.

There was a toxic smell in the air that caught Cerah's attention, dizzily she turned to look behind her, in the process tumbled to the ground in horror. Nothing was behind her but horrible dark trails of her blood, bright against the snow. Turning away she felt the sting of the snow in her wounds and cried out in pain. Hog was crying too, shaking and sputtering like a fool. She tried to pull herself up, struggled to rise, but the world was spinning softly, so softly and smelled of blood and snow and memories she had not even had yet. Memories of a different world, a face and body much the same but a heart so lost, so unknowing of its natural name.

"Is this my fate?" Her lips were against the snow, she lay half on her side, in a slump of defeat. Hog sputtered more, nastily. She wished to be rid of the coward, her heart she could feel was slowing, and the thump of its efforts to save her was loud in her head.

With heavy lidded eyes falling shut she was barely able to the fierce eyes of the Bird-King meeting her own. She could hardly feel the pain of his rough hold on her as he flew her somewhere, somewhere far away and strangely soft and almost uncomfortably warm.

"You saved me?" Sarah's ghost ripped herself out of the memories, and anxiously rubbed her arms. The pain of it felt so real, the steps so cold and defeated.

Jareth could hardly speak through his sorrows. "The memories are not complete; you need to see what happened next Sarah... Cerah."

"No. Before we go any farther I must address someone else."

She turned sharply and there was power in her bright green eyes and fury in her naked soul. Her spectral skin turned rosy, her hair grew suddenly as long as it had once been. With the recollection of her name, her home, and her life her transformation elevated. Across her arms fine white lines appeared, one across her forehead and so too lines over her legs, like brands and terrible reminders. She faced the Lady Goddess in green and silver, a woman who had had many names, one in particular which meant quite a great deal to the Story Teller.

"Mother," She said.

The Lady blinked her vibrant eyes and suddenly smiled. It was the sort of expression meant for very naughty children who were still persistently being bad, the kind of smile one reserves only for those one must truly hate beyond measure.

"My daughter," She cooed. "I only wanted to protect my little girl. You could be so much, more than anything this hell beast could ever help you become. I admit I left you at your birth. It was very wrong of me, but I was so young."

"Not so young as to not understand the severity in your abandonment. What you sought to alter you fulfilled. You have spent my existences in pursuit of my demise, my end, so the world you treasured would never have to change." Cerah turned back to the hulking bird creature on the floor. In her delicate clean hand she gathered up his claw, wincing at the stiff sharp nails on the wiry fingers. "Our coupling will bring balance. He is no demon, he is my other half."

"You would forgive him for the things he has done? All of his treacheries?" Her goddess mother could see how her soul was reforming, immortality was weaving into her through the magic she carried and she was slowly transforming into a goddess.

"I would forgive him even if he destroyed even my very soul. I do not love him." She paused when she heard him let some strange mournful soul out. "I do not love him as I would love another being. I love him as another part of myself. You both believe my memories of what happened in the finale of my first run are a mystery to me. When I must admit to you each the knowledge of my first death is as clear to me as your terrible gazes."

"Then speak it daughter! Speak what this monstrosity has done to you. Speak and tell us with an honest heart that you can forgive your murderer." Her mother's bones seemed sharper, the beauty of her face less ethereal and more animal. The green irises the two women shared were much uglier and sour in the eyes of the elder.

Cerah still held the mournful bird's claw and turned to face him with the cautious eyes of one seeking to heal the hurt. His own eyes had returned to his marred face, blue and oddly shaped, but still that proud soul, the proud powerful creature. In her eyes she could see the way their souls were the same, how their similarities were evenly equal and their differences, many in number, fit together like a stone broken in half.

When she spoke it was only for him, that other piece of her, and his eyes began to drip the same tears as she did, and they breathed the same breathes.

"I lay in the snow, yet he found me and he cried like an animal, for though he did not know it, the Bird King was losing his mate…

Cerah woke with the taste of blood on her lips, yet it was not her own. It was too salty, almost unnatural, as though the blood of a thousand were mixed into one liquid. She had a feeling of fullness about her, starkly different from the chill emptiness as she was bleeding to death.

"How foolishly you behaved, Story Teller." The Bird-King said.

Her eyes moved to see them, but they felt fat in her skull, overstuffed with new blood. He was sitting beside her, wings awkwardly askew, one draped over the side of the bed, the other curled around her like a huge winged cage. His pose may have seemed almost protective were it not for the way he peered at her, hungrily. There was too a light of anger in his shadowed eyes and she could not bear to see it.

"Did you think you would escape me, precious thing?" He laughed. "You have a grand courage, I shall grant you that. You would bleed to death, rather than die by my hands. It is a wonderful gift though, child, to die by me. You shall never journey to the land of the dead. You shall stay here and live in my lands, a spirit forever at peace here."

"What have you done to me?"

"Done to you?" He looked genuinely offended. "I have saved you. Fed you the blood from my own body when you cried for it. Saved you from yourself. I have done nothing to you which you did not desire."

Cerah could have hit him. Had his heavy blood not made her so weary she would have reached up to his face and clawed him with her nails, dragged the skin from his face and disfigured him worse than he already was. And he could see that hungry in her eyes, the need to cause him harm and he smiled.

"You have a fiery soul, Cerah."

She hated the way he said her name, hated the letters sounds in his mouth and against his teeth. The way he whispered it, like a prayer, was so mocking. It ripped at her heart, to have him be the last to ever call her name to her.

"I hate you."

Almost as soon as she had said these words, something in her told her they were not true. The look in his eyes was puzzled, slightly humored but still confused.

"You hate me?" He smiled. "What if I were to change myself then?"

He slid lower on the bed she laid in so he lay beside her leaden body. His wings shrank into his body and vanished. The feathers he was covered in dissolved from his body and in their place was the tanned skin of any ordinary man, and a nude man at that. His face changed as well, the hard boned beak shrank away to a noble sharp nose, the other features of the face just as defined and elegant. His hair was the color of the missing feathers, shining white-gold and hanging in lazily mess. He turned this new human body on its side and peered at her.

She stared back at him, in a gaze he may have considered amazed, yet she was far from amazed at the sight of him. Recognition was running through her body, she knew this man.

Finding the strength in her to move she surged toward him like a wave of light and took his strange sneering mouth with her own. The familiarity in the touch rang through her like a bell, star crackled behind her eyes and memories of all kinds, from the past, present, and the future made her heart and soul ablaze with truth.

The king was shocked at the touch of her mouth, the way it moved against his and loved him. For a moment, all seemed settled and at ease, this touch was all that ever he needed… But the moment passed too soon.