Hello, everyone. Here is the next chapter. I just wanted to let you know that Sarah and Jareth won't be confronting each other for a while. Trust me, this story isn't even half way finished. Also, I am sorry that it took so long for me to update. I have been sick for a couple days, and I was sick when I wrote this, so watch out for really yucky grammar. I know that before I went over it, over half of the chapter was green or red in Word. Anyway, thanks to all my reviewers and please review. Hope you enjoy.
CHAPTER 8
"It's beautiful…." She whispered, her delicate ivory hand falling to rest on the branch of a large, healthy oak. With a sharp intake of breath, large green eyes took in the beauty around her, nearly tearing at the green, lush nature of everything in her field that had been so dark only recently.
"It is a gift fit for a queen." Came the sharp, aristocratic voice from behind yet another fully grown oak.
Sarah swirled to look at him, dressed in only his signature white poet shirt and grey breeches tucked into tall, black boots. A large smile spread across her face.
"Am I a queen?"
For a moment, Jareth looked down, mismatched eyes flashing something she could not read.
"No. You should be, though."
Sarah giggled and reached out a hand to him. "Very well, then I would like to dance with my King."
Her musical tinkling surrounded them both as he swirled and swirled them through the verdant Utopia, the wonderland he had made for her from the death and destruction that her life had created in her soul.
Jareth had been angry all week.
Jarteh had been really angry all week.
He had bellowed. He had screamed. He had ranted and thrown things.
"Like a child, Jareth. You are throwing a tantrum as a child would." Chalen told him, limping in the elaborately carved doorway with his cane.
"Old man, you should not be in here…" Jareth growled as the goblins who had allowed him in closed the door and backed away. If anyone could handle this mess, it would be master Chalen.
"Shouldn't I? No, I suppose not. I really don't know if in this temper of yours you are above beating a frail, tired man who raised you like a son and who only did what he thought was best for you…" As if to emphasize his point of old, he sat down heavily in a chair and rested his chin on his cane.
"I know better than to believe for one second that you even come close to needing that cane, Chalen." Jareth told him crisply. "You should not have acted on what you thought was best for me. I am old enough now to do what I think is best for me. You meddled…..meddled, Chalen, like an old woman with seven daughters and no dowry for any of them. I suppose that is what the spell was originally invented for…"
He did not look for his reaction but instead walked onto his balcony as a strong wind blew through the air, whipping his hair around his face. Mismatched eyes stared at the busy town below him, at the goblins running to and fro, trying to cover the produce and bread stand to protect them from the harsh wind. He looked on at the human children wandering the streets alongside them, laughing at their mischievous antics and trying to join in.
"No, no, no, boy. You've got to hold it more firmly….like this." A skinny Goblin with a large nose told a wide eyed boy of about seven as he struggled to properly shoot his slingshot.
The little boy giggled as he hit a chicken dead on, oblivious to the fact that in the air high above him, the goblin King was faintly laughing too.
Chalen limped onto the balcony, watching the scene with interest.
"You love this place, don't you?" It was more of a statement than a question.
"You know the answer to that, Chalen." Jareth told him dryly. "This is the only home I have ever really known."
The man came to stand beside him, his eyes twinkling with the knowledge that the boy he had raised as his own loved something more than himself.
"You never told me why you're father banished you here in the first place."
For a moment, Jareth clenched his fist and Chalen feared he would get no answer.
"We had a falling out……"
Chalen looked on as if waiting for more.
Jareth sighed and continued.
"About the treatment of my mother…"
"Ah, I see. Your mother was a human, was she not?" The old man supplied, his suspicions confirmed for the first time as to where contention had come between the two.
"The things he used to do to her…..said she was nothing more than human chattel. If it had not been for the immortality I had given to her as a baby, she would have died quickly. Sometimes, I thought she would rather not have had me give it to her, but she would never say anything that hurtful that I might hear."
"I had thought that was what had happened." Chalen told him, noticing how the King gripped the railing until his knuckles went white. It was a widely known fact that in the underground many Fay kept human slaves and so more often than not, there kind was considered to be nothing short of inferior beings who could be treated any way that the malicious Fay deemed fit. There were very few who believed differently.
"She was a good woman, but I am more like him than her. She was not vindictive or scheming. She was innocent…so damn innocent to our ways."
"And so he sent you from him…"
"Yes," Jareth nodded. "When I first came here it was nothing more than a wilderness with a ruined castle in the middle. I nearly froze to death for weeks. I was only a young boy with no real control of my magic. One night, I remember I went to sleep in the only room in this very castle with four walls. It had been weeks since I had eaten. I thought that I would not wake in the morning, even fancied that I saw my mother hovering over me in my dreams."
His old friend looked on, waiting patiently for him to continue.
"When I woke in the morning, I was alone again except for a large structure in the middle of the land: the labyrinth."
"And after that?" Chalen asked as eagerly as his age would permit.
"The Goblins found me. They fed me and taught me how to live in the wild." Jareth looked at the old man fondly. "And that is how you found me."
Chalen looked down at the bustling setting below him. He had always suspected that his King had led a harsher life than the rest of his kind. Even in his aged mind, one of his most vivid memories was finding the young Jareth in the deep of the woods that had once been called haunted.
"Is that why you fear Sarah? Is that why you fear a child?"
Jareth nodded with a frown of realization.
"When I offered for her so long ago, I was still fairly innocent. I hated my father with such a passion I thought that I could do better than him. But now, as I get older, I see myself becoming him. I could not risk that."
For a moment, Chalen looked thoughtful and then turned his eyes back to the scene below him.
"Jareth, you now have no choice but to risk that. Your path has been set, but I can tell you this: You are more like your mother than you know. You have more kindness in you. Just look at those human children, those sad little creatures that were exiled here the same as you, unwanted and unloved. If you had been your father's son, you would have put them to slavery, but instead they are raised by the same ridiculous creatures that raised you. You have given them a chance."
He could see Jareth's jaw clench as another burst of wind whipped his hair around his face, making him look formidable to any that might see him. Resolutely, Jareth stayed silent, his fiery eyes burning holes in the horizon. It was this image that stayed in Chalen's mind as he hobbled back into the castle and away from the angry King.
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