Jen blanched at the vast and Escher-esque chamber of stairs, platforms, and arches going in all directions. Running along the top of a wall that stayed horizontally parallel to the ground was one thing, but overcoming her acrophobia enough to handle something of this overwhelming magnitude was quite something else. Vertigo arose like a wave and caused her vision to tilt several degrees to the right. Even sitting down, her balance was thrown way off and she wound up leaning against the wall with her eyes closed until the feeling of being on a Tilt-a-Whirl passed.
Jareth grinned predatorily from a platform above Jen. If she couldn't even move through the room, then he would win by default. He began to wonder where within his kingdom she and Aiden might prefer to live. The goblins would be a bad influence on the lad, so the castle was unlikely to be preferred. Since Jen had gotten along so well with his mother a cottage nearby would probably do nicely. Unless that kiss in the ballroom had meant she did want to live in the castle... Jareth's eyes returned to the subject of his musings and his mouth quirked with a hint of annoyance to see that she was trying to make progress.
Jen knew she was running against the clock to get her son back, so she forced her eyes open. Limiting her gaze to the area immediately in front of her feet, she carefully scooted forward to the set of stairs going down. Lacking a rail to cling to, she kept to the center of the stairs and rose to her feet to descend. At the limestone platform, she only allowed her eyes to follow the floor where it went forward about eight feet and then another staircase arose from there. Sighing, she kept moving and keeping her eyes away from the ledges.
Two more stairways, an arch, and a downward stairs landed her on a platform with a sideways arch. When she looked through it, Jareth stood on a sideways platform on the other side. A wave of vertigo hit, forcing Jen to close her eyes and breathe deeply for several minutes. Aiden is waiting for me, she gave herself a pep talk. There isn't much time left.
"You don't have to win you know," Jareth informed her.
"What happens if I lose?" she had to ask.
"I cannot tell you that," he frowned. "There are rules."
"Then I must win," she insisted. "I have to have my son back."
"Give up, Jen. You'll never navigate this chamber in time." Jareth absently started humming the tune that they'd danced to at the ball. He was once again feeling secure in impending victory as he turned and walked up the wall and through an arch, out of sight.
Jen tilted her head to one side as the tune reached her ears. She recognized it as the song she and Jareth had danced to from the ball and... was that Lagan Love? Her heart thrilled as the part of her that wanted the romance to be real resurfaced, insisting that the dance and kiss had meant something. She began singing the words as she sat on the thick, bench-like side of the sideways arch and swung her feet up so she was lying on it in an attempt to control her dizziness.
Where Lagan stream sings lullabies there grows a lily fair
The twilight gleam is in her eye the night is on her hair
And like a love-sick lennan-shee she has my heart in thrall
Nor life I owe nor liberty for love is lord of all.
Suddenly, she slid down the side of the arch and her feet hit what had been a sideways platform as if gravity had turned 90 degrees. She experimentally took a step forward and found that it really had. Now the stairs she'd just climbed were sideways and Aiden was somewhere above her head. With a half smile, she considered her new options - two stairs going upwards but in different directions. Following one set with her eyes, she gasped to see Jareth standing on the platform at its pinnacle, arms folded and expression stern. He wordlessly turned and stepped over the ledge, his body swinging around like a hinge until he was walking on the platform's underside away from her.
Jen didn't realize she'd been holding her breath until he disappeared through an arch and she gasped. It rattled her that he looked almost angry: was he upset that she'd escaped the dungeon and was now so close to winning? Her stomach sank as her mind leapt straight to the agonizing but compelling conclusion that the ballroom had only been a distraction and he really did want her to lose Aiden. Song forgotten, she trudged up the other stairs, grimly determined to get her baby and ignore the pain in her chest.
Despite his earlier resolve to be fair and noble, Jareth was upset that Jen was now so close to winning. What if she leaves? Again, he felt the conflict between duty and affection; despite the ballroom kiss and resulting desire to keep her, he was bound by his office to try and defeat Jen. Thus, to slow her down a tad, he rearranged some of the platforms and staircases, using a crystal to move them around like those in a castle he'd visited several times in Scotland. Since she'd figured out how to change her relative physical orientation and gravity, albeit accidentally, he felt like it was a fair thing to do.
Jen congratulated herself on getting the hang of the gravity switches, although several times she had to stop and control her vertigo when her gaze had accidentally strayed over an edge to gauge her path to Aiden. To get switched from a platform to a wall, she laid on the platform and put her feet on the wall. Gravity switched quickly and then she could stand up on the "wall," which had become a platform. Going 180 degrees as Jareth had, however, required more courage than she could summon, so she avoided it.
Jen paused to assess where she was relative to Aiden's platform, and found herself looking straight down at his platform from hers. The sight of the 20 feet or so of distance downward forced her to take a knee and grapple with dizziness yet again. She didn't think she had the guts to try stepping over an edge like Jareth had done but it appeared as if doing so was going to be the only way to get to a set of stairs that led to Aiden. Vertigo threatened from the back of her mind as she tried to drum up the courage to try it. Closing her eyes, she held the mental image of Jareth rotating around the edge of his platform and stepped forward.
Air wooshed around her, and if her feet hadn't remained in contact with a surface, Jen would have screamed in the belief that she was falling. As it was, she trembled and ducked her head to her chest, screwing her eyes tightly closed until the sensation of movement stopped. She tried to slow her breathing as she cautiously opened her eyes... to find herself standing on a platform just a few yards from Jareth. They were facing each other across a stone floor at what appeared to be the bottom of the Escher room. The clock on a nearby wall indicated she had barely two minutes remaining.
"I was winning," Jen's forehead wrinkled in confusion. Why had he magically whisked her off when she was so close? Was he so determined to make her unfairly lose?
"Were you really?" he tauntingly asked before shaking his head. "You never would have made it to him in the time left at the rate you were going."
"You don't know that," she protested. "All I had to do was swing around the ledge like you did and I could have gotten him. I had a plan."
"I have a much better plan," Jareth dismissed her words with a wave of his hand, which turned the gesture into the conjuring of a crystal ball. He contact-juggled it back and forth from one hand to the other before bringing it to a stop on the tips of his fingers.
"What is it?" Jen eyed the sphere critically.
"It's a crystal, nothing more," he casually informed her. "But if you turn it this way and look into it, it will show you your dreams."
She suspected Jareth was reciting from his script again since the intensity of his eyes were at odds with the nonchalance of his movements. He was trying to stall her. The ballroom had been a dream after all. Her heart sank.
"Show me my dreams?" she wrinkled her nose in distaste. "I've all but won and all you can do is try to show me my dreams?"
Her tone rose with her words and she stomped toward him, offended at the idea that a crystal was considered equal in value to a baby. Jareth slowly stepped back as Jen advanced, maintaining a few feet of distance between them. "I don't need a crystal ball to show me my dreams! I solved your labyrinth, fighting my way through every challenge you threw at me, and got all the way to this freaky castle to get my son back and you're offering me dreams?"
Jareth frowned at her vehemence. He was failing to convince her to stay and there were only seconds left. What was wrong? His words usually made the incipient champion at least pause and consider it. "Jen," he wrapped his voice around her name like a caress, "stop. Listen. Stay with me and you can have your dreams. Everything you desire you will have..."
"Does that include my son?!" she cut him off.
"I can't say... the rules of the labyrinth..." he stammered. This conversation was going horribly awry. He proffered the crystal again, "Accept your dreams. Stay and let me rule you and you can have everything that you want."
"If you really think I'm going to selfishly trade my child for my dreams, you are dead wrong," Jen's eyes narrowed as she spit out her words. "And 'rule' me? Absolutely not!"
"Oh? The experience you had in my ballroom need not become a fleeting memory to be recalled in times of regret," Jareth's countenance darkened and he stalked to within arm's length of her like a panther, purring her name. "It could become your life, Jen, and a far better one than the streets you left. Consider it: fine dining, parties, silk gowns... and myself. All you have to do is... choose to stay."
Jen failed to suppress the shudder of desire she felt at hearing her name on his lips, which stopped mere inches from her own. She tried to regroup around the thought of Aiden, "Choose to lose, you mean. If you want me to stay you're going to have to come and convince me in my world because I've won my son back and I'm going home."
Face aghast, Jareth reached for her as the clock chimed and the world around her shattered in a dizzying whirl of colors.
Author's PS: I wrote the first part of this chapter based on the experience I had wherein I discovered my own acrophobia: on a tour way up inside the dome of the Iowa state capitol, standing on a too-narrow balcony encircling the inside of said dome, looking over a too-short railing straight down 5 stories all the way to the basement rotunda. Jen's reaction is closely modeled on mine, so I can certify that the vertigo symptoms that Jen experiences really do happen (give us both a cozy underground cave vs. a high ledge any day!). Apart from that and singing, I have little in common with Jen. She is instead based on a friend of mine who is an amazing strong woman.
Just a little bit of this tale is left to be told... remember reviews = love and encouragement!