To those of you who left feedback on my last chapter: thank you so much! I feel so encouraged and have discovered a new source of energy and vigor to keep writing. I'm so blessed to have readers like you. In honor of that, here is another chapter for your reading pleasure. Love, Nienna.
"So let me get this straight," Sarah stated. She and Jareth's parents had excused themselves from the joyous revelry in the main hall and sequestered themselves in a small antechamber for more privacy. When they left, Sir Didymus and Hoggle—with occasional interjections from Ludo—had been regaling the company with tales of their numerous adventures, both those of seven years ago and, more recently, those just prior to Sarah and Jareth's joining ceremony. Zimri was holding council with Moira—a good friend of Felicia's and Kyran's aunt—so Sarah had seen no reason not to pester her in-laws with the million questions she had accumulated since Jareth's kidnapping. They had only recently finished telling her Ammon's history and Sarah was still sorting out his relationship to Jareth and his parents.
"So, however many years ago—"
"Roughly five thousand, give or take a few decades," Makarios interrupted. Felicia set a soft hand on his forearm and placed a single, slender finger against her lips. She gestured for Sarah to continue.
"Right, so five thousand years ago, Ammon wanted to marry you, right Felicia?"
The blonde-haired woman nodded. "Yes. Remember when I told you the story of the woman who was in love with the sky? The fiercely passionate woman that many of the princes of the Underground wanted to marry?"
Sarah nodded in the affirmative. "You were speaking about yourself. The story of the young lady was really your version of what you were like when you were a young woman," Sarah stated, remembering the night she had learned of Jareth's agreement with the Court to marry the woman who conquered the Labyrinth. It was the night that changed everything, she recalled. When I fainted, Felicia accompanied me to the next room to watch over me while I woke up. Then she told me all about when she was a young girl and how her decision to marry the Goblin King is the reason Jareth was born. She turned to her mother-in-law. "I remember, Felicia."
"Do you recall that I mentioned a man—the King of the pegasi—who fell in love with the girl but she refused to marry him because he was arrogant and cruel?" Sarah nodded and Felicia continued. "The name of the king, which I neglected to mention four months ago, is Ammon."
Sarah gasped, "You mean…"
"The man my lovely wife refused to marry is now the High Arbiter of the Court of the wise," Makarios finished. His gentle face—so like Jareth's with its highly arched eyebrows and thin nose, though it lacked Jareth's mocking sneer and mischievous glint—turned toward his wife with a mixture of adoration and worry. Seeing her troubled expression, Makarios rushed to comfort his wife. "Don't blame yourself, my love," Makarios soothed, cupping her sorrowful chin with one hand. "You could not have known what would happen thousands of years later. You would have been miserable, had you married him. It was always his choice to turn his rejection into bitter hatred and allow it to fester and rot like a carcass in the desert sun. No one forced him to turn rancorous, least of all you."
A single tear slid down Felicia's face, which Makarios wiped away with his thumb. His wife looked at him through her wet lashes—love radiating from her delicate features, "Thank you beloved. I needed to hear that."
"I know," he replied, pressing a compassionate kiss to her forehead and taking her carefully into the consoling embrace of his open arms. Sarah watched the moment with a bittersweet melancholy. The obvious love between the two made her yearn even more strongly for Jareth, her whole body aching to be held in a protective and caring embrace like that with which Makarios held his wife. I hope someday Jareth and I will be able to gaze with equal affection at each other after the trials and struggles we have experienced and likely will experience again. I long for the day when he can know me as intimately and thoroughly as his father knows his mother; it is so beautiful to see parents so in love after so many years together. Mine didn't even make it to ten years and these two have been married for almost five thousand! But for now, I'll be content when I can see him again face to face rather than only with the pictures from my memory.
"I'm sorry Sarah," Felicia apologized, sitting up from where her head had rested on her husband's muscular shoulder. "I should be giving you explanations instead of wallowing in self-pity and long-dead memories."
"Please, don't apologize. I understand why you might feel responsible for Jareth's kidnapping. But I don't blame you and I know that Jareth would never make it your fault," Sarah laughed lightly. "He'd be more likely to find a way to blame the goblins somehow; they're almost always to blame when something goes wrong in the kingdom."
Felicia smiled weakly and dried her eyes with a small white kerchief Makarios handed her. "I suppose you're right. No sense feeling sorry for myself when no one blames me."
"Exactly right!" Makarios stated vehemently, eager to wean his wife from her fixation on blame and see her face once again free from the oppressive guilt weighing her down.
"So if he was the man who was in love with you all those years ago, why did he retaliate now?" Sarah queried. "Five thousand years is an awfully long time to hold a grudge."
"Do you remember the prophecy I mentioned four months ago?" Felicia replied, leaning forward earnestly.
"The one about your child being the greatest king in the Underground and having the ability to overcome the barrier between Aboveground and Underground? Sure." Sarah answered. She may not understand, but I have not been able to expel that part of the story from my mind. Whether it is simply because I enjoy thinking about Jareth being more powerful than the other kings and queens or because it still humbles me to realize that he wants me as his Queen, is difficult to say. I do know that I can never forget that prophesy so long as I am Jareth's Queen.
"Well, Ammon wanted to be that boy's father," Felicia replied. "He wanted to sire the child who would one day be more powerful than any other King or Queen in the Underground. Combine a prophesy of unsurpassed magical power with the ability to bypass the banishment that has left us all captive to this place, and you have a prophesy any man would kill to be a part of. To be the father of that prophesied child would have been a huge boost to Ammon's political power and prestige. And the thought of his son being able to pass into the Aboveground suited Ammon's long-held bitterness against the humans. I think he hoped that if his child could travel Aboveground, Ammon might be able to enact some form of revenge. I suppose it also irks him that the son he did have, instead of being powerful, is rather weak when it comes to magical ability. Danic is not a strong magician, nor is he that clever, really. He's a shadow of his father and only a dim one at that."
"If he is a shadow, that does not mean he lacks substance or the power to menace and destroy. Whatever was twisted about Ammon is infinitely more so in his son," Makarios noted. "Ammon is an arrogant, self-aggrandizing, bitter man with an enormous burden of anger and resentment on his shoulders; his is a darkness born of unrealized expectations. Danic, however, was born dark and twisted, as if the offspring purely of Ammon's demented hatred. He is more a child of hell than of the light, depraved to his very core and almost feral in his bloodlust and perversion. Of the two, I fear the son more than the father and believe Ammon is driven more by jealously and revenge rather than the pure delight in terror that drives Danic."
Sarah shuddered and a silence thicker than that cloaking a funeral procession descended on the small room. Danic's leering face—its sunken eyes and skeletal features framed by greasy dark hair—loomed in Sarah's memory. She recalled his contemptuous laughter and her cheek smarted afresh with the memory of his leather-clad fist making contact with her fragile skin. Too frightened to speak more of Danic, she returned the conversation to the wicked boy's father. "So Ammon used Jareth's restoration of Toby's memory as an excuse to gain power and exact revenge?" Sarah guessed.
The other two nodded in assent, "We both believe that he has been waiting for just such an opening to occur so that he can punish Jareth—and the two of us—for what he believes he had a right to and lost," Makarios folded his hands in his lap in a gesture of solemn resignation before continuing. "He's always hated Jareth for not being his own son and Jareth's, ahem, rather impish nature made him an easy target for Ammon's plot. When Jareth refused to listen to the Court's edict concerning the Labyrinth and was forgiven for it, Ammon seized the opportunity to foment rebellion, lying in wait for Jareth to make another obstinate response to the Court's authority."
"So when Phainon refused to take action swiftly enough for Ammon's taste, Ammon staged a coup with those he already knew were discontent with Phainon's peacemaking and forgiving manner towards our rather precocious son." Felicia smirked fondly, a delicate and more feminine echo of the expression Sarah oft found gracing her husband's handsome face.
All mirth aside, the conversation reminded Sarah of the one she had a week ago with two she had supposed her friends. "So when Kyran and Alegra knowingly withheld such obviously important information from me…"
"They were only safeguarding our privacy, Sarah. Do not be angry with them," Felicia replied. "They did not want to begin a tale they could not finish, as they did not have access to the history in full. Would you rather they had given you only half the information and sent you on your way—only to have you worry over the bit they gave you like a goblin with a chicken bone?"
Sarah shook her head slowly, still angered at being kept in the dark regarding her opponent and his malicious intentions toward Jareth and his entire family. "You're right," she sighed reluctantly. "I suppose this was the better way, but I still dislike secrecy on such a grave matter. However, that does remind me of something. There was one other question they refused to answer." The couple across from her tensed visibly but Sarah persisted. "Where is Jareth anyway?"
Once again, silence flooded the room and the cold stone of their surroundings suddenly weighed heavily on them all. "Sarah…there really is no easy way to say this…" Makarios faltered.
"Somebody please just tell me!" Sarah shouted angrily, fed up with being pandered to like a child.
"He's in the Underworld," Makarios exhaled sharply, forcing his words out like air from a bellows.
"What do you mean? I thought that's where we are now."
"Not the Underground," Felicia corrected. "The Underworld." Sarah was still genuinely and naively puzzled, which brought a measure of composure to her in-law's manner. They looked at her sympathetically. "It's where people go when they die, sweetie." Felicia explained.
"You mean Jareth's dead?!" Sarah screamed. She rose from her seat across from Makarios and Felicia and continued to shout at the unforgiving walls. "Why didn't anyone tell me? Why have I wasted all my time coming here just to find out that Jareth is in a place people only go to when they die? Kyran and Alegra could have saved me the blood, sweat and tears I spent traveling across the entire Underground if they'd just told me!!"
"No, Sarah, you don't understand—" Makarios soothed, but his gentle words went unheeded.
"Don't understand? What is there not to understand?! My husband is dead and none of my friends have the decency to just tell me. I…I just can't believe it!" Exhausted and broken-hearted, Sarah sank down in her chair and wept into her hands. Jareth…my beloved Jareth. I can't believe you're gone. I never even got the chance to try to save you…and now it's too late…you're gone forever…
"Sarah, look at me." She felt a hand on her head and she dammed up her tears long enough to stare up into Felicia's pale blue eyes. Once she thought them icy, now she believed them more closely akin to the color of a warm, comforting summer morning—like the ones she used to love as a young girl. She could feel warmth seeping into her despairing soul from where Felicia's small hand pressed against her shoulder. "Jareth is not dead, Sarah."
"I don't understand, you said—"
"I said the Underworld is where people go when they die, Sarah, human people. Jareth is not human." Felicia's full lips curved into an amused grin, like a mother whose child has accidentally used salt instead of sugar to make cookies. Sarah's mouth formed a small "o" of understanding before she blushed crimson with chagrin.
"Don't be angry with yourself, Sarah," Makarios comforted. "Anyone could have made the same mistake. We understand."
"So," Sarah whispered softly, still embarrassed about her needlessly angry outburst. "What happens to one of you when you go to the Underworld?"
"For us, it is something like a limbo existence," Makarios explained. "We are immortal, as you know, so our souls cannot exactly die. When a titan is sent to the Underworld, they continue to exist, but as only a fragment of themselves: still alive in every sense of the word, but powerless. It is supposed that they have no real magical ability in the Underworld, for Hades—Lord of the Dead—still rules there and he suffers no one to have any power there but himself. Otherwise, any one of us who descends to the Underworld could escape and free others there as well."
"So it's impossible to ever get out of the Underworld." Sarah concluded, slumping heavily against the back of her chair in defeat.
"Not so fast," Felicia replied. "Makarios didn't say that. You humans have a tale of a man who went to the Underworld to rescue his wife." Sarah looked back at them blankly, so Felicia continued. "Are you unfamiliar with the ancient tale of Orpheus and Eurydice? Orpheus was a human man—an extremely talented musician—whose lovely wife Eurydice had the misfortune to die. Determined not to live without her, Orpheus traveled to the Underworld, wooing Cerberus with the haunting melody of his harp, and convinced Hades to free his beloved. The Lord of the Underworld agreed to release her but Orpheus was commanded not to look back to see if she followed him, lest he lose her forever. Sadly," Felicia sighed. "The poor man was unable to complete the journey on faith and his beloved wife was lost to him for eternity, that is, until he joined her in the Underworld at his own death."
"So if it was possible once, it can occur again? Is that what you're saying?" Sarah asked hopefully.
"Well…" Makarios hesitated, glancing nervously at his wife.
Sarah attacked his uncertainty like a cat pouncing on its prey, "But you just said it was possible!"
"It did happen once," Felicia concurred. "But that is no guarantee it can occur again. The tale I just told happened many, many years ago, Sarah—back when the Olympians ruled the Aboveground. It is almost certain that such an excursion between worlds was only possible because the Olympians enjoyed breaking the established rules and hierarchies governing the Aboveground, Underground and Underworld. Now that they have all fallen into ruin—and are likely denizens of the Underworld themselves—there is none to grant free passage for mortals into the Underworld."
"So how am I supposed to get Jareth back?" Sarah moaned, once again torn between despair and anger.
"I suppose," Makarios pondered aloud. One hand was poised philosophically beneath his chin, cupping it between his thumb and forefinger. "I suppose you would have to become immortal." Sarah stared at him openmouthed, agog at the familiar words pouring from his thoughtful lips. "The only way I can think of would be for you to somehow become immortal. They say that any titan who enters the Underworld willingly has the possibility of retaining their own powers. And if not, at the very least you could go to Hades and beg for Jareth's life," his eyes twinkled. "Though I doubt very much that you are the begging kind. You'd be more likely to bully him into giving Jareth back to you, which I don't doubt you would be able to accomplish easily. If you can defeat Jareth, I believe you would be able to confront the Lord of the Dead and win."
"That's what the old woman said," Sarah whispered, her voice filled with awe and a slight tinge of fear.
"What old woman?" Felicia queried.
Sarah explained her experience with the midnight visitor to her camp the previous night and how she had told Sarah the only way to rescue Jareth was to win immortality. As with her friends, she left out the information regarding her pregnancy—she didn't want to worry them needlessly, for she had already determined that her child would not hinder her quest to rescue her husband. After all, the woman had also told her that her child would be doomed to a mortal life if she did not succeed in gaining immortality, so there was no choice left to her but to seek eternal life. However, she did recount the strange story the old woman had told her and Zimri's assessment of it, to which they both agreed.
When she had retold the tale in full, she bluntly asked them the question that had been nagging her since the old woman had first mentioned immortality: "How am I supposed to gain eternal life?"
"There is only one answer to that question, dear daughter," Felicia answered. "You must find the first King and Queen of heaven and get them to grant it to you."
"It's the only way," Makarios interjected. "Only Chronus and Rhea—the original King and Queen of heaven that the Olympians deposed—only they have the power to grant immortality to mortals. If you are determined to rescue Jareth from the Underworld, you must find them and convince them to grant you immortality."
A million other questions and thoughts swirled through Sarah's dizzy consciousness like so many bees on a hot summer's day. However, she refused to allow the plenteous distractions to triumph. Too often I have given in to fear and allowed the unknown to daunt me needlessly. No. Today, I am no longer the sixteen-year-old child running endlessly down a doorless corridor into infinity. I am no longer the child kicking uselessly at the stone corridors while refusing to admit that my own perspectives are warped and limited, or the arrogant teen rushing headlong into danger by rashly boasting of my own prowess to the creator of the maze. I am not Sarah Williams of the Aboveground any longer; I am Sarah, Goblin Queen and Conquerer of the Labyrinth. I refuse uncertainty. I reject fear. Most of all, I denounce my ignorance and embrace the courage to move forward. All the rest is but vain interference—they have no power over me.
Drawing herself up to her full height, Sarah's deep green eyes blazed defiantly into the unseen face of danger. I have already passed through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered to win back a child that was stolen. I have conquered a Labyrinth and won the heart of a king. I shall now face the unseen perils and lurking pitfalls of the Underground to win immortality for myself, my child and my beloved. Wherever you are, Chronus and Rhea, I shall find you. Or I will die trying.
Sarah's off to go win back Jareth! More adventures to come and I promise, they are plenty interesting! Please review and let me know what you think. I love feedback and you're your guys' thoughts into account as I continue my story. You all are wonderful!