Part Four

Chapter One

This place was a foul, desolate wasteland. The tunnel was pitch black and sweltering hot. It was the third place they had located that looked as though it might lead to a Wyvern cave. They had been wrong the last two instances, and the men's morality was low, but still, they marched on, determined not to fail their king.

The clank of armour and the marching footsteps of the twenty one men moving briskly through the cave was all that could be heard in the dark cavern.

While there was no doubt in any of the soldiers minds that this place was the dwelling of a dragon, whether or not it populated a Wyvern was the question on every man's mind. They had seen other dragons here, even had a close encounter with one a while ago, where it had taken the group of men weeks to recover from the attack. But now it was time to start hunting again. They had been at it for months now, though none knew exactly how long, and still they had not spotted so much as one Wyvern dragon.

An ominous noise stopped the men's steady pacing dead in its tracks as the sound travelled through the dark tunnel. It was a menacing low rumbling growl that shivered up the spines of most of the young soldiers, and even a few of the experienced ones. Peter Farwell, the member of court who was leading the expedition on behalf of King Oberon, halted the men with a single hand gesture. They all stopped, remaining as still and quiet as possible. Farwell held up the small lantern in the air and proceeded to creep alone towards the noise. He heard the clank that told him some of his men were attempting to follow, but he waved them back down to still them. Someone needed to act as a scout and it might as well be him. He took a deep breath behind the magically cooling armour and proceeded forwards alone. In truth, the man was terrified, but he was completely loyal to his king, and as such, was determined not to fail. Oberon needed that venom, and he was adamant that none of them would be returning home until they had what the king needed.

The member of court proceeded down the dark tunnel alone, hitting some twists and turns in his path but not slowing down. He moved cautiously, careful not to make to much noise and surrender their position. As he progressed, the cavern got increasingly hotter, so hot he could feel it pressing against the magic of the cooling armour. Without the spell a man would be burnt alive within minutes, and thus he was grateful to the king's advisor, Roderick, for providing it. The old man had offered to come with them when the hunting party had boarded ships to head out to the old abandoned kingdom of Tenebris, but Farwell had insisted he stay with the king. That he could handle this mission on his own.

It had been months since he had sent a raven with a message to their king about the progress they were making. After they passed the boundary marking the kingdom of Tenebris, he had decided that he would not send another update until he had some good news for the king. Now so much time had passed it seemed pointless to send a message that basically stated that they had achieved nothing and Farwell was getting desperate. He wanted this mission to be a success. He wanted to do the king proud. The air started to grow heavier and more repressive as the man steadily crept through the winding cavern. He took several deep calming breaths as the tunnel started to widen out, the small candle burning in the protected glass lantern spattered and threw shadows around the small black clearing. There was nothing here, just dust and ash and blackened stone. The fact that he might have been standing in what was once a castle hallway was not lost on the man, but there really was no way to tell. Time and dark magic had diminished the once great kingdom and now it was nothing but dead trees, dried up rivers and the carcasses of dead eaten animals.

Farwell heard a crunch underneath his armoured feet and froze, easing slowly back to make as little noise as possible. He brought the lantern down to the ground as far as he could go in the restricting metal suit. He gulped down some of his fear as he saw he had trodden on what looked to be blackened human teeth. Everything else surrounding it was ash, evidence of what were probably once the bones of a fully grown man or woman.

I must be getting close.

The noise that resounded around the small space, louder this time, only confirmed the thought.

The man proceeded to press his body towards the wall and creep along its edge. All the walls widened and the man began to see more remains, both of animal and Fae. His breathing became increasingly unsteady. The cavern widened out the more Farwell walked and soon the man noticed the darkness begin to lighten. As quietly as he could he bent, dropped the lantern to the ground, and continued to creep forward. The area around him began to constrict his breathing to short sharp gasps the air was so hot.

Just keep moving. He thought over and over.

Eventually the cave had widened to the point where every member of their hunting party could have fit shoulder to shoulder, but Farwell kept himself pressed to the wall, sure he was getting close as the ominous noises got louder.

Then he came to an opening. Light was streaming from it, uncomfortably bright with a strange orange glow.

Feeling it was finally time to take some form of action, Farwell slowly drew his sword from the holster on his back, holding it on his shoulder as he moved to peer around the corner and into the room the light was streaming from.

What he saw nearly froze his racing heart.

The room itself was wide and vast, and from the barely distinguishable colours of the room's broken floor and shattered ceilings, it looked as though this was once king Aurum's old ballroom. The once lavish and beautiful piece of architecture was now overgrown with strange plant life and random piles of fire. Trees seemed to be growing out of the floor and twisting themselves up through the shattered glass roof and into the night sky.

But it was the contents of the room that really stilled the court member in terror. There were at least a half dozen of them. Not overtly large beasts, but ghastly in their cruel structuring. Their thin lean frames seemed to slither like monstrous snakes as they crawled across the room. There heads and large shredded wings close to the ground as their two bent, clawed legs scraped across the once elegant marble flooring.

The air radiated with heat, so much so that Farwell could actually see the air shimmering with it through light squinted eyes and once again thanked the protection of the armour.

His eyes were glued to the room as, almost directly adjacent to the opening Farwell was hiding in; he saw three Wyvern dragons fighting over the carcass of what appeared to be, from his distance, a dead shark. Farwell watched, horribly entranced as the three scaled veiny blue beasts all clawed at the dead animal, using their hind legs to each snatch at a part of the shark while using their wings as leverage to beat each other back. As he watched, all three dragons flew into the air with the animal, biting and snapping at the other as though communicating in a language of snarls and growls. Soon one of the dragons finally managed to capture a large chunk of the dead carcass and fly higher into the air with it. When the other two attempted to retrieve it, the beast let out a burst of white hot fire which the other two dove to avoid. Victorious, the winning dragon landed on the ground where it then proceeded to viciously devour the shark's body with its two layers of sharp teeth and long blood red split tipped tongue.

Farwell quickly withdrew before he could be seen.

This was it! This was a Wyvern nest, no question about it. They looked just as the books had described. Smaller than regular dragons, but not to be underestimated. Their power as predators was infamous and the nest was larger than Farwell had suspected or anticipated. He had only expected to find one or two Wyvern on this island overall. Six would be a lot harder to tackle. Not least because the beast needed to be alive when they extracted the venom, and that meant fighting at least five of the animals to the death. Quickly, Farwell replaced his sword, picked his lantern back from the ground and opened the metal clasp keeping the flame encased. Muttering a few quiet words behind his heavy armour, the little flame suddenly burst to life and glowed bright before zooming out of the lantern and back down the dark caverns tunnels he himself had just arrived from. Moments later he heard the quiet clanking of synchronized armour moving swiftly out of the tunnels mouth. He motioned with his hand that they approach in silence, and drew them all to the entrance of the tunnel, where the dragons still resided.

They would wait until the creatures let their guards down in sleep, and then, then, they would attack.

Gods protect them. And their king.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

As it turned out, it did in fact snow in the Underground. Sarah watched in silence as the light fresh little flakes of ice fell silently from the pure white sky towards the grounds frosted grass tips.

She hadn't slept, nor did she have any desire to do so, for she feared that should she close her eyes and rest her head she would awaken back in her own personal nightmare, instead of, what she now saw, was a perfect perfect dream.

As quietly as she could, so as not to wake the sleeping occupants of the room whose balcony she had just stepped onto, she silently closed the doors behind her to block out the imposing cold. She was cold as her long cotton nightgown flowed and played lightly over her bare feet, but she completely dismissed it in favour of the view. The snow was beautiful in its purity, landing and immediately dissipating onto the cool grass below her as though expressing the desire to merge with the very earth itself.

And Sarah had once thought she had known contentment.

She shifted her body slightly, so as to better look at the three sleeping figures in the room through the glass window of the balcony door. Her smile brimmed with love as she saw the visage of her baby brother tangled in a heap of blankets on the floor. His body clumsily angled. His light sandy blond hair flopping over his youthful features in a wild disarray.

Her eyes had never once known a sweeter sight.

They had shared the mattress on the floor together, giving her parents the four poster bed directly beside it. Both were sleeping as soundly as their son, their bodies rising and falling in sync as they dreamed.

Oberon had offered to get them separate rooms, but they had all objected the idea insistently. After a year without them, Sarah never wanted to be separated from them again. And after hearing her story, her parents and brother felt exactly the same way.

After she had entered the Throne Room, and seen her parents and baby brother standing before the throne, their faces almost comically fixed in identical expressions of confusion, she had almost completely lost consciousness. She had dropped to her knees and swayed as though extremely weak. Her parents and brother had rushed to her, confused over where they were and what was happening but also concerned for their daughter. It was the feel of Toby's small body latching around her waist that brought her crashing back to the real world, and in one swift movement, she had pulled them all down into a crushing embrace.

The next few hours were some of the worst and yet some of the best of Sarah's young life. Oberon had conjured two long shezlong chairs for them to sit on and promptly ordered the room cleared, leaving the door firmly closed behind them. Her parents immediately bombarded her with questions. Where they were and what was happening and who were all these strange, extravagantly dressed people.

It was at that point Sarah had broken down completely and revealed to them everything that had happened to her in the past year. Though deeply confused by the strange surroundings and Sarah's description of the time difference explaining how she had in fact been missing for over a year, her parents had believed every word. Karen had shed more tears then Sarah had as she recounted her tale. Her father had sat still in appalled silence while her brother simply clung to her, to young to understand why she wept, but also old enough to know his big sister was in pain.

She had told them everything. Everything from the night she had wished Toby away, to the moment she had seen them again.

She was actually rather surprised at how well they had taken everything. Particularly her father. Being a strict intellectual man who had never quite seen eye to eye with his daughter's vivid belief in magic, he nevertheless could not simply dismiss what he was seeing right before his very eyes.

They had spent the whole night crying and talking. She had rocked Toby in her arms long after he had been taken to slumber, and it was only after the sun began peeking over the horizon outside the Throne Room's windows that Oberon had returned and suggested that he provide them rooms.

Sarah had chosen to sleep on a set up mattress with Toby while her parents, after much persuading, took the large bed. Exhausted beyond belief, her parents had been asleep before their heads had even hit the pillows. But, though completely spent herself, Sarah couldn't bring herself to rest for even a moment, terrified that if she took her eyes from any of them, they would disappear in a wisp of smoke.

She had been lying on her back looking at the blue curtains lightly blowing in the morning air when she noticed the fine streaks of white through the windows, and now here she stood.

Never had snow looked so beautiful. So fresh and crisp and pure and real. A memory of her last Christmas's snow fall brought an even bigger smile to Sarah's lips as she recalled when she and Toby had built a snow man, made angels, and started a snow-fight with her parents who had been innocently sitting on the porch drinking hot chocolate at the time.

I cant believe your here, she thought over and over as she looked at them. Your really really here.

She had truly believed that she would never ever see them again. That all she had left of them were faded memories that seemed to grate on her mind like shattered broken glass. She had never been able to look back on those happy memories without feeling an agonising boulder of pain slide down her chest, but now...

She realised that she needed to find Oberon and give him the biggest, most sincere thank you she had ever given anyone. For he had given her back something she had never once thought she would find again; hope.

After she was taken, hope had been the very first thing that Jareth had snatched from her. When no person and no magic words had saved her from that first dark, torturous night, she had given up hope of anyone ever saving her again.

But someone had saved her. Oberon... and Jordan.

She then realised she needed to find him too, for she also owed him thanks, and an apology. She knew she had been completely ungrateful about him saving her from the Goblin Kingdom, and now she knew that if he hadn't, she probably never would have met Oberon, who apparently was the only other Fae in the Underground who had the ability to travel through dimensions and retrieve people from another world.

It was thanks to him. It was all thanks to him that she had once again gotten to be held by her family and retrieve the once completely lost feeling of safety.

I am safe. I. Am. Safe.

She almost jumped a mile when she heard light knocking on the door, and quickly rushed through the room to interrupt the knocking before it woke her sleeping family. She pulled the door open and was met with the very person she had been thinking about moments before.

Jordan stood there, hands in his pockets, looking rueful and nervous as though he knew what a personal moment he had been intruding in on.

Strangely, her first instinct was to throw her arms around him and thank him as insistently as she had sworn to do so mere minutes ago, but she refrained. Instead, she calmly stepped out of the room and closed the door lightly behind her, leaving it open a crack just in case.

Paying no attention to her own state of undress, she wrapped her arms around her chest and quietly asked, "What is it Jordan?"

For his part, Jordan was momentarily stunned. Looking past the beauty of her visage, her long raven hair billowing freely down her shoulders right to the small of her back, and the long, white nightgown that was amazingly flattering even though it had absolutely no shape at all, he noted vividly that this was the first time she had used his name.

And she hadn't even been screaming at him in anger or resentment, it had been spoken in a gentle sleepy, calming whisper.

In that moment she appeared to him as an angel. An angel who was probably growing irritated by his silent gaping. He shook himself of his momentary stupor and taking a step back, addressed the girl formally.

"Oberon would like to see you."

Sarah bit her bottom lip. She knew that she needed to thank Oberon, and she wanted to. She owed him from the bottom of her heart for all he had given to her. But the thought of leaving them now...

She turned and pressed her palm to the door, pushing it open slowly to look longingly in at the three people who hadn't moved an inch.

"Don't worry." She heard Jordan say, his voice softened into what Sarah could only describe as affection. "They'll still be here when you get back."

Sarah turned to see him smiling at her warmly, and she could only smile back, somehow trusting his words to be the absolute truth.

They are safe. We all are.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

The walk to Oberon office was quiet. She didn't exchange any more words with Jordan as he led her through a sea of stairs and hallways, finally arriving outside an old mahogany door that was not the same as the office Sarah had found Oberon in days before. It was then that Sarah remembered Oberon mentioning that that room had been his father's office, and perhaps he had a separate one of his own. Not caring much on the subject either way, she watched Jordan make a fist and rap smartly on the door three times.

"Enter." Came the call from within. Jordan opened the door for Sarah, and held it open for her to enter first. Perhaps chivalry isn't dead after all, she thought through a hazy sleep-deprived mind and had to suppress the urge to giggle when Oberon, seated behind his desk, invited them both to sit, and Jordan very casually pulled out a chair for her.

So cute, she thought before she could stop herself.

Jordan had only half turned to leave them alone when Oberon stopped him.

"No, Jordan. I would like you to stay also. What I have to say concerns the both of you."

Sarah repressed the heavy urge to groan. She was in no mind set to deal with heavy conversation. And yet she knew Oberon deserved her full attention, especially now. Fighting the exhaustion as though it were a physical foe, Sarah sat straighter in her chair and looked at the king expectantly.

"First of all, I would like to thank you both for your patience. I know this whole affair has been rather trying, and I haven't exactly been all together forthcoming about my plans for the future. This is why I requested to see you both."

Sarah was the fastest to respond. "Thank us? I should be thanking you. What you did..."

There were no words, fortunately Oberon held up his hand before this fact could be exposed.

"Not at all child. I gave you my vow that you would be safe here, and that extends to your blood-kin as well. For as long as you remain here, all of you will be safe."

Sarah's already tired eyes brimmed with tears of gratitude as she silently nodded her head in understanding. Jordan leaned over to squeeze her right hand reassuringly, but Sarah did not even appear to notice.

Jordan addressed the king. "Whatever you need us to do, whatever we can do to help, we will try to support you to the best of our ability." He announced. Sarah only nodded her head in agreement, subconsciously squeezing Jordan's hand right back. The action caused a small smile to momentarily lighten on his lips.

Oberon nodded thoughtfully and pushed an open envelope on his desk closer to the pair sitting opposite him. Jordan leaned forward to retrieve it as the king spoke.

"This was sent to me from the expedition I sent to retrieve the Wyvern venom. You remember, we spoke of this?" He questioned Sarah, who only nodded, fascination and interest lighting her eyes as she sat straighter in her seat.

"Well, they have finally answered back." The king said, gesturing to the letter Jordan was now reading.

"We finally have almost all the ingredients for the spell to eradicate the UnSeelie once and for all." He declared triumphantly.

"They were successful." Jordan said, raising his gaze from the thin slip of paper, his face intense. Oberon smiled.

"Yes. They were. They retrieved the venom, and are on their way home even as we speak."

Sarah stared between the king and Jordan, a tad perplexed. So, the court member Oberon mentioned he had sent to retrieve the dragon venom had been successful. But wasn't there other things on the list as well? Weren't there other things that needed to be done? On top of that, how could Oberon even be so sure the spell would even work, if he had never been able to try it? And didn't he also say that the spell needed to be preformed on the UnSeelie High King? And wasn't his identity still a mystery?

Perhaps it was some of her earlier pessimism kicking back in, but she obviously did not see victory as clearly as the two gentlemen before her.

She was just about to open her mouth to voice some or all of these concerns, when the king spoke again.

"I am going to put an end to the Unseelie. It is my wish that by the time this world has circled another sun, every single one of those evil bastards will be dead and buried."

There was a long, abrupt, rather charged silence following this remark, as Sarah's mouth slowly closed again. She stared at the king, and the confidence and power radiating from the man was almost intimidating, but she believed the absolute conviction he put in his words, and the intentions behind them.

The silence dragged, and then Sarah, looking at the king with a completely serious expression asked quietly,

"Does that include Jareth?"

"Yes." Was the Seelie High King's firm reply.

"Then I'm in."