Updated for grammar & spelling and checked for continuity: March 10, 2011.

Chapter Thirty-Five: Ere the Sun Doth Rise

Night in the Labyrinth truly was an eerie thing. And for Bill, that was saying something. He was no stranger to weird situations, surrounded by magical objects that preceded recorded history. But this... The magic inhabiting this place was older than any he could imagine and equally foreign. It brought new meaning to the word discomfort.

It would not let him rest.

He had experienced his share of sleepless nights, and then some, and he knew how to function on minimum hours. The key lay in convincing the body it actually was asleep, for all that the mind would be racing. Come morning, or whenever he would rise, he would be rested enough.

But here, something would not allow it.

It was strange, actually. That first night, he had fallen asleep easily enough - once he had stopped talking to Christopher, that is. But at some point a few hours before sunrise, he awoke with a start and with a deeply unsettled feeling. The last time he remembered waking thus was one morning when, in his sleep, he had the sudden awareness that someone was watching him. Sure enough, when he opened his eyes, Ginny was staring at him unblinkingly, her face not three inches from his own. Scared him witless. So it always was when he awoke like that.

This time, however, no face greeted his abruptly opened eyes. No visitors were in the campsite. Even Christopher was asleep. He lay back down after a bit and tried to go back to sleep, and that is when he heard it.

Or rather, didn't hear it. The Labyrinth was utterly silent. No insects chirruping, no rustling of leaves indicating nocturnal animals, nothing. It was as though the entire place had taken a deep breath and forgotten to let it out.

He lay there, wide awake and certain he was being watched intently, until the first rays of light shooting up from the horizon indicated the sun had begun to rise. Feeling there was no point in continuing to feign sleep, he got up with a heavy sigh and got on with the day.

The watching continued all day, though not constantly. It was more like he was being periodically checked up on. The thing was, it never happened when anything of import was happening, only when very little was happening. As he trekked from one point to the next, for example, or when he stopped to get his bearings.

He would have thought he had imagined it all, that the pressure of this particular quest compounded with the stress of events in the Wizarding world - Magical Realm, he reminded himself - was starting to make him jumpy, perhaps signaling an imminent breakdown. It had happened to some of the best Curse Breakers, after all. Why not him? His only reassurance otherwise could be found in Christopher, who seemed to become aware of this watching as well shortly before midday.

It was the second time Bill felt it after it had initially gone away. He was crouched behind a rock, the tome lay open at his feet and he muttered to himself as he flicked back and forth between two pages. Suddenly, the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. Popping his head up like a garden gnome, he rapidly looked around. Seeing nothing, again, he crouched down once more to lean against the rock. A quick glance at Christopher, who perched on a tree - though it was not so much a tree as a single branch sticking out of the ground - next to the rock, told him the owl was not as unaware as he had previously supposed.

Christopher sat on the branch, his feathers in disarray. He was looking around as well, which Bill found to be both a comfort and rather disconcerting. When he caught Bill looking at him, he settled down again as though nothing had happened. Bill had never before seen an owl capable of pulling an innocent expression, but this one had it nailed down pat. With a dubious, "Hm," he ignored the situation and trudged on to the next spot.

Every time it happened after that, Bill looked at Christopher to see his reaction. The owl consistently became more and more irritated with each occurrence. By the time they had stopped for the day and made camp, Christopher's feathers were sticking straight out and he kept shuffling up and down whatever he happened to be perched on as though he was pacing. Humorous though the sight might have been in other circumstances, seeing this did not do much for Bill's peace of mind; he could not imagine what could possibly be out there that would irritate an owl to such an extent.

However, Bill was able to take some comfort in knowing whatever was going on was not a merely a figment of his own imagination. Though, to be fair, he was growing less concerned the more he thought about it. Christopher was not acting frightened or nervous, merely excessively frazzled. Whatever this watching was, it was a source of great annoyance. And, in truth, that was exactly what Bill felt as well. Not threatened, or pressured even, just bothered.

Dinner that night was a silent affair, Bill not really feeling like talking much without knowing if the mysterious voyeur could hear as well as see what was going on. In any case, he did not think Christopher wanted to be interrupted; he had graduated from irritated to what Bill took for sulking. And he was being rather stoic about it as well, as though refusing to leave as he had done the previous night out of sheer stubbornness. Contemplating that raised more questions than Bill had answers for, so he tried to ignore the owl as much as he tried to ignore the unseen eyes.

So there he lay, wide awake all night. Unlike during the day, when the watching would come and go, in the stillness - the complete stillness - of the night in the Labyrinth, it carried on. He would sigh heavily now and again, casting a look at Christopher who was glaring stonily out into the night, and sigh again, attempting to content himself with gazing at the unfamiliar night sky.

Then, abruptly, it happened.

About an hour or two before sunrise, the watching stopped. Having grown accustomed to it, though it was a begrudging acceptance, Bill sat up in surprise. Wondering what his reaction would be, he immediately looked at Christopher.

The owl looked back at him, steadily. Bill would have sworn he nodded solemnly, and then he launched into the air. Bill watched as Christopher flew around the campsite once in a wide, swooping circle before flying off somewhere in the distance. When the form of the bird became a speck and then vanished, Bill lay down once more.

"Well," he said to the once again silent Labyrinth, though it now lacked the excessively bothersome feel, "since I'm supposed to have an owl companion, I had best not leave without him." That said, he settled down, and finally fell asleep.

Sarah sat in the nursery appearing to watch Michael sleep and waiting for the sun to announce the new day. Once upon a time, she would have said it was far too early to even consider being awake. Since coming to live in the Labyrinth, however, time had taken on a new meaning.

She discovered that in the Underground, the Mortal conception of time was irrelevant. In the Underground, time was not bound to the cycle of the moon or the planets circling the sun. Instead, it served the whims of those controlling the magic of the lands. Each Kingdom ran separately within their boundaries as deemed by their rulers; only the High King and Queen held the power and the privilege to overrule these decisions.

It was a difficult concept to grasp and could only be understood when she threw out all the rules of logic and physics taught to her over the years. They scarcely applied here regularly in any case. But for all that she was now bound to Jareth and, through him, the magic and cycles of this Kingdom, Sarah still held the ways of her Mortal existence deep in her heart for it was intrinsic to her very being. Though she had left it behind, it would always call to her. At times, she could feel the collision of these two rather incompatible worlds within her, their conflict sweeping over her in grand waves to leave loneliness and uncertainty in their wake.

When she first came, the only comfort to be found was in the arms of her beloved. Yet, as their time together continued, their lies intertwining in an intricate dance, she discovered equal solace in the presence of their children. In them, she saw both herself and Jareth reflected back at her. They were constant reminders of the strength of their love for each other, of the legacy being created. She knew that, no matter what happened, this would remain.

So it was now. She had not slept easy, in truth she could not have said whether she had slept at all. Jareth had not come to bed this night; he remained in the study, brooding over the reality that, for all that he was King of the Goblins and a powerful Fae, not all aspects of his life could be controlled by his will. Namely, she knew, the situations surrounding their daughter. Katrin had too much of Sarah's obstinate stubbornness and too much of Jareth's proud arrogance to ever allow herself to be controlled by another, even if that person was her father. No, Sarah thought, she will rule herself. As is well within her right. But he always did have difficulty relinquishing that control. At that thought, a wistful and nostalgic smile graced her lips.

She wished he would confide in her though. Sarah knew she only had to ask him and he would tell her all that bothered him, but she did not want to have to ask. And, at the moment, he was too caught up in his own thoughts, in the task of processing this newly developed challenge. So she would be patient, another thing she had learned with great difficulty. As time for her husband did not move in conjunction with her own internal clock of seconds, minutes, and hours, he likely would not realize the strain waiting was causing her until after the fact. After the length of their union, these occurrences were rare and infrequent. But there would ever come moments in which he would forget that she was not Fae born, much as she would have her own moments of forgetful insensitivity expecting him to behave as a Mortal. They would be understanding and forgiving, but this did not lessen the frustration with waiting for it to pass.

Her thoughts wandered away from the present as she reflected upon moments passed. Abruptly, she felt a whisper of affection run down the bond constantly linking them together. By the nature of its feel, she knew he was not thinking at her but about her, nevertheless she smiled and wrapped herself in the warm glow of it. Then, without warning, she felt him go Aboveground.

Sarah rose, her brow furrowed. This isn't like him. She went to the window and gazed out at the Labyrinth. It was still shrouded in night, with random twinkling lights indicative of the various inhabitants going about their business in the early hours. Sunrise was only about an hour or two away, but stars still shone ever brightly and the moon remained high in the sky. She thought of when Jareth decided upon the appearance of night, how he played with it now and again and usually for her own amusement. As she looked at the moon, the moon that should have been low on the horizon by her reckoning, she saw a shadow against it, growing as it approached at quite some speed. Her brow furrowed even more as she looked at it before her eyes widened in surprise with the recognition of the form.

"Christopher?" she whispered, hastening to unlock the window. "What is going on?"

It was early Sunday morning Aboveground. Katrin had a vague sense on the edge of her awareness that someone was calling her name. But it sounded strange, as though coming at her through a layer of cotton. Her initial thought was that if she ignored it, it might just go away. Instead, the sound became more persistent. She waved a hand and muttered, "Go 'way," subsequently getting a mouthful of fleece. At the sound of a rather familiar chuckle, she blearily opened one eye. Though she knew to whom the chuckle belonged, it shocked her to see a shadowy outline of her father crouched in her tent and leaning on her guitar case. She bolted up into a sitting position and immediately regretted it. With a moan, she leaned forward until her forehead hit the blanket. At another hearty chuckle from her father, she turned her head and glared at him. "Shut up."

"Now, Katrin, is that any way to greet your loving father?"

"Eh, whatever. I was actually working on sleeping off the worst part of a hang over, Dad, and would prefer to get back to it rather than engage in another thrilling exchange of wit; so, couldn't this wait until I'm a bit more capable of doing the cognitive thinking thing. Say, tomorrow when I come home?"

"Not really." Amusement coated his voice. "I actually wanted to let you know that you needn't come home this week if you don't want to."

"Wh... wh..." She thought her face was going to fall off as she yawned. "Why not?"

He shrugged. "There really is no need, is there? You can just as easily read through the tome in your apartment as in the castle, and you'll likely get bored at home otherwise. Plus you have the rest of the season to finish in any case, right?"

"Yes, that's true." Something about the logic of this conversation did not quite sit right with Katrin, but, as her brain was not processing at even a quarter of its normal speed, she just ignored it. "So, just to get this straight, you don't want me to come home at all this week?"

"Well, of course I want you to come home, but I would prefer you doing it when you are not going to be moping about all the time."

"Uh, ok then. I guess." She blinked at him a few times, wondering if that would stop him from looking quite as much like a fuzzy blur, but to no avail. This did not prevent her from seeing a smirk appear on his face, albeit a fuzzy smirk.

"Is something amiss, Kati?"

"Yes," she grumbled. "I'm awake."

She groaned at the sound of his rich laughter. "All right. I shall go and leave you to suffer in peace. I hardly need add that this would be the ideal time for a lecture on over-indulgence."

Katrin closed her eyes again. "Oh, go away, Dad." When there was no scathing comeback in response to her own ineloquent retort, she cracked an eye again. Satisfied she was alone once more, she slowly maneuvered herself back to a sleeping position and closed her eyes with the intent of returning to the state she blissfully inhabited not ten minutes before.

After laying there for a few minutes listening to the sound of frogs, she realized sleep was not going to oblige her with another visit and decided that, since she was now wide awake mentally, she may as well attempt to get to a fully functional state. The first step, of course, was to discover the time, thereby knowing how slowly she would be able to move. Flinging one hand out, she felt around for her travel alarm clock. Grasping the small box at last, she pulled it close to her face and squinted at it, trying to press the button to turn on the backlighting.

"Aaah!" The sight of '5:37' shining merrily at her rendered her momentarily blind. As the light faded out, what time the clock read registered in her mind. "Five-thirty A.M.?" She bolted upright again, again instantly regretting it. This time, she stayed upright until her head caught up with the rest of her body. She began muttering as she fumbled for her electric Coleman. "Ugh. What the blazes is he thinking waking me up this early? The blasted water truck hasn't even been through to wet down the roads and the honey-bucket people haven't been by either. And I only went to bed a few hours ago! There's something very fishy about this whole thing. Not that I have a clue what it is yet." She sighed heavily as she shut her eyes again before turning on the lantern. Even behind lowered lids the brightness made her wince. She sat there, becoming accustomed to the light, listening to the frogs again. "Huh. I didn't even know there were frogs at this site. The things you learn when you are awake before sun comes up."

Not entirely willing to venture out of her tent before dawn broke completely based on a rather sudden and irrational worry that she would encounter one of the frogs in the dark, she set herself the task of tidying up her tent. Very, very slowly. Her goal was to find some bottled water, aspirin, and her toothbrush. She knew all of these things were floating around somewhere, but she was not entirely sure where each of them lay. She had taken them out when she returned to her tent after leaving the party, but where they ended up after that she could not remember. Certain they were around somewhere, she continued the search.

It was not until a few hours later, after the sun had risen and her teeth were brushed, that she realized what was fishy about her father's early morning visitation: he had come in person.