What was he missing? According to his spell, any time she was in danger he would be notified. But so far whatever danger was there had escaped his notice. A thought occurred to him. He hesitated. But when the crystal light up for the third time that hour, he knew he had to.

He left orders to the goblins of what to do in his absence. He was unsure of how long he'd be gone, and the goblins felt mildly troubled by this. The few who lived in the throne room looked out the window as their King, now in his owl form, flew out of sight.

Aboveground, he circled over the house where Sarah lived, hoping to gain some insight into what exactly was happening there.

In under a week, he realized what was going on. She was in danger, yes, but the kind of danger he had expected. She wasn't in danger of being hurt or injured, but she was deeply in danger of becoming bitter and numb and hopeless.

It had been nearly two years, but instead of growing to accept the changes in her life she seemed instead to only bristle all the more at her circumstances. Her parents had suddenly divorced, and her father quickly remarried. She had always felt closer to her mother, but upon the divorce she had quickly turned custody of Sarah over to her father, which stung the girl to no end. Visits to mother were now few and far between, her being busy with her career on the stage. Too busy for Sarah, it seemed. She was finding it harder and harder to concentrate in school, especially now that her best friend had moved out of state and barely wrote anymore. No more studying sessions with Jessica meant she struggled more in certain subjects, and the cruel realization that the other girls at the lunch table had mostly been involving Sarah in the conversations because Jessica had insisted upon it. The room temperature chocolate milk and reheated casserole tasted that much worse when eaten alone. And on top of all that there was now a half brother and a woman whose attempts at befriending the teen felt too much like prying and intrusiveness.

Sarah was becoming increasingly isolated, and it worried Jareth. She frequently had fits of anger and she often wished for escape from it all. She found escape, at least temporarily, into her books. But at the end of it she was still her sullen old self.

He worried over what to do. He could see she was heading down a path that might lead to very bad places. Left unchecked, he was afraid she'd end up like one of those other Sarahs in the darker timelines. Perhaps, after all, he had been guided into her life at just the right time.

In his owl form he lived in the park for nearly a month, watching over her on the afternoons and evenings spent there, or perched in a tree just above the bench she sat in during her recesses that she spent pointedly ignoring others and absorbed in a book.

Reading human words was difficult in his owl form, but he managed well enough to gather the kind of stories she seemed to like best. When he was sure, he went back to the Underground and spent long hours scrawling ink over parchment.

Sarah received a small parcel in the mail one day, with the return address of the theater her mother worked at. Inside was red leather bound book with no author name, but simply a title.

The Labyrinth.

It contained a thrilling story inside, of a young woman who defeated an evil wizard who had stolen a baby from her. Sarah fell in love with the story, rereading it often and even using her mother's old sewing machine to try to recreate the dress the heroine wore. She'd play act the story out with the help of Merlin, her dog. She knew all of the words by heart - almost all of them, anyway - but it was still one she'd pick off the shelf and take with her to school to read during lunch or curl up on her bed with during the weekends.

She thought about the story a lot. She thought about that dark and mossy maze during math class when anxiety started to eat at her over not understanding the equations. She thought about how frightfully high the turrets on the wizard's castle must be when her father and step mother argued over the dinner table. She thought of the beautiful gowns the heroine surely wore as the other girls talked loudly in front of her about the party they had been invited to that Sarah had not. She thought of the tricky goblins who were minions of the wizard while she babysat her half brother who would not stop crying.

And one day, she said the fateful words.