"When Words Get In The Way"
Part Four of the 'Words' Saga

**

Part 5
"While intelligent people often simplify the complex, a fool is more likely to complicate the simple."


True to her word, Sarah went to bed, and stayed there for a good part of the afternoon, staring at the ceiling and letting her thoughts run. But no matter how hard she tried, she could not drift into anything resembling sleep. She'd summoned a goblin servant and had given him an explicitly detailed list of things to do in preparation for her in-laws.

The creature had scampered off to comply at once, but even then Sarah couldn't feel totally at ease. She'd pondered the prophecy instead, but hadn't gotten any farther than what Jareth had told her.

So she stared at the ceiling and tried to sleep.

Fat chance.

Finally, with a frustrated sigh, she sat up again and swung her legs to the ground. *That does it. I'm not getting any rest just lying here. I might as well go do something constructive. Or destructive. Whichever is more convenient.*

So she'd put on a light cloak and made her way out of the castle, pausing to instruct a goblin to inform the King she had gone to see the Wise Man.

Outside, the sun was just beginning to set, and the gentle breezes stirred the nearby trees and carried with them faint raucous laughter and shrieks. Sounded like a Firey party to her...in that case, she'd just look for the Wise Man elsewhere. He was usually somewhere in the hedge maze, but sometimes she found him down by the junkyards or on one occasion, in the courtyard itself.

It wasn't going to be that easy this time. She made her way down through the City and past the junkyards, only sparing a cursory glance through the rubble for the Wise Man. She tore her eyes away quickly though. Pity raged in her belly, as it always did, when she caught a glimpse of the hunched creatures shuffling through their miserable lives under heaps of old junk.

They were happy though, in their own sad way. So she pushed back the pity and averted her eyes. Live and let live, after all.

But if Sarah had raised her eyes as she all but ran past the junkyards, she might have seen the shadow passing through the lumbering piles of junk-laden creatures. If she hadn't been so occupied with finding the Wise Man, she might have noticed that the breeze that shifted and blew around her body didn't extend to the bushes and shrubs growing haphazardly across the ground.

But even had she looked, she probably would not have seen the flicker of dark-light that glimmered in that shadow's eyes before the last sun's rays hit the spot and the shadow dissipated.

****

"You don't understand what it means."

"No," Sarah said for the third time, desperately holding on to her patience. She ran a finger over her pendant, resisting the urge to just wish the old creature into clarity.

But she'd promised herself long ago never to use her powers to manipulate another living creature, and she wasn't about to break that vow. So she grit her teeth and waited for the infuriating old man to say something pertinent.

"He's having a quick day, he is," the Hat chirped cheerily. "Can see it on his face."

"Ahem!" the Wise Man glared in the general upward vicinity.

"Sorry."

"Well, then." The Wise Man harrumphed a few more times. "You want me to tell you what it means."

"Yes," Sarah nodded, and cast forth a prayer that he would not repeat himself another three times.

"You want *me* to tell you what the prophecy means."

"Yes." Her voice was almost desperate.

"Tell me the prophecy."

Mentally thanking whatever deity had heard her plea, she carefully repeated every word she could remember to the ancient one.

He sat very still for a time, so long that she feared he'd drifted off again, and even the Hat was silent.

Then the Wise Man leaned forward, until his long craggy nose was almost touching Sarah's considerably smaller one, and his bushy eyebrows lowered into a glare.

"To the creatures of the Labyrinth, things are never as they appear, young lady. But illusion does not rest here. It is everywhere. And sometimes, the greatest illusion of all is when things are exactly what they seem to be..."

As he spoke, his words had gotten slower and slower, and on the last 'be' he had slumped in his chair, and was apparently fast asleep again.

"Huh," the Hat tilted its bird head curiously. "I've never heard him say so much all together before. You must have sparked some real thinking in his old head."

Sarah slammed her clenched hands into her thighs distractedly. "But he didn't make any *sense.*"

"You can't expect miracles, now, can you?"

And that was that.

**