Sarah had taught him a new lesson. He knew how his affection for the woman looked on the outside. How ridiculous he was. She had crossed his path at the tender age of sixteen, and even in the beginning he found her alluring, even though she was too naive to appreciate the affections of an older man. He had felt attached to her from the very beginning, spotting her as he flew over the lands above as he often did for brief amusement. Weekend after weekend she would go to the park near her house and practice the lines from different plays her mother had sent her. He watched her constantly, enchanted, for he had seen very few girls in his journeys that had been so enamored with worlds of fantasy at that age. Often their walls were plastered with posters of teenage pop icons and movie stars, and they flailed around on their beds in their little meaningless universes on the phone with friends, discussing crushes and clothing. Not to say that Jareth only watched teenagers hopefully for someone to toy with, for there were plenty of adults ready to make a deal with the Goblin King to rid themselves of some annoying co-worker, sibling, or lawyer. These cases were more infrequent, though, since most adults had lost touch with a belief in beings of magic, and didn't usually seek a man like the Goblin King for recourse.

But adolescents did have something that neither adults nor young children had—a remaining belief in magic combined with an impatient and often petulant desire to rid themselves of some person who troubled them. They were the most fertile ground for kidnappings, and they almost always had some baby sibling they were itching to be rid of. He would give them some kind of inspiration to make a wish to ask his assistance in becoming rid of the sibling; sometimes it was a flash of something on television, or a slip of paper tucked under their door, a story, a dream. He had to give them the idea somehow, but it was entirely their choosing to utilize his services in getting rid of the person in question. Jareth doubted Sarah had ever considered the depth of his diabolical actions prior to his experience with her. She probably would have despised him much more deeply had she known. So would Toby.

Jareth had been quite an evil man, with Kaleb's help. His hunger to taunt and toy with people could never be satiated. It was an elaborate game, and he constantly sought pawns to play. Sometimes people would regret their decision, as Sarah had, not realizing in the world of magic that the intent is just as bad as the action. Some would journey his Labyrinth, but many gave up quickly, not creative enough to find a way around the obstacles, unwilling to bend their thinking to the new laws of his playground. Underwritten in their failure was that they too would become goblins, and thus he had many goblins who were unwittingly related to one another. This wasn't entirely his choosing, for it was his curse that anyone he brought to stay in his Labyrinth for more than thirteen hours would be transformed, unless they had solved the labyrinth. Sometimes he could make the time stretch and re-order itself, but it would always sap a great deal of his power to do such a thing.

He had changed the rules for Sarah. He did reorder time, because, deep down, he wanted her to win. He felt tied inexorably to her from the moment he flew into her magical grove. Something in him knew that it was she who had created him, like he was just a dream from her fertile imagination. Though he knew he had lived much longer than her, he knew also that time is meaningless in the mystical gates of the fae, and that such a thing was very possible. Perhaps, even, they had created one another. It had taken him nine years to be able to verbalize the sensation he had felt when first seeing her, but now he knew that what had happened was that he had found his soul mate. His long life had brought him to strange places and opened up deep channels in his spirit, places of understanding that few were able to tap. He had been to the edge of the gateway into the world of fae, having some fae blood via a great-grandfather on his mother's side. Sometimes still, despite the loss of his power, he could sense large powers at work, could unravel a bit of the mystical fabric of the universe for his own perusal.

Sarah was deeply connected to this fabric. He had always assumed that the connection was just to him, but now he knew that the only way she would have been able to pull off the merging of the worlds would be if she was connected more intimately to the fabric of the universe. Perhaps she was a reincarnated being of great power, completely unwitting to her own roots. While Jareth suspected she created him, he did not think he was her slave, but that she had blown a breath of life on his soul in her dreams.

One day in the Dark Ages of men Aboveground, a cleric from a small monastery in Scotland called Jareth to him, asking to have one of his brothers to be taken away. Jareth appeared to find the young cleric all alone, the brother in question non-existent.

Jareth remembered the day with a smile, the young man's cleverness still imprinted on his mind.

"Well, here I am," Jareth had said with a playful smile, in perfect Gaelic.

The young cleric gaped at him from over the codec he had been illuminating. "You're real!" he whispered, carelessly dripping red ink all over the Celtic knots on the page. He dropped the pen, destroying many days worth of work.

"It would seem that way," Jareth replied coyly. "I am here to help you with a troublesome cleric?"

The young man stuttered, trying to find his voice, "I, uh, I lied. There are no brothers troubling me at this time. The one I named does not exist."

Jareth was intrigued. "I knew lying monks existed, but I did not expect to come across one in my life."

The monk was hypnotized by Jareth's apparel, which was more elaborate than any king he had seen ride past. "Are you the Dark Angel?"

"What, Lucifer?" Jareth let out an intimidating chuckle. "He spends more time whispering into ears than darkening doorsteps." Jareth casually walked around the room, analyzing various open manuscripts and admiring the detail of the illustrations. One illustrated the angel Lucifer falling from the sky into the fires of Hell. "Ah, Lucifer, poor misunderstood soul."

The monk watched from afar, too nervous to offer speech to the mysterious man that had flown into his quiet, damp cloister.

Jareth spun on his heel and looked carefully at the man. The monk looked like he thought the Goblin King's mere glare would make him disappear in a puff of smoke.

"What shall we do with you?" Jareth asked with a glint of mischief in his eye. "So, do you wish to become a goblin, my good Brother Gimley?"

The monk, though shy, seemed just as sparked by the words of the Goblin King as he was intimidated. "Not necessarily. I was just calling you to test the words old bard who told me about you."

"Oh yes, William the Bard. We did have an... exchange."

"I didn't believe him. I thought he was surely possessed by the Devil to be saying such things," Brother Gimley said, overcoming his shyness and becoming increasingly excited over the results of his wish. "But he obviously wasn't. I always knew there was more to the world than the Lord's book."

"Well, you were right, weren't you?" Jareth remarked with a smile. He was starting to like this boy. It brought a little glimmer of genuine respect out of his increasingly darkening opinion of humanity Aboveground. "What do you propose we do, now, Gimley? You don't wish to be a goblin, but I must have someone to take with me. Shall you find a brother who you do indeed find distasteful, and have me take him off your hands?" The corner of his mouth turned up slyly. Jareth was very curious about what the young man's answer would be.

Brother Gimley wrung his ink-stained hands in turmoil. "I could never do such a thing. Is there any other option?"

"Well, you could travel through my Labyrinth, and should you unravel its mystery, I will render you free of your debt. However, should you become lost in the time allotted, you will be doomed to remain in my castle as a goblin."

Brother Gimley looked down at the maze of Celtic knots on the illuminated page of the Bible he had been copying, and a large smile spread on his face. "A labyrinth, you say? Well, then, I accept your challenge."

Brother Gimley solved the Labyrinth in half the time he was given. Jareth threw many obstacles in his path in an attempt to make a challenge suitable for the imaginative young cleric, but nothing seemed to phase him. Usually Jareth knew more about those who traveled his labyrinth, but Brother Gimley had come out of nowhere to Jareth, through word of mouth, and he therefore had too little knowledge to use as a means for increasing the challenge. He was sure, however, that Gimley would have solved the labyrinth nonetheless.

When it was time to send the man back to his cloister, Gimley bowed down before Jareth and begged to stay.

"As a goblin?" Jareth inquired, surprised.

"No, in the lands beyond your kingdom," he said, looking out the window. "Just as there was more to life than the cloister, I know there is more to this world than your labyrinth. I wish to stay here, I've never felt more at home."

Jareth looked at the man in amazement. There was no reason he could not have his wish, for he had succeeded in averting the curse by solving the labyrinth. Usually Jareth would use such an incident as a means to gain more power over a person, forcing them to indebt themselves to him for such a transaction, but he was enchanted by the young monk with the fertile imagination.

"Certainly. Normally I charge, but you can consider it payment for convincing me of the necessity of making my labyrinth more difficult."

Brother Gimley chose to live in the Valley of the Worjamonga in the East, the stomping grounds of a rare gazelle-like beast that had the same mystical rareness of the Unicorn. Jareth had heard legends since then that Gimley had become known as the only man who could call the Worjamonga, and had created a small village inhabited by other Abovegrounders who had accidentally stumbled upon portals, and could not return. He even started his own family. Some of them found ways to return Aboveground, including his first son. For his son, Aboveground was the mystery to be explored, as Underground had been for Gimley. The boy settled in Germany eventually, where he became good friends with the famous Brothers Grimm, and wrote his own tale of a King of Goblins who lived in the center of a labyrinth in the world Underground.

In the twentieth century a playwright came across this tale and converted it into a play, unbeknownst sometime for Jareth. The circumstances under which he discovered the play were rather extraodinary, as the playwright had never found publication for this little red volume, nor had found a stage willing to perform it.

Jareth found it one day sitting on a desk in one of his favorite studies. It faithfully rendered the tale that was to be Sarah's first journey to the labyrinth.

The written word had a funny little personality of its own in Jareth's realm. It was a sort of case of the chicken and the egg. Sometimes words made things happen, like self-fulfilling prophecies. Sometimes words were written after things had happened. But very rarely were words carelessly jotted down Underground. They had a funny way of making themselves manifest. That is why books were carefully guarded by those who could keep their mischief at bay, like Hoggle's father, the Bookkeeper. Words had consequences. There were some Aboveground who believed that their lives were too unreal to be anything but the work of a mischievous author, and most of those individuals were probably right.

For Jareth to find this volume sitting on his desk, as if carelessly left there, was anything but a happenstance occasion. Jareth immediately read the little book, fearing the worst. He was perplexed greatly by the story's existence, until he came across Sarah in the little glade on the east coast of America. He knew what he was supposed to do.

Jareth always suspected in the back of his mind that Sarah had indeed imagined the book into existence, had called some spirit to create a fairy tale for her to act out. In this way he felt like she had created him, that he was meant as the perfect villain to test her psyche. Were he born Aboveground, such notions might seem to him simple whimsy, but he knew better. Stranger things had happened.

He supposed he could have kept the book, but he wanted to see how the predestined story would play out. He might have known how it ended, but the book was remarkable in that no ending had been written. Like most readers, he had to know how the book ended, and it seemed that it would only come about by playing the game. So he wrapped the little book up in brown paper and sent it by carrier to Sarah's house. On the inside cover he inscribed, "To Sarah—All my love, Mom."

After that he watched month after month as she rehearsed the lines of the tale, filled with a combined obsession for the story and her devotion to her biological mother. Jareth waited patiently for the girl to call him, and was ready for her on that day. He had kept his own copy of the volume, as well, and had memorized it by then. He was to offer the girl her dreams in return for the baby. She would travel his labyrinth, and would probably win.

And Sarah did beat his labyrinth. He waited for her in graceful expectation, trying to hide his anxiety over the conclusion. Over the time he had watched her, Jareth had indeed fallen in love with her. He knew that she had always seen the end of the book, though he had not. It would be a declaration of freedom, a denial of him. He knew this, but his own volume had remained unwritten, and thus he hoped beyond hope that she would see the spark in him that he saw in her. But she was young, and had a different journey. So, though he knew by then what the ending was to be, he was still shocked when she told him to take his dreams back and return her brother.

Had she done any less, she would not have been the woman he loved to this day.

So he had been a fool, and fallen in love with a young girl. Over the five years after her first journey, Jareth had become increasingly despondent, denying to himself that he had ever loved her. The more withdrawn he became, the more Kaleb took over. He found himself acting more rashly than ever before, more willing to go to dire extremes. He became obsessed with the amethyst, and studied endlessly to find a way to gain access to its powers. It was at this moment when he found an excuse to bring Sarah back into the picture.

Every time she encountered him, she seemed surprised, and it had always amused Jareth, for he had always been in the background. Humans Aboveground were always amazed when encountered by beings of other realms, and though many of them would admit to believing in some sort of deity watching over them, they always yelped with surprise when confronted by beings of that other realm. Didn't they know that there were many spirits and beings watching them the way Jareth had watched Sarah? They said they did, but their constant surprise revealed their true beliefs.

Sarah's second journey led to Jareth's transformation back to his true self, and to Sarah's permanent residency Underground. The little red book called The Labyrinth had led to a lot more than its own story. Its story continued to unfold invisibly, leading to this moment in time where it was time for Jareth to save Sarah. He felt to blame, but he also felt inexorably tied to fate, or perhaps tied to the mischievous soul writing the story they were living at that moment.

It was no use trying to question the source of the circumstances, because the possible sources were too numerous to even consider. Jareth decided to return to the old theory that he was a stupid fool who had consistently brought on trouble to others all throughout his life. He was paying in spades, having to watch the slow disintegration of the one woman he loved more than anyone in all his life. Yesterday she hated him, and today she was out of reach. And like her, he was doomed by his connection to Kaleb. The man had changed him long ago, and now, knowing his biggest weakness, he had changed Sarah. He would kill the man, if it weren't for the fact that their connection would cause him to die in the process. It wasn't so much that he worried over his own life, because if he thought he could end Sarah's misery through his own suicide, he would do it instantly. However, were he to die, he might not be able to help unravel the mess that Kaleb had begun. The evil magic of any sorcerer did not die with them—it usually required the cooperation of the caster to undo.