DISCLAIMER: I DON'T OWN ANY OF THESE CHARACTERS.
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Sarah became a woman possessed. She felt that there was some answer to find, some thing she only had to lay her hands on to make perfect sense. She was once again obsessed with the Labyrinth. And if there was a play about it, surely there must be more about it somewhere.
She began spending entire weekends at libraries. This library, that library, the library the town over, the nearby college's library. She told her family she was going to study and read. They believed her. Why wouldn't they? And she was going to study and read, but not on schoolwork.
For some reason, Sarah had thought it would be easy. Just go in, sit down, look a few things up, etc. But she soon found that this was a monumental task she had taken on. Looking through card catalogues, databases, and searches, The Labyrinth never appeared. She found plenty out about the myths of the Greeks, and a vague part of her mind realized that even here were common threads. It contained a king (though not a Goblin one), an underground Labyrinth, lost children in the form of sacrifices, and monsters in the maze. This legend also spoke of a heroic defeat, while Sarah knew for a fact that the Labyrinth still existed. And it was too a distant connection; she needed one less than thousands of years old. But the fact that there were legends of this place so long ago sent a shiver down her spine.
This was when she actually pulled the book out of her bag and looked at it. Yes, the cover was torn, and the pages were yellowed. So when...? Opening up the first few pages, Sarah found that the last printing was in 1912, and a rare run at that. The first printing was 1778. She tried to remember exactly how she had come by the book. No wonder no one else had ever seemed to have heard of it.
She then turned to looking up the playwright. It took her five weekends even to find an old article that mentioned him by name. He was not even a footnote to a footnote of any great playwright. Apparently this was the only play that he had ever written, before dying of a fever a year later. And the play had been a complete failure. However, the article did have one useful piece of information. The author had been inspired to write the play after he had become deeply interested in 'tales of true encounters.'
This gave Sarah a new direction in her research. She checked out books by the dozen and poured over them in her room. Books on the occult, books on legends, books on faeries, books on demons, books on gods, books on anything she could possibly relate to the Labyrinth or its King. But none of these helped. Many were only stories, old wives' tales handed down through the generations. And while there was some semblance of connection in the ideas of stolen children, it still didn't seem quite right. All were too vague. She needed something specific. Though what exactly, she wasn't sure.
The only thing she did divine from these books was the fact that many people who had seen such things had become insane. They turned into desperate shells whose only goal was to find that place, that thing which they had once glimpsed. The idea vaguely occurred to her that she could be becoming one of these people. She wasn't out roaming the wilderness searching for hidden doors, but it was obsessing her nonetheless. Though something made Sarah feel that she wasn't quite in others' predicaments.
Time passed like this, with anything that didn't have something to do with the Labyrinth a mere haze. She found her senior year slipping away, but she didn't care. Her own graduation was a blur, but it didn't matter.
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And she was much too busy to notice the owl that was sometimes present, perched watching her from outside the windows.
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If Sarah had tried to explain to anyone what she was doing, they would have told her that she was crazy, that she was looking for a needle in a haystack. But even now, Sarah never considered the fact that she might not find something. It was inevitable that she would, as long as she kept searching. She would know it when she found it.
She began getting up on Saturday mornings at seven to drive two hours and sit in the big city libraries until dusk, reading the special collections that couldn't be checked out. She could often be found in the oldest part of the library, mulling through books that were printed in preceding centuries.
One library in particular had become her favorite, first for its large collection, but then for its databases. It had access to many search programs that would search for any word contained in any of the things that the library owned, and others that it didn't. It was part of global systems, and countless hours had been passed by someone out there, scanning in and transcribing handwritten letters, documents, diaries, even property records.
Recently, what had interested Sarah the most were old letters and diaries. There were copies of ones from hundreds of years ago, and all she had to do was search. And search she did. The first time she sat down anywhere, she typed in the Goblin King's name. There was something terribly important about that name, that little word, she knew there was. But she found nothing.
Sarah still spent hours over the keyboard, typing in phrases that she thought would lead her to something. But none did.
Until one day when the librarian, a nice black haired woman in her fifties who always waved when she saw Sarah, but never asked her what she was looking for, had stopped her in the hall and said, "Oh, my dear, we've just been hooked up to a new service, InlogE. It's got access to archives from libraries all over Europe. It's available from the two main computers in the archive room. I thought you might like to know."
Sarah thanked her, and immediately went to one of the computers and sat down. She accessed InlogE with the library's codes and began searching. She got results for "goblin."
Many matches popped up, but she wasn't excited, as there were always things for "goblin," just not what she wanted. "Goblin" was usually accompanied "ghoul" or "spirit" or some such thing, none of the time having anything to do with taking children away.
But Sarah clicked on each one, looking at the transcriptions, which were sometimes accompanied by scans of the scrawled documents themselves.
These things were much older than ones she had seen before, and the language became increasingly difficult. But Sarah read the old words slowly, not finding much, until she got to the pages of a diary. It was written by a woman of the late medieval times, and only pieces of a few pages still survived. Most of the language was confusing and archaic, but there was no denying the words that leapt out at her.
"Mine babes...pilfered them...hobgoblins...their king."
