The Goblin King closed his eyes, alone and all at once finding himself far too weary of the world. It was easy enough to will himself into a memory far away from the present: a ballroom full of beautiful and distinguished guests, all dressed in lavish costumes, all filled with joy and excitement, all vying for his attention. Their chatter and laughter echoed in his ears, and when he opened his eyes again he was truly in their midst, moving among the ghostly recollections of his mind. Grinning masks surrounded him, men and women draped over one another, whispering, kissing, dancing – always dancing.
The memory was a particularly poignant one; there had been no such costumed balls for several years now, not since the last had ended so poorly. How they had danced that day, their king in a particularly jovial mood, still confident of his victory despite the best efforts of the foolish girl who had dared to challenge him. Dressed in his finest, he had been oblivious of the fact that she would soon bring the celebrations to a crashing halt, and him to his knees.
All of that remained in the future, though; in this memory, in their past, the dance went on. The costumed revellers were hazy at the edges, their voices not quite true, tinged with the aura of his magic, but she seemed real enough when she appeared before him. The party's newest guest was open-mouthed and wide-eyed with wonder, wheeling in amazement to gape at those around her. She was dressed in a shining silver gown both too young and too old to suit her, tainted as it was by her own mind's tangled thoughts, princesses in fairytales, and her perceptions of adulthood. She was a flower on the very brink of that last; a pretty enough sight, though nothing would compare to the woman she had yet to become. Such an innocent flower would easily be crushed in the mass of heaving, writhing bodies surrounding her with their impurity.
Jareth thought now, as he had back then, it was that innocence that had called to him, shy and overwhelmed as she was, first by his labyrinth, and now by this entirely new world of drunken, laughing guests and amorous lovers. Bringing her here, he had sought only to distract her from her quest, ensnaring her in his power, but now that she was here, she exuded some small power of her own, calling out to him to aid her. It had been her innocence that had bid him to go to her, a guide to draw her through the chaos and confusion of the crowd; a dance he would lead her on that would, in due course, set each of their worlds crumbling down around them.
Perhaps it had been destined even then, that one day she would come to him again, wide-eyed and so very beautiful, wanting for him to claim that innocence for his own once and for all. Even through her denial of his power, she had always looked to him that way – as her elder, her mentor, needing his guidance, and so eager to learn from him in the dreams they had later shared. As a king and as one far more well-versed in the ways of the world, he would always be above her, but all that had ceased to matter when, to his astonishment, he had begun to need her, too. The master had become weak, desperate, relying on his charge more than she had come to depend on him, hoping for more than she seemed willing to give.
Sweet words were one thing, elevating his senses when she spoke of longing and that tiny chance of love, but no man could live on promises alone. He had tried, and the past few years had been hellish with their endless waiting. She had sworn him everything, and left him with naught but a handful of dust and bitter memories – memories of a time when his power had been just as great as it always had, and he had bowed to no one.
In this memory, at least, he was free to move his own stars, denying the truth that had been. Instead of going to her, he remained in the shadows at the edge of the masked ball, watching as the younger Sarah lost herself amidst the crowd, always searching for him to save her, never losing that small, pathetic hope. Jareth found himself smiling, laughing almost. There is a bitter satisfaction in hurting those we love when they have first wounded us, and now he found himself basking in that hateful glow.
For a time, he supped on her bewilderment, tasting pleasure in her fear, finding his own glee paired nicely with the wine that ran like water though these raucous gatherings. He drank deep of both, revelling in their warmth, and that of the supple bodies surrounding him on all sides. His two female companions were hardly known to him – he had not bothered himself to go looking at what might have been revealed outside their masks – but their heated grinding and busy hands had already begun to arouse him regardless. In reality, he had stopped them back then, pulling away before they had gotten much further, choosing innocence and Sarah instead of desire and debauchery. In this new, carefree state inside his memory, he allowed for the fun to go on.
Smiling his satisfaction at such liberty, Jareth freed one woman from the lacings of her dress with nimble fingers, lowering the gown from her shoulders with ease. He took one breast firmly in his hand, squeezing the soft globe and grinning at the woman's equally soft sigh of pleasure. Not to be ignored, her companion snatched up his free hand at once, suckling at each of his fingers in turn to entice him. The Goblin King laughed, and dipped his hand inside the bodice of her gown, squeezing her breast hard enough to make her groan, her nipple quick to peak against his palm.
This is how the party should have unfolded – a belly full of wine, a warm and willing woman grasped in each hand, his cock straining against his trousers with the promise of what was still to come. The throng of merry guests around them made no difference as both women returned his caresses, their hands roaming freely over his body.
The first woman leaned closer, and he captured her mouth at once. Their kiss was slow and deep, tasting of alcohol and lust, and the power that had at long last become his again. By the time Jareth pulled back from it, his head was reeling with his excitement. The wine they shared poured freely over the first woman's bare breasts, her companion taking a nipple between red, smiling lips, while Jareth captured the other, lapping at her font with an eager tongue, drinking lustily as Bacchus had from his conquests.
Wine, and women, and no worries; how much he had missed, all for the sake of a snivelling mortal. He had hungered for no one but Sarah for years, true, but now he had finally rid himself of that craving, finding his satisfaction between her thighs at long last, who was to say he could not move on to lusher pastures? He grinned around the plump pink nipple he had claimed, grazing it with his teeth and relishing the nameless woman's moan.
Yet, when the Goblin King finally tore his attention away from the festivities, his ardour left him at once. Sarah – his Sarah, his mind still insisted – was weeping openly now, hope for salvation as lost as she herself was, frightened and miserable, swallowed up by the crowd.
The woman he had drank from reached out for him again with her welcoming warmth, but Jareth felt only coldness in his breast as he pushed her gently aside. The two women mourned the loss of him for but a moment, before losing themselves once more in their own pleasure without him. The Goblin King cared not. The pleasure he had felt had died with Sarah's tears – the single person in this room of many who truly mattered to him, weeping by his own doing.
The pleasant haze of his enchanted memory cracked and shattered as his own dismay pulled him back from it, drawing him back to cold reality. Yet, even in those last moments when it was already too late, he was pushing his way through the crowd to get to her, swiping at the wine that stained his lips, the grapes long dead and cloying on his tongue, trying in vain to wipe away that sickeningly-sweet pleasure he had tasted at her expense. He went to find her, to guide her as he always should have, but this time he did not reach her.
He came back to himself with a jolt, rubbing at his mouth in his shame before his eyes had even fully opened, but the only taste that haunted him was that of her. Try as he might, other women or no, there would be no blissful escape, no mending the damage that she had already done to him. He was Sarah's now, as he had been for years, the Goblin King kneeling at last to another.
Oh, but he was pathetic, lying on his back in his own bed – in his own castle – yet entirely enveloped in her. The sight of her as she had been only moments ago danced behind his eyelids with every blink, seeing her lost in pleasure beneath him, the taste of her still rich on his tongue. When he threw his arm back over his head, the smell of her hair came warmly from his pillows, and when he arched his hips, he could still feel the silken wetness of her around him. The smell of their sex was in the very air he breathed, intoxicating, and the heat their bodies had made together had yet to cool from his sheets. He was a prisoner in his own castle, the great Goblin King bested once again by a mere mortal.
Elixir, had he thought her? Poison? The woman was divine vengeance made corporal, hell twined with heaven in his bedsheets. There was a trace of Nemesis in every beguiling glance and flex of her smooth thighs, laughing in his face as she pulsed around him, as she demanded and then took from him her pound of flesh, squeezing it inside her. The climax she had pulled from him had been draining, sapping him of the very last of his power. Whatever crime the greater gods had found him guilty of, it was clear now he would be shown no mercy.
Through the blasted self-pity that had seized him, the anger was hot inside him as well – he could actually feel it burning inside his chest – but the worst of it was aimed at himself, as well as her. But for some pitying smile from those gods, it was likely to have been both the first and the last time he would ever be granted the feel of her in his arms, the heat of her body surrounding him, and he had soured it for them both. When she had questioned the time she had left, hinted at leaving him, he had done the deed for her, sending her back into that hellish labyrinth with her shoes and clothes magicked upon her back, and hardly a goodbye. His wounded pride had demanded no less.
He had given her everything and more – had all but rent his chest open and given her his heart. Still, still, she denied him. He had let her go, given her the freedom she had demanded all along, and could have seen himself rid of her, yet that deepest, most shameful part of his mind never would. He would go on torturing himself with the promise of her, re-opening that wound over and over, until she had finally grown weary of him, stealing from him even those last pitiful grains of hope for the future, and leaving him with peaceful agony at last.
In his current mind-frame, he would do well to welcome it when such a time came. This pitiful creature who had sat brooding in his castle all this time, staring deep into his crystal just to steal a glimpse of the one who would never truly be his – this was no king. Such loathsome behaviour was beneath him. He knew this even as he sat up in his bed, his fingers already curling to form another crystal so that he could look upon her the same way until the very end.
No. He would be bound in this wretched castle no longer – no more a prisoner to her will.
He redressed with no more than a muttered word, cloak and boots and all, a true king in all his splendour as he slipped from his lonely bed with renewed purpose. The half-formed crystal he tossed into the aether, before he called upon a deeper strength, and changed. The Goblin King left behind his castle and all who might seek it in a majestic beating of wings, a pale and beautiful bird of prey against the darkening sky.
He flew to escape everything, but it was impossible to ignore the sight of her far beneath him as he soared overhead – a precious jewel of deep green and pale skin set against an otherwise desolate landscape. It put him in mind of Zeus and Leda – the great and powerful god brought low by the promise of earthly sin, sweeping down in the guise of a noble and handsome swan to claim his mate in a fit of lust. He found such base desires were harder to ignore in his animal state, particularly now, with the new heat of her still fading from his loins. It was with some effort that Jareth climbed higher, his wings beating proud and resolute, his mind in tatters with thoughts of the woman who was his undoing.
She had come on leaps and bounds in the last few hours, allowing him to hope perhaps more than he had ever dared in the past, which made her reluctance seem all the more cruel to him. After all this time, she still treated whatever small affection she had for him – the small chance of their love – as a burden, rather than a blessing. He could no longer deny that the fact wounded far more than his pride. She had allowed for him to taste of her, and he knew he should be grateful for even that chance, but such sweetness only made him yearn for more.
There was not a soul in his kingdom who would dare deny the Goblin King whatever he so commanded, but this foul and oh-so-fair creature was not of his realm – she was not his. He would never command her, and what vicious hope he clung to that she would ever come to him of her own accord still refused to die, no matter how foolish such hope was. The agony of it was, he loved her enough to release her, if she asked it of him. Their game was over; perhaps from the very start, when she had returned his kiss, he had already been lost. Yet, still, his Champion moved on, steadfast and resolute in her intent to reach his castle, to break down his walls as she had so many years ago, leaving him defenceless and entirely broken once more.
He should send her home and have done with it; he should preserve the last of his dignity and pretend he would not spend the rest of her short mortal life clinging to the whispers of her world, begging the gods to once more hear his name upon her lips. He would not send her away though, not unless she asked, and not while time still remained to them – perhaps the last minutes she would ever be near to him again. When her time finally ran dry, she would see just how powerless he had become. A wise man would treasure those last few minutes, spending every second drinking in his last fill of her – a man resigned to the gallows, and determined to take in whatever last breath of life he can.
Instead, he flew, a coward unable to bring himself to look upon all he had lost.
In some confused way, he told himself he was trying to prepare for the future – that time after. There had been a labyrinth before Sarah Williams had come to destroy him, and unless he took care of it, it would continue to grow wildly out of control long after she had left him – long after her mortal bones had turned to dust beneath the ground, but never in his memory. He must set to rights all that had been corrupted in his labyrinth long before then – before he lost everything the same way he would one day lose her.
Melancholy was not a constructive mistress, and those small steps he might have taken towards restoring the balance in his realm seemed impossible – enormous. The crumbling walls and dying trees of the outskirts he flew over did not right themselves in his shadow, though with only a nod and a will, he could have made them do so. Such small matters were beneath him in his current state of mind, or so he told himself. He needed a greater exercise to occupy his clouded head and pounding heart, and, so thinking, his wings turned him towards one such challenge he had put off for far too long.
He found his human form again on the outskirts of the wastelands, and when the beast that lay at their centre roared in challenge, the Goblin King roared back, fit to shake the stones of the labyrinth itself. When the sound died, absolute silence reigned in its absence, but he knew better than to think the creature had been cowed into submission so soon. New fury blazed within him, and he embraced the chance to loose some of the frenzied tumult of emotions that battered at the inside of his skull, visions of love and betrayal, and the rotten peach that had been the start of it all. He raised a fist, and within it grew a crystal tarnished a deep and terrible orange, alive and pulsing with dark magic between his fingers, a grim imitation of the fruit.
He was half-tempted to set the whole cursed place alight and have done with it, but then he would rob himself of the confrontation, deny himself that chance to vent the blind sickness that enveloped him. Cursed with love, and with no hesitation, he strode into the tall grasses to meet the beast head on, hand raised and prepared to do battle. He pushed on bravely, fist full of dark magic and hell bent on making something pay for his displeasure. The straggling weeds bowed before him, but the scent of her hair seemed to cling to every wretched one, giving them their own beauty, and in the end he found he could not go on. Another angry cry tore from his throat at such cruel distraction, less forceful this time, but he heard the creature rumble in response, sounding oddly chastened.
Jareth laughed aloud, shaking his head as his tantrum subsided somewhat. The pain of another would not heal his own, and it would be unseemly to subject even such a foul creature to his rage, simply because he wasn't strong enough to control his urges. He closed his fist, sealing away the crystal's awful power with it.
"A warning, then," he called out to the beast. "Mind yourself, and we might find some place in my kingdom for you yet." He took wing again, without waiting for whatever might pass for a reply.
Flying above the forest she had run through, in all her desperation to find him, he sensed her again, her sheer presence calling out to his mind as loudly as if she had spoken in his ear. When he stooped lower, reaching for her now, he found the smallest swatch of silken fabric caught between the trees. It was a scrap from her gown, barely an inch wide and fraying where it had torn away from her sleeve. Its absence had been noticed by neither of them in their passion, but now the material became the centre of a king's attention as the owl became the man once more, held as reverently as a rare and precious jewel. Jareth turned it carefully between his fingers, holding onto that sense of her, yet still feeling that there must be something more close-by. He flew on, the scrap tucked safely away into a white sleeve that once more grew wings.
The trees receded beneath him, the land dropping steeply away, and there it was. There, upon the cliff's stony edge, he spied the enchanted boots he had pulled from her feet – a small and sorry heap, cast aside without a second thought. They were grey and lifeless, leached of the magic that had protected her, that he himself had instilled them with. Another piece of her; another reminder.
He regained his true form again beside them, thinking how easy it would be to add these to his collection – to worship the boots as well as the one who had worn them. A reluctant smile curled his lips. He was not so far gone yet, nor would he allow himself to be. A lift of his hand brought a clear and glowing crystal to life in his palm. He lifted it to his lips, blowing upon it as softly as one might send on a lover's kiss, and the shimmering orb took flight, drifting on the breeze until it reached its target. The boots caught alight at once, licked with pale blue flame.
Jareth watched them burn, feeling the smile fading from his face, some new coldness creeping into his chest. Still, he hesitated only a moment before adding the scrap of her gown as well, dropping it into the small fire that had blossomed. The green satin was gone almost at once, eaten away by the flames. It was as good a tribute as he would ever manage, this solemn goodbye, knowing that when the time came, he would never be able to bring himself to visit the last resting place of his beloved's mortal remains.
He forced a laugh, cursing himself once more for a fool. Only minutes ago, he had felt her warm and wet and willing against him, surrounding him with her joy and vitality. She was still young, with many years before her; a vision of life, and here he was contemplating death for the second time that day. Foolish indeed, and yet he knew that human lives – as were the lives of so many creatures outside of his kind – were so, so short …
There was something to be said for this owl form though, he thought, as he grew wings once more. They were magnificent creatures, and how he envied them their simple lives right then. Tawny owls, in particular, were solitary creatures up until such time as they found a mate, and then the pair would remain bonded for life, fiercely protective of one another, and what offspring they might have. When one mate died, the other would, more often than not, be soon to follow.
Still, the act of their coming together was far simpler than the past years he himself had suffered through. The male would court, pitching woo with a call, and a choice morsel to tempt his intended. How, at any other time, that might make him laugh at the irony, given it had taken the removal of such a morsel before his own mate saw fit to accept him. Even now, there was no promise of anything between them beyond the remainder of the day, let alone the many seasons.
A part of him could not quite believe the sex had been the end of it all. A single act of physical love between them – the truest display of affection his kind knew – and then this infernal nothingness. With any normal conquest, he would reminisce on their time together with joy and lust, the memory made all the sweeter when he thought back on how he had seen and coveted, greeted and wooed, and then finally taken his lover. His time with Sarah had been sweet enough while it lasted, but now the memory left a bitter cast over his thoughts; with her, their lovemaking had felt oddly like saying goodbye.
He had promised her – warned her – that he would come to worship only the body of his queen, and the words had been true enough when he had spoken them. How quickly his resolve had crumbled, though, faced with such powerful longing in her eyes – at last, in the flesh, longing for him. He had foolishly let himself hope that there was love, mixed with that lust. He would forever be under her spell, and no doubt hurt fit to die when her own time came – if she, in her trying nature, was not the death of him first. It was a fact he had long since accepted, but one that vexed him even so. He was bound to his cruel and cold mistress for good, but for now, the air was warm and freeing against his body, and he embraced it.
He flew ever higher, courting the sun like Icarus, allowing for its rays to kiss his wings before barrelling down towards earth, only to repeat such divine courtship anew. He rose and fell on the breeze, thinking of life and death, love and loss.
He landed again on the outskirts of what passed for his kingdom's crypts: a vast field that spread for miles and miles around, long grass bursting from the fertile earth in rich, snowy-white clusters. There were no earthly remains to bury when the fae kind passed on, but after the many eons bonded together, the magic that consumed the last of their bodies went to ground here, erupting into colossal living crystals, their smooth facets catching the light of the sun and turning the pale grass around them into an opulent spectrum of all colours.
Some crystals had barely peeked their heads above the soil, as small and delicate as newly-seeded plants, their owners lost to the living realm only a matter of centuries ago. Others towered overhead, shimmering rainbow columns that reached longingly toward the sky in all their majesty. Some stood alone, but others were in pairs; sometimes, in the cases of those who had found solace in life with multiple partners, the crystals clustered in threes and fours.
At the centre of this great field, Jareth could already see the area where the crystals grew their brightest. It was a place he refused ever to tread, though it was where he himself would end eventually, and, somewhere amidst the dazzling glow, he knew, was that of his own parents and the ancestors that had come before them. In that most special place, the magic was at its strongest. It was said that you could hear the voices of the long dead, faint but there all the same, talking and rejoicing amongst themselves forever – for how could they not? Every single crystal there had its mate, standing equally tall and proud beside them – a companion whose love and laughter would illuminate the very air surrounding them for all eternity.
It was the resting place of every last goblin king, and his queen.
A/N: Chapter title borrowed from Boss of Me (The Next Day) by David Bowie