Floating weightlessly in the darkness, I watched the objects of my dream fade away like wet paint under running water. Something nestled in my throat and weighed on my chest, a burden of five hundred pounds. As the light blossomed from beneath my feet and spread around me like Van Gogh's crazed yet graceful paintbrush, orchestrating the sunset and the castle in the distance, and my feet touching on an unsteady ground and the castle disappearing behind a dark mountain before me, I realized the thing in my throat was forcing its way up. Air left my throat and panic set in; I stumbled to my knees, grasping at my throat helplessly and making guttural sounds. The unsteady ground blurred before my eyes and patches of blue and purple blinked on the peripheries of my vision.

This is it, I thought as the blue and purple took over my vision and blended into a sickly black, this is how I'm going to die.

Something whacked me on the back with such force that the obstruction in my esophagus came shooting up out of my mouth and hit the ground with a sickly flop. Breathing heavily, my vision slowly sharpened and I saw what had been in my throat, and nearly threw up again.

It was a bubbling, black blob of goo that was dissolving between two dirtied doll faces.

Wait a minute, I thought. I whipped around and-

"Oh my God!" I exclaimed, stumbling backwards on my hands and butt. A wrinkly thing that looked something like an eighty year-old smoker-grandma was glaring at me with pursed lips. The most disgusting thing about her was not her wrinkly face and yellow, glowering eyes, but the mound of trash heaped up on her back, like a camel carrying way too much luggage across the Sahara.

"Well!" the grandma-smoker-thing said haughtily, her horrible eyes widening like I'd just wiped my mouth on my sleeve in a fancy restaurant. "That's no way to treat the person who saved your life! What a wretch, you are! Coming up out of nowhere and choking on something you ate that probably you weren't supposed to eat, hmm?" Her 'hmm' was a grotesque cross between a high pitch tone and a guttural growl that made my skin crawl.

"Who the hell... are you?" I asked breathlessly, not feeling very thankful.

"That's none of your business!" Smoker Grandma exclaimed, much louder than necessary.

"Alright, alright," I said, attempting to quiet her. I gazed around me, and was struck that I didn't realize that the mountains weren't mountains of rock, but of... well, junk. Old, dirtied dolls, belts, dollhouses, footballs, clothing of all kinds, baseball cards, and even a car here and there. "Where am I?"

"Where lost things go," Smoker Grandma replied mysteriously, "when they've been forgotten or withheld... like this!" She turned noisily around, the knick-knacks and pans on her back jangling together as she started digging amidst the junk beside her.

"No, I had to go somewhere..." I began, enveloped in confusion. I was here for a reason; something had happened.

Why did I cough up that shit? What did I eat? Where the hell am I? Was I looking for something?

But the Smoker Grandma shoved something into my hands, derailing my train of thought. I looked down, and saw a fat, dirtied envelope. I looked back at Smoker Grandma in confusion.

"Go on!" she insisted in that awful voice of hers. "Open it already!"

With trembling fingers, I peeled open the flap and spread open the mouth of the envelope...

"Money," I breathed, gazing at the green bills inside the envelope. I fingered through them, feeling my heart rate escalate. "There's gotta be... there's gotta be a thousand dollars in here." I gazed up at Smoker Grandma and felt a wave of gratitude flow over me. "Thanks, I must have been looking for this! It would've sucked to have lost all this."

"Yes, my dear, it would have," Smoker Grandma said in an ominous way that made my stomach turn. "That's exactly what you were looking for."

Something still felt off... I shook it off; I had a thousand dollars here, what else could I want?

A thousand dollars is going to make a world of change! I'll be able to pay off bills, pay for better food and better housing, expand my comedy career! Wait 'til I show Mark!

My heart seized in my chest as it all dawned on me once more, everything I'd been through since I'd wished for the goblins to take me away from the nightmare of being booed off stage and subsequently punched in the face, to taking the Goblin King's challenge and opposing him as much as my spirit could stand, but my heart, meanwhile, was enjoying having him around. My brain loved the banter that was so easy, my heart relished in his concern over me, and my eyes loved his weird blue eyes of different shades and his eccentric attire that stood out like a rockstar amongst peasants.

But I loved Mark, too. His spiky brown hair that always got ruffled by his hands when he was hunched over his laptop late at night, working on a detailed marketing project, his little quirky smile that he had when I made a particularly stupid pun, his tolerance with my sass and sarcasm that few people had shown me in my life, and his serious eyes and their shade of hazel with light brown and flecks of yellow around the pupils that I found so intriguing.

I felt the envelope drop from my hands. I didn't want the money. I wanted a means to an end. I wanted a way to fix things with Mark, to make him trust and value me as a fellow working individual again. Sure, he loved me, but the last thing he expected me to do was to help out with the rent. I was too fixed in my dreams, my head was so far up in the clouds that I was gazing into the stratosphere with no hope of coming down.

I closed my eyes and felt another lump in my throat, but this one was entirely different. I felt the fat envelope in my hands again, and I opened my eyes and saw Smoker Grandma standing in front of me with a grin that chilled me to the bone, her wrinkly hands gripping the envelope that was touching mine.

"What a lot of money this is, hmm? Lots of good money, just what you wanted!"

I grasped the envelope and then, without a moment's consideration, hurled it onto the next trash pile. Smoker Grandma screeched in distress and turned to me, hellbent.

"Get the hell away from me," I snarled, making a motion to withdraw the Goblin blade- I grasped at air. "Oh, shit," I breathed, and then took off as Smoker Grandma made a lazy jump at me. All of the junk on her back jangled and clanked together as her face made contact with the trash on the ground, and I sprinted away without looking back.

I weaved between the mountains of junk, jumping over twisted bikes and disfigured dolls and sliding across a dusty car hood, and kept running until a stitch grew painfully in my chest and I could no longer hear Smoker Grandma's scratchy screaming.

I paused to breathe and put my hands on my knees.

"I think that's enough exercise for one day," I said to myself. "Really wish I still had that sword. Jareth must've taken it when I left the dream, that bastard."

I straightened my back, cracked it pleasurably, and gazed at the castle looming so high in the sky that it blocked the setting sun. The trash land gave way abruptly to stone a few yards from my feet, to which the Goblin City gates were not much farther; a quick jog would have gotten me there in no time.

"Wait, I'm not supposed to be this close," I murmured, glancing around at the trash heaps, as if someone could offer up an explanation. A feeling of apprehension spread over me but I tried to ignore it, thinking against that possibility.

"I was far away from here... I'd gotten so far..." I stammered. Turning back to the castle, it was all driven home. That peach had sent me here, back to the beginning. I had to start all over.

Something crumbled inside me and my knees went weak. I stumbled to the side, grabbing hold of the trash heap beside me for support. I felt the hot tears on my cheeks before I realized I was crying.

I have to start all over.

I began to sob into my free hand, hoping against hope that this wasn't real. That I had dreamt all of this, that I had fallen asleep on that park bench in the cold and that my nose was still bleeding from the man's punch.

I pulled my hand from my face, only to see the castle looming over me. A wave of wrath came upon me so suddenly that I snatched up the nearest doll and, cocking it back, hurled it in the direction of the castle with such velocity that the doll soared over the Goblin City gates.

"Screw you, Jareth!" I screamed, my voice cracking and sounding borderline delirious. Perhaps I was, as my face burned and my fists shook. "I hate you! I hate you!" I grabbed a toy car and hurled it, going short this time and colliding with the outside wall. "Go to HELL, you son of a BITCH!"

I stood there, breathing heavily, engulfed in my own fury, before I realized it was no use. Whether Jareth could hear me or not, that arrogant, royal asshole would never change things for me simply because I was furious enough to tear his face into two pieces. He'd ignore me and chuckle with his little goblin minions over how I fell for his little peach-dream thing, and how I now had to start all over, and that I'd surely give up soon and become his queen.

"Not today," I snarled dangerously low at the castle, bawling my hands into fists; I might as well have been foaming at the mouth. "Not tomorrow, not yesterday, not ever. If you ever had a chance... you just lost it. I hope you heard that, Jareth. You just lost your freaking chance..." Then a thought occurred to me, and before thinking it through, I uttered it with more ferocity and malice than I've ever uttered anything in my entire life:

"Just like you did with Sarah."

As I spoke those words, I immediately felt a pang of remorse in the pit of my heart. I was tempted to apologize, even in a whisper that would be carried away by the winds, when I heard someone call my name from the distance. I stopped and listened, focusing on the sound of the voices. One was considerably high pitch, and the other booming and low.

"Sir Didymus! Ludo!" I shouted, seeing the ray of sunshine in the dark tunnel I was in emotionally. "I'm by the castle! Over here! By the edge of the trash!"

"We are coming, dear Warrioress!" I heard Sir Didymus cry across the land of trash.

"Coming, Ga-Wen!" Ludo agreed and I heard his laborious stomping amidst the trash. He howled suddenly - he must've stepped on a Lego or something, for Sir Didymus chastised in a loud voice him for clumsiness, reminded him that it as unlike a knight to be clumsy, and encouraged him to go onward despite his injury.

When they reached me, we all embraced for a moment, during which I finally felt some sort of security.

"So," Sir Didymus began once we broke up the group hug, "what is thy plan for conquest, dear Warrioress? It doth appear that we are at the beginning. Shall we trek to the start of the Labyrinth and make our way thence?"

"Hell no," I responded, to my companions' shock. "I'll tell you what we're gonna do." I took a glance at the castle and felt a surge of excitement rise within me before whispering, "We're gonna storm the castle and take Jareth on his own turf."

Sir Didymus gawked at me while Ludo covered his big face with his hands and shaking his head, making his long ears flop about.

"Dear Warrioress," Sir Didymus began gingerly, "how can thou storm the castle of the evil Goblin King? 'Tis heavily armed by goblins from all sides! 'Tis no way in!"

I was about to respond sassily, but I stopped myself; I thought of something else.

"Hey, Sir P. Diddy," I began, getting down on my haunches so that he was only slightly taller than me as he sat on his steed. "Have you ever heard the parable about the mustard seed?"

Sir Didymus stared at me in bewilderment before, twitching his nose in thought, then shook his head. "I fear that I have not, dear Warrioress."

"Well, a long time ago, there was this guy named Jesus. He was the Son of God, ya know. Jesus had twelve followers, and one day, his followers weren't feeling so tough and life wasn't treating them right. But Jesus told them that you can have faith the size of a mustard seed, the smallest of the family of seeds, and you can move mountains. You plant that little seed of faith, and it grows into a big tree for everyone to see. You feel me? We can do this, Sir Didymus, Ludo. All we need is a little faith... a'ight?"

Sir Didymus let out a shaky breath, and for the first time, seemed legitimately scared. He seemed to noticed my observation, for he puffed out his chest and loudly proclaimed, "'Tis true, I have faith that far exceeds that of thy mustard seed and Jesus' expectations, good Warrioress! For, am I not, a fearsome knight?"

"Mustard!" Ludo agreed enthusiastically, smiling toothily at me. "Seeds and trees!"

"That's the spirit, I guess," I said, feeling much lighter than I had a few minutes ago.

Sir Didymus gazed at me for a moment, then said cautiously, "Gwen, I must inquire... Ludo and I heard thou crying out in wrath earlier, at the Goblin King. This endeavor... doth it have something to do with thy wrath towards the King?"

I sighed. "Yes, completely. I... lost my cool earlier. He tricked me, and I've had a hell of a time before you guys showed up... and I need to get back home and I know I won't make it if I have to start all over. I've only got enough willpower left for a sneak attack on the castle. So, what d'ya say? Are we game for getting the upper hand on that royal asshole?"

Sir Didymus and Ludo nodded, with the former tipping his feathered hat and the latter smiling his big, stupid grin that made my heart feel warm.

"A'ight, here's the plan..." and they gathered in close, listening intently.