Okay, so I'm a little slow on updating, but I will update!
Jareth glanced over his shoulder at the path behind them, in the Howling Forest to see if Hoggle was still behind them. "I think we lost him." Sarah giggled, cheeks flushed.
As the children traveled farther into the forest, a low ground fog rolled in, signaling that they were getting closer to the graveyard. Except the pair didn't notice, because they were to busy congratulating themselves on a job well done. Jareth puffed out his chest and strutted along the path. "I am a genius."
Sarah stopped short. "Hey, it was my idea." She said looking at Jareth a frown on her face.
"Yeah, but I pulled it off." Jareth pointed out.
Sarah rounded on him, hands clenched at her sides, glowed a sparkling emerald green. "With me!" she stated raising her shimmering hands.
Jareth raised his own, a lustrous, sparking white, in defense. "Oh yeah?" he aimed a white beam at Sarah. She ducked and hit Jareth squarely in the chest, making him fall over with a yelp. Sarah quickly sat on his waist and held his wrists at his sides with her still green hands. Jareth wriggled on the ground, unable to get up. "Ha! Pinned you!" Sarah cried, smiling.
"Ay, let me up." Jareth complained, kicking his legs. Sarah shrugged and let him up. Jareth made a great show of brushing off his breeches and tunic with his dirty hands.
As Sarah strolled away, head high, Jareth sprang up and tackled the girl. Sarah and Jareth engaged in a brief wrestling match, sending them over the lip and down to the bottom of the steep hill that they were just climbing, moments before. Sarah didn't even have to use her magic this time, and again Jareth found his face mashed into the sandy like dirt beneath him. "Hah! Pinned you again!" Sarah exclaimed, hair falling out of her carefully made braid. A sudden stillness in the air, as the children stared at each other, alerted them that they were not in the howling forest any longer. The Howling Forest is appropriately named. Many creatures in the forest that made anyone who stayed in the forest for more than an hour leave with a splitting headache.
Jareth got up and brushed off his clothes again, looking around in awe. The place was littered with bones of many sizes. Where those bones came from, Jareth did not know, and Jareth was sure that some of those bones weren't just from the skeletons of basilisks. The children walked over to a huge bone lying on the lip of the hill that they were on, and peeked over it. The sky was dark, the ground was hard packed dirt, bones of many shapes and sizes were strewn about, and a huge basilisk skull sat in the middle of it all. "Whoa." Jareth and Sarah said together, as green and mismatched eyes looked at each other and back out at the place. Jareth climbed over the bone and began walking slowly toward the skull with Sarah following close behind. Jareth stole a look around the basilisk's huge skull. A hazy fog seemed to be everywhere, making it hard to see the land, from where the children stood. "This is it. We made it." Jareth whispered to Sarah, not sure why he was whispering. They stood a little ways from the grinning skull.
"This is really creepy." Sarah said rubbing her arms. She could feel the goose bumps through the sleeves of her tunic. "I wonder if its brains are still in there." She wondered pointing at the skull.
Jareth beckoned her with a hand. "Come on. Let's go check it out."
"Hold it right there young master! Or so help me I will hang ya by yer toes over the bog of eternal stench!" an extremely harassed looking Hoggle charged toward the pair.
"Aw man." Jareth complained rolling his eyes.
"We're way beyond the boundaries of the Labyrinth." Hoggle said, looking around anxiously.
"Look, Hogbrain is scared." Jareth taunted.
"It's mister Hogbrain to you buster, and as of right now we are all in very real danger." Hoggle said jumping at every noise.
Jareth ran in the opposite direction, to stand in front of the skull. "Danger? I walk on the wild side." He strutted in front of the gapping mouth. "I laugh in the face of danger." Jareth threw his blonde head back and tried to laugh as deep as his father laughed.
A slightly hysterical laugh answered the young prince, making him jump behind the trembling dwarf as three animals came chuckling out of the mouth to circle the frightened group. "Well, well, well, Bonsai, what have we here?" a female hyena said, off to Jareth left.
"I don't know Shenzi." Bonsai answered her. "What do you think Ed?" he asked the third member of their group who drooled and laughed, in that hyena laugh of his, darkly. "That's what I thought. A trio of trespassers!" Bonsai barked at Jareth, Sarah, and Hoggle. Sarah had turned as white as a sheet.
"And quite by accident, I assure you. A simple wrong turn at the Watch tower." Hoggle said trying to usher his charges out of the way.
Shenzi jumped in front of Hoggle. "Wait, wait, I know you. You're Jared's little stooge."
Hoggle straightened up. "I, madam, am Jared's major counsel."
"And that must make you…" Bonsai trailed off, looking at the blonde boy in front of her.
"The future king." Jareth said proudly, hoping that, that would scare them off. No such luck.
"Do you know what we do to future kings who step outside their kingdom?" Shenzi asked circling around the group again.
"You can't do anything to me!" Jareth spoke up, trying to bluff his way out.
"Ah, actually they can since we are on their land." Hoggle said, trying to shut up his young charge.
"But Hoggle, I thought you said hyena rogues were nothing but mangy stupid poachers." Jareth said as Hoggle tried to shush the young prince.
"Exnay on the upidstay." Hoggle said sweating profusely.
"Who ya callin' upidstay?" Bonsai shot in, shoving his face right up to Hoggle's.
"Oh, my, my, my, look at the sun it's time to go!" Hoggle and the children backed up.
Shenzi jumped in front of the retreating group. "What's your hurry? We'd love for you to stick around for dinner."
"Yeah, we could have whatever's lying around." Bonsai said.
Shenzi laughed. "Wait, make mine a cub sandwich." Ed poked at Bonsai frantically.
"What Ed?" Shenzi exasperatedly asked.
"Hey, did we order this dinner to go?" Bonsai was looking down Ed's pointed paw.
"No, why?" Shenzi asked.
"Cause there it goes!" Bonsai yelled as the trio disappeared over a huge bone.
Jareth and Sarah ran for their lives when the sick, lame jokes distracted the hyenas. They scrambled over bones and through long skeletons as the hyenas chased behind. Jareth could hear their hard breathing behind them as the hyenas closed in. Jareth and Sarah stopped to catch their breath, not hearing the hyenas any longer behind them. "I think we lost them." Sarah panted, brushing hair out of her face.
Jareth looked around. "Wait, where's Hoggle?"
The hyenas laughed hysterically as they edged Hoggle over the edge of a fissure that glowed a sickly green. "Look at the little dwarf go hippity, hop all the way to the dwarfy boiler." Bonsai taunted.
"Oh no, not the bloody boiler!" Hoggle howled falling over into the fissure. He shot up high in the air with a shout.
The hyenas fell over laughing. "Hey," said Jareth as the tree looked up at him and Sarah on the ledge above them. "Why don't you pick on someone your own size." He scolded them.
Shenzi grinned evilly. "Like you?"
Jareth skin turned a even more pale color as he realized what he had just said. "Oops."
The hyenas lunged at the children, snapping their powerful jaws at them. Jareth and Sarah jumped back with a scream of terror and ran. They hoped onto the vertebrae of a long dead basilisk and slid down it like a crazy roller coaster ride. They shot out the end and fell into a pile of bones, but the hyenas were just not giving up the chase. Jareth started climbing a hill of bones with Sarah right behind him. "Jareth!" Sarah shrieked as she began sliding back toward the hyenas, who waited at the bottom. Jareth shot a blast of white magic at Shenzi's cheek, she yelped and let go of Sarah's ankle. Sarah scrambled after Jareth as they went over the other side of the hill of bones. Shenzi turned her eyes on the vanishing children, a raw shiny burn visible on her furred face. She growled low in her throat. Jareth and Sarah turned into a tunnel with a rib cage of a dead animal at the far end of the end of the tunnel. There was no way out.
Jareth pulled Sarah onto the top of the rib cage and they jumped up and down trying to catch a handhold. The few solid fragments of the unidentifiable hide, ripped sending Jareth and Sarah to the ground beneath, now hemmed in by the rib cage bones. Jareth frantically tried to shape change into a formidable animal to success. He just wasn't old enough to change into an animal yet. "Here kitty, kitty." Bonsai taunted as the three came closer.
Jareth shot a beam of white magic at the hyenas, only to have it explode two feet in front of the attackers and shower them with glitter. The hyenas laughed. "That was it? Do it again." Shenzi sneered while Ed laughed hysterically. Jareth stepped up, putting himself between Sarah and the hyenas, fists turning white again.
A powerful roar ripped through the tunnel, stopping the hyenas in their tracks. "Huh?" they wondered together, before a huge paw knocked the three off their feet and into a wall. Hoggle scurried up to the children as they clutched at each other. They stared wide-eyed at the scene in front of them. A mighty lion with a blonde mane beat the three attackers into submission. The lion finally pushed the hyenas up on a wall. It morphed until it was Jared, who had Shenzi, Bonsai, and Ed, cutting off their air supply as he pushed them hard into the wall by his forearm. "Don't you ever come near my son again." Jared growled at them, mismatched eyes hard. Jareth shivered at the sheer power and fury that rolled off his father in waves.
The hyenas' fiend innocence. "What? Your son? This is your son? I didn't know that. Did you know that?" Bonsai hurriedly said looking at Shenzi.
She shook her head frantically. "No, of course not! Did you?" she gasped when Jared pushed on their windpipes.
"No!" he stated. "Ed?" they asked together, looking at their third partner in crime. Ed stupidly nodded his head yes, emphatically.
Jared shouted "Silence!" he dropped them on their behinds.
"Tootles." Bonsai waved and in a flash they were up and gone, running as if their lives depended on it.
Hoggle hurried up to Jared to congratulate him on a job well done, as Jared stared at the spot where the hyenas had left. Hoggle shrank back at Jared's glare as the Fae king slowly turned around at the sound of the children's steps behind him.
Jareth was ashamed. "Dad, I…"
Jared was too angry to talk in full sentences. "Deliberately disobeyed me." He said voice low. Jareth flinched and hung his head. Jared glanced at a still pale Sarah, with rips in her tunic and breeches, dirt all over her face, hair all over the place, and there were small cuts on her hands from some sharp bones. Seeing this made Jared even angrier. "Let's go home." He barked, spinning on his booted heel, he walked off with Hoggle right behind and the children following slowly.
"I thought you were very brave." Sarah whispered to the down cast Jareth.
A tall and lean shadow watched from above with gleaming green eyes at the departing group.
To Be Continued...