As promised you delicious creatures, sorry if it's a bit rough!
REVIEW REVIEW REVIEW - because we're on the cusp of 100 comments! The hundredth commenter gets a prize! (but what?)
OKAY, if you HAVEN'T read this yet, but you HAVE read chapter 12 recently, I should let you know I've made a change due to a major oversight. Where was the goblin King at the end of our first day asking his supposed question? He forgot to show up, didn't he? _;; just letting you know you might have missed some banter which makes parts of this chapter a little clearer.
Woo Hoo, Beta approved and improved. Thank you to the lovely nothingnothingtralala, who never fails to have me on the floor giggling over the absurdities of some of the things I put in these chapters...
Sarah examined the ring in the dawn light. Like everything she'd experienced on this second visit to the Labyrinth, she couldn't help but be mistrustful of it.
Waking had left a terrible taste in her mouth, a bitter film of thirst and poor oral hygiene. She was thirsty and she would have killed for a toothbrush; she remembered her joy at finding one in her second forced suite, courtesy of Carl. How oddly the Goblin King had reacted then, thinking she was lit up by greed rather than a need to make herself presentable. Perhaps he didn't understand the finer points of self-maintenance. No doubt he woke every day as polished and perfect as the last, and little to no effort was required to appear so flawless – other than that he remained vainglorious of it, of course.
She considered backtracking to the fountain to quench her thirst, which should be harmless enough in retrospect; it had helped her without incident and it was a proven friend. Of course there was the problem that she could no longer remember which direction she had come in to get here, or the fact that she was working on a limited time frame which didn't really allow the revisiting of areas already explored, especially when they had yielded no friends in their humanoid state and no children whatsoever.
Standing, Sarah decided to keep moving forward rather than going back.
"The way forward is not the way back at all," she snorted to herself.
She had no pockets for the ring, only fingers. The decision was made for her; she winced as she slipped the ring onto the little finger of her right hand, where it settled snugly. Things shifted, just a little bit. It was like the difference between looking at an object with one eye closed and then swapping to the other eye. Something subtle loosened around her and then constricted until she could feel it pressing down on her, an alarming and overwhelming sensation to say the least. When it finally passed, which was surprisingly quickly, Sarah was connected.
She could feel the Labyrinth.
A ring is a bond…
She had given her ring to the Labyrinth, a contribution for advice which had led her nowhere. Now it was linked; she was linked to the Labyrinth.
Small wonder the Goblin King had wanted no such link to her, his entire self; open to her inspection, and vice versa. Now, despite his aversion, there was a link between them: he was bonded to the Labyrinth, and suddenly she was also a part of that connection. She wasn't sure how it worked, or how to use it to her advantage, but she could feel the darkness and sadness hanging over the path she stood upon. She could feel the flicker of the Goblin King in the corner of her mind, and gave it a wide berth, fearful that he would sense her joining to the collective. There was an awareness of life around her, despite the fact that she seemed to be alone on the trail. The Labyrinth was crawling with living creatures, hidden or invisible to her, each a tiny glimmer in her mind's eye. For a moment she wondered if this new discovery might help lead her to the children, but then they were not a part of the Labyrinth; they were other, like her. If she could find them… she didn't even want to try… it might mean she was too late. Instead, she tried to focus on her companions. As she did there was a directional pull, something cold and hard, and a smell of water. Hoggle. Surely it must be her petrified friend? He was still there, waiting for her by the fountain. She tried to concentrate on the link, hoping to somehow delve beneath stone and find a warm beating heart, but the connection wavered and disappeared under her attention. Frustrated, she sought the link again, her head already aching from the odd sensation and strain of the unfamiliar.
Sir Didymus.
The feeling was so close, so strong; he might have stepped out right in front of her.
Sarah started running in his direction, her head pounding. When she closed her eyes she could see a spidery web of red, pulsing veins in the darkness of her eyelids. She soon entered a maze in pursuit of his presence. Stained, stone walls stood high around her; choked with strands of ivy, most of it dead. She stopped to lean her forehead against the cool brick for a moment, bright spots dancing before her eyes. The link to Sir Didymus had faded, but she knew the general direction to travel in. Her bond to the Labyrinth seemed to have weakened, but she suspected it was wrong use or overuse, rather than dissolution.
A grating sound made Sarah jump, and she cautiously glanced down at the cause. A brownie, caught in the act, was turning over the bleached cobblestone a few feet away. For a moment they locked eyes, and then, with a terrified squeak, the Brownie dove back beneath the stone, leaving its task incomplete. Just as caught out, Sarah blinked dizzily at the momentarily empty spot. When her mind caught up, and in turn urged her body forward, she knelt to inspect the cobblestone. One side was streaked with a hastily drawn lipstick arrow, now browned with age.
Nostalgia… That colour looked terrible on me.
With some effort, Sarah managed to heft the cobblestone out of its furrow. She wondered if perhaps she could dig the little brownie out and… well, who knew what… she was working from instinct. Truthfully, perhaps it was only curiosity; a sense of whimsy overcame at the reminder that she was in a magical world filled with fairy beings. Her fingers were heavy with dirt and aching by the time she managed to prise it up, nails chipped and filthy. Beneath the path was a small burrow, filled with all manner of objects. Sarah pulled them out of the makeshift tunnel and sat them on the ground before her, inspecting the odd assortment.
A small doll… a voodoo doll from the look of it, a dried piece of cheese, green with mould. A small pouch of potpourri, a hand mirror, a child's left shoe: Sarah stopped to stare longingly at this. It seemed to be in a rather decrepit stage of disrepair; probably not from the children she was looking for. The crowning glory of the pile was a water bottle. Not just any water bottle, she was sure, her water bottle. Gifted to the Goblin King; a peace offering which he had accepted rather ungratefully.
Had the Brownie filched it from the king's throne room? Had it ever even made it that far? No matter now. Sarah reached out and claimed it for her own, grinning when she found it still nearly full.
"Finders takers," she muttered, as she unscrewed the lid and took a swig.
It was probably an exaggeration to say it was the best water she had ever tasted, but in that moment it certainly seemed to be the case. She knew this might be a trap, an elaborate, ridiculous trap, but she found herself unconcerned. She was thirsty and feeling a touch reckless. If the Goblin King had the presence of mind to plan something this unexpected then she deserved to be caught out. The water was water, however, and she suffered no apparent ill effects. Despite her devil-may-care attitude she felt immensely relieved. Now she had a hard won treasure to take with her.
Carefully she returned the other 'unique' items to their home beneath the stone, pausing as she picked up the hand mirror. She knew that looking at herself was probably not a good idea, but thinking about flawless Goblin Kings had her bothered. Sweet vanity – there were bigger things to worry about, far bigger, and yet it niggled at her in true girl fashion. Reluctantly, she turned the mirror to examine herself, expecting to find a lost looking, sweaty, dirty girl reflected within.
The beauty represented was a stranger, and Sarah dropped the mirror in shock, watching as it tumbled awkwardly back into the hole at her feet. Numbly, she looked after it, hoping it hadn't broken from the fall; seven years' bad luck was just what she needed right now. She wouldn't look again though… something was wrong about that reflection. Perhaps it was some sort of magic mirror, maybe she had looked in on somewhere unknown… but then, there had been an odd reflection in the water at the fountain. Suddenly Sarah had a horrifying thought.
Am I still Sarah Williams?
Looking down, she confirmed that all her working parts still seemed to be in order, nothing odd there. So if she was still herself, who was she seeing reflected? The answer was in the mirror, not beyond the reach of her hand. It was, however, beyond the reach of her courage. It was a canny thing and she didn't want anything to do with it. There were no children reflected in the glass, which made it none of her business. Mind made up, Sarah replaced the last of the treasures in the burrow and returned its cobblestone roof.
Dusting her hands on her filthy, ripped, once green dress, Sarah started moving in the direction from which she had last sensed Sir Didymus' presence. Her headache was now only a dull twinge, and Sarah let the tiny sliver of Labyrinthine awareness lead her, not exerting herself by seeking the connection. It took some time, a series of dead ends and detours which involved retracing her steps to make up lost ground, before she found the right path.
Once she arrived it seemed that she had not actually left the maze, simply found a resting area within it, filled with dilapidated structures and wandering pathways. The grove was oddly quiet, the buildings eerily shadowed and uninviting. Some were no more than splintered frames; all of them had likely once been very grand. Fragments of rich mahogany furniture remained in the spectral configurations, vast balustrades, even the remains of a piano. Some buildings were more robust; either the materials they were made up of had weathered better, or they had not suffered the same onslaught as their companions.
The pull was emanating from one of these, and pain; but the pain and the darkness were everywhere. Sarah wondered at it, the Goblin King's suffering, what could have brought it about? His defeat at her hands was one thing, even his disgrace and the cost he had born from it, but the grief of the Labyrinth was something bigger than this, some dark history she had no knowledge of. She pondered what it might be, something that had happened since she last ran the Labyrinth? Or was it something which had always been apparent? Unnoticed by her young, conceited self; a sorrow she had built upon.
Nervously she approached the house in question, ducking through the smashed-in doorway and coughing as she disturbed grains and wood and dirt alike. She could hear the painful creaking of the wooden beams above and feared that it might cave in at any moment, trapping her. Tentatively, she followed the compulsive pull of a familiar presence through what might have once been a hallway into remains of someone's bedchamber. A large, four poster bed stood dusty in the centre of the room: 'princess beds,' Sarah had always called them. In the corner was a large, free standing mirror, covered by a dustsheet. The sheet was heavy from its intended purpose, and as if on cue, slid from the mirror as Sarah beheld it.
The woman staring back at her from the reflective glass was beautiful, but she was not Sarah.
She was tall and lithe, with dark, doe eyes that did not smile as her lips curved. As her full pout parted, revealing rows of white, perfect teeth, Sarah moved towards the mirror, entranced. Dark, glossy hair tumbled over the woman's sculpted shoulders and framed her face, her skin alabaster and almost translucent. She wore a black evening dress with a modern cut, daringly scalloped about the waist and covered with sheer black gossamer. A fur stole about her shoulders brought even more volume to her hair, which cascaded prettily and was lost in the dark of the dress. She beckoned.
"Sarah," she whispered, and a thrill ran up Sarah's spine at the melody in her voice.
"Hello," she coughed, as a cloud of dust clogged in her throat.
"Oh, Sarah dearest; whatever are you doing here?"
"I'm looking for some children," explained Sarah, feeling slightly confused. "No, wait, I was looking for a friend."
"I'm your friend, Sarah," said the woman.
"Are you?" asked Sarah hopefully. That might be nice; she couldn't find any of her friends after all. She felt a little bit… odd. Perhaps she had breathed in too much of this dust?
"Of course I am! I'm here to help you. Now tell me why you've come."
"Well," started Sarah, "it's rather a long story, but the gist of it is due to some mistakes I made, the Goblin King has taken some wished away children, and I'm here to find them."
"Oh no," sighed the woman in the mirror. "I think you have it all wrong, there are definitely no children here."
Sarah frowned. "Yes there are, they were wished away, I'm partly to blame so I need to rescue them."
"Dear, dear, this all sounds terribly harrowing for you. It would be much easier for you if you would just forget all about it," cooed the woman.
"Be that as it may," spat Sarah, suddenly starting to feel more lucid and rather angry. "I'm going to continue looking for them until I find them."
For the first time, Sarah noticed an obvious slash of colour through the sheer fabric of the woman's dress: a scar? Noticing Sarah's inquisitive gaze, the flawed beauty pulled one end of her fox fur stole lower, hiding the evidence.
"No, no, it won't do at all. I really must insist that you forget all about the children," smiled the woman.
Sarah suffered a coughing fit as another puff of ancient dust entered her lungs. She glanced up at the mirror woman, wiping tears from her eyes.
"I'm sorry, what were you saying?" Sarah asked.
"I was asking you why you were here, sweetling," said the woman.
"Oh," replied Sarah, who had just been wondering the same thing. She felt muddled and distracted; something about the woman's fox fur stole was bothering her, did it only have one glass eye?
"I think," began Sarah, hesitantly, "I think I'm here to find my friends?"
"I'm your friend, dear," said the woman.
"Yes," agreed Sarah, licking her lips. "I mean my other friends."
"Which friends might those be?"
"Well… there's this one," said Sarah, eyeing the fur stole, "who's a fox."
"How interesting," simpered the woman, obviously disinterested.
"He's a knight and he wears an eye patch; he only has one eye you see." Sarah could definitely only make out one eye glinting back in the mirror from the fox fur stole. Where might the other one be?
"It all seems rather trying," sympathised the woman. "Perhaps you should forget all about it?"
"No, I -"
Sarah was overtaken by another powerful coughing fit. It seemed to be very dusty in this room; she could now see the fine white particles in the air It probably wasn't very good for her health, why had she come in here anyway?
"What am I doing here?" she asked.
"That's exactly what I was just wondering," smiled a woman in the mirror before her.
"Hello, who are you?" asked Sarah.
"I'm your friend," said the woman.
Well, that was nice, maybe this woman could help her remember why she had come in here, where was she anyway?
"Where are we?"
"Oh," smiled the woman sweetly, "this is the Labyrinth."
"Ah," replied Sarah, "I ran a Labyrinth once."
"That must have been very hard work," sighed the woman.
"Yes," agreed Sarah, "but I was looking for something."
"Really, what were you looking for?"
"I was looking for… it was… was it a name, no, a person?"
"Who were you looking for sweetling?"
Sarah's mind felt disordered. She was looking for her brother, or, had she already done that? Wasn't she looking for something new now? Someone had told her that person's name, hadn't they?
"It started with a J," Sarah said.
The woman nodded encouragingly. Sarah tasted the letters with her mouth.
"J… Ja…-"
The mirror in front of Sarah shattered into thousands of pieces, she screamed. The explosion of glass was so loud it felt like her ears shattered with it, as she slammed her hands down over her ears. When it was over, she lifted tentative fingers to wipe them, half expecting blood.
The Goblin King towered over her in full fury, shards had fallen to either side of him, but Sarah had been protected from the glass by the cover of his body. Slowly, her mind was pieced back together, almost as fragmented as the broken mirror surrounding them. With a sob, she flung herself towards the glass remains, but as her fingers brushed them, they disappeared beneath her touch.
"SARAH!"
It was a command.
"I pluck you from one danger and you dive head first into the next? Would you sooner cut your wrists than look at me?"
She did look then. He was angry, furious. She had almost remembered his name.
The recollection was gone again now, she started to cry.
"Sir Didymus, he was in the mirror and now he's all smashed. Just because I remembered your name, you monster! And you won't even let me put him back together!" she screamed.
The Goblin King sighed, and it was as if all of his anger left with that lusty exhale. He squatted in front of Sarah and searched her expression.
"You were not about to remember my name, you were about to forget me. How can you win a game when you can no longer remember that you were playing one? You're losing memories faster than a woman with Alzheimer's, can't you feel yourself being stripped away? It's unforgiveable Sarah, the one thing I will not allow is your unknowing submission. What good are you as a prize when you do not even know you have become one? All we are made up of is our experiences; once you're hollowed out you're nothing. And since you will be mine, I'll have you with all that fire and pluck; if anyone is going to take it away, it'll be me. I'm not going to let that vulture of a reflection steal away what makes you who you are." Seeing he had Sarah's attention from her somewhat dumbfounded expression, he twisted his wrist, and a shard of glass appeared in his gloved hand. "This is glass, nothing more. The silver backing shows you a reflection, but the reflection does not reside within. Have you not broken a mirror before? Did you cease to be reflected once this had occurred?"
Sarah blinked. A reflection, one she had even seen elsewhere, of course it did not belong to this specific mirror.
"Sir Didymus is okay?" she asked. She felt like a child, looking for reassurance… what an odd confidant she had chosen.
"I'd hardly say his situation is ideal, but he hasn't broken into thousands of pieces, if that's what you're worried about."
"Oh, thank goodness!" was Sarah's choked cry, as she buried her face against the Goblin King's neck. Or would have, were it not for his high necked collar; the comfort of the fabric was not what she longed for.
"It's so terrible, "she gasped, "it's all so dark, my friends… what has made everything this way?" Sarah realised that the Goblin King had gone very still; when she looked up she could a perplexed expression on his perfectly sculpted features. "Sorry," she mumbled, pulling away. What a foolish moment of weakness. "What was that thing in the mirror anyway?"
"A fuath," he answered, his mocking smile returning. "You knew her as Cindy though."
"Cindy!" Sarah breathed. "You brought her here, to the Labyrinth?"
"I thought she would make an excellent junk lady, apparently I was wrong. It was not material possession and greed she was driven by, but memory, and now memory is what she feeds on."
Something the Goblin King said rang in her mind. He believed she was swayed by wealth, and yet she herself had conquered over it when visited by a junk lady during her first run in the Labyrinth. Even with this proof before him he had still been convinced she would turn to Carl out of greed, it didn't make sense. She looked up wistfully at the Goblin King, no less a mystery for all her study.
"All I ever see of you is this outward veneer," she sighed, reaching out to stroke the curve of his sarcastic lips.
For a moment he met her eyes, and his look was nearly painful.
"Won't you take me to the children in the Labyrinth?" she asked.
He leant back from her hand then, relaxing into a seated position. Running a hand across his face, he smiled coldly. "I can't."
Sarah nodded, she had already known his reply, but that didn't make it any less disappointing.
He sighed again loudly, his gloved hand still hiding his face.
"Sarah, let us make a compromise."
Sarah sat up in shock. Did he know how to compromise, was he even capable? Seeing her look of disbelief, a flicker of irritation crossed his features, chased away by his usual uniform indifference.
"I do not want you to continue flinging yourself headlong into danger. Since you are my prize it is not in my best interests to have you smashed into pieces by your own force of will. And you have made no progress whatsoever, your friends are lost to you, and although you cannot see it from in here, outside the sun is setting on your second day."
Sarah felt sick at that. One day left and she was no closer to a name or the children than she had been when she had started.
"What I propose," he started, "is that we both get a little bit of something we want. I will get you, but not exactly as I had envisioned, and you will get whatever it is you want, but in fiction rather than reality."
Sarah frowned. "What do you mean?"
The Goblin King regarded her carefully, and then with a flick of his wrist, a glass sphere appeared in his hand.
"Your dreams Sarah… do you remember? I will offer them to you again; you can have your dreams, whatever it is you want. But they will keep you here, with me."
Sarah snorted. She remembered this game well enough. So now she could rescue children in her mind, her body a prisoner to the Labyrinth. He saw the scathing remark she had prepared before she could even voice it.
"Stop! You are so quick Sarah, always so quick. You never stop to think. Look properly at what I am offering you now, think about your situation. Indentured servitude, your mind and body, mine forever. Or your dreams - are they really so repugnant to you?"
The crystal ball danced across the back of his fingers enticingly.
"Let me put in another way Sarah," he said, leaning forward. His lips were so close to her cheek she could feel the warmth of his question. "What is my name?"
Sarah felt her stomach do a sickening somersault.
His name, she had thought she would do better today, but what did she have? A beginning…she had a beginning.
"James?" she asked.
The Goblin King smirked. "No."
"Janus, Javier, Jarvis, Jason, Jasper, Jacob, Jay, Jayden?"
"Psssh, no. Some of those don't even sound like real names. Are you sure you're not just making them up?"
"Is your name is a real name then?" yelled Sarah, frustrated.
"Now that would be telling. Really Sarah, you don't seem to be much closer to finding my name at all."
"I know! Don't you think I know that?" she shouted. "There's no need to rub it in and be a complete asshole about it."
"I find there's rarely ever any reason to be an asshole," replied the Goblin King. "It's kind of its own reward."
Sarah tried to calm down. He was just winding her up to make her lose focus.
"Jake?" she asked.
"You've guessed that one already," he sighed.
"…Jared?"
The Goblin King smiled. "Why don't you just give up?"
Again he danced the glass sphere across his fingers, and as Sarah watched herself reflected within she was surprised by what she saw there.
It was no dream of saving children, of being loved by a Goblin King, or even having her family whole and normal again. It was a dream of understanding.
The thing she wanted most in her heart was to understand the Goblin King. His pain, the reason for the darkness in the Labyrinth. This was a window to the past, all that had come before, all that had made him who he was now. Rather than rescuing the children, she wanted to understand why he would bring them here. Rather than her normal life at home, she wanted to know if she could ever fathom this remarkable creature, because things would never be normal now that she had given him her heart. The crystal ball was an answer to her heart's desire, and now that she knew what it was it could never be denied. It was only through this understanding that she could ever truly beat the Goblin King.
As she looked back up into his eyes, she realised that he knew none of this. It was not only her remaining senses that were hidden from him, her mind and her dreams were too. He had absolutely no idea what it was he was offering her; it was just a glass bauble full of smoke and mirrors to him.
The way forward is sometimes the way back.
Perhaps this was the answer, held the answers. If she dared to take it, if she had the courage to believe she could bring herself back again from a dream, as she had once before…
She smiled, and reached out to take her dreams from him.
She watched the perfect 'o' of his mouth, as his face contorted with shock. Not for a minute had he expected she might accept them.
She remembered his name… and forgot everything.
Alright, five more reviews till the big '100', I'm excited! How should I celebrate? I think I should reward all of you who have stuck it out since those awkward first chapters, who review and encourage constantly and have favourited and followed.
I love you all, you are the people who keep me awake at night, anxious that I'm late to update knowing you're all out there, WAITING... creepiness aside you all make the effort worthwhile, but I can only really reward you with more chapters - I hope that's okay?
Obsessive360:Would I kill off an integral character? no wait, don't answer that... Seriously I don't think I could keep Jareth out of these chapters if I wanted to, if it wasn't completely ridiculous to put him in every chapter I think I would. It's like he's leaning over the keyboard egging me on, and I love it! I'm sure you'll be happy to see he's back ;)
Smiles1998: Awww thanks for your glowing comment, I keep plugging away so that new readers can just take a nice big bite out of all those chapters. I'm glad you like my Sarah and Jareth and think they're true to canon, I'm certainly trying to be true to them!