Glimpse of Us: Prologue (Jareth)
"The price," Jareth rasped.
The air fled from his lungs in a whoosh as he collapsed, his knees crashing to the hard stone floor. If he could have afforded any concern for his dignity, his blatant desperation would have stung his pride.
A dry chuckle skittered across the stones beneath him, sending a visceral pulse of dread along his nerves. Coming from everywhere and nowhere, the sound stirred imagery of dead leaves suffocating a forest—one spark away from devastation.
Jareth appealed again to the ostensibly empty chamber. "Name it."
The laughter abruptly stopped, and Jareth braced himself in the long silence that followed.
The reply was amused and completely unsettling—beneath the wheeze of rotting leaves, Jareth could hear squirming creatures that fed on decay.
"You know not what you ask."
It wasn't a warning. Jareth knew better than to expect benevolence.
"I do," he admitted, his head dropping in shame. He pressed a hand to his chest in an effort to relieve the pressure of grief building behind his ribs.
The chuckle returned, satisfied and cruel, before the voice finally declared the terms of their deal.
Jareth listened intently, daring to hope that he had been wrong before he nodded, unsurprised when it was exactly as he had expected.
His darkest fears had been intuition all along.
A scroll materialized inches from his fingertips. "Give me your word, Goblin King."
Jareth reached for it impulsively but hesitated, his hand hovering with indecision. He knew that with his word came the undoing of everything he had ever dreamed of—a future that had been so nearly within reach.
"You have my word," he vowed, relief and sorrow battling for dominance within him. He let his fingers close around the scroll, saving himself from one heartbreak only to seal another to fate.
A/N:Thank you, Geliot99, for beta reading! I also want to thank Bowie_Queen for reading through the initial version of this chapter.
First of all, to readers of Fade into You: I SWEAR I am not abandoning that work. I'm still all in. It's my heart and soul, but also, so is this story that has been bubbling for almost a year.
I worked on this twisty-turny fic for months before giving it a rest and writing Fade instead because this one is A LOT. As you can probably already tell, it has a very different tone than Fade does. I have many, many chapters already written and outlined, and the whole story is fully formed in my head. I'm ecstatic to share this with you. 3
Please let me know what you think!