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Each glance Sarah takes in the mirror, she looks older, she’s sure of it.
Too soon, she’s going to college, and that’s something for grown-ups, right? Starting off the next four years in art school isn’t something somebody who still reads fairy stories does.
She leans in close to the vanity mirror late at night, pushing her dark hair back from her forehead, convinced she’ll find strands of silver starting at the roots. None yet. Or maybe the light is too dim to tell.
Eighteen—she might as well be a hag! An old maid!
It isn’t that she doesn’t want to grow up, it’s just…
Oh, alright, so she doesn’t want to grow up. But only because it would mean leaving everything behind. The fairytales, the sweet dreams, the magic…
Sarah huffs and stands up straight again, letting her hair fall back down normally. She leans back against the vanity, staring out into her childhood bedroom, the same as always. The stuffed animals, the trinkets, the costumes, the bits and baubles. The last time she had seen any of the goblins, she had been sixteen. The world has been quiet since then.
She defeated the Goblin King… for this?
She wanders to her bed, where on the headboard, a crown rests on one of the posts. It’s made of shiny, plastic gold, affixed with glimmering, plastic diamonds. Fine 99-cent store lace adorns the edges. Sarah picks it up, long ribbons of pale pink and dark red trailing from it. She blows off the dust.
Really, she was supposed to start packing days ago.
But she can’t help but feel that rather than moving out, she’s packing away the fairytales. She can feel the past slipping away from her. The memories growing foggier, everything less certain. The vivid details become lost in the haze of time.
I have reordered time. I have turned the world upside down. And I have done it all for you.
She does not want to remember him.
The Goblin King—no, she won’t think his name—who stole her brother and made her go through fucking literal hell to get him back, and for what?! For her, he had said. What a load of garbage. It doesn’t matter now; it’s over.
But she’s always wondered.
Why her?
Sarah crosses her room again, back to the vanity, to the mirror that tells the grotesque truth. She is just Sarah, now. Not the girl from the fairytale. She is just Sarah, and she will never know why the Goblin King once chose her.
She puts the plastic crown on her head, the white lace resting against her hair. The rosy ribbons streaming.
Sometimes she wonders if any of it had been real.
Maybe she had just fallen asleep that night she babysat Toby.
She tilts her head, meeting her eyes in the mirror, glinting in the low light of the vanity lamp. In her blue dress, she almost looks like a fairy queen, indeed. Beautiful, wise, magical. Not some flighty princess. Not a girl wandering around lost.
Oh, how ridiculous!
Sarah tears the crown from her head, casting it onto the cluttered vanity with everything else. Lipsticks, rouge, perfumes. They rattle in protest, but she doesn’t listen. She won’t put it back on.
“No more fairy stories,” she says quietly. A spell, a promise.
She turns out the light.
In the morning, she starts packing.
It isn’t that she’s going to take all of her earthly possessions with her to school, but for all intents and purposes, she’s moving out, and her parents want her room empty of anything that can’t be converted into a guest room. Sarah packs away anything that wouldn’t look at home in a Holiday Inn.
Which is to say, everything but the bed. Even the vanity is on thin ice, an antique from her great-grandmother, not that anybody in this house gives a shit but her. They’ll probably throw it out.
Tucking her dolls together, she can’t help but start to feel bad for them, telling them ‘sorry’ and ‘it’s not forever, no matter what anybody else tells you’ and things like that as she nestles them on top of one another in a cardboard box.
But before it’s even noon, she can’t take it anymore.
She goes downstairs, dodging her parents—easily done, when they don’t even give her the time of day. She shrugs on her coat, long and beige, and heads out into the late summer morning.
There’s still fog lingering around, and the air is crisp with the lingering chill of night. The waking sun is shining through the trees—the fog will dissipate by the end of the hour, she’d bet.
Sarah starts walking, not sure entirely where she’s going. She just knows that she has to go, to get out of that depressing room where all she can think about is goblins and fairy magic and how she’s leaving it all behind, for certain, like sealing a tomb.
She had hoped the fresh air would clear her head.
When she reaches the meadow, she only feels dizzier.
She sits down in the dewy grass with a certain kind of determination. She is going to relax. She is going to enjoy herself, and feel calm, and peaceful, and not worry about any of this. It’s ridiculous, really, to have gotten so worked up.
She misses the goblins. But… what if they weren’t even real?
Sarah sighs, hugging her knees to her chest and gazing past the long grasses into the woods. The fog moves slowly around the trees.
The whole labyrinth thing was probably a dream. That’s just the reality she’s been denying for years. And now she’s older, and she knows how delusional she’s been to ever think there was some kind of truth to it. Of course, none of it was real. Of course, she had fallen asleep through the sounds of Toby’s annoying crying and dreamed it all. Toby, whisked blissfully away. Befriending goblins, dueling their king, becoming the heroine she had always imagined herself to be.
Owl wings. Everything glittering. A setting sun.
A hand reaching toward her.
Wolfish eyes meeting hers.
Sarah groans, tucking her head against her knees. This meadow is deserted, at least—there’s no one to witness her suffering at the hand of a bout of insanity. Though they probably wouldn’t be surprised. Sarah’s basically the town lunatic, after all, the strange daughter of the Williams household, with fairy dust in her dusk-dark hair and wilderness in her woodland eyes.
She’s excited about art school, really she is. But she can’t help but feel, a little, as if she’s being shipped off to an insane asylum. Packed away in a box, thrown out with the trash, tossed somewhere no one will have to really look at her anymore or think too much about her.
Something lands on her head—a bug? God damn it. She shakes her hair to get rid of it, but keeps her face tucked into her knees, wishing she could simply dissolve into the meadow. To sink into the grass and wildflowers. To become them.
That’s where she belongs, isn’t it? Somewhere wild.
That stupid bug lands on her hair again. Ugh! She lifts her head and shakes her hair with more feeling this time, something white drifting lightly by her face. A moth?
No—a feather.
The white feather falls onto the ground in front of her, beside one that has, apparently, already done the same. But…?
Sarah looks up, only to find the air is full of feathers. Falling down, down, down, all around her, scattering, blowing on the slow breeze like petals. Her pulse picks up, brow furrowing in confusion. This can’t… be…
Her thoughts scatter into fragments:
Wings. Staircases. Adrenaline.
Fear me, love me, do as I say, and I will be your slave.
Dark midnight. Blond hair. Blood pumping.
“It can’t be,” she hears herself whisper, the sound from somewhere beyond her body, beyond this dull world.
She turns her gaze upon the yawning woods.
The breath wanders from her lungs with nowhere left to go. He is a glowing shape coming closer. A creature. A beast. A devil.
But hers.
Hers, hers, hers, he has always been hers, and he comes for her now, dressed in black, red roses in his phantom-white hair. He comes from the tall trees. He strides through the mist, through the grasses of the meadow, coming up the hill toward where she sits. His cape skims the grass. Glittering roses bloom under every step he takes, leaving a dark red trail from the woods. It’s like blood. It’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen.
Real, real, real.
The Goblin King stops a pace away from her, and he is real. He regards her with his wolf eyes. How did she ever think him imaginary?
“You tried to forget me,” he says. His voice sounds like mist and so many silver bells.
She gapes at him, stupid and speechless and managing only to shake her head.
He lifts his chin. “I’m hurt.”
“I—I didn’t—”
“Did you try to hate me, too?”
Sarah finds her voice. Remembers. “I do hate you,” she says. She frowns, and begins to get to her feet. “You—”
“Sit down, ” he says, breaking his gaze from her at last to roll his eyes.
She frowns harder and sits back down. “You put me through hell.” Sets her jaw. “You’re going to tell me why.”
“I am?”
“You are,” she commands. “Sit down.”
The Goblin King sits in the grass with her. Roses bloom between them, shimmering like diamonds.
“I took your little brat to get it away from you. Just as you asked,” he says. An old argument.
“Why else did you do it?”
“To get to you.”
She didn’t expect him to admit it so easily. And really, she wasn’t ready to admit it to herself, either, though she knew it to be true.
“You’ve always been afraid of me,” she says, not letting his admission shake her. “Because you have no power over me, and I have power over you.”
“Will you use it?”
“Do you plan on stealing any more babies?”
He shrugs lightly, a carefree motion, his winter eyes wandering. “I make no promises. It worked well the first time.”
“Why do I have this… power?” she asks, and she feels almost embarrassed at the earnestness in the question. But she’s been waiting for two years to get these answers. “Why me? If I’m the heroine and you’re the wicked king, then you should’ve stayed as far away from me as possible to save your own skin. No offense, but your goblin city kind of sucks, your palace is in shambles, and you’re the only human being in your entire realm. If you’re even human.”
She swears she sees him smile.
“I’m pretty sure you spend 364 days of the year as a bird, but hey, whatever makes you happy,” she continues. “I defeated you. I humiliated you. I left you to rot.”
“So the hero returns home, irreparably altered by the journey.”
“If you think for one second I’ve missed you—”
“I need your help, Sarah.”
“You cower before me!”
“I love you.”
Well, obviously! She scowls at the man—?—sitting before her, looking so out of place in his black cape, like a shadow. He’s utterly inhuman. He doesn’t belong in this world.
Neither does she.
“Fear and love aren’t the same thing,” she says, not unsteadily.
“No,” agrees the Goblin King, tilting his head in consideration. “But I’m managing both somehow. Isn’t it commendable?”
For a long moment, Sarah stares at him, hesitating. He wants something from her. Her help, whatever that means. Probably something to do with his crumbling realm and dusty castle. Maybe he wants to enlist her to help remove the cobwebs.
How did he become the king of the goblins, anyway? She didn’t run into anyone else human during her trials in the labyrinth. Only him. And maybe it’s all some kind of glamor, and he’s really a goblin underneath the smooth skin and flaxen locks.
“What do you want from me?” Sarah asks him, wanting a straightforward answer.
“Marry me, Sarah,” he implores her, like it’s nothing.
Her eyes go wide—she can’t help it. She wasn’t expecting that. It was one thing to hear him admit he loves her… That was pretty obvious. But this…? He wants something, and it’s not just holy matrimony for the sake of it.
“Be my queen,” he says.
“No, I will not,” Sarah tells him.
To his credit, he actually looks surprised at that, if not kind of hurt. A brief flicker of vulnerability passes over his vulpine features.
She swallows thickly. “W-where I’m from,” she says, attempting to school herself, “most people like… go on dates first. For like, a long time. They don’t just—throw the other in a deadly labyrinth and then disappear for two straight years.”
He pulls something out from the shadowy depths of his cape, and she shouldn’t be surprised to see that it’s a crown. So much like the plastic one from her bedroom.
But she has a feeling this one isn’t from the 99-cent store. This one is actually made of gold, glittering with real diamonds. The ribbons that trail are pink and red carnations.
“I made this for you,” he says.
“Thoughtful,” she replies, winded.
“Wear it.” He offers it to her. “Come with me. Be my bride. Live with me forever, walk the centuries as an immortal. Rule by my side.”
Sarah takes the Goblin King’s crown. She holds it in both hands, gazing down at it, imagining a life like he suggests. But there’s more to it than he’s telling her. And as much as he loves her, she knows a trick from the Goblin King when she hears one. This isn’t her first time dealing with him.
He’s desperate. Trying not to let it show. But will she help him…?
Not like this, she won’t. And not when she still… feels… some attachment to her human life, regardless of everything. Maybe she is the hero that returns to find home now so empty, but she can’t just disappear, though she doubts her family would even notice if she never came home again.
Sarah places the crown on Jareth’s head.
The carnations lay over his hair. He looks like he was born of the woods.
“Not yet,” she says, which isn’t a promise. But it isn’t not a promise.
Despite herself, her fingers trail over his cheek, a part of her simply marveling that he’s real and solid. She touches his chin, lifts it.
“But…” she says, standing. “I think I could spare some time to come help with the cobwebs.”