From: "alorindanya" <[email protected]>
Date: Sat Aug 3, 2002 2:32 am
Subject: "Linda's Wish" chapter 3


Author's note: I HATE THIS CHAPTER. Now that is said, it was very
difficult for me to develop a coherent history for the Labyrinth and
the Underground as a whole…and creating Jareth's personal history is
just ARG!!! "But that's the way it is" with prequals, I guess. If
interested in sequels by me, please read "The Thief, the King, and
the Son" and the soon to be released "A Change of Magic." Blessings
and Thanks bunches.

Please let me know what you think of this chapter—if it totally needs
to be cut or if it does make sense; especially since this is the
history I use for my sequels also.


"Linda's Wish" by Alorin Danya

Chapter 3/? All That Duty Requires

Jareth, the King of the Goblins, returned to his throne room, furious
with this Williams woman. He shouldn't even allow her to try to reach
her daughter; she obviously didn't deserve her and didn't want her.
Yet she had chosen to try and save her. So be it. She'd probably give
up anyway, then he'd have another creature in his minions.

No matter how many times he had taken a child into his kingdom, he
had to remind himself there was always the possibility of them being
won back. More often than not, he desired for them to return to
their earthly lives, but that is not what the Labyrinth was for. And
it was the Labyrinth, not himself, who decided who should stay and
who could go.

The Labyrinth had chosen to allow this pompous woman to retrieve her
child. It baffled Jareth. The child would certainly have a better
life as a goblin; even a life as a slave would be better than living
with a mother who was so unloving. But he was a servant to the
Labyrinth and so continued his duty. Jareth rolled his eyes at
thinking of his other responsibility. Not only must he monitor the
progress of those who traverse his Labyrinth, but he also had to ease
the minds of the other Fae and assure them the humans would not
travel beyond the boundaries of the maze.

He threw himself down on his throne and brought his gloved hand to
his nose, rubbing the top of it as he tried to drown the noise of the
goblins out of his head. He wasn't prepared yet with what to say to
the Empress of the Underground. Every time he spoke with the
insufferable woman she would say something that would drive him
insane, but he could not say anything against one who had power even
over him. Hopefully he would be able to tell her the humans would be
gone in 13 hours and she would just accept it; but he knew that would
never happen.

Jareth reclined on his throne and he stopped for a moment to conjure
a crystal, rolling it between his fingers, deep in thought. The
Goblin King sat up suddenly and looked into crystal within his gloved
hands. He yelled for the goblins to shut up before using the crystal
to call upon Empress Malora. It was a moment before she responded,
her regal image appearing within the crystal's depths.

"My lady, another human fool has entered my kingdom to retrieve her
wished away child."

"Prompt, as always, Jareth. It's been quite some time since one was
actually wished to you." The woman's voice was soft and motherly,
though the glint in her eye was far from it. The smile Malora had
held at her greeting suddenly faded as she changed subjects, "It just
proves the books are still in use. Are these humans a threat?"

Jareth grinned at her forwardness but suppressed a laugh. To laugh at
the Empress of the Underground for merely wanting to protect her
realm would be out of line. She didn't know humans as well as he did
and wouldn't understand that their race did not care for magic as
much as believed.

"No, my lady. The mother is too set with her life on Earth to care
about our world, and the child is too young to harm us. She'll be a
goblin soon enough."

"I trust you will make sure that happens...unless you believe the
mother will retrieve the child."

Jareth laughed out loud at this, "I highly doubt that will happen,
your majesty."

Malora looked at him inquisitively, "Do you believe the child could
be of service to us? It's been a while since we've had new a human
slave, and King Troy has been asking..."

"No, Malora." Jareth snapped in anger, "I will never give a girl to
him again with what he does to them. Yes, slaves are slaves, but he
goes too far."

Fury flowed out of the Empress's eyes, "Are you suggesting humans be
treated as equals?"

"No, but such abuse..."

"Is what their kind deserves!" Malora yelled but then regained her
composure, "You know their history in our world and all they have
done. They killed the seven queens."

"Five." Jareth corrected her.

Malora smirked at him for the interruption. "That's right, your
mother wasn't alive at that time, and your kingdom not created.
Pointless details. We must break the humans or they will overrun us,
rule us. They are not worthy of being over us, they don't even have
natural magic. You see what magic makes them--goblins. Putrid,
disgusting creatures. Does one human form out shine the other? Are
they not the same creature? Do they not have the same soul?"

"Yes." Jareth did not feel like arguing with her. She had many valid
points, but much she was wrong about.

"I do agree that at times Troy has been wrong in his...methods, but
as you said, slaves are slaves. Slaves can be controlled, free
humans, if they find magic, cannot...We cannot allow the humans to
destroy us again."

"I know."

Jareth had been raised on the evils of humanity, how the human race
came to the Underground before the Labyrinth was created around the
gate between the two worlds. With nothing to stop humans from
entering the Fae world, they spread throughout the kingdoms
undetected and mated with the Fae. But the children of such unions
had unpredictable magic...that is how the Fae discovered what humans
were. Humans looked the same as Fae, but they held no magic.

The Fae rulers had no idea how many humans had entered their land,
but they knew they had to be stopped; the magic needed to be purified
again. The kings, in their frustration, believed the humans were
intentionally polluting their bloodlines. They didn't go as far as
kill the humans, they just didn't want there being any more.

So the humans were placed into containment until the rulers could
figure out what to do with them. The humans certainly couldn't be
allowed to roam free, to contaminate the magic further. Yet they
couldn't be sent back through the gate...no one knew how to open it
up to the human world without someone from the other side willing it,
but since the humans who entered were the unwanted and forgotten, no
one from Earth would try to open it.

The kings quickly found a use for them. Why waste magic on trifle
things such as cooking and cleaning when the humans could do it for
them? But the humans didn't like being slaves; who would want to when
you never aged past your prime and never died from disease? It would
be an eternity of torment.

One human, Rourke, had come to the Underground as an older man, with
years of experience on Earth at a time when humans practiced magic
through minerals and herbs and believed in godlike spirits. Such
magic and faith the Fae could not fight and many Fae were killed,
including all the Fae queens, before the leader of the human
rebellion was finally assonated, making the knowledge of such earthly
magic forgotten.

To insure such knowledge was never brought over from the human world
again, the kings tried to close the gateway between the two worlds,
but it could not be done. The gateway was older than time with a
natural magic so strong, all the Fae alive combined could not destroy
it.

It was known that the power the gate held was powerful enough to
destroy the humans--not so much as to kill their kind, but enough to
no longer leave them a threat to the Fae. If the humans stayed near
the gate for longer than half a day, they would mutate into small,
wrinkly creatures, goblins, and lost all abilities of comprehendible
human thought. This is exactly what the Fae wanted; for no more
humans to spread into the Underground.

With those humans already enslaved, they searched for the boundaries
of the gate's magic; but when a goblin was created, they were
captured and kept with the humans. Once mapped, the kings debated
with the best course of action. Merely putting up a wall would not be
enough to stop anyone from finding a way over. They came up with an
ingenious idea to put up obstacles to keep the humans within the
boundaries as long as possible. So a great maze was built, and a
fortress was erected around the gate itself, to hold an army if
needed to prevent a human evasion. But it was difficult to appoint a
ruler over this land. No one had enough courage to face those humans
not already broken into slavery. It didn't matter anyway. The magic
didn't want to be ruled.

The Fae never realized the magic of the gate had a soul and could
think for itself. But they found out soon enough that they hadn't
even fathomed how far the gate's power could extend into the
Underground and how powerless they were against it. Now, with the
magic being one with the Labyrinth, the Fae could see that the
gateway wasn't stable; yes, it had a definite center that never
wavered, but the magic itself ebbed and flowed like the sea or arms
of magic could stretch out like the pseudo limbs of an amoeba. It
went wherever it wanted to go, destroying what ever it came into
contact with if it got in the way; but it did have it's limits.
Once the kings were absolutely certain the Labyrinth had touched
every piece of the Underground it could reach, they made strict
orders for no one to inhabit such areas, for they never knew when the
Labyrinth would come or go.

So, with the creation of the maze backfiring on them, the Fae kings
did the only thing they could; they stayed away and set up watch on
the boundaries edges—their only means of defense at keeping humans
from entering the Underground if they ever did escape the Labyrinth.
But they needn't have worried.

The only humans the Labyrinth had ever allowed into the Underground
were those unwanted or unloved by either themselves or their kin. The
gate saw itself as their redeemer and protector and allowed them into
the Underground to find a better life than could be found on Earth.
The gate knew of the human's suffering at the hands of the Fae but
also knew of the human rebellion and the murder of the queens.

It made a choice, to separate the two worlds completely until it
deemed both sides able to be accepting of the other. The gate fused
itself with the maze covering it, became one with the labyrinth, and
did not allow one Fae to enter its walls nor one human to escape it--
unless it deemed them worthy enough to do so.

Jareth had been one of exception in the Labyrinth's eye. He wasn't
Fae and he wasn't human, but he had been unwanted by his murderous
step-mother. Jareth was a young prince when his father died, and
with him being the oldest son, it should have naturally been
expected for him to have inherited his father's kingdom. But, oh
no Jareth discovered his mother, the woman he'd loved for all his
years, was not his real mother at all and she disowned him, telling
him he was borne of a half human who had died when he was a small boy
trying to give his father another child. Only with this cruel
reminder did Jareth remember there had been another mother in his
life. His step mother could have cared less if he held more magic in
him than her own flesh and blood son ever would. When she tried to
sell him as a normal human slave, he ran as far away from her as he
could, he found himself in the Labyrinth—a land no Fae had entered
since its creation.

But in the Labyrinth the unwanted were protected and took pity on
them, as it did Jareth. Jareth learned to survive and live in the
wilderness of the maze before he ever discovered the Labyrinth
listened to him and would do his bidding if he only asked. Over
years, over decades, Jareth created a civilization for the goblins,
merely from the observation that they lived quite civilly on their
own, they just had no organization to it. He did so with no thought
of ruling them all; that only came once the outside kingdoms saw a
change in the Labyrinth. It has stopped spreading, and they wanted
Jareth to keep it that way.

Jareth was convinced over time that he needed to not only keep the
humans who wandered through the gateway inside the Labyrinth, he
needed to control the Labyrinth/gateway personally; make its will
his. One might ask why the rulers didn't do so themselves when the
Labyrinth was first created, and the answer is a sadly simple one; no
one was brave enough or willing enough to sacrifice their magic
incase something went wrong. But Jareth had nothing to loose, so
they told him what spells he needed to do and once they were
complete, the Labyrinth was his slave.

"Then if you know," Malora stated, "I expect you'll make sure neither
of them remain as they are. If both leave, so be it, but if one
remains, make sure she is a goblin before the day is thru or give her
as a slave."

Jareth bowed his head to the Empress out of courtesy before he
dissolved the crystal.