I do not own Sarah, Jareth, or any other characters from Labryinth. The rest are mine. The poem quoted at the beginning of some chapters is from T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets."

- Cailleach Oidhche

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Prologue

Sarah was gazing at a sky...but not the blue sky she had seen her whole life, no, this sky was a dusty red: the sky of a different world. She was standing on that hill once more, and ahead were the high stone walls that bordered the labyrinth. The labyrinth... It was longing that pulled her forwards to the gates, made her walk forward...the gates were there...she couldn't resist, she...

...snapped back to consciousness.

The pilot's voice was making a loud incoherent announcement to the passengers on the plane. It was always impossible to tell what they were saying, and the thick Irish accent just made it harder. Very few people listened anyway. The packing up going on around her told her what she needed to know: it was close to landing time. She sighed and shifted the grey blanket covering her aside. It had been a long flight and she was anxious to be on the ground again, free of the droning that had been a constant noise in her head for the past six hours. She was weary, her conflicted internal clock was telling her it was time to be asleep but her mind was completely unable to relax. During the flight she had been unable to achieve anything resembling a restful sleep. She stretched her limbs as far as she could in the narrow seat gratefully and looked eagerly out the window, wondering if they were low enough yet to see the ground. Unfortunately the plane was tilted slightly and all she could see was the early morning sky, then it tilted even further with a nauseating movement. She closed her eyes and her tired mind recalled images from her dream.

She had been having these dreams for six years now. The strange thing was that they seemed to be getting stronger as time went on, not weaker in the manner of most childhood fantasies. When she woke she could sill hear the echoes of voices in her head, still smell the deep earthy smell of the moss and the tress, and those eyes lingered, blazing into her waking mind: those strange mismatched eyes. More than just that, though, details became clearer as new areas of the labyrinth were discovered in the dreams, and other parts, as will happen in the passage of time, were forgotten. The faces of old friends faded and she couldn't understand why.

Six years ago she had been so certain that her strange adventure had truly happened, that she had faced many dangers and fear in order to save her brother, and along the way had made wonderful friends who helped her solve the labyrinth and promised that they would come to her whenever she called.

Only they never came. They came to her just once, right after she had faced the king and returned home with her brother, only then but never after. She was confused and tried for a long time to call them, calling in different ways, wondering if she had somehow got it wrong. Words were important, she had learned that, and she spoke them carefully, searching for every meaning that could be hidden. Nothing. Eventually she had only her written account of what happened, a testimony that with the passing years began to sound like nothing more than a story created and obsessed over by an adolescent mind. She had hidden it, along with her "Labyrinth" book, the thing that had inspired the whole thing and told herself to focus on the real world.

She still dreamt, and the dreams never ceased.

She rubbed her temples and sighed. She always got a little dehydrated on long flights, and now she had a massive head ache. She was looking forward to having a long drink of good cool water once she landed. She was also looking forward to stretching out and sleeping properly in a bed.

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