We continued in this way for the next few days.

Time quickly grew meaningless in the labyrinth, whose denizens are unused to its ravages, unfamiliar with its merciless flaying of humanity. The goblins, whose lifetimes are indeed finite, have few worries within their city surrounded by the great maze. They are mostly ignorant to their own mortality.

Each day I tested the limits of the labyrinth: to find a turn that hid itself from me, a doorway lurking in a shadowed nook, a spot where the brambles grew almost too close together - any anomaly in its perfectly manicured puzzle. The further I ventured from the castle, the less I heard from the remnant of Toby that wailed in the dungeons beneath its spires.

Instead, I walked through sun-dappled gardens, verdant hedge mazes, past fountains and fragrant orchards. I trailed my fingertips through crystal-clear streams and walked across forest floors littered with leaves, climbed to the top of the tallest tower in the castle and looked out over the sun-dappled maze, all green and gold. It looked serene from such a vantage point while the wind tore at my hair.

And each night, I looped the chain around my neck, wrapped myself in a robe, and ascended the steps to Jareth's chambers. Each night he arched against me, accepting pain for the pleasures of the flesh without complaint, allowing me to bind his wrists and take what I needed. His gloves masked the evidence, and if he winced now and then as he accidentally brushed the blackened scar tissue against something, no one ever dared to ask why.

Occasionally and unprompted, he tells me that he loves me, which presumes that he is capable of love.

I love him the way that he loves me. We two are mirrors, empty reflections, and it means that we will never have enough of each other for we will never give enough of ourselves. We stretch for substance in each other, and we find only infinite emptiness. We are the recursion.

I tell her that I love her, and she tells me that I don't know what love is.

She tells me that she stays because I make her feel something - preferable to feeling nothing - but I can see the truth behind her eyes. When they open to me - a rare occurrence - I see the rawness of her pain laid bare, and I know that I am cause and perpetuator.

She feels because every moment she is with me, her wounds reopen.

As far as I could tell, it had been three weeks since my unceremonious and unheralded arrival here.

A white silk robe fell, rippling, to the floor. I was bare beneath it, save for the chain.

There it was: the familiar turn to his mouth as his eyes lit upon me; the knowledge that as much as he hated it, he needed it like the very air we breathed, needed it too desperately to dare to challenge me. I knelt above him, held the chain in my fingers, smoothed my fingers along its edges, drew it across and through his obedient, offered wrists, white and white and blackened, burned, bruised. This was his penance; this was my power.

The familiar surge of sick excitement in my stomach; the pulse in his throat, beating faster and faster. I leaned in, licked at it, tasted the salt of his sweat. The wisps of blond hair at his temples were damp. I pushed his hands over his head, urged him back and down and he didn't fight me, never fought me anymore, not since the beginning and even then his resistance was token, borne out of pride. His wrists touched the oaken headboard.

I was empty, hungry: my entire body became void and voracity. He offered his submission. I reached down, took hold of him, heard him hiss through sharp teeth. His bottom lip was still bruised where he had bitten through it the last time we danced these steps together. I stroked along the velvet length of him, hot and hard. The fingers of my other hand curled tightly around the chain, cinching it tightly against his skin.

He was perfectly still except for the shallow rise and fall of his chest, eyes half-lidded but still watching me intently, fixed unerringly on my face. He twitched in my hand. I wet my lips and moved forward over him, maneuvered the tip of him to nudge against my core, and then I lifted my body away from him, ran my thumb over the slick head of his cock and listened for his sigh of frustration. Arousal flooded hot between my legs. The chain rattled against the headboard, and where my knees and thighs pressed into his sides, I could feel how tightly he was strung. He was practically trembling.

"Do you want it?" I asked him, and my voice was tight. I had a tenuous grip on my own control.

His chin dipped once.

"Show me you want it, Jareth. You can do better than that."

Patches of color bloomed high in his cheeks. He lifted his hips, seeking contact.

"Your queen is unconvinced," I said, the curtain of my dark hair falling against his white chest, and then I kissed him, hard, and he met me at every turn, his teeth nipping at my lower lip, his tongue licking at the inside of my mouth. I settled against him, positioning his cock against my slit, and swallowed the low whimper he couldn't bite back at the contact.

I sank onto him, slowly, exhaling at the sensation of fullness, free hand plastered against his chest. His heart, which I might otherwise have insisted didn't exist, was beating frantically against my palm. I smiled and shifted my hips, and his chin lifted slightly away, teeth playing over his bruised lip in response. I slid forward, and then slickly back, enveloping him, daring him to vocalize. The only response I managed to elicit was the slight shift of his hips to meet mine when I rocked back against him. My hand slid up to his throat and rested there for a moment, a threat and a promise. His eyes never left mine.

I ground down against him, my free hand now curled around the top of the headboard. His skin glistened, as did mine, and I brought myself higher and higher until I was mindless with need, my entire existence contracting to the throb and drag, his muscles shifting between my thighs, the length of him meeting the depth of me. I turned my face back down to his and saw fire in his eyes, and something that might have been hope and might have been hatred, and he brought his iron-bound wrists away from where I had held them, batted my grasping fingers away, stroked at my neck tenderly as I rose and fell above him, wet and wild and frenzied.

My hands fell to his shoulders and I bent closer to his body as his fingers splayed at my throat and then traced downward, cupped reverently at my breast - my hips skittered as his thumb swept over my nipple, losing half-a-beat to the shock of pleasure - over the plane of my stomach, tracing the beginnings of tension there as my body exulted, and finally, loosening the chain between his hands just enough to spread them to hold my hips, one iron-braceleted wrist at each side, and guide my rhythm, bucking to meet me as the pressure built.

"Good girl," he groaned, and the words pushed me over the edge, my orgasm rippling through me from core to extremities, blurring my vision, stealing my breath, my body clenching around him until he followed with a harsh exhalation of breath, pulsing within me. I hated him for praising me, hated myself for responding to it, hated that I'd been diminished so that he had risen to meet me. I slid from my perch atop him and lay on my side beside him. He left the chain around his wrists, though the pain of it must have been exquisite, and caressed along my side as I came down from the high, my chest heaving. He curled his body around mine, his back to my chest, ran long fingers through my sweat-tangled hair.

A stinging, building pain across my abdomen made me hiss in pain. I looked down to a thin, raw weal across the front of my hips, and my mouth fell open.

I jerked away from him, turned to face him. "What did you do to me?"

His eyes opened lazily. "I believe I followed you to paradise."

"Jareth, what is this?" I indicated the red line that connected my hipbones.

His eyebrows rose in genuine astonishment, and then he laughed, and it was not a nice sound. "The labyrinth is claiming her own."

"What did you do?"

"Why, Sarah, it wasn't me," he said, coyly, slipping the chain off of his wrists to let it fall into the folds of the sheets. "Of the two of us, I haven't been the one who is insistent on incorporating iron into our little sessions." I was certain, now, that I wasn't imagining a savage satisfaction on his aquiline features. I caught my breath and reached for the chain.

It was warm to the touch, retaining the heat that it had stolen from our bodies. I looped it through my fingers.

"I don't feel anything," I said.

"Perhaps not yet, but if you hold it much longer, I assure you that you will," he said. I stared at the livid, blackened rings of flesh around his slender wrists.

"Does it hurt?" I asked.

"Terribly," he said, and though his tone was flippant, I believed him. And at that moment, almost as if it was responding to his claim, the chain blazed red-hot and searing against my fingers; I dropped it immediately and watched a rash rise on my skin.

"If you persist with it, we will both sustain the effects," he said, a smile hiding beneath his eyes. "You are in transition. Soon, the pain will be nearly unbearable. That is the barest taste of what awaits you."

"What's happening to me?"

"I think you know," he said, and the smile emerged, wolfish. "You might wear gloves until you heal. Iron poisoning will make people ask questions that I suspect we will both find ourselves reluctant to answer."

It wasn't until I found myself standing before the mirror in his lavish bathroom, leaning forward on my palms to meet the wild-eyed gaze of the woman in the mirror, that I considered that I didn't know who would possibly ask.

How to describe her.

She is living flame, and I the moth, and how foolish it was to have supposed otherwise. I burn myself to ashes simply to touch her, and if she put up bars, I would beat my body against them, break it to pieces to taste her poison.

The iron will not kill me. The healers have seen to it, with salves and herbs and potions to halt its spread, but iron is death to my kind. The burns are hardly superficial. I will carry the scars long after she allows me to heal. If she allows me to heal, for I have kept her from healing, and my queen is as vicious and vengeful as she is lovely.

The pain has become my constant companion, a dull roar beneath the everyday goings-on. Writing missives, edicts, decrees. Settling petty disputes within my borders. Securing the boundaries of the kingdom that I call my own. All these tasks, constantly underscored by the light draw on my power to keep the iron at bay, the tender, branded flesh around my wrists.

Sarah was ever a clever girl. Much too clever for her own good: to attract my attention, to best me at my own game, to leave in a whirlwind equal to the one with which I'd entered. To deny me my request after I'd granted each of hers in turn, spoken and unspoken.

Now she has come into her own, and she has moved beyond my control. I need her with an intensity that unsettles me, and she knows it, which frightens me all the more. She has become a feral creature, straddling first worlds and now natures.

But it was foolish of either of us to expect that she could give up her life Aboveground - make a deal with the devil, they used to call it - and remain in the Underground unchanged. In truth, she'd changed irrevocably at the moment her brother breathed his last. Two parts horrid understanding and swift regret; one part loss of herself. She is finally shedding the last rotting remnants.

The fragments of humanity stolen by the labyrinth to breathe life into the monster did not belong only to her brother.

One rarely emerges from the labyrinth unscathed.

I stared at my reflection, the white marble vanity cold beneath my hands, until Jareth padded over to stand behind me, tilting his head and still smiling that vulpine smile. I met his eyes in the mirror, each of us naked and exposed, and then I looked back to myself, and there was no denying what had happened to me.

How could this have happened before my eyes, I having so completely failed to see it? How could I have risen from bed every morning, stretched and dressed before the mirror in my chambers, and failed to see the stark changes wrought in me?

Looking at myself was rather like being doused with ice water. I didn't recognize the woman in the mirror, but she moved as I moved, each of us trying to shake the other off. Jareth's mirror-twin stroked a finger from her shoulder down her arm, and goosebumps rose in its warm wake on my skin.

My skin was nearly as white as the milk that the goblins brought to me each morning. My body had grown willowy, slender and graceful, tapered impossibly at my waist; my eyes were vividly green - the color of the jade beads on a bracelet my mother had once given me as a birthday gift - and ringed with long eyelashes like bold inkstrokes. My cheekbones cut more cruelly across my face. I was every bit as beautiful as the nymph who had died at my silence and his hand.

Jareth laughed. I bristled.

Leaning closer into the mirror, I discovered that every scar I'd ever had was gone. The history of every miscalculated popped pimple had vanished from my face. Each time I'd cut myself while chopping onions or sawing through a slightly stale loaf of bread, gone. The scar from the time I'd hit the front brakes instead of the back on my bike and flipped over the handlebars to break my arm, gone. My skin was radiant and unblemished except for the thin red imprint of the chain from hip to hip and the nasty-looking burn that sloughed away skin around and between the fingers of my right hand.

A lock of glossy hair the color of coffee - shinier than I remembered it - slipped past my shoulder, and Jareth brushed it back behind my ear, pulling my hair aside very deliberately, meeting my gaze in the mirror with a quirked eyebrow as his finger traced the slight point at the tip of my ear.

"I'm not human," I said, as my throat constricted. I was stricken, confronted with the shedding of the last of my former life. Even had I wanted to go back, I would never belong. I'd only half-fit in since my first return. I would never survive a second.

"No, you aren't." He looked exceptionally self-satisfied. "You have always been meant to be something more than human."

"Will I live forever?"

"No one lives forever, Sarah," he said, and placed a kiss at the junction of my neck and shoulder. I shivered.

"Who would ask questions?" I asked as he lifted my hand to his lips, kissed along the broken skin there. "Why should I need to wear gloves?"

"Have you forgotten so soon?" He looked up from my fingers, almost disappointed. "You wanted a wedding-" he nipped at a fingertip, and I yelped and tried to yank my hand from his grip, "so there is to be a great celebration. Attendance should be… varied. There are many who are curious about the nature of the new queen."

I extracted my hand from his and drew myself up to my full height, which seemed higher than it had before. "What does a queen wear to such a celebration?"

"I should have thought that would have been obvious." His smile seemed to take up his entire face, all sharp teeth and darkly smudged makeup. "She wears white."

On the night of the celebration in question, I rose from a lavender-scented bath and combed out my hair until it flowed down my shoulders like water, and then I braided and swept it into a chignon at the nape of my neck.

When I threw the doors of the wardrobe wide, there was the dress I'd been expecting. I unhooked it from the hanger and stepped into it. Buttons ran the length of the back of it, and I did up as many as I could before my tired arms gave up the ghost, leaving the elusive stretch between the small of my back and my shoulderblades undone.

Ivory charmeuse that clung to my body as fluidly as a second skin, hugging my newly and artificially perfect figure. The sleeves fell past my wrists in trumpeting flares, while the neckline hung close to my collarbone, lovely and virginal. I could imagine him laughing about it as he spun it from a dream-crystal. Seed pearls traced the hem, the collar, the wrists, catching the light with nacre iridescence.

This time, the knock at the door was unmistakably his.

"Let yourself in," I said, staring at my reflection. I hadn't grown tired of visually interrogating the woman in the mirror, transfixed by marmoreal beauty and unruly eyes - by a sylph in technicolor, forever unexpected.

He entered, resplendent in black, a waterfall of white ruffles at his throat, and a golden circlet I'd never seen before on his brow. He looked me over with obvious approval, as I turned, offering him my back. A moment later I felt his fingers deftly slipping the formerly defiant buttons through buttonholes, lingering just a moment too long to smooth the fabric against my skin.

When I faced him again, he offered a pair of white, wrist-length kid gloves to me. "To disguise your disfigurement."

I smiled serenely at him, accepting his gift - such as it was - and slipped first my good hand and then my injured hand into the gloves before laying one on his arm.

"Not quite yet," he said, sweeping my star-studded diadem from the vanity where it had been neglected since my arrival. He slipped it over my head with care. "There shall be no doubt who you are. Wear it proudly."

"I am not ashamed," I told him, head held high beneath the weight of the crown, and let him lead me out of the room, where the door shut quietly behind us, down hallways and stairs until we crossed through the room that his throne overlooked, cold and empty. The final hallway - the one threshold I had not yet crossed, waiting for a signal that had never come - led down more stairs until we arrived at a huge pair of double doors, wood gleaming in the low lamplight.

And from inside those doors I could hear the sound of quiet music, of glasses clinking, conversations punctuated by laughter. I imagined the crowd, and then I imagined their eyes, curious and perhaps reverent in faces upturned to greet me. Jareth stole a glance at me and I caught him at it, offered a sideways smile.

He gestured, pushing outward with his palm extended, and the doors slid noiselessly open. As they did, the volume first grew to a roar, then quieted to near-silence, countless pairs of curious eyes blinking up at us where we stood above the room. Despite myself, I was caught off-guard by the huge ballroom, the candlelit chandeliers, the light catching on every jeweled gown, every wineglass, the clinquant ornaments strewn across the space.

The lights were low, and the starlight from my crown cast soft light and sharp edges across Jareth's face as he turned from me to the company gathered below. "Might I introduce," he said, his voice resonant in the expectant quiet, "Sarah."

A wave of murmurs crested and broke over us as the partygoers looked at each other. I leaned into him. "I see I'm a familiar name in these parts."

"And across the land," he said, inclining his head with a mischievous little smile.

We descended the staircase to greet the attendees who had gathered in my honor, and I had my hand - the uninjured one, thankfully - grasped and wrung countless times. Jareth, for his part, did try to keep me abreast of the people gathered here. Nymphs and sylphs, dwarves and elves, and more fae than I had somehow expected. Slender, cat-eyed men with stripes dyed across their faces pressed their lips to my gloves as Jareth looked haughtily down on them. Pupilless, black-eyed women with skin the color of brand new leaves knelt before us. A fae pair in golden crowns, one wrapped in a cloak like the night sky and the other in a gown like a rainy morning approached us, and Jareth inclined his head.

Without exchanging words, they returned his greeting and practically floated away. I looked to Jareth.

"Neighboring kingdom," he said. "They've been tasked with the elves, and a formidable task it is. Elves are far more intelligent than goblins, and as a result are much less agreeable subjects. The living quarters are lovely, though; that's the tradeoff for skilled workers."

I didn't quite know what to say in response. I hadn't considered that there would be establishments similar to Jareth's labyrinth here, but faced with the evidence, it seemed obvious that it would be so. A goblin passed by with a tray of champagne flutes and offered them to us, saving me from having to find some suitable reply. Jareth smiled at the little creature and handed me a glass, reserving one for himself. The goblin grinned back, baring a mouthful of pointed teeth, and swept away, but not before I noticed that even his fingernails had been fastidiously scrubbed.

I brought the glass to my nose. Bubbles rose to the surface and burst, wafting an aroma that was a little bit like roses and a little bit like peaches, nostalgia and a summer's day and somehow like home, if I had a home to speak of. When I looked up, everyone in the room had a glass and was clearly anticipating the toast.

"To the mistress of the labyrinth," said Jareth, simply, and raised his glass with a little smile. I could see where his gloves ended when his sleeves fell away, and I thought of the wounds beneath them, invisible to our guests. My fingers gave a little throb in response.

"Champagne?" I asked him, raising my glass in reply with the rest of the room. The glasses caught the light as they moved in unison. I could see the twin stars from my diadem reflected in the flute.

"Near enough," he said, looping his arm through mine so that we had to stand very close to drink. His body pressed warmly against me, even though all the frills and the ruffles. As the champagne touched my lips, he murmured, "And to my queen and our unconventional story."

It was strong enough that I nearly couldn't swallow it, dry and sweet all at once, a contradiction in terms. I paused, holding it on my tongue, and then I tossed my head back to accept it. I drained my glass, and he held me tightly in his arms as the world swam around us, just once, before straightening back out.

"I shall have the first dance," he said, and I nodded.

He led me out to the dance floor, where he cradled me against his body, exquisitely delicate with the hand that he knew was burned. We were very nearly forgotten in the sway of bodies and rustling fabrics, and he was such a confident leader that it didn't seem to matter that I'd always thought of myself as having two left feet in lieu of any rhythm to speak of.

Every so often, we passed by the perimeter of the floor and he plucked another flute from the tray of a waiting goblin, alternating between sipping from it himself and offering it to me. In this way, I found myself floating along the floor, all insecurities forgotten, my hair coming loose to stream in gentle waves down my back.

"Some party, Jareth." I smiled up at him and saw something in his face soften.

"I am glad to know that it meets your expectations." He twirled me beneath his arm, and a laugh bubbled up in my throat.

"My expectations are simpler than you think."

He drew me in close, his hands at my waist. "Are they?"

"Yes," I laughed again, "I just expect that you'll disappoint me, and then I am never disappointed. It doesn't make any sense, does it? That I would keep myself happy by expecting disappointment, I mean. It isn't that you're so very bad, Jareth. You are, you know, but then again, how could you be bad when you have no moral code to speak of? Your whole world is grey. You just don't understand anything at all, and you bring out the very worst in me."

I stroked a gloved fingertip beneath his glove, across the burn that I knew was hidden there. His eyes went hard and his mouth went tight. "Perhaps you should sit for a spell. You are unused to our spirits."

As if to confirm that I should, indeed, sit for a spell, I tripped over my own feet, stumbling into his arms and falling against his chest. He steered me to a chair at a table and helped me into it, and I half-fell, clutching my skirts around myself. I watched him glide away from me, back toward the crowd, and within a moment, a gaggle of nymphs had fallen upon him.

He kissed the wrist of one, the fingers of the next, and when a green-eyed nymph smiled up at him through coquettish lashes, he lingered with his lips by her ear for too long, his fingers threaded through coal-black hair. He drew back and she threw her head back, bared her throat to laugh at whatever he had said, and he caught her hand, his eyes meeting mine just for a moment before inviting her to dance.

His steely gaze cut me to the quick. My heart threatened to beat out of my chest as embarrassment and jealousy stained my cheeks scarlet. He was punishing me publicly, and here I sat, unsteady and angry, not quite one of them. Not yet.

But I was not afraid to create a scene of my own, and when a suitably blond, blue-eyed boy with a crooked smile and pointed ears offered me his arm, I took it and allowed him to sweep me right back to the floor. My balance was shaky, and the height of my heels only further hindered me, so I leaned heavily into him, laughing as we blew champagne-scented air into each other's faces.

He spoke a dialect that fell awkwardly on my ears, but our smiles were universal enough, and though I was painfully aware each second of where Jareth and his consort were relative to me, the boy was more than adequate distraction. He wasn't as skilled a dancer as Jareth, but he gamely kept me upright as we followed the motion of the crowd. When another boy tapped me on the shoulder and offered his arm, I placed a kiss on the blond boy's cheek, leaving a crimson smudge of lipstick too close to his mouth, and then spun away in the arms of the next, and then the next, and then the next in a seemingly endless procession of beautiful, starry-eyed forest children, until I was dizzy and exhilarated and had nearly forgotten about my spurning by the goblin king.

Finally, after what felt like hours, with sore feet and an aching smile, he filled my vision, burning brightly with righteous anger, and then he took me back into his arms.

"Darling," I said, tilting my head to look up at him. "How nice of you to join me."

"The final dance of the night will always be mine," he growled into my ear, giving my bad hand enough of a squeeze to bring tears to my eyes. The flames from the candles burning low in the chandeliers above us blurred as I blinked them away, and he swayed with me, keeping me on my feet though each step was agony.

I arched my neck up toward him, and he dropped his head obligingly. "Bring me the girl."

"What do you want with her?"

"I think," I said, emphasizing the occlusive, "she has overreached her station." His eyes narrowed. "If you love me, you will bring her to me."

"Jealousy becomes you," he said, and when the final strains of the music died away in the ballroom, he left me there, at the center of the room.

He returned with the nymph, her hand in his, and brought her before me. He stepped back, to my side, and as she turned her face up to mine, the laughter died in her eyes and her voice dried to dust in her throat.

I touched the crown at my brow, the velvet petals of the flower, the insistent heat of the stars, and I looked at her. The simple golden dress belted at her waist, tiny shoes on tiny feet, the curl to her dark, dark hair and the fringe of lashes around her green eyes. She was a pale imitation of me, and I knew that I outshone her, on this day or any other.

"You are nothing," I said, and my voice rang out in the room. "You are nothing, and you are no one."

She nodded frantically, cast her eyes down to my feet.

"Kneel before your queen," I said, and she collapsed to her knees immediately, as though her legs had been waiting for the excuse to buckle beneath her. "You are never to darken these doorways again. You are to be nameless and faceless even among your own people. You will never set eyes upon him again, but you will always remember the night you danced with a king."

She was silent, motionless except where her arms shook, braced against the ground.

"Kiss him goodbye," I said, and she looked up at me, her face white. Jareth made a small movement at my side. "Kiss him goodbye," I repeated, my voice like a blade, and she trembled as she picked herself up from the ground, and with tiny, frightened steps, she approached Jareth, who remained motionless before her. She rose to her toes before him, hardly daring to look at him as she touched her lips to his.

Then she turned to flee, and before she took more than one stride, I called after her. "No gratitude after being granted the king's kiss?"

She sank into a clumsy curtsy in her rush to leave the castle. "Thank you, your majesty," she stammered, and as she did, there was a gentle electric sensation down my arms and into my fingers, and her features began to run together until she was unrecognizable. She turned to walk placidly away, and with a vacant, unremarkable smile, she murmured to the crowd that drew back, parting around her, "Did you know I once danced with a king?"

I had expected the remaining guests to look horrified, but the faces that weren't aloof were creased with grim respect. The fae from the neighboring kingdom drew close to say their goodbyes, and they leaned close. "Truly an impressive evening. Well met, Queen Sarah."

As goblins ran through the hall, whooping and finishing abandoned glasses of champagne, Jareth and I left the ballroom to the sound of shattering glass on the floor.

"It was unnecessary and cruel," he was saying.

I gripped his arm, wishing for the effect of the drinks to wear off. "We are both cruel, you and I," I said.

"The nymphs will not look kindly on us."

"If I recall correctly," I said, smothering a giggle, "you started it." We were at the door to my chambers, and he opened it, ushering me inside. I pulled him in behind me and closed the door. "I told you that I would be Mistress of the Labyrinth, and that is exactly what I intend to be." I turned and presented the buttons down my back to him, standing before the vanity.

He drew a breath and then released it, and I found that I could hear a smile even through the exasperation in his sigh. When my eyes found his face, they confirmed it. His fingers brushed the buttons, unhooking them. The fabric began to fall away from my back. The air was cold against my skin as he continued. "You are ever a surprise, Sarah. I should have learned by now not to underestimate you."

"If they will not love me, they will fear me."

"They could have loved you."

"They want to love you," I said petulantly, "and I will not share."

"My jealous queen," he said, removing his gloves to continue with the buttons at the small of my back. The material slid across my skin. I slipped my arms out of the sleeves, and the dress fell to my waist. He paused. I smiled. Another two buttons, and the garment streamed past my hips to the floor in a glorious puddle of ivory charmeuse and pearls. He reached around me to cup my breasts in warm hands, and I sighed.

I reached to a little carved box that sat on the vanity, eased it open on reluctant hinges, and plucked the chain from within, holding it between two gloved fingers. His eyes followed the motion of my hand, then clouded.

"I had hoped that you had had rather enough of that," he said. I dropped it where it lay half-in, half-out of the little box.

"I don't want you to forget it."

"That is unlikely," he said, examining his wrists. I turned and stepped into his personal space, stripping him unceremoniously of his jacket.

"Whose kiss do you prefer the taste of?" I asked him, hovering just past his lips. He leaned in, eyes fluttering shut.

"Yours," he whispered, and I moved forward to meet his parted lips with my own, to erase the touch of the raven-haired nymph, to overwrite it with my own. His fingers knotted in my hair, and I pulled free of my gloves, wounded hand an afterthought, to fist my fingers in his silken shirt.

I pulled him down to bed and kissed him deeply, touching the gold on his eyelids and the black on his eyebrows, leaving daubs of crimson along his jaw and down his neck, and then on each finger in turn, but when he moved to touch me lower, I caught his wrist.

"No," I said, and drew his arms around me. He pressed his hips needfully against mine, to show me exactly how hard he was, to show me the magnitude of his desire, but I closed my eyes and shifted my hips back into him, just once, listening to his answering sigh before I drifted off to sleep.

I woke to a rhythmic pulse and thrum in my sex as his thumb strummed over my nipple, again and again and again, the hard length of him pushing insistently up against me.

"Good morning," he purred, and his hand traveled lower to find the wet heat at my core and answer the hunger rising in me. I moaned, long and low and needy as his fingers sank into me, setting an immediate, generous tempo that my sleep-sated body rocked to meet. I reached back behind my head and found his head at my shoulder, his breath hot against my neck.

Tangling my fingers in his hair, I brought him nearer still, his mouth meeting the junction between neck and shoulder, his tongue laving across my skin. I reached down with my other hand to brush a finger against myself, and he stilled his motion, fingers buried inside me.

"Let me," he said, and it was a plea breathed against my skin. I turned over, rose from the bed and stood beside it, and he blinked sleepy, arousal-dilated eyes at me in confusion before he, too, stepped down from the bed to stand before me.

"Kneel," I said, and he moved gracefully to his knees, stroking up my legs, lifting one and placing my foot on the mattress so that I was open to him. He kissed me, just there, and my eyes rolled back as his mouth closed over my clit, his fingers unerringly finding the spot deep inside me that made me weak. I trembled, and he braced my elevated knee with his hand.

I looked down at him, sensations rippling through me as he licked and sucked, crooking his fingers just so. My hands found his hair again, holding him against me, and my hips shifted of their own volition. He hummed with satisfaction and I found myself shaking and crying against him, and as I did he lifted me, laid me across the bed, and in one movement he was buried deep inside of me.

Without allowing me the chance to recover, he pushed me higher and higher, hips snapping him into me harder and harder, thrusting through the peak of my climax until I was coming down without coming down, my nub swollen and tender and grinding against him until I was writhing and sobbing anew beneath him, praying for release as the excitement built like a wave beneath my unsteady feet.

He throbbed within me as I cried out, arching my back to meet him, and when he had spent himself, he laid next to me, panting.

"How long until you let me touch you again?" he asked. Cautiousness crept in behind his eyes.

"I don't know," I answered, and he dropped from where he'd held himself up on his forearms to bury his face in the pillows.

"I love you," he said without looking at me.

"You don't," I said. I padded off, naked, to draw a bath, and when I returned, clean and fragrant, he had gone.

The day passed, as each had since my arrival, without further interaction between us. Somehow, today, it felt emptier and lonelier than usual. The look in his eyes was niggling at me; it had been a close cousin to the baseless, exhausted hope in Josh's eyes when he'd offered me the doll, or the fear and partial resignation in the nymph's eyes when she hadn't been sure of her fate. Maybe it had been the uncertain look of a man who wasn't sure whether or not he'd been handed a death sentence. I found that I couldn't bear the thought of venturing out past the castle, into the labyrinth.

I'd looked for Hoggle many times since the day he'd taken me to see the dungeons, but I had never found him, and I had never asked for him. Since the debacle with the nymph, I didn't imagine he would be thrilled to see me. I hardly felt prepared to deal patiently and gracefully with his obvious disapproval of my actions. Who besides Hoggle dared blame me? My brother was dead and my name had passed from my parents' mouths; I was cursed to remain here, the unlucky queen of the labyrinth that both loved and hated me.

I wandered the hallways of the castle. I stood in the threshold to the Escher room and tried to hold it in my mind, and when I found myself growing dizzy, I turned away. I climbed up to his throne, conscious of the way the knee-length skirt flared away from me, and I sat there, high above the room, legs tucked beneath me until I was pestered by enough goblins to make my head spin. I stopped at the kitchens to have warm bread and butter for lunch, feeling more a child than a queen.

And then, as the sun sank low on the horizon, I made my way to my favored tower to watch the play of colors over the maze. I climbed the stairs slowly, though my body did not grow fatigued, and when I reached the top, he was already there.

The setting sun turned him to burnished gold, here in the highest tower.

He was always beautiful, but the red-gold glow of the dying light rendered him a fallen angel, aeonian and aureate. He lifted his chin - slowly, carefully. His eyes were dark. The final rays of sunlight danced across his skin, a lover far gentler than I, and though I had always thought of him as a nighttime creature - he had, after all, chosen the form of an owl from which to watch me - he seemed somehow frail as day turned to night.

"Have you come to kill me?" he asked, exhausted.

"I have never intended to kill you," I said, my tongue shaping the truth without my permission. If it hadn't leapt from my mouth of its own accord, I would have been struck dumb by his question and the immediate ensuing recognition that the look I'd been considering all day had been the uncertain look of a man who wasn't sure whether or not he'd been handed a death sentence and extended one final mercy before death. Even so, this new, involuntary adherence to truthfulness would require acclimation.

"I thought I could smell it on you," he murmured, "but perhaps it was only my expectation. Perhaps it was the last vestiges of your former species fleeing you. Your people have iron in their lifeblood. My kind thought my pursuit exceptionally foolish. It is not without reason that stories like ours end in tragedy. Star-crossed lovers, aren't we, Sarah?"

"I hadn't thought it."

"I have loved," he said, swallowing, the blue light of the moon illuminating the ivory hollow of his throat, "but I have never lost. Not until now."

"You haven't loved," I said, with a gilded laugh like wind chimes, a sound unremembered. "That quote has never been meant for you. And I'm quite sure it isn't true. Do you think the nymph who fought so desperately against our coupling is better off for having loved and lost?"

"She had a name."

"I don't care to remember it."

His mouth twisted. "Have you come to say goodbye, then?"

"I'm not leaving, Jareth."

"Your brother is dead."

"My brother is dead," I agreed, "but even wandering to the edges of this world or any other will not bring him back. Where could I go? The labyrinth sings to me. The maze runs hot in my blood. She will not give me what I want, but she gives to me according to my merits and she grants me what I need. I remain more alive here than I could possibly be anywhere else, so I will stay and live out my days, such as they are fated to be, with you. She has become our labyrinth, after all."

"I love you," he said, and his eyes were depthless.

I smiled.

It's always the same story - but I can't remember how it goes. Not anymore.

This is what I can remember.

It went like this: there was once a young princess who wished she was not.

There was once a monster, prowling a maze.

There was once a boy, a beautiful boy.

There was once a vengeful king.

There was once a jealous god.

In his duties, the king was possessed of the power to grant wishes and take children, until one day the wished-away was reclaimed, and he could not forget the should-be princess who had bested him, and his appetite could not be satiated.

The young princess, who wished she was not, searched her heart for love for the boy, though she had only known him for a short time. She whispered to him the secret of the maze, and, determined to take up his mantle, he summoned the king.

The boy - the beautiful boy - laid himself down as a sacrifice to try to win the heart of the girl in challenging the king.

The boy slew the monster and escaped the maze, to the great pleasure of the wrathful king.

But the monster was not what it seemed, and its defeat brought great sorrow to all those who had expected joy.

The boy, overcome with the knowledge of what had transpired, left the princess, who became determined to take up her title, her crown, her glory, all for the novelty of love - or was it power? - and the chance to alter the course of her own life.

And what of the god? The god, of course, was also the king, and he laid claim to his queen as her humanity fled.

So who was the true monster? The king? The god? The boy?

Was it the princess?