Epilogue: And They All Lived...
Less than 2 years later, Jareth had his heir.
Robert had his granddaughter… and Bevelyn had her step-granddaughter. Sarah cried with happiness as Jareth cradled his black-haired, blue-eyed daughter in his arms, with his own odd grey eyes looking suspiciously bright. "Avery," he named her. "She shall be a wise ruler." And so their firstborn was christened Avery Williams rin Emrys.
Toby completed his formal education from Jareth and, having shown an aptitude for construction, began an apprenticeship with a master mason. He dreamed of someday redesigning and rebuilding the Goblin City. He and Sarah both maintained their close friendship with Arien; even though Jareth could no longer approach the unicorn as closely as before, Sarah found that those few shared drops of blood enabled Arien to tolerate her presence almost as well as if she'd remained virgin.
Toby and Arien became fast friends and gained quite a reputation throughout the kingdom for collaborating on mischief together.
Terrillia, strangely enough, actually found her niche as a university student. Once she got used tobeing without magicshe settled in nicely, using her fae-born musical talent to gain a spot in Paris' band. Paris didn't like this, since before Terrillia's advent, Paris had been the leader of the band. The rivalry between them was friendly on the surface, but ran deep and bitter underneath. Whenever they looked in on her, Jareth and Sarah both agreed that it was a fitting punishment for both of them.
And every Court day was well-attended… by both the king and queen… neither of whom could ever remember which of them had won the wager the night before. Though not for lack of trying.
END
Author's note: Whew, that was long! I give a heartfelt thank you to every single person who reviewed; I literally couldn't have finished this story without your helpful reviews and encouragement. I have no plans to write a sequel, although I haven't completely ruled out the possibility of posting brief, "oneshot" chapters at some point in the future if I feel like it. So if there's something I left out that you'd like to see, email me about it and I'll see whether or not I get inspired to write that scene.
Thanks for reading, everyone. It's been fun.
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Cheers!
CL