A Mirror Darkly: A Labyrinth Story of Love and Revenge

It was the day after Sarah Williams' twenty-first birthday, and her friends still hadn't come to visit her. Not her human friends, of course, who had attended her combination going-away and birthday bash two nights ago; her friends from the Labyrinth. Her friends that somehow traversed the magical boundary between the world of humans and the world of the Fae, who had faithfully kept her company and visited her whenever she needed them for six years.

It was her last week at home; she was going to spend her final undergraduate semester abroad, studying European folklore before heading off to graduate school. She stood before her mirror, examining her reflection. She looked the same, so her friends from the Underground kept assuring her, but she saw the differences. She was older, even if "older" in this case meant "barely legal" but she could see it even if they couldn't. Maybe it had something to do with being so unchanging themselves, but she loved them for seeing her as they always had.

Not that she had anything to complain about; she certainly was far from being a wrinkly old hag. Hell, she was far from being ugly, may as well be honest with herself; she'd received enough compliments on her eyes and waist-length brown hair and features in general that she knew, even without the evidence of the mirror, that she'd Turned Out Well.

"Oh, aren't we modest," she mocked herself, then shook off the odd mood that had overtaken her. "Hey guys, last chance to see me off before the big trip!" she called, then stepped back, waiting to greet them.

And waited. And waited some more; frowning, she stepped back to the mirror. "Guys? Are you in there? Hello? Ludo? Hoggle? Sir Didymus?"

No one appeared, either in her room or in the mirror. She felt a stirring of concern; they'd never been late for a party before, and this was the last one to be held in her own room, the last one before standing in front of a foreign mirror in a foreign college dormitory. "Guys?"

A sharp bark from behind her caused her to spin around. "Ambrosias!" she cried, going down on one knee to pet Sir Didymus' noble "steed." He wasn't saddled, and warning bells went off at the sight of him looking like a normal dog instead of the mount for a fox-like goblin Don Quixote. "Where is everybody, boy?"

He barked again, then whined and lifted a paw beseechingly. Then he scampered away from her, rearing up on his hind legs to lean on her vanity table and paw at the mirror. "Something's wrong," she said. "I get that now. The only question is, what?" She peered into the mirror's depths as if sheer force of will would allow her to see past her reflection.

No such luck. Ambrosias sat back on his haunches, facing her and panting. Just like an ordinary dog. And, like an ordinary dog, he couldn't do anything to bring her into the world of the Labyrinth. Not that she really wanted to go back there; she'd learned to appreciate the world she'd been born into, and was happy for her friends to visit her rather than risk going Underground to see them.

She shivered. If it wasn't for him, she might be willing to visit there.

Him. The Goblin King. Instinctively, she knew he had something to do with this. Instinct also told her there was only one way to confirm it. One way, the only way, the way she didn't want to try. But for the sake of her friends, she would risk anything.

Even seeing Jareth again.

Taking a deep breath, she said the words she'd never expected to voice. "I wish the Goblin King would come to me."

A/N: Yeah, I know, I haven't even finished my other Labyrinth story and here I am starting another! Call me inspired, what can I say. Inspired, I might had, directly by one review of "Mirror Friend, Mirror Foe" in particular. So thank you, sanna B. for giving me incentive to think up the much darker version of Jareth that will appear in this story!