Exchange Fic #3: Fallow Heart
The actual identity of the writer will remain secret until all the submissions are in and posted.
****
Title: Fallow Heart
Author: moon_lover68
Recipient: outinthestorm
Prompt: “Sarah builds a Labyrinth of her own”
Rating: G
Summary: A short story about madness, isolation and sneaky subjects. Quite an uplifting tale, actually.
-1
Fallow Heart
Jareth had realised very early the price he would pay for creating the Labyrinth and sealing it off from the rest of the world. It was a haven, a place of refuge for the little folk when the humans turned on them, or worse, forgot them altogether. But Jareth himself was forever changed and could no longer abide the overlands for more than a few scant minutes at a time. The mass of unbelieving humanity was poisoning the air; he was a creature made of dreams and there were precious little of those to sustain him. And his new world had had quite predictable effects on those humans who ventured there.
Many of them had gone mad, in fact most would have been considered ‘touched’ to a certain degree. Locked up, cast out, shunned or burned at the stake. He’d watched them all go down in one way or another. There was something in the water or the air or even the dirt between the crack of the pavers. Jareth never knew for sure, only that humans could not abide in his world for any length of time without the madness of spirit that seemed to settle on them like the dust. It was unavoidable, even for those gifted with his blood.
Sarah was one such child of his. Jareth could count more than twenty generations between her and the mortal woman he’d once lay with. That one had been fair, pretty enough to tempt even himself from the gates of the Labyrinth that she danced before. A witch and his natural enemy, but he’d taken her in the dead leaves and wilted flowers. A rare encounter to be sure, but one only needs a single seed to start a garden.
He still bore the silvery scars from that coupling, when the witch had raked him with her iron painted nails. He wondered what had become of her. Had her coven sisters chastised her for her failed attempt to capture him or had they been merely content with his offering?
In later years he’d seen them. Like cold fires in the midst of flickering candles they were, to Jareth and those few others who could see such things. Sometimes he would leave his nest and walk amongst them as a stranger for as long as he could bear to. Eventually they spread out to cover the world but he always knew them. They were the artists, the writers and the functioning drunks. The ones who startled awake from the darkness of their beds, always knowing they weren’t the same as everyone else. A few he would lure into the Labyrinth, curious to see if those few genes of his they possessed would be enough to protect them.
Jareth had lost track of Sarah’s line many years before she’d been born, so it was a surprise to find her living virtually on his doorstep. She would run through the fields and parks of her world, fingertips barely scraping the portals that would have opened to her if she’d only thought to ask. She was so strong, her blood thrummed with potential. His heart was given to her so quickly he wondered if the Labyrinth had deigned to influence the world on his behalf. He thought that perhaps she would be different. She might survive his world and his magic.
So he made her a key and she used it very well.
She’d proven quite easy to catch, less so to hold on to. Whiny, petulant and endearingly sweet, the Labyrinth had taken to her like a long lost child of its own. Afterwards, when he’d surveyed the ruins of his castle he’d laughed to himself because it was the sort of thing he would have done; and Jareth was no longer considered young amongst his people.
The portal was like a gaping wound left wide open when he followed her home. He had to wait now, he had to be sure. He felt like a child at Christmas, sure that the beautiful wrapping held only treasures and not the things he didn’t want to see. Sarah functioned well enough for a couple of months but as she finished her schooling and grew close to adulthood her behaviour became precarious. No one really got close enough to look into her eyes and see the strange compulsions and irrational thoughts, the hidden mind that tried in vain to assimilate everything it knew and everything it shouldn’t. Jareth crossed the boundaries between their two worlds so often he put his own existence at risk but every contact, every sighting she made of him only made her worse. In the end he could only watch as they finally took her away.
When she returned home, she was not the Sarah he knew. He hid in the shadows as she dutifully took the poison that made her eyes dull and her thoughts muffled. Jareth did not know what she saw when she looked out her window anymore.
On her eighteenth birthday he sent her a gift; a giant ruby nestled amongst diamonds on a black velvet band. He was as bold as he’d ever been to sit directly on her windowsill as she deftly tied it around her neck so that the jewel sat in the hollow of her throat to catch the last of the sun. The velvet merged into the ink blackness of her hair so that her white face seemed suspended from her body. Jareth laid his bare hand up to mirror hers on the glass between them as she spoke to him for the first time in years.
“Please take me back.”
“No, I cannot. You will not survive, your mind will not. You know this, Sarah.”
“Then stay.”
If only.
“Goodbye Sarah.”
He left her before her tears could change his mind. He gathered up those few of his wards who still lingered in her company and closed the portal.
Years passed in the Overlands, but perhaps only days in the Labyrinth. It cost him far more than he knew to keep to his own word and stay away. The maze world ran riot for a while as he kept to his towers and paid little notice to the comings and goings, even though there were many during those particular days. He locked up his spying crystals and made himself forget where they were. One was missed however, and it came back to him one day encased in the dirty rag-wrapped hands of a junk lady named Agnes.
“Here then, here’s a pretty bauble for the King, no?” she crooned idly under his window. She tossed the thing about like it wasn’t the most deadly and breakable spell ever conjured. Jareth watched it despite himself. Green flashes of light and blue sky flickered on and off from its depths. Higher and higher it came towards him, close enough that he could see a swathe of jet black hair carelessly tossed over a shoulder as someone bent over a rippling wall of….
“Wait!” he called out, which of course startled the junk creature enough that she lost track of the ball as it hurtled towards the ground and oblivion in a million pieces. Jareth leapt from his tower to capture it a mere inch from death. Bruised and battered, he cradled the crystal and whispered the incantation.
Out of the whirlwind he stepped, into a field of long grass bounded by trees and forest. The air was heavy, dense with moisture and quite impossibly, magic. Jareth turned about, trying to find the source like a dying man will still look for water in the desert. He was faced with a wall of green, a line of hedging knitted together to form a boundary that stretched out of sight in both directions.
It couldn’t be, not here.
He ran forward, hand out to trail along the foliage. He knew these leaves, every one. He had grown them himself, out of himself, in the very first hours of the Labyrinths existence. He edged along the row, as fascinated as he had been on that very first day when the soft branches reached back to caress his hand, bathing his skin with the earth magic that sustained him. Faster now he ran back and forth, panting long before he realised there was no gate.
“Sarah!” he called out, “how do I find you?”
There it was, a simple old wooden gate. He lifted the latch quietly and slipped inside, at once assailed by the comforting Underground atmosphere that somehow had come to linger here. It was not strong, this hybrid coupling of reality and magic wielded by a mere child but sure enough, here were his own flagstones, corridors hewn out of glittering rock and moss that winked at a tiny worm with blue hair. Not perfect, but just perfect enough for him. Jareth could live here, he knew it. For an unknown span of time, perhaps even a lifetime of someone he loved.
Underneath it all he could sense the quiet humour of an overgrown deity that was very pleased with itself. Somewhere in the shadows behind him he could sense them watching, hear their collective breaths being held as they waited to see what he would make of their gift to him. Many hands had crafted this place. Jareth could see the obedience of the stones, the preciseness of the fairy-free hedgerows and he suspected a somewhat military precision to the layout. He tasted the air with his tongue. Hmm, no bog as yet. Well that could be remedied, or not. He still had a reputation to uphold after all.
And where was she, this random seedling of his who had daringly struck down her roots in this inhospitable world?
“Sarah” he breathed. His crystal showed her for an instant, reclined in some extravagant pavilion somewhere in centre of this newborn Labyrinth. A new world, he laughed, one where he could survive and she could survive him. Her eyes were clear and she laughed right back with an impatient gesture with her hand as she beckoned. She was wearing her ruby necklace against her pale skin.
He had no idea where to start, so he took one step and then another. And right on cue a dwarf stepped out from behind a corner.
“Even if you make it, you’ll never get out again,” he muttered dutifully with just the right amount of exasperation that meant someone had put him up to this once again.
Jareth laughed as went off to get as lost as he possibly could.
She had made him a key, and he intended to use it very well.
****
Title: Fallow Heart
Author: moon_lover68
Recipient: outinthestorm
Prompt: “Sarah builds a Labyrinth of her own”
Rating: G
Summary: A short story about madness, isolation and sneaky subjects. Quite an uplifting tale, actually.
-1
Fallow Heart
Jareth had realised very early the price he would pay for creating the Labyrinth and sealing it off from the rest of the world. It was a haven, a place of refuge for the little folk when the humans turned on them, or worse, forgot them altogether. But Jareth himself was forever changed and could no longer abide the overlands for more than a few scant minutes at a time. The mass of unbelieving humanity was poisoning the air; he was a creature made of dreams and there were precious little of those to sustain him. And his new world had had quite predictable effects on those humans who ventured there.
Many of them had gone mad, in fact most would have been considered ‘touched’ to a certain degree. Locked up, cast out, shunned or burned at the stake. He’d watched them all go down in one way or another. There was something in the water or the air or even the dirt between the crack of the pavers. Jareth never knew for sure, only that humans could not abide in his world for any length of time without the madness of spirit that seemed to settle on them like the dust. It was unavoidable, even for those gifted with his blood.
Sarah was one such child of his. Jareth could count more than twenty generations between her and the mortal woman he’d once lay with. That one had been fair, pretty enough to tempt even himself from the gates of the Labyrinth that she danced before. A witch and his natural enemy, but he’d taken her in the dead leaves and wilted flowers. A rare encounter to be sure, but one only needs a single seed to start a garden.
He still bore the silvery scars from that coupling, when the witch had raked him with her iron painted nails. He wondered what had become of her. Had her coven sisters chastised her for her failed attempt to capture him or had they been merely content with his offering?
In later years he’d seen them. Like cold fires in the midst of flickering candles they were, to Jareth and those few others who could see such things. Sometimes he would leave his nest and walk amongst them as a stranger for as long as he could bear to. Eventually they spread out to cover the world but he always knew them. They were the artists, the writers and the functioning drunks. The ones who startled awake from the darkness of their beds, always knowing they weren’t the same as everyone else. A few he would lure into the Labyrinth, curious to see if those few genes of his they possessed would be enough to protect them.
Jareth had lost track of Sarah’s line many years before she’d been born, so it was a surprise to find her living virtually on his doorstep. She would run through the fields and parks of her world, fingertips barely scraping the portals that would have opened to her if she’d only thought to ask. She was so strong, her blood thrummed with potential. His heart was given to her so quickly he wondered if the Labyrinth had deigned to influence the world on his behalf. He thought that perhaps she would be different. She might survive his world and his magic.
So he made her a key and she used it very well.
She’d proven quite easy to catch, less so to hold on to. Whiny, petulant and endearingly sweet, the Labyrinth had taken to her like a long lost child of its own. Afterwards, when he’d surveyed the ruins of his castle he’d laughed to himself because it was the sort of thing he would have done; and Jareth was no longer considered young amongst his people.
The portal was like a gaping wound left wide open when he followed her home. He had to wait now, he had to be sure. He felt like a child at Christmas, sure that the beautiful wrapping held only treasures and not the things he didn’t want to see. Sarah functioned well enough for a couple of months but as she finished her schooling and grew close to adulthood her behaviour became precarious. No one really got close enough to look into her eyes and see the strange compulsions and irrational thoughts, the hidden mind that tried in vain to assimilate everything it knew and everything it shouldn’t. Jareth crossed the boundaries between their two worlds so often he put his own existence at risk but every contact, every sighting she made of him only made her worse. In the end he could only watch as they finally took her away.
When she returned home, she was not the Sarah he knew. He hid in the shadows as she dutifully took the poison that made her eyes dull and her thoughts muffled. Jareth did not know what she saw when she looked out her window anymore.
On her eighteenth birthday he sent her a gift; a giant ruby nestled amongst diamonds on a black velvet band. He was as bold as he’d ever been to sit directly on her windowsill as she deftly tied it around her neck so that the jewel sat in the hollow of her throat to catch the last of the sun. The velvet merged into the ink blackness of her hair so that her white face seemed suspended from her body. Jareth laid his bare hand up to mirror hers on the glass between them as she spoke to him for the first time in years.
“Please take me back.”
“No, I cannot. You will not survive, your mind will not. You know this, Sarah.”
“Then stay.”
If only.
“Goodbye Sarah.”
He left her before her tears could change his mind. He gathered up those few of his wards who still lingered in her company and closed the portal.
Years passed in the Overlands, but perhaps only days in the Labyrinth. It cost him far more than he knew to keep to his own word and stay away. The maze world ran riot for a while as he kept to his towers and paid little notice to the comings and goings, even though there were many during those particular days. He locked up his spying crystals and made himself forget where they were. One was missed however, and it came back to him one day encased in the dirty rag-wrapped hands of a junk lady named Agnes.
“Here then, here’s a pretty bauble for the King, no?” she crooned idly under his window. She tossed the thing about like it wasn’t the most deadly and breakable spell ever conjured. Jareth watched it despite himself. Green flashes of light and blue sky flickered on and off from its depths. Higher and higher it came towards him, close enough that he could see a swathe of jet black hair carelessly tossed over a shoulder as someone bent over a rippling wall of….
“Wait!” he called out, which of course startled the junk creature enough that she lost track of the ball as it hurtled towards the ground and oblivion in a million pieces. Jareth leapt from his tower to capture it a mere inch from death. Bruised and battered, he cradled the crystal and whispered the incantation.
Out of the whirlwind he stepped, into a field of long grass bounded by trees and forest. The air was heavy, dense with moisture and quite impossibly, magic. Jareth turned about, trying to find the source like a dying man will still look for water in the desert. He was faced with a wall of green, a line of hedging knitted together to form a boundary that stretched out of sight in both directions.
It couldn’t be, not here.
He ran forward, hand out to trail along the foliage. He knew these leaves, every one. He had grown them himself, out of himself, in the very first hours of the Labyrinths existence. He edged along the row, as fascinated as he had been on that very first day when the soft branches reached back to caress his hand, bathing his skin with the earth magic that sustained him. Faster now he ran back and forth, panting long before he realised there was no gate.
“Sarah!” he called out, “how do I find you?”
There it was, a simple old wooden gate. He lifted the latch quietly and slipped inside, at once assailed by the comforting Underground atmosphere that somehow had come to linger here. It was not strong, this hybrid coupling of reality and magic wielded by a mere child but sure enough, here were his own flagstones, corridors hewn out of glittering rock and moss that winked at a tiny worm with blue hair. Not perfect, but just perfect enough for him. Jareth could live here, he knew it. For an unknown span of time, perhaps even a lifetime of someone he loved.
Underneath it all he could sense the quiet humour of an overgrown deity that was very pleased with itself. Somewhere in the shadows behind him he could sense them watching, hear their collective breaths being held as they waited to see what he would make of their gift to him. Many hands had crafted this place. Jareth could see the obedience of the stones, the preciseness of the fairy-free hedgerows and he suspected a somewhat military precision to the layout. He tasted the air with his tongue. Hmm, no bog as yet. Well that could be remedied, or not. He still had a reputation to uphold after all.
And where was she, this random seedling of his who had daringly struck down her roots in this inhospitable world?
“Sarah” he breathed. His crystal showed her for an instant, reclined in some extravagant pavilion somewhere in centre of this newborn Labyrinth. A new world, he laughed, one where he could survive and she could survive him. Her eyes were clear and she laughed right back with an impatient gesture with her hand as she beckoned. She was wearing her ruby necklace against her pale skin.
He had no idea where to start, so he took one step and then another. And right on cue a dwarf stepped out from behind a corner.
“Even if you make it, you’ll never get out again,” he muttered dutifully with just the right amount of exasperation that meant someone had put him up to this once again.
Jareth laughed as went off to get as lost as he possibly could.
She had made him a key, and he intended to use it very well.