Chapter 1: Chapter One- Soul of Will
Chapter Text
📜 Fragment from the Journal of Saelor, Scholar of Flesh-Souled Constructs
Date Unknown — presumed Late Fifth Cycle of the Hollow Moon
ENTRY 413: ON THE IRONBOUND
They call them many things: The Tongueless Choir. The Sealed Flame. The Vessels of the Last Word.
But I will call them what they are: people who have been folded, pressed, starved, and silenced until only the core of their will remains—stripped of memory, voice, and identity, yet not erased.
Not killed—no. That would be too clean. These are not ghosts. They are souls made obedient by endurance.
I have seen twelve in my lifetime. Three shattered before I approached. One tried to sing when I held it.
- One hummed like iron cooling.
- One pulsed with something that might have been fury—or pain, or defiance too raw to name.
- And one looked at me. It had no eyes. No face. But I swear by the Longest Night, it looked at me.
To create an Ironbound is to remove all distractions from the self: no flesh, no breath, no stimulation but memory and magic. Over the course of one hundred years, the soul is held in an unlit chamber carved from veined stone.
Time is distorted to make them feel each moment—each loop of grief or triumph stretched thin until sensation blurs, yet never fades. Their only companions are echoes—carefully selected fragments of war, grief, tenderness, and triumph played on loop in a random sequence.
Most souls forget who they were. They become water spilled over time—dissipating, soft, gone. But the few who remain intact… they are stronger than any blade. And they are never the same again.
The market claims the ritual is humane. They say the soul agrees. But I have seen the etching circles, read the binding lines. Consent is implied, not confirmed. A whispered wish at the wrong moment. A dream spoken aloud. A contract half-signed. That is all the magic requires.
I once asked a seller how they could be certain the Ironbound remained sentient.
He smiled and said, “Because they scream during the ingestion.”
I have not eaten since.
And I dream of veined stone. I hear the humming.
—Saelor, Third Quill of the Obsidian Archive
Sarah, One Hundred Years Folded
She no longer remembers her name. But she remembers the sound it made in a warm throat—the syllables caught between a smile and a dare. It was once whispered in love, shouted in defiance, and spoken like a challenge only she could win. Now, that sound has slipped into the ache behind thought, a shape she can’t quite touch. But she knows it was hers, and it mattered.
Someone once called her clever. Another called her cruel. One voice—a teacher, perhaps, or a rival—told her she would never last. She remembers the tones more than the words, the heat of praise and the sting of dismissal. Memory here is not linear—it is pressure and instinct, not image.
They were all right. They were all wrong. She lasted.
Time here is a kind of torture. For what felt like centuries, she hung in the stillness of memory, pressed between silence and thought. There was no sight, no voice, no breath—only pulse and pressure, the ghost of identity coiled like a fist. Some days, she imagined herself a sword in the forge—glowing with heat, reshaped with every strike. Other days, she was a scream folded into itself, packed so tight it had no sound, only edge. There is nothing soft left in her.
Now—now they come to see if she has held.
The silence breaks with a flick of fingers on crystal—cold and deliberate. She feels it before she hears it, a ripple skimming the curve of her being like a drop of water across glass. Her soul flinches, unready, but the touch has already pulled her upward into awareness. Light rushes in—not literal light, but sensation too bright to bear. She is awake, and she resents it.
She hates them for waking her. For pulling her from that forgelike stillness where the pain had become clean and predictable. She is not ready to feel. She is not ready to hope. But she is grateful to be seen, even if only as a thing.
“This one still stirs,” a voice says. Young. Pleased. Male. “That’s five this quarter. The others faded. This one kept her spine.”
She wants to laugh, and so she does—not with a mouth, but with pressure and pulse, a gleam against the inner curve of her vessel. They would not know it as laughter, but it is. The defiance she once wore like armor still clings to the fragments of her. Some things never burn away.
They set her on a pedestal of bone and obsidian—market black, the color of secrecy, chosen to mute whatever dares to shine. The surface is polished smooth, ceremonial, yet built from death. She glows against it—not from warmth, but from pressure, as if every inch of her vibrates with a breath that can never be exhaled. She is a storm behind stone, lightning sealed in silence. They mean to display her like a relic. She is so much more.
They come in droves.
Buyers. Bidders. Whisperers.
Fae of every station—some with crowns, some with scars, some with eyes that drink in power like wine. Robes hang like war banners, woven with starlight and bone-thread. The air smells like oil and old magic. She recognizes the type, even if their faces are new: predators dressed in ceremony, collectors of power wrapped in velvet and hunger.
One pauses.
He does not speak at first, only steps into the hush like someone already burdened by knowing. She does not know his name. But something about the shape of him cracks her stillness. He carries regret like a crown—heavy, deliberate, worn into the bones of him. She does not know him, but some part of her remembers.
“Is she aware?” the king asks.
“Surviving awareness is the final trial,” the auctioneer replies. “If she blinks at you, she’s worthless. If she fights you, she’s unstable. But if she endures—if she watches without breaking—she is ready.”
So she watches. Her presence tightens like a thread being drawn through a needle. She does not blink—she cannot. But more than that, she chooses not to flinch, not to retreat. Every ounce of attention she can summon turns outward. This is the final test, and she will not fail.
Then the spell begins.
It’s subtle, at first. A murmur repeated twice. A gesture out of sequence. The king’s shadow flickers—not once, but three times. A corner of the room seems to breathe in reverse. Time folds oddly, like parchment creased along unfamiliar lines. This is the compression curse—the final pressure, designed to collapse her soul.
They want her to snap. They want her to crack down the middle and bleed memory. They want to see what noise she makes when she breaks.
She will not give them that.
Instead, she draws inward, into the deepest core of the self that remains. Not a scream, not a whisper—but a vow formed in stillness:
If you must take me, then wield me well. If you must break me, let it mean something. If I must become a blade… then let me choose who I cut.
The air stills. The pressure lifts. Something old inside the magic recoils—not in fear, but in respect.
The king exhales, a breath that trembles at the edges. Slowly, carefully, he places a sealed coin beside her pedestal. Iron-marked. Magic-bound. It is not just a bid. It is a promise.
“I’ll take her.”
And that is how she is sold. Not as a slave. Not as a person.
But as a weapon who survived herself—and remembered how to choose.
Jareth, Goblin King, Firstborn of the Hollow Court
There is no color in this place.
The corridor that led him here had been carved from shadow and starlight—flawless obsidian veined with white bone, as though the walls remembered every oath ever swallowed. Old magic hummed in the stone, quiet and reverent, like a cathedral holding its breath. There were no torches, no lanterns. The light came from the walls themselves, as if memory had learned to glow, casting no warmth—only consequence.
He walked as one accustomed to power, but even his boots dared not echo here. The floor devoured sound, just as the walls devoured warmth and certainty. Jareth had stood in war councils, in queen-thrones, in the ruins of ancient marble soaked with prophecy and blood—but here, in this polished tomb of soulwork, the market began to weigh him. Each step forward felt like entering judgment, though no voice would ever speak the verdict. The silence itself did the measuring.
When the door opened, he did not bow. He did not blink.
He stepped into the chamber like it belonged to him—though he was painfully aware it did not. The air shifted around him, cool and deliberate, as if the room was deciding whether he belonged at all. Still, he moved forward.
The Ironbound were displayed like saints.
Twelve pedestals, evenly spaced in a perfect circle, ringed the chamber like the hours of a clock counting down to something sacred—or profane. There were no glass cases. No chains. Nothing between the soul-artifacts and the buyers but open air and the threat of magical retaliation. The silence here was not emptiness; it was structure, weight, intent. It pressed into the bones like pressure before a storm, making the skin itch with the need to whisper and the certainty that it would cost too much to do so.
He had read of the Ironbound, of course.
Weapons forged not in fire, but in endurance. Souls folded like secrets until only the core remained—hardened, sharpened, stripped of all but will. Living artifacts, consumed by generals and kings to grant resistance to iron, to fear, to unraveling. He’d once believed them to be myths, stories told to frighten soft-hearted courtiers. Then he’d seen the border guard flayed by cursed blades and yet survive. Myth had become a necessity.
He hated this place.
He hated the taste it left in his mouth—like copper, dust, and mourning, as though the air itself had once wept. This was not a place for rulers. This was a place for buyers. A place where souls were reduced to inventory. But his kingdom could no longer afford the luxury of purity, and so he came.
“You seek an Ironbound to resist iron?” asked the host, a thin fae in gold-thread robes.
The voice was smooth, detached, but his eyes gleamed like he knew the price of everyone who walked through his door.
“Rare request. Few admit to such a need.”
“My kingdom is under siege,” Jareth replied, the words clipped, deliberate. His voice was even, but his spine was taut beneath the weight of decision. “And I do not indulge in fiction.”
The host laughed, but the sound held no amusement—only ritual, and the sharpness of a man used to watching others flinch.
He gestured toward the pedestals, his sleeves whispering like dead leaves in windless air. “Choose one, then. If you dare.”
Most of them were cold. Not inert, not dead—just quiet in that way a tomb is quiet, full of things buried too deeply to speak. The magic in them had settled into stillness, like ash after a fire. Some glimmered faintly, holding on to the last embers of what they once were: a blade etched with prayers in a forgotten language, a sphere that pulsed as though it once held dreams, a glass rose whose petals shimmered like memory suspended in amber. He paused at each, more out of obligation than interest. None of them saw him.
Only one did.
It rested on a pedestal of blackstone streaked with copper veins—veins that glinted like old blood beneath the surface. The vessel itself was shaped like a teardrop, the color of spilled wine at its base, fading to glass-clear at the tip. It did not glow. It throbbed—a slow, deliberate pulse, like the beat of a heart sealed under glass. As he stepped toward it, the world narrowed.
Presence.
Not thought. Not voice. Not words. But awareness.
She felt him. She saw him. And she did not flinch.
“That one survived the compression curse,” the host said, with something like reverence in his tone. “Full awareness. No backlash. Hasn’t spoken. Hasn’t faded. We estimate a century of cultivation.”
Jareth swallowed, his throat dry as dust. There was something unsettling about the vessel’s stillness—not passive, not docile, but coiled, as if what lay within had not submitted, only waited.
“What was she?” he asked, and the question escaped with more roughness than he intended.
“Unknown. Mortal, likely,” the host replied. His voice was indifferent, a man reciting statistics. “Many soulfolders rarely document their acquisitions. It is not the acquisition itself that matters… merely the result.”
“She still exists.”
“Yes,” the host said, the pride in his voice as brittle as frost. “She has not broken. Yet.”
He stared at the vessel.
So small. So quiet. But impossibly steady.
She did not shimmer. She did not weep. She simply was—unshaken, untouched by the gaze of the room, anchored in something he could not yet name. He had known highborn fae who shattered from less than a decade of scrutiny. She had survived a hundred years of silence and pressure and memory, and still she watched without turning away.
“I’ll take her.”
He removed the token of purchase from inside his coat—a single coin, forged from the circlet of his own crown. A symbol of rule, reshaped into payment. He set it gently on the pedestal, letting it ring against the blackstone once, then settle. The glow of its iron mark was faint, but binding.
The host’s eyes flickered, unreadable.
“You realize you cannot return her.”
“If she survives me,” Jareth said, his gaze never leaving the vessel, “she will have a life of her choosing.”
He did not finish the rest. He could not. To speak it aloud would make it real. That she might break inside him. That he might break around her. That he had not just purchased power—but a reckoning.
He lingered longer than he should.
Other buyers drifted past in murmuring clusters, eyes flicking toward each vessel with practiced disinterest. Most paused only long enough to appraise the flashier forms—swords etched with divine runes, fluted crystals that shimmered with internal flame, or living vines hardened into rings that whispered when touched. One voice, low and unimpressed, muttered just loud enough to be heard: that one’s too still, too soft, too slow to spark. Jareth didn’t turn. He didn’t need to. He had once said the same thing about a sleeping fire—just before it burned him.
This one wasn’t dormant. She was watching.
It was not the blank stillness of loss, nor the dulled weight of resignation. It was the stillness of a bowstring held taut. The soul inside the vessel did not flicker or flare. It simply waited—for him.
There were no eyes to meet, no voice to speak, no face to read. But the presence within the crystal leaned toward him, invisible yet undeniable, like breath fogging glass from the inside. It pressed against the surface of his magic, subtle but insistent, a pressure that teased the edges of his focus. Not hunger—she did not beg. Not fear—she did not flinch. It was readiness, the kind that exists only in survivors and soldiers.
You know what I am, she seemed to say. Will you still take me?
Jareth bowed his head slightly, just enough to let her know he had heard. It was the only gesture he could afford here that would not be used against him, one breath of acknowledgment in a place where meaning was dangerous. This was a market of power, and in such a place, kindness was currency—and currency was weakness. But he gave it anyway. Not out of sentiment, but out of truth. Because whatever she was, she had earned it.
He was not ready for this.
He had told himself he was—repeated it like a prayer every night since the siege began. The war council had pleaded, circling his throne like carrion, each one with a different plan, each one pointing toward the Ironbound vaults with bloodless logic. The iron spreading through the Wildlands had begun to leech into the stones of the Labyrinth, corrupting its paths and souring its heart. His kingdom was breaking. His people were dying.
The goblins were the first to fall. Magic, once playful and untamed, had begun to wither beneath their feet. The Labyrinth’s humor turned bitter. Its riddles refused to answer. The forest paths no longer shifted in his favor.
He had run out of time. And still—he had resisted.
He could not bind another living being—not with eyes that could beg, not with a voice that might call his name. Not again. But this… this was different. A weapon. A will. A soul refined into silence and edge. No name. No story. No ties. That, he could carry. That, he could command.
Until he stood here. Until she felt him. Until he felt her feel him back.
“She recognizes you,” said the host, returning as silently as a stain bleeding into stone. His tone was pleased, almost indulgent, as though this recognition confirmed something he had suspected all along. “You radiate pain. Ironbound are drawn to the ones who need them most. It’s instinct.”
Jareth did not respond. He had no desire to give the host the satisfaction of his voice. Instead, he kept his gaze on the vessel—on the quiet defiance that pulsed at its core. There was something sacred in her steadiness, and he would not desecrate it with spectacle. She was not reaching out to beg. She was holding ground.
“Will you perform the fusion here?” the host asked, voice oily with ceremony. “It would be traditional.”
“No,” Jareth said, softly but without hesitation. “I will take her home.”
The host sniffed, a sound that carried both disdain and boredom. “Romantic. Sentiment rarely survives ingestion.”
Jareth did not rise to it. Instead, he closed his hand around the coin he had placed on the pedestal. It was warm now—marked by him, shaped by the decision already made. He pressed it downward until it clicked, the ritual seal sliding into place like a lock turning inside the bones. It bound more than the purchase. It bound intent.
“She will survive,” he said at last.
He didn’t know how he knew. There was no logic to it, no prophecy, no runic confirmation scratched into the walls. But something in the silence between them pulsed with certainty. It wasn’t hope. It was recognition.
And somewhere in the back of his mind—soft, quiet, unexpected—he thought he heard something.
Not a word. Not even a thought. Just a note.
Low. Held. Steady.
Not a cry. Not a command. But a resonance.
Like a song waiting for its singer. Like steel waiting to be drawn.
He didn’t speak to her.
Not at first. Not like the others had—those merchants with their practiced praise and greedy fingers, the testers with their diagnostic spells and half-curious prodding, the nobles who tapped at her shell as if she were already dead. She had learned long ago how to be still beneath their hunger. But she felt him the moment his hand touched her, and it was different. It was not a grasp or a claim—it was a hold. His grip was too careful to be careless, too light to be indifferent, too quiet to be anything but intentional.
She didn’t know his name. But she knew what it meant to be handled like this.
He cradled her in both hands, close to his chest—not like a weapon or a relic, not like a prize or a burden, but something between all of those. She felt no conquest in his touch, no magic meant to bind her. He was not afraid to carry her, and somehow, that told her more than words ever could.
He held her as one might hold a sealed letter bearing a forgotten truth—tight enough not to drop it, loose enough to let it speak. She felt the beat of his heart through the arc of the vessel, a quiet rhythm that did not waver even as the rest of the world shifted around them. There was no tension in him. No revulsion. Only weight. Only movement. Only a silence that felt like permission.
He walked. And as he walked, she listened.
The city’s magic was thicker here.
She had felt its texture before—woven into the veins of the pedestal beneath her, clinging to the hands that passed her around like a ceremonial dagger too sacred to wield. It had always been cold, curated, transactional. But this was different. Outside the market, the magic moved like wind through tall grass—unbound, unsettled, humming with stories she could almost remember.
It brushed against the outer curve of her form like a musician testing a string, gentle but watchful. Footsteps echoed over bridgewood and glass, the tempo measured but unhurried, as if he knew the world would not wait for him, but he refused to rush. Wind swept past chimes strung with iron beads and whispering paper, and the tones vibrated through the glass like memory. Voices flickered at the edge of perception—sharp, brittle, incredulous.
“That’s the Goblin King.”
“He bought that one?”
“He’s desperate.”
“He’s doomed.”
She heard them all. But more than that, she felt his response to them.
Not anger. Not pride. Just silence.
A deep, bone-worn silence that rang more honestly than any oath or war cry. He absorbed their judgment like weather and simply moved forward, unshaken.
He doesn’t deny them, she thought. He just walks.
They passed into a corridor carved of duskstone—cool and soft, a mineral that absorbed sound the way snow absorbs light. She felt the shift immediately. This was one of the outer thresholds, a boundary space where only certain magics could follow, and even then only with permission. Here, the first true pang of separation struck her. Something pulled at her edges—not tearing, but testing—as if the vessel were being measured against its own containment.
The enchantments that kept her sealed stirred like thread pulled too tight, vibrating against the shell of her being. The air changed, too—buzzing faintly, vibrating at the threshold frequency of portal-magic. It was not painful, but it was sharp, unnatural, like stepping across a current of river-light. But he didn’t falter. He didn’t even pause.
He knelt at the circle’s edge, his robes folding around him in quiet ritual. Then he set her gently on a raised platform—a sending stone, she realized, forged for sovereigns and those they dared to love. The sigil beneath her was old, its carvings crisp with renewal magic, and his fingers moved across it with reverence. He traced the rune as if he knew its name. As if he had prepared this.
“Hold,” he whispered.
Not to her. To the spell. Or to himself. Or to time itself, slipping too fast through his grasp.
Then came the flash. Cold. Bright. Real. And the world shuddered like breath caught between words.
When it stilled again, everything changed.
The air here was warm, not with temperature alone, but with life. Not humid or stifling—but lived in, softened by presence and repetition. This was no throne room, no market chamber, no battlemage sanctum. This was a place where someone read by lamplight, where ink dried beside half-finished letters, where boots were left near doors that locked inward, not out. It smelled of charcoal ink and old books, of layered wards and faint iron—present, but restrained.
She recognized it not by name, but by feeling. The kind of feeling that lingers in homes built slowly, in spaces where grief and comfort live side by side. The wards here were not defensive. They weren’t designed to keep her in. They were meant to keep the world out.
The protections weren’t for him. They were for her.
He brought me home.
The thought rose without anchor, soft and strange, but more real than anything else she had felt in a hundred years. She had no mouth to say it. No breath to give it shape. No arms to cradle the meaning. But she clung to it with everything she had left.
He brought me home.
And for the first time in a century of silence, she let herself believe she was no longer lost.
Chapter 2: Chapter Two- The Joining
Summary:
Jareth never expected her to live. Ingestion has always meant obliteration. But the soul inside the crystal has endured a century of silence, and she will not fold easily. If Sarah resists, they’ll both burn. If she opens to him—truly, fully—they may yet survive. But it will change them forever.
Notes:
This is a work in progress, and no beta has dared these waters yet—so thank you for your grace with typos and rough edges. I’m discovering the shape of this story as I write it, and the journey is just beginning. Expect soul-deep metaphysics, dangerous magic, and a bond that refuses to be anything but transformative.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Excerpt from On the Consumption of Will: Ritual Methods in the Age of Reclamation, attributed to Scholar-Magus Tatherin Rul (c. 723 3rd Cycle)
Chapter IV: On the Efficacy and Cost of Ingestion
Ingestion—often mistakenly grouped with lesser practices such as absorption or dissolution via tonic—is not merely a method of consumption. It is, in truth, a ritualized joining. The practitioner does not devour an Ironbound’s power alone; rather, they invite the essence of that bound will to pass into their own core, binding it through passage of tongue, throat, and breath.
For centuries, ingestion was abandoned in favor of cleaner, more predictable rituals—those that stripped the Ironbound of lingering sentience before transfer. The discomfort of shared presence, the risk of backlash, and the unpredictability of outcome made ingestion both dangerous and distasteful to the civilized courts. It is a rite of the old ways—older even than most scholars admit.
It is also, paradoxically, the most complete form of integration. Because the Ironbound are not just power—they are will refined. And will, once swallowed whole, does not fracture easily.
But it must be noted: no Ironbound has ever been recorded to survive this process. Not truly. At best, they leave behind a residue of memory or impulse. At worst, they rupture the host from within.
And yet still, ingestion is chosen—by the desperate, by the powerful, or by those who cannot bear the idea of letting such a soul vanish without touch. It is not clean. It is not sacred. But sometimes, it is the only method left when all others have failed… or when something more than strength is sought.
There is no elegance in being swallowed. But there is intimacy. And intimacy, unlike strength, does not lie.
He closed the door behind him. Not with a spell. Not with a ward. Just the soft click of old wood against older hinges—the sound of ritual not recorded, but remembered. It was the kind of sound that said: no one else is coming in. Not a barrier, not a lock—just a final, quiet punctuation to everything that had come before.
He stood still for a long moment, as if unsure whether he was still a king now that no one was watching. The weight of the vessel in his hands had already changed the balance of the room. Slowly, as though every gesture might matter, he crossed to the table near the hearth and set her down. There was no flourish in the movement. Only intention, anchored in something older than duty.
The vessel—her form—glinted faintly in the low amber light. It caught the glow like a living thing, refracting it in thin, trembling halos across the table. It was beautiful in the way sacred objects often are: still, precise, waiting. But not passive and not hollow. She was not the thing they had tried to make her. Somewhere inside that shaped crystal, a soul looked back—and he could feel the way she watched him, not with eyes, but with presence.
He braced both hands on the table, leaning forward until his shoulders curved, as though speaking to something fragile enough to shatter—or sacred enough not to be named. His breath escaped in a slow, weighted exhale, the kind that carried more than air. He didn’t look up right away. He didn’t need to. The presence in the room had shifted the moment he entered.
“This is the part where I’m supposed to give you a name,” he murmured, his voice low and thick with restraint. “Label you, mark you, and file you in my mind as a tool, or a weapon, or—so help me—a blessing.”
He shook his head slightly, silver-blond hair catching the lamplight in soft threads. His eyes tracked the vessel’s curves, not with hunger, but with a tired kind of ache.
“But I can’t do that,” he said, quieter now. “Because you’re not… anything I expected.”
“You’re aware. Still whole. Still listening.” The last word caught on the edge of his breath, and his voice frayed with it. He’d spent years surrounded by voices that didn’t truly listen. Hers—silent as it was—already felt closer than most.
“And I don’t want to lie to you.” He said it like a confession, not a vow. Though, in truth, as fae he couldn’t lie to her even if he desired to.
He stepped back from the table, hands loosening at his sides. He paced once, then again, each pass short and uneven—like a caged thing trying not to thrash. His boots whispered against the stone floor, the silence around him so full it might as well have been watching. Then, finally, he returned to her. Not out of obligation—but because he couldn't stay away.
“I need you,” he said, and the words came without shield, without crown.
They were not spoken like a ruler addressing a weapon. They were spoken like a man confessing to a storm.
“Not like they do in the Courts,” he continued, bitterness creeping beneath the calm. “Not like the generals who chew through Ironbound and spit out their ghosts.”
His lip curled faintly at the memory. His hands curled, too, then uncurled.
“I don’t want your power so I can parade it or burn kingdoms to ash.” He swallowed hard, the words thick in his throat, “I need you because my kingdom is under attack with a threat unlike any we’ve faced before. And I’ve tried everything else.”
The silence that followed pressed close—not heavy, but attentive. It folded around him like breath held too long. He swore he felt her lean toward the sound of him, not physically, but with soul-leaning, like she was listening from inside the dark. She hadn't spoken. But she had answered.
“What I’m about to do…” he began, voice cracking at the edges. He didn’t clear it. Some things were meant to break. “It’s called ingestion. A binding ritual. One of the old methods—older than most would admit still exists. The kind of magic spoken about only in shadows, behind closed doors, with names softened by time.”
The words tasted wrong even before he spoke them aloud. They sat bitter on his tongue, like something stolen. “It draws the soul into the self. Through breath, swallowing, and dissolution.” He paused, gaze slipping sideways for a moment, as though trying to remember the exact phrasing from a time before such rites were forbidden. “They say it was banned. Forgotten. But that’s a lie. We buried it because it costs too much. Other methods may be safer, but they come at the cost of power that I can’t afford.”
His eyes lowered to the vessel cupped in his palm, and for a moment, he simply looked. Not at the crystal, but through it—as though he might reach the girl inside if he stared long enough. His expression softened—not with pity, but with the kind of reverence usually reserved for the dead.
“You’ll feel me,” he said quietly. “If it works, you’ll feel everything. My thoughts. My power. My hunger. The old magic beneath the glamours. The truths I don’t speak. The pieces I’ve never shared—not even with myself.”
He drew in a slow breath, but held it at the top of his lungs like something fragile. His chest didn’t rise again. For a moment, it was as though time itself paused, waiting for him to exhale.
“And I’ll feel you,” he said, voice lower now. Like a whisper meant for her alone. A flicker of something ancient and aching crossed his features. “If there’s anything left to feel.”
His hand rose without command—just two fingers, extended like a benediction. He reached out and touched the vessel, barely grazing its surface. The warmth startled him. It wasn’t sharp, wasn’t searing. Just there. Steady and undeniable. Not the chill of a soul long lost, but the faint heat of something enduring. As if she still resisted, even now. As if some flicker of her remained that had not surrendered.
He didn’t pull back. But the contact anchored him in place, rooting him like a tree too old to bend. His breath caught and held, not from fear, but from reverence. She was real. Not a symbol. Not a weapon. Her. And that reality threatened to undo him more than any pain the ritual might bring.
“It will hurt,” he murmured, not to frighten her, but to ground himself in honesty. “For both of us. This isn’t some elegant rite with pretty words and clean lines. It’s not sacred, no matter what the scrolls once claimed. It’s survival—dressed in ceremony to make it palatable to those who’ve never needed it.” He shook his head once, slow and raw. “But it’s the only way I have left.”
His hand fell away from the crystal like the last step off a ledge. It was slow…. reluctant. Final. He didn’t want to sever the moment. But lingering too long would only make it worse—for both of them.
“But I swear this to you, whoever you are,” he said, and this time his voice held stillness, not softness, not gentleness, but resolve. “If you survive this… if you survive me… I will give you your life back.” The words didn’t tremble, even if he did. They rang out with the weight of oath—not hope.
“Not just a body. No, I will give you a name, should you wish it. You can have a choice.” Each word landed like a stone in water, quiet but irreversible. “You may return Aboveground, if that’s what you want. Or stay Underground. Or become something else entirely—something of your own making.” His throat worked once, and he pressed on before the moment could collapse.
“I won’t keep you,” he said, quieter now, but no less certain. “I’ll give you freedom eventually. Once our enemy is defeated and the kingdom secure, should you survive it, I’ll give you freedom. Even if—” His voice faltered. Just once. Just long enough to show the cost. “Even if I’m tempted to keep your power.”
He stepped back from the table, letting his hand fall to his side like a dropped sword. The room did not echo. The silence did not return—not the silence from before. Something in the air had shifted.
It wasn’t waiting. It was watching.
There was a presence now, soft and watchful. Not a voice. Not yet. But something aware. Something near. She had heard him. And somewhere, behind the crystal curve of her prison, she was deciding what that meant.
The first thing she noticed was that he had set her down as if she might break.
Not because she was fragile—but because she mattered in a way no one had acknowledged in a hundred years.
Most had touched her with the wary reverence reserved for dangerous relics, half-fearing what she might do if stirred. Others had prodded, tested, pressed their intent against hers like a thumb against bruised fruit, always trying to see what she would yield.
But none had treated her like something…someone important. Reverence, then—this strange, quiet grace—was new. And in its newness, it unsettled her more than cruelty ever had.
Fae were cruel. That was the truth she had ingrained into her for a hundred years. But this fae… he didn’t speak of cruelty. He spoke of duty, even a reluctant or resigned one.
It was not performance. It was not pity. It was a belief. And belief, she remembered dimly, could change things.
His fingers had left something behind—something that lingered even after he stepped back. Not heat, exactly. It wasn’t the lingering warmth of skin or spell.
It was resonance. An imprint. The kind of mark not made by flesh, but by recognition. He had seen her. Not what she was shaped into, but what still endured within.
And then—he spoke.
At first, it was only vibration. A hush of sound through the stone, a hum that shivered faintly through the pedestal beneath her.
It wasn’t language to her sluggish mind yet—just breath and tone and presence, the kind of sound that brushed against memory like wind through long-shuttered halls. The world did not tilt or tremble. But something inside her did.
Her soul reached toward it. Not out of instinct, but need.
She had no body left to lean with, no hands to extend, no eyes to close. But that core spark—buried so deep it should have gone out long ago—moved. Like breath after drowning. Like light cutting through centuries of fog.
His voice wasn’t what she expected. It rasped at the edges, rough and unpracticed, like it had grown hoarse from silence rather than song. But it held no cruelty. There was no command. No distance layered in dignity or duty.
It held grief.
That was what struck her when she finally processed what he said—not the words themselves, not even the promises curled inside them. It was the ache braided through every syllable, the tremor that hollowed out his tone. A sound like cracked glass under pressure, sharp and vulnerable and real.
And then came the words that broke something open inside her.
“Even if I’m tempted to keep your power”
Not a declaration. Not a plea. Just truth, spoken raw.
And in that truth—unadorned, unhidden—something ancient in her stirred. Not shattered. Opened.
He didn’t know her name. Neither did she, not anymore. Time had scraped it away, a slow erosion carved by centuries of silence and misuse. Every handler, every whisper, every ritual had worn it thinner, until even the memory of sound was gone.
But even stripped of title, language, or self—she recognized this: he had not lied.
He spoke not with grandeur, but with wear. Not with glory, but with weight. His was not the proud duty of those who sought victory. It was the kind that cost everything, the kind that carved you out from the inside. And she knew it, because once, it had almost consumed her, too.
Now he was asking for something no other had dared: Not her obedience. Not her compliance. But her soul. To fuse. To burn. To become something neither of them could be alone.
It was not possession. It was a partnership—if she let it be. He was asking for her choice and that was a rare privilege that she wasn’t sure she could trust. She hadn’t had a choice since she became Ironbound… maybe even before that. And now he asked for her to choose a partnership.
Not a physical partnership... at least, not with them as two separate people. Not in name, either. This wasn’t about shaping her or restoring her. It was about stitching two truths together, in defiance of the world’s expectations. Something deeper than ceremony. More intimate than touch.
She should have feared it. Once, long ago, she would have. A century had a way of muting such feelings, though.
Now, after everything she had endured, something older stirred in her bones. Older than dread. Older than war. Older even than survival. It was not fear, but rather the act of choosing.
It was this:
If I must be used, let me be used by someone who knows the weight of it. If I must be burned, let me catch fire on my own terms. If I must enter him…
Her soul answered itself—low and steady. A single pulse. A rhythm like the start of a spell or the strike of a war drum. It beat once. Not in panic. In promise.
…then let him feel me. All of me.
And then, she quieted. Not in retreat, but in resolve.
She braced—not for collapse, not for surrender, but for union. It wasn’t dread, nor resignation. It was readiness that threaded through her stronger than her compressed state should allow.
This was not the end of her. Not the dissolution they had warned of, the extinguishing they had promised. This was the moment before—the breath caught between lightning and thunder. The stillness before fire takes root in bone.
She was ready. She had to be.
He stood over the table again, the vessel cupped in both hands, as though weighing something sacred. Not merely magical—consecrated. It carried not just spellcraft or soulweight, but something older. Older than kingdoms. Older than the iron it was meant to endure.
There had once been rituals for this. Formal ones, laced with robes and witnesses and song. But those rites had been buried beneath centuries of war, secrecy, and bloodied silence.
Now only fragments remained—and a single soul too rare to be ignored.
“This is how it’s done,” he murmured, voice low and shaped more by breath than by sound. “Not with potions or sigils. Not even a grand circle of salt and blood.” His eyes didn’t shine with magic. There was no glamour left in the telling. Only ritual, stripped of hope and dressed in necessity.
He looked down, thumb tracing the curved edge of her prison with a tenderness too careful to be accidental. “You place the vessel in the mouth. Let it rest on the tongue. And if the soul within is willing…”—his voice caught, just enough to betray him—“…it dissolves.”
The words didn’t echo. They settled instead—low, quiet, final. As though even the air understood that this wasn’t a spell. It was a sacrifice. And not hers alone.
“Most don’t fight,” he said after a long moment, and this time his voice was roughened by something more than dust. “Not because they consent, mind you, but because they’ve forgotten how.” His jaw tightened. “They fold. Fade. They vanish in the doing—so quickly, you wonder if they were ever truly there.”
The implication hung between them like a warding: She hadn’t.
“You’ve endured,” he said, as if daring her not to. “You’ve remained, somehow—through all that time, all that pressure. Refined but not erased.” His throat moved with effort. “If you resist… I won’t survive the joining. And neither will you.” His fingers curled slightly, not in threat, but in bracing. “We’ll both burn. And it will end there. That is the danger of this method. But the benefits outweigh the danger.”
He inhaled slowly, reverently—like a man about to cross a threshold he did not expect to return from. “And if you choose it—if you open to me, even for a breath—then we will burn together. Not as kindling.” His thumb ghosted over the smooth face of the crystal. “But as kindred.”
And softer still, barely a whisper, his final vow followed. It was not a promise made in confidence, but in grief. A prayer to a soul he could not save—but might still meet.
“You’ll no longer be alone in the fire.”
Then he raised the vessel to his lips.
There was no tremble in his hands. No flourish to disguise the truth of it. This was not spellwork. Not showmanship. It was ceremony, stripped bare of pretense. He parted his mouth and let the vessel rest upon his tongue—cool, silent, inert—and closed his lips around it like a vow made in solitude.
No swallow followed. No clink of crystal against teeth. Just stillness—taut, deliberate, and final. The taste was faint, strange—like minerals and memory, like the edge of something sacred and unfinished. He did not flinch or breathe too hard. He simply held her there, as if waiting for time itself to yield.
Inside the vessel, she knew only darkness.
Not the soft dark of dreams or drifting sleep—but a sealed, claustrophobic silence. It was the kind of dark that came with compression, with preservation, with forgetting. A dark meant to hold, not to cradle. She could not move. Could not brace. Could not even cry out. She existed only as awareness pressed between the absence of light and the weight of meaning.
And yet—she felt him.
Not just in magic, but in body. The slick warmth of breath washed against the crystal curve of her prison. She felt the ridged surface of his tongue beneath her, textured and deliberate. She felt the arch of his palate above, the soft pressure of lips sealing her in. Teeth held slightly apart, gently caging her in. She felt his heartbeat, not as an echo through the air, but as a presence—a living metronome against which her own dormant rhythm began to stir.
Then came the question.
Not in words. Nor in sound. But in the resonance of a will held still beside hers. It threaded through her like the thrum of a tuning fork, vibrating through the edges of selfhood she had forgotten how to name.
Choose, it said. Choose.
She recoiled—not from him, but from the sheer impossibility of what was being asked. Choice had long ago become a dead language to her, buried beneath a hundred years of being examined, handled, ignored, and displayed. She had been passed from mage to merchant, noble to collector, her silence mistaken for agreement every time. What did it mean to choose now, when she had never once been given the power to refuse?
And yet, she was here.
Not on a shelf. Not in a vault. But in his mouth. The horror of that thought pulsed through her once before the Ironbound compression muted it to nothing.
She was physically inside him. The point of no return. If she refused now—if she flared too hot, pushed too hard, or fractured in the attempt—she would destroy them both. Not metaphorically. Not magically. Literally. There would be no second chance. No reset. This was the moment. Her only moment.
He did not force her.
He did not press with tongue or spell or grip. He held her gently, maddeningly, as if her silence held just as much weight as her assent. As if her fear was not something to be overcome, but something he would bear with her. And that—more than anything—made it worse.
Because it meant he saw her.
Not as a relic. Not as a resource. As a person. A soul. A woman who had outlasted time itself. A will that had never broken, even when everything else had been stripped away.
Something ancient stirred within her.
Not fire—not yet. But something that wanted to be fire. Something shaped like rage and grief and survival, coiled tight around the spark of her. It wasn’t surrender. It wasn’t desire. It was memory—and recognition.
He wants me whole. The thought landed like a stone dropped in a still pool. It rippled through her—not with comfort, but with truth. It wasn’t worship or even consumption. It couldn’t rightfully be called a rescue. It was a reckoning.
She felt his breath again, soft and steady, brushing against the curve of the vessel like a promise not to move. Not until she did. Not until she chose. And the vessel—her prison, her shell, her anchor—it did not shatter.
The magic that had once sealed her in now bent like a thread gone slack, no longer coiled in resistance. It asked her nothing. It only held the shape she had left behind, as if waiting for her to outgrow it.
There was no real choice.
She could join—or she could end them both. There was no middle ground. No escape route. And yet even in that, she felt the miracle of being asked. Not demanded. Asked.
And so, wrapped in breath and darkness and trembling will, she chose.
Her essence unfurled—not all at once, but in pulses, deliberate and slow. First one ripple, then another, each more certain than the last. It was steady. Rhythmic. Sure.
The vessel warmed. Not from without, but within. Then—it began to soften.
Not like glass breaking. Not like magic unraveling. But like the first thaw after a bitter winter.
Like something buried deep beneath frost and silence, suddenly remembering itself.
She was dissolving. She was doing it. And she did not flinch.
Jareth did flinch. He staggered as the first wave hit him.
It wasn’t a blow or a spell, but a presence—sudden and immense, flaring through him like a wrong note struck in the center of his soul. His knees didn’t buckle, but everything inside him recoiled and braced, as if some primal alarm had been triggered. There was no warning. No gentle lead-in. Just the impact of being—ancient, raw, and awake.
This was no inert magic, no docile spell waiting to be harnessed. It was not power shaped for wielding. It was will—self-aware, deliberate, and burning with the kind of quiet fury that comes only from long silence.
The heat of her presence didn’t crackle with flame or spark with lightning. It moved heavier than that, like molten stone through his throat, his chest, his spine. It settled, and it pushed.
And then— she entered.
Not in pieces. Not in threads. All at once. A soul poured into his own—not through thought or emotion or memory, but through pressure, presence, and purpose. It was not communion. It was a collision. It wasn’t something that could be prepared for or even truly consented to. Just the brutal inevitability of joining.
His mouth parted reflexively, as if to spit out the offending invader. But it was too late.
She was already within him. Her vessel dissolved, and her soul expanded. She wasn’t waiting. Not observing. Moving. He felt her like a storm inside his ribcage—shifting heat, grinding edges, a rhythm out of sync with his own. Not hostile. But not yielding, either. She didn’t ask for space. She claimed it.
And oh, she wasn’t passive.
She didn’t whisper along the edges of his mind, seeking some quiet corner to hide in. She didn’t hesitate or test the perimeter. She pressed outward—desperate, resolute, unrelenting. As if she had been crammed into too many containers for too long and would not suffer this one without a fight. Her will expanded faster than his body could accommodate.
He gasped, desperately drawing in air to combat the gut punch that was her soul slamming into his.
One hand reached for the wall. The other splayed against the floor as his balance shifted and dropped. One knee struck stone, then the next. He did not kneel in reverence—he collapsed under force. Not from her strength alone, but from how utterly unprepared he had been for her to survive. No Ironbound survived ingestion.
Yet, here she was, blazing through him. She was not shaped for containment. She had never been.
And he—he had tried to contain her anyway, not out of malice, but out of centuries of conditioning. That was what the Ironbound were meant for: power, refined and weaponized. You took them. You used them. You never asked if they wanted to be used.
But this one—this soul—refused.
She did not collapse into him like dust. She rose. Every memory, every thought, every defiant heartbeat pressed outward against his own. Her magic did not merge with his. It resisted—not to destroy, but to declare. A voice without words rang through his bones like struck crystal:
I exist. I endure. I will not vanish for you.
And still, he tried to shape her. Not to smother her, but to pull her into the channels he understood—runes, patterns, harmonics, breath. If he could form her presence into something familiar, perhaps he could survive her. Perhaps she could survive him. But the effort was like caging a hurricane with a silk thread.
She didn’t fight to dominate. She fought to be real.
She demanded to be felt, fully and without distortion. Fragments of her flooded him—shards of thought, warped memory, a century of compressed rage and aching silence. He saw glimpses of metal and skin, of chains and shelves, of isolation so vast it no longer needed walls. And underneath it all—her will, molten and intact.
He fell. Not with grace. Not with dignity.
The moment became body and stone and breath—too much breath, not enough breath—as his muscles gave and the world blurred. His hands hit the ground. His shoulders bowed under the weight of a life being poured into his own. The force was not physical, but it flattened him all the same.
And through it all— She did not beg. She did not apologize. She did not wait to be invited.
She simply was.
Notes:
Thank you for sticking with me so far! The ritual is only the beginning—and survival was never the endgame. As always, this is a work in progress with no beta, so comments and kudos are welcome as I feel my way forward.
Chapter 3: Chapter Three- Until She Fades
Summary:
Sarah doesn't fall. She descends—without motion, without form—into the still silence of a soul not her own. Locked inside Jareth’s mind, she begins to fray, thread by thread. He calls it containment. She knows it as erasure. While he waits for her to unravel, she clings to the last ember of identity.
Notes:
This story is a work in progress and remains unbeta’d, so please pardon any typos, shifts in pacing, or rough edges along the way. This chapter explores the immediate aftermath of the Ironbound integration—where Sarah descends, and Jareth isolates. It's slow, quiet, and aching.
Thank you for reading. Comments, questions, and thoughts are welcome as always—they help shape the direction of this tangled thing.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
From The Practical Ethics of Ironbound Integration, 3rd Edition, translated from the High Script
“In all recorded cases where the Ironbound retained a trace of self after ingestion, the phenomenon proved temporary. Integration follows identity collapse, as surely as dusk follows day. Though some whisper of anomalies—souls that resist, linger, or fracture into memory echoes—no verified account confirms long-term preservation of will within a host.
Souls with stronger will—those that remain whole or self-aware even after ingestion—are known to cause considerable strain during the integration process. The bearer may experience intense magical backlash, metaphysical instability, or internal fragmentation as the Ironbound's self rejects dissolution. Typically, this is a rapidly resolved issue, as no Ironbound has been credibly verified to survive more than an agonizing minute of true integration before the self collapses.
The very nature of the Ironbound process refines will to exhaustion. What remains is not a person, but a potential.”
— Scholar-Adept Vasym of the Northern Spire, banned from court testimony following the Reclamation Accords
Sarah
The world did not end when she let go, but it changed.
There was no corridor or tunnel. No great celestial stairwell ushering her downward. Just a plunge—swift and sudden, without grace or permission. It wasn’t even a fall, not in the traditional sense. It was directionless and dizzying, like being flung toward a depth that had no floor. A motion born not of descent but of surrender.
And she landed— Not on earth nor flesh, but on soul.
It was not warmth that met her. It was not safety. Just a vessel waiting: powerful, taut, pulled into shape by will and command. She struck it like a spark against flint, and it closed around her at once. However, it didn’t embrace her with welcome. It was with defense.
She collided with a wall of self. A fortress of instinct with a perimeter sealed and watchful. His soul wasn’t a sanctuary—it was a citadel, ringed in stone and sharpened edge. It was ancient and automatic. The kind of structure built not to nurture but to protect, to survive.
It tried to box her, to shape her into a function, and to reduce her into fit.
The instinct was fae, through and through. Compartmentalization as a defense mechanism. Structure as salvation. Command as order. She knew this pattern as intimately as she had once known her own breath. She had lived in cages shaped like that before—constructed not of bars, but of assumptions.
He—whoever he was—reacted as all fae were taught to react: with containment. With instinctual parsing. She wasn’t met with cruelty or gloating, only the smooth, inevitable calculus of control. It was not meant to be dehumanizing. It simply was. It was as natural as swatting at a flame, unaware it might be the only light left in the dark.
She did not rage. But neither did she yield.
She didn’t resist in hatred or fury. Rather, she stood firm in selfhood. In identity carved from a century of resistance. She pressed into the space he tried to deny her, filled the lines he drew to define her. Not to destroy—but to exist. She would not burn him, but she would not fade.
Because if she shrank now—if she folded herself small enough to be palatable—then there would be nothing left of her to remember… no edges… no name. Just another ghost in the machine of fae design. And she had survived too much to be rendered into silence.
Something gave slightly beneath her efforts, causing him to stagger.
She felt it—not with body or breath, but through the strange echo of a shared vessel. It was a crack in his control. Not split by aggression, but by her undeniable presence. She wasn’t a spell, weapon, or tool that he could shape.
She was undeniably a person.
That’s what had entered him. Not some shimmering enchantment or well-forged weapon. But her. A soul stripped bare by necessity, laid down like an offering. Not in trust—but in desperate, deliberate choice.
Because she had known that, if she hadn’t chosen this stranger—this one who spoke to her like she mattered, someone else would have taken her instead. Someone who wouldn’t have paused. Who wouldn’t have asked. And who wouldn’t have seen her at all.
He had spoken to her— not just at her. So she had gambled that he might treat her as something more than a means to an end.
But he wasn’t. At least, not yet. And that hurt.
Still, she did not pull away. Even though she could have—drifted, unraveled, disappeared into the fissures of his soul and never tried again. Instead, she remained. Not as a trespasser and not as a prisoner. But as a truth.
If he would not make room for her, then she would claim it. She wouldn’t be violent nor cruel. But it would be an undeniable claim of her selfhood.
It was a breath drawn into lungs he no longer held alone, a whisper curling beneath his heartbeat, and a memory of steel and silence that refused to be buried. She refused to be forgotten. And she refused to be made small.
Jareth
He flinched again, actively recoiling. Not from pain this time, but from the unbearable intimacy of it. Not a gasp, not a word—just the exhale of her being, threading itself through the shattered edges of his restraint. There was no resistance in her, no conquest, no war—but she pressed forward all the same, and it felt like being unmade from the inside. Every place he had fortified, she found. Every place he had hidden, she reached.
It was too much. Too fast... and far too alive.
His soul spasmed, and his magic—his ever-faithful magic—panicked before he did. It twisted back upon itself, recoiled in a spiral of defensive incantation that didn’t require thought or intent. It was not slamming a door—no, that would have implied will. This was worse. It was folding… crumpling. The way a body folds around a wound too deep to bear.
He hadn’t meant to push her back. Hadn’t meant to contain her, but the storm of her presence was unlike anything he had ever endured.
He wanted to scream, but screaming would make it real. He wanted to plead, but the words caught behind his teeth like shame. Kings did not beg. Kings did not falter. But this—this wasn’t power or attack. This was presence. And his soul, used to compliance and carved corridors of rule, didn’t know what to do with something so relentlessly whole.
“Stop,” he rasped—brokenly, uselessly, not out of command but desperation. His voice cracked in the hollow of his own chest, echoing into a place no longer his alone. “Stop, please—”
The plea blistered his pride as it left him, torn raw from instinct rather than choice. “You’ll break something—I’ll break you—” But she didn’t stop. Couldn’t. She wasn’t trying to win. She was just being.
And he— in a moment of panic he realized that he didn’t know how to survive her.
His hands spasmed against the stone as he gasped in magic-thin air, trying to hold himself together while everything inside him splintered. He had thought himself strong—resilient, hardened by centuries of court and combat. But strength was a wall, and she wasn’t battering it. She was seeping through the cracks. Becoming part of the mortar.
Contain it, hissed the oldest part of him—the survivor, the ruler, the blood prince who had clawed his way to power in a world that devoured the soft-hearted. Seal it before it swallows you. Seal it before you become something less.
His magic obeyed not with malice, but muscle memory. The way fire withdraws from ice. The way the body closes around the wound.
And so she was sealed.
She wasn’t destroyed, silenced, or even banished. Just—hidden.
It was somewhere deep. Somewhere dark. Somewhere far enough inside that even he could not feel her anymore. It was a chamber of reflexive containment, not shaped by reason or cruelty, but by fear. A place no part of him could name, because it had never needed one.
A metaphysical oubliette.
There were no windows. It was a place with no sense of time. No tether to the rhythm of his waking self.
It was only stillness. A place of silence.
A hush fell over his mind like a curtain, drawn closed against a storm already passed. He felt it like a reprieve. It was like air returning to shattered lungs. He thought it mercy. It was over.
He didn’t even realize what he’d done. At least, not right away.
All he knew was that the pressure was gone. The pain was gone. The presence—was gone.
And he was still kneeling on the stone. He was shaking, whole, yet strikingly empty. The silence was too clean. It was too calm. A wrong kind of peace.
He reached for her—instinctively, then more urgently. The ember she’d lit inside him should have still been there, small and bright and maddening. But he couldn’t find it. He couldn’t feel the warmth. Couldn’t feel her.
It was just cold. There was only absence. Just the echo of what she had nearly become.
And that— That was when the first crack of panic hit.
But panic, for a king, was not a thing shown. It was assessed, tamed, and recast as strategy. Jareth didn’t lunge or scream or claw open his chest searching for her, though something in him wanted to. No—he breathed—measured and cold. He drew back from the edge like one stepping away from a blade, unwilling to bleed in front of a watching world, even if the only witness now was himself. He pressed the rising fear into a smaller shape, something manageable, something he could wrap in logic and bury beneath control. And then he reached—not blindly this time, but inward. Carefully. Through the folds of soul and self, tracing the pattern his magic had carved when it flinched from her touch.
And there it was.
Tucked low, sealed tight, buried deeper than anything he had ever needed to hide. The shape of it was unfamiliar, yet undeniably his. Made of instinct, not intention. It was armor turned inward. It pulsed faintly beneath his awareness, not with pain or power, but with silence. A place that should not have existed—and yet, of course, it did.
He had made it. Not consciously, but absolutely. It was an oubliette, for all intents and purposes.
It wasn’t a punishment, not really. Just… a pause. A soft unknowing. It was a place where pressure wouldn’t build, where neither of them would tear any further. A space beyond damage, beyond need.
Not a cage, he told himself. Not a grave. Just a holding chamber.
It could be considered a waiting room between surrender and silence. A place where she could cease gently, without further violence.
She would fade, eventually. That was what Ironbound did. That was what they were meant to do. They were refined to the edge of endurance and purpose. Then they were swallowed into the soul of the one who claimed them. It was never meant to be symbiotic. It was never meant to last. They were not people... not anymore. They were power—temporary and perishable, but power nonetheless.
He had told her the truth before he took her in. He had said if she survived. Not when. He had never promised her safety or freedom or return. Only that he would try. And that, in itself, had already stretched the bounds of what any Ironbound was owed. This outcome—her survival this far—was unprecedented. It was dangerous. Unsustainable.
This—this was the price of survival. It wasn’t cruelty nor failure. Instead, it was a compromise.
He hadn’t scattered her soul across the ley-lines or devoured her spark in a single act of magical combustion. He had not crushed her for the sake of convenience. He had let her rest, held her in stasis, and preserved her from herself and from him. He had not ended her. He had simply… contained the moment. Deferred the inevitable.
A kindness, perhaps. Though a kindness to whom, he would not say, even if he knew.
He stood slowly, not as one victorious, but as one endured. His body bore no wounds, but his posture remained bowed from the weight of what had passed through him. Muscles trembled in slow, residual waves—small betrayals of tension kept too long. His magic still thrummed beneath his skin, restless, searching for a rhythm it no longer had to match. He straightened his gloves with practiced fingers, not because they needed fixing, but because the ritual steadied him. And he let air gather again in his lungs like a man reentering a role after nearly forgetting who he was.
He would wait.
Time would do what time always did. It would grind away the pieces. Dull the edges. Dim the glow. The flicker would gutter. The soul would dissolve. And her power—her purpose—would remain.
It wouldn’t be stolen. Not taken. Just… left behind. The same way perfume lingers after flame, or the way light remains on the lids even after the fire is gone.
Ephemeral, inevitable, and final.
Sarah
It didn’t feel like falling.
There was no motion. No sense of down or up, of space widening or collapsing. There was no wind, no gravity… no moment of catching breath before impact. Just stillness—so complete, so unbroken—that it ached in a way she couldn’t name. It was a stillness that pressed against her in every direction, not with force, but with absence.
It was the kind of hurt that came after—after the rupture, after the storm, after the soul had screamed itself raw and silence settled over the wreckage. She wasn’t sure if she had breath anymore. Or bones. Or blood, for that matter. She tried to call her hands, her limbs, her eyes—but nothing answered. There was only awareness, untethered and thinning, like light through fog. Even that fragile sense of self began to drift, no longer sure of its own shape. A hundred years of compression and suppression was enough to erase any surety of form—of identity.
Time didn’t pass here. There was no change, no pulse, no rhythm to mark before and after. There were no moments at all—only the suggestion that such things had once existed, somewhere beyond reach. She floated in an unmoving eternity, and the longer she lingered, the more she feared she might forget that motion had ever been real.
She tried to remember where she had been or what she had done. There had been something—heat, pressure, a scream that hadn’t been hers but had struck through her like a lightning bolt. It had come from him—Jareth. Her mind caught the name like a splinter under the skin—sharp, raw, and tender all at once. His magic had met hers. His soul had recoiled. And then—it had closed.
Jareth. The name echoed, low and aching, like a bruise in the dark. Not spoken, but felt. Not called, but remembered. He had pulled away. No—shut. It hadn’t been violence, but he had shut her with finality. It wasn’t a pressure held against her, but around her. She was no longer at the edges of him, pressing inward. She was inside, and he had locked the door.
Something inside her tried to cry out. Not with sound—there was no mouth—but with refusal. That deep, rooted refusal that had carried her through a century of compression, that had endured when every trial had tried to reshape or erase her. The same core that had once burned in the center of her soul like a star. It still stirred, still reached, still resisted. But it was weaker now. Flickering like a candle flame trapped in a jar, smothering slowly in the vacuum of neglect.
There was no pain. And that was the worst part.
If it had hurt, she might have fought. If it had burned, she might have screamed. But this—this was peace. It was a false peace—too sweet… too still. Like drowning in honey. It offered no threat, no reason to resist. Only quiet, warmth, and death.
She could feel the edges of herself softening. They weren’t breaking or fracturing. Just… loosening. Like threads unspooling from the hem of a forgotten coat, tugged gently by time. Each one carried a memory. Each one held a name. Each one marked a choice she had once made. And as they drifted from her, she feared she would never know what they had been.
The more she tried to remember herself, the more she felt herself becoming memory. Not a person, but a pattern. Not a will, but a story. A breath that had been held too long, and now no longer remembered why. She wasn’t gone. Not yet. But she was going. Bit by bit. Thread by thread.
Somewhere—distant, unreachable—she felt a movement. It wasn’t light. Not warmth. It wasn’t even sound. Just a change in the tide beyond the wall. A decision, but not hers. But she felt its shadow nonetheless.
It wasn’t him. At least, not directly. But it came from his direction, like a ripple of thought in still water. She felt it brush against the oubliette—cool, detached, waiting. The ache of something choosing not to choose. The shape of a soul that had decided to wait. To let her fade. As if that were mercy.
He hadn’t destroyed her, but he hadn’t saved her either. He had chosen… stillness. And in stillness, she would be lost. And somehow that was worse.
She didn’t know how long she had. She didn’t know if she would know when the end came. Perhaps there would be no end. Just silence and unraveling. Just memory slipping into nothing.
But something inside her—small, stubborn, burning—still was. Still refused. And if it had no mouth to scream, it would remember. If it could not move, it would persist. Even as the silence tried to fold her flat.
Jareth
He recovered slowly.
Not from injury—there were no wounds—but from a strange kind of exhaustion that settled beneath his skin like cold. His soul had clenched too tightly. His magic had flared and coiled like a serpent around a fire it couldn’t swallow. Even now, hours—or was it longer—later, he still felt faintly out of rhythm, like an instrument that had been restrung but not yet tuned. The room around him was quiet, his chambers dim and undisturbed, but the silence was not restful.
He rose from where he had collapsed, straightening with practiced care. His movements were slow but precise, shaped by long habit and ceremonial discipline. No one had witnessed the moment of weakness. No one would see the aftermath.
He adjusted the cuffs of his sleeves and rolled his shoulders back, listening for the click of his spine settling into place. The ritual grounded him. He was not a man undone—he was a king, and kings endured.
Still… the effort had cost him more than expected.
He moved to the center of the room and extended one hand, palm up. Magic gathered easily in his grasp, as it always had. It was familiar, obedient even. It shimmered faintly at his fingertips, curling into fractal patterns that rippled outward in the air. He shifted it and reshaped it. It coiled into a crystal sphere, then dissolved. Nothing stuttered. Nothing surged.
It was the same as always.
The same magic he’d always had. It was no stronger or richer. There was no new resonance under his skin.
He frowned—not deeply, but with measured thought. The Ironbound were supposed to fade, their magic seeping into their bearer like ink into cloth. They were not spells to be cast but wells to be absorbed. And once absorbed, the change should have been noticeable—more force, more clarity, more resilience. But his magic felt… unchanged.
Oh, it was steady, stable. Although stagnant might have been the better word.
It wasn’t a failure, not yet. Some integrations took time. Some souls resisted the process longer before dissolution. It was possible—perhaps even likely—that the magic couldn’t be drawn while she remained intact. He had heard of such cases in whispers, old texts, marginal notations made by healers and harvesters who didn’t dare speak openly. If the Ironbound’s will remained too strong, the power stayed locked inside until the soul dissolved on its own. It was rare. Inconvenient. But not unexpected.
Still… it bothered him.
Not because he had failed. But because something didn’t align.
He turned away from the open air and began moving toward his private shelves—books bound in skin and song, scrolls etched with ink that shimmered in low light. If there was precedent, he would find it. If there was protocol, he would follow it. She had surprised him once. He would not allow it to happen again.
There would be no more pleading. No more faltering. He would have his answers. He would understand this. He would master it. And when the time was right—when she had softened enough to let go—he would take what remained. What was always meant to be his.
The candlelight bled low across the spines of ancient tomes, flickering in steady defiance of the hour. Jareth sat with his sleeves rolled to the elbows, his jacket abandoned over the back of a carved chair, and his hair pulled loosely from his face. The table before him was covered in scrolls, books, tablets—some bound in soft leather, others etched in materials long extinct. Every one of them crackled with residual magic. None of them offered answers.
He read without pause, turning pages with precise, calloused fingers. Language did not slow him. Half these texts had been written in tongues he had outlived, and the rest might as well have been etched from his own memory. And still, there was nothing. Account after account described the same: integration. The Ironbound faded. Their wills dispersed. Their magic became usable. That was the way of things.
The process varied by strength, by preparation, by the bearer’s method of ingestion—but it always ended the same. They did not remain. Not like this. Not intact. Not sealed and untouched. Not beyond his reach.
Jareth exhaled slowly, closing another book and setting it aside. He picked up the next without hesitation. His eyes were shadowed now, the hollows beneath them deepening with each passing hour, but he pressed on. He was no stranger to long nights. Knowledge was power. And power—especially hers—was not something he could afford to misunderstand.
Then, at last, something shifted.
It came not in a grand revelation, but in a footnote. A margin mark scrawled in a hand more frantic than formal. The parchment was brittle, the ink faded to the brown of old blood. But he leaned in, breath held, as the words sharpened under his gaze.
One known instance of resistance post-ingestion.
The soul remained whole—interference noted.
Magic did not integrate while identity persisted.
Self dissolved naturally within the first day.
Integration followed.
No known method recorded to access power while self remained.
Further experimentation discouraged.
Jareth’s jaw tensed as he read it again. Slowly. Word by word.
It wasn't the confirmation he had hoped for, but it wasn't a contradiction either. The identity had lingered—briefly. And during that time, the power had remained inaccessible. The bearer had done nothing. The self had faded on its own. Integration had resumed. The desired outcome had been achieved.
He sat back in his chair, the worn leather creaking beneath his weight. The flickering candle cast a long, thin shadow across the page. No known method. Not impossible, then. Just unstudied or uncontrolled. The kind of thing too rare to bother mastering.
It made sense.
She was strong. That was why she remained. But strength didn’t last forever. Not in isolation. Not sealed in stillness. Eventually, she would tire. Unravel and fade away. And when she did, the barrier would lift, and the power would flow.
He would wait.
He would not try to break her further. That would risk destroying the magic entirely. No—he had made a clean containment. A quiet oubliette. She would fade in time. Sooner than later. There was precedent, however thin.
The text offered no ritual. No further warning and no alternative. But he had what he needed: confirmation. This wasn’t a failure. This was a process.
He reached forward and closed the book, smoothing the worn cover with both hands. The motion was almost reverent. Then he stood, adjusting his cuffs, straightening his spine as if returning to the weight of his crown.
He would endure. He would be patient. And when she withered, the rest would follow. The self would fade. The soul would settle… and the power would be his.
Notes:
If you’ve made it this far: thank you. This chapter lingers in stillness by design—frustrating and fragile, like Sarah’s unraveling sense of self. Jareth believes he’s doing the reasonable thing. He always does.
As a reminder, this fic is still unfolding and has not been beta read—so feedback is welcome (and deeply appreciated). Whether you're reading silently or leaving a comment, I'm grateful for your company on this journey.
I also know I said that I would try to be posting weekly, but I'm not sure I'll have the chance to next week...so I'm posting this chapter just a little bit early!
Chapter 4: Chapter Four- When Power Does Not Come
Summary:
The oubliette was built to silence, to dissolve will into power and memory into ash. But within the dark, something stirs. Not whole, not gone—just unraveling. Sarah’s thoughts drift like smoke, her name forgotten, her self scattered— and yet, one ember of refusal burns steady, cruel in its persistence.
Jareth enters the sealed space inside himself to observe what remains. He expects surrender, fading, quiet. What he finds is presence. Not a voice nor a cry. Just awareness, watching him from the dark. And a soul that should not have survived, still clinging to its shape.
Notes:
This story is a work in progress and is not beta read, so please excuse any rough edges.
In this chapter, we step into the silence between two souls: one unraveling, the other beginning to question what it means when things don't go according to expectations. As always, your thoughts and reactions are deeply welcome—and thank you for walking this strange road with me.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Epigraph – Full Letter Excerpt
Excerpt from a letter to Crown-Prince Jareth, penned by Ariman Thorne, Senior Advisor to the High Court, during the Eastern Uprising
(Preserved in the Royal Instructional Letters, Box III)In regard to your question for advice on the present situation, I commend you for pausing long enough to ask. That alone marks you as wiser than many of your peers at the same age. Leadership, I’ve found, is not measured by decisiveness alone—but by the moments one chooses to defer action until the choice becomes clear.
You asked whether the use of the oubliettes is necessary. My answer is yes. But not for cruelty nor for spectacle. They exist for a reason more subtle and more powerful: they preserve the future. When a threat cannot be resolved—when it cannot be reasoned with, persuaded, or destroyed outright—containment is not cowardice. It is wisdom. It gives you time. It grants your people peace. And it grants you the distance to think.
The oubliette, whether stone or spell, is not the end of a problem. It is a pause. A breath held beneath the water. And when you resurface, older and clearer, you may return and decide… without haste, without fury… what should be done with what remains.
Never let others shame you for buying time. That, too, is part of ruling.
— Ariman Thorne, Royal Advisor Emeritus
Jareth
The dawn came pale and indifferent, bleeding over the horizon in cold, milk-grey light. Jareth hadn’t slept. He rarely needed to, but this time it wasn’t stamina that kept him upright—it was the quiet necessity of stillness. If he moved too fast, he might feel the edge of what had passed. If he let himself think too deeply, he might name it.
Instead, he stood at the high window of his chamber, watching the world below stir into reluctant motion. Goblins bickered on the outer ramparts. A fae courier crossed the courtyard in swift, ceremonial steps. Magic stirred in the air as the Labyrinth shifted faintly beneath its morning breath.
His magic, however, remained unchanged.
He summoned the magic again—precisely, deliberately. His fingers splayed and his palm turned upward. The familiar spark of light bloomed in his hand like a dying star, obedient but unremarkable. He twisted it into a spiral, then compressed it to a sphere, waiting—listening—for that telltale change. That pulse of power he had been promised.
But there was nothing.
There was none of the expected deepening in his magic. It did not settle heavier into his veins or ripple outward with the strength of a newly claimed soul. No surge rose up to meet him, no widening of the well, no shift in resonance that signaled power unfurling from its host. Everything remained steady—too steady—like a pool untouched by wind. Not a single sign showed that the soul he’d consumed was unraveling into strength.
He frowned, the expression carved more from thought than from any trace of fear. This was slower than expected, but slow was not unprecedented; the texts whispered of rare cases where integration dragged on longer than the ritualists predicted. She was strong-willed, unusually so, and perhaps her selfhood simply required more time to shed before the power could flow. In that light, it was not a failure, only an anomaly—an inconvenience to be endured rather than a threat to be feared. Yet the longer he stood in the pale dawn, the more the steadiness began to taste like defiance.
He turned from the window with measured precision, the movement of a man who had practiced control as ritual. His hands found the gloves at the edge of the table, drawing them up with smooth, unhurried motions. It was habit as much as armor, a small liturgy of composure that steadied him when the world refused to align. The fabric slid against his fingers like cool reassurance, one of the few sensations that still obeyed him. Even here, in the hush of his private chamber, he performed the motions of a king because the ritual reminded him who he was.
Despite the restless energy curling beneath his skin, he forced himself not to pace. He wanted to—wanted to wear grooves into the stone with his boots, wanted to feel movement echo his unease—but he did not. A king did not pace, not even when no one watched. A king waited, and he had already waited this long. He would wait longer if necessary. He would wait for the Ironbound to fade.
Still, there was something off, a wrongness he could not quite name. It was not the ordinary quiet of magic at rest but something thinner, more fragile, as though the echo of power had retreated rather than expanded. His magic did not simply feel unchanged; it felt diminished, muffled, hollow in a way that unsettled the disciplined cadence of his thoughts. It was like a cup set out for rain, not only empty but drying from within, the promise of fullness fading drop by drop. For the first time, he wondered if the process was not simply slow but slipping.
He shook the thought away with a deliberate breath, as if exhaling could banish it. It was too soon to worry, far too soon to admit to himself that this could be more than an anomaly. Even the irregular case he had unearthed in his research had resolved within a day, the self dissolving and the power rising like clockwork. This Ironbound would follow the same course; she had to. Anything else would mean that his control—his certainty—was an illusion, and that was not a thought he was prepared to hold.
By midmorning, Jareth had completed the motions of his day without incident. Though it would not be questioned for him to be sequestered away to acclimate to the power of the Ironbound, he went out of his chambers to complete his usual duties. The court hadn’t noticed anything. His servants hadn’t questioned his silence. And the power still hadn’t risen.
He exhaled slowly, the sound escaping him like a quiet admission. He tested his magic again, reaching inward with deliberate care, as if touch alone could coax a different result. This time, he wasn’t imagining it—there was a change, slight but unmistakable, a thinning of the current that had always been steady beneath his skin. It didn’t shatter or falter outright, but it rippled with less conviction, the once-clear resonance now faintly muted. Even his own senses, honed by centuries of command, hesitated at the edge of the shift as though trying to name it without language.
The weakness was subtle, but it was there. Not an obvious collapse, but a slackening of tension, like a bowstring no longer drawn to its full arc. The resonance no longer carried as far, and the echo within his soul returned to him quieter, as though from a greater distance. It wasn’t absence—he could still feel the magic, still shape it—but it was dimmed, blurred, its edges softened in ways he could neither measure nor control. It felt less like something resisting him and more like something slipping away, receding at a pace he could neither halt nor follow.
He lowered his hand slowly, staring at the faint residue of the spell still curling from his fingertips before it dissolved. His brows drew together as thought took the shape of doubt. The texts had promised this was the natural progression: the Ironbound fading, the magic unfurling, the self dissolving into power. But what he felt was not the calm of integration; it was the hollowness of loss. It clung to him like a shadow that did not belong, a subtle wrongness that resisted being smoothed over.
He still didn’t act. There was no point in rushing a process older than the kingdoms he ruled, no reason to break ritual with impatience. The words on the parchment had been clear—power came only after the Ironbound’s self was gone. He had already waited this long, had already staked everything on endurance and precision. He could wait longer. He would wait for the fading, because that was what the texts had promised him.
And yet, somewhere beneath the discipline of his thoughts, unease began to stir. It did not sound like a warning, sharp and immediate, nor like a call demanding response. It was quieter than that, deeper than that: a silence where light should have been, a hollow place that whispered of absence. It lingered behind his composure like the first tremor beneath still earth, too faint to name but impossible to ignore. And though he did not yet move, a part of him began to wonder if patience might cost him more than action ever could.
Sarah
There had been… a shape.
It wasn’t a body or, at least, not anymore. But once, she had held her thoughts in a shape—something akin to a ball, where she could curl around them to protect them. But now they slipped through her like sand—too fine to catch, too many to follow. Names were the first to go. She couldn’t remember hers. Couldn’t remember his, the one who had—had what?
He had taken her, bound her, and folded her into the dark. But she couldn’t remember his name. Shouldn’t she remember someone who would do something like that to her?
The memory tugged at something just beyond reach. She could sense the echo of fury, the ghost of a scream, but the emotion no longer had a face. The shape of him had blurred. The shape of her had blurred.
She thought there might have been… fingers surrounding her. She was put between lips. She could almost remember laughter… but surely there was no laughter during that. Was the memory of laughter hers? It all felt disjointed… confusing. She tried to place the memories in some kind of order. But when she reached for them, she found only smoke.
Something burned still—small, bright, and cruel in its steadiness. Was it love? Fear? No… perhaps memory. It was the core memory of refusal. The ache of being not yet gone. It didn’t push outward. Didn’t claw for release. It only was.
Sometimes she wondered if that spark of refusal had always been there. Or if it was all that was left of her. If so, she would cling to it.
She didn’t want to go. She didn’t really want to stay, either. She just wanted to know—something. Anything. Anything other than this unraveling. She wanted to know anything other than the sensation of memories slipping through her grasp… of her very self slipping away.
She cried out in the darkness. But the silence answered nothing. It didn’t answer who she was nor what she had been. It didn’t even answer why she remained.
And yet—she did.
Jareth
By nightfall, the glow had gone out of his spells.
Not completely. Not in a way anyone else would notice. But to his eyes—attuned, honed, exacting—the edge was missing. The magic still responded, still shaped itself at his will, but it was thinner now. Quieter. As if its roots had begun to rot.
He’d tested it four times that day. Each attempt had yielded less than the one before. Not in volume—he could still summon force—but in resonance, in depth. It wasn’t the kind of grounding he expected when a new source had been taken in. Instead of deepening, his magic was skimming.
He unthinkingly paced his private study with a scroll unfurled in one hand—long past worrying about whether a king should pace or not—his other hand absently dragging across the spine of a dozen volumes stacked in frustrating silence. None of them offered anything new. The footnote, his only lead, remained unchanged. The bearer had done nothing. The self had dissolved. The magic had come.
Except now… he wasn’t sure that was what had happened.
The texts had not said how long it might take before the power emerged. They offered no guidance beyond the assertion that integration would inevitably follow dissolution, as though it were a law of nature rather than a living, volatile process. Nowhere in the margins or footnotes had anyone written what happened when the self refused to dissolve, or—worse still—when it dissolved too slowly. That uncertainty gnawed at him like a slow-moving poison, not sharp enough to demand action, but deep enough to unsettle his confidence. He found himself rehearsing the fragments of what he knew, as though repetition might make the unknown yield its shape.
Jareth closed the scroll and leaned his hip against the edge of the table, his posture deceptively casual but his thoughts heavy. His eyes drifted toward the cold hearth, not because he needed warmth—he rarely did—but because he needed something fixed to look at while his mind ran. What he wanted was certainty, something solid to stand on while everything else threatened to shift beneath him. Yet the silence pressing in around him was not the stillness of rest or resolution. It felt brittle, like the surface of frozen water, beautiful but always on the verge of cracking.
His fingers curled slowly against the table’s edge, the motion small but deliberate as a new idea began to take shape—dark, persistent, and tempting. He could go in. Not physically, no; his body would remain here in the safety of the room. But as his will personified, his magic given shape and purpose, he could step into the oubliette he had created inside himself. He had done it before with other spaces, lesser ones, though never with something this volatile or this rare. Even considering it sent a ripple of unease through him, but the possibility rooted itself all the same.
He knew exactly where the oubliette had been sealed; he had felt its edges like a seam stitched into the fabric of his soul when he first confirmed her containment. With care—delicacy, even—he could thread his awareness into the threshold without breaking it, enough to sense how far the process had gone. Perhaps, if he were careful, he could even reach for the magic directly, test the tether, and glimpse the power before it fully emerged. The thought was both seductive and dangerous, a step into territory the texts had left blank.
It was undeniably a risk, but to Jareth it felt like a measured one. Ironbound magic was at its most volatile in the moment of ingestion, when the soul and the power were still fighting to define their boundaries. This unprecedented slow fading—if that was what it was—could make the magic even more sensitive, like a wound refusing to close. If the Ironbound’s self truly lingered within the oubliette, any interference could either stabilize or destroy it entirely. Yet he found himself weighing the chance nonetheless, as though some part of him already knew he would take it.
He resolved, at least in thought, on the limits of what he would do. He would not engage with the self that remained, no matter how strong the temptation might become. He would not unseal the oubliette or undo the containment he had reflexively built around her. He would not free her. He would simply observe—only enough to understand, only enough to prepare. It was a small comfort, but it was one he repeated to himself like a mantra.
After all, she was not resisting—at least, not openly. She was fading, or so he told himself, and the fading would eventually yield the power he sought. Yet even as he repeated the logic of the texts in his mind, he felt the first quiet question rise beneath it: what if waiting was not enough?
The oubliette opened without resistance.
Not physically, of course—there was no door, no threshold to cross. But in the layered architecture of his soul, it was a room he now recognized. Not made of stone, but instinct. It was not designed, but conjured. It had sealed itself at the moment of impact, drawn up from reflex and terror like scar tissue.
And now, he peeled it back. Not all the way. Just enough to look inside.
He extended his will like a gloved hand, precise and steady, pressing into the folds of himself where the boundary of the oubliette hummed. The place was cold. Not with temperature, but with absence. Light did not gather here. Sound did not echo. His magic hesitated at the threshold—not in fear, but in something closer to respect.
He stepped in.
Not entirely—just enough to let his awareness permeate the space. To feel the shape of what had been contained. He expected to sense pressure, perhaps resistance. Instead, he felt… thinness. A fragile weave of what had once been fierce. A self in dissolution. There was no attack, no rush to greet him, and no great pulse of magic waiting to be claimed.
There were only threads now—thin, tenuous strands of being that shimmered faintly in the dim of the oubliette. What had once been a dense presence, compressed and burning at its core, was scattered and fraying like the last fibers of a worn tapestry. The Ironbound’s magic drifted slowly, listlessly, like dust suspended in an airless room where no current could stir it. It was not gone, not yet, but it no longer gathered itself into anything solid enough to touch.
Still, the magic remained bound to her, tethered by some instinct deeper than either will or spellcraft. It was faint and inconsistent, flaring at odd intervals like a dying star, then fading again before he could mark its pattern. He reached for it carefully, as though cupping water in his palms, testing the tension of the link without pulling too hard. But each attempt slipped through his grasp like oil, not resisting him but retreating, as though it were being drawn away by her slow unraveling. It was not a struggle of power but a siphoning, drop by drop, into the same quiet that was consuming her.
He pulled back with deliberate control, breathing in slowly through his nose as he gathered his composure. The gesture was ritual as much as necessity, the act of reclaiming steadiness after touching something too fragile to hold. He could not seize what was left of her without risking both the magic and the soul; he knew that now with a certainty that weighed heavier than any scroll or warning. This was not a question of force. It was a question of time—and time was not on his side.
She was not gone—not yet. He could still feel the faint pulse of her presence, steady in its refusal even as it dimmed. And the power he sought—the power he had risked everything to claim—was going with her, retreating into that same silence, as if waiting for a moment he did not yet understand.
Sarah
Something moved.
She didn’t know what. Didn’t know who. It wasn’t a voice. It wasn’t a touch. But it pressed against her—not harshly, not cruelly. It was just present. Like heat from a nearby flame. Like a shape leaning in just close enough to shift the air.
She tried to lift her head, but realized she no longer had one. She tried to speak, but there was no mouth. There was no name to shape on any imagined tongue.
Still—something stirred. A flicker of warning in the place where her will had burned longest. The core that had refused to collapse.
It wasn’t fear. It was a memory. Or the ghost of it.
Someone had done this. Someone had put her here. And now—they were watching.
She didn’t know if she hated them. But she remembered that she had once wanted to.
Jareth
He withdrew.
Not quickly. Not startled. But with the care of one backing away from a ledge he hadn’t expected to be so narrow. The magic had not struck him. The soul had not risen. But something inside the oubliette had noticed him.
In that space where names held no power and selfhood was meant to dissolve into silence, something had stirred. Not a voice. Not a force. But an awareness—faint, flickering, and impossibly present. And for the briefest of instants, something—someone—had looked back. It hadn’t spoken. It hadn’t moved. But it had seen him. And that recognition, small though it was, wrapped around him with a weight he hadn’t expected.
He resealed the oubliette with care, neither harsh nor hurried. The seal slid into place like the closing of a thought, measured and intentional, as if to reassure both of them that boundaries still existed. It was not a punishment, nor was it driven by fear. It was protection—his and hers—from something neither of them was ready to confront. He could not afford to act rashly, not now, not with the balance so thin.
The texts had not prepared him for this, had offered no guidance for what it meant when an Ironbound held on not with rage, but with recognition. They had warned of resistance, of instability, of power that bucked and broke until tamed. But they had never imagined her. They had not known the shape of her will, the edges of her defiance, or the quiet way her soul clung to the world instead of collapsing into it.
He left the chamber in silence, each step deliberate, though slower than before. The door to the study clicked shut behind him with a soft, final sound—not the slam of anger, nor the lock of retreat, but the quiet acceptance of a line drawn. Not between right and wrong, but between what he understood and what he did not. It was not fear that kept him from opening it again, but caution—and perhaps something closer to reverence.
The door to the study clicked shut behind him with a soft finality. It was not slammed nor locked. Just… closed.
He stood in the center of the room for a long moment, letting the silence settle around his shoulders like a cloak. His breathing was even. His spine unbent. There was no outward sign of strain. And yet—he felt it. In the magic and in the marrow.
Something was wrong. It wasn’t broken. Not yet. But it was wrong.
He crossed to the hearth and lit the fire with a flick of his fingers, more for focus than warmth. The flame leapt to life obediently—no resistance, no flicker of failure—but the spell was thinner than it should have been. He’d shaped fire a thousand times, and always it had come like breath. Now it felt… borrowed. Pulled from a place further away than it ought to be.
He stared into the blaze, jaw set, fingers clasped behind his back.
The Ironbound was still there.
Still whole enough to respond. Still strong enough to recognize him. He hadn’t expected defiance, but he also hadn’t expected… awareness. The oubliette should have dulled everything—will, memory, perception. Instead, he had felt the brush of something watching him from within.
It wasn’t her voice, nor was it anything close to an identity or name. It was just awareness. It was a self that refused to fade. A soul that should have been silent.
He paced to the window again, ignoring the view. His reflection hovered in the glass, sharp-edged in the firelight, and for a moment, he thought he looked older. Though as a fae he wouldn’t outwardly age. He didn’t even think he looked tired, nor worn—but drawn. Like something inside him had stretched a little too far.
He had told himself over and over that this was the right course. He had built his resolve around the promise of order, of ritual, of inevitability. She would fade, and when she did, the magic would come—clean, seamless, and sure. That was the truth written in every text, the law behind every ritual. Yet standing here now, the promise rang hollow; the power had not come, and she had not faded. Not truly. Not enough to release her hold. The shape of her still lingered at the edges of his magic like a breath he could not exhale.
He lifted a hand and flexed his fingers slowly, an old habit of measuring strength when words failed. His magic stirred at the call but did not leap to answer as it once had. Instead, it moved sluggishly, like water thickened by silt, shimmering at his fingertips without weight or depth. It was no longer the eager pulse of a wellspring but the wavering shimmer of heat on stone—there, visible, yet intangible. As he studied it, he realized the current had shifted, flowing not toward him as the texts had promised, but away, following the same vanishing path as the soul it was tied to.
The direction was unmistakable now. It was not integration but retreat. The magic was slipping further from his reach with each passing moment, echoing the slow dissolution of the self that carried it. He could almost feel it in his veins, a gradual ebbing, a tide pulling back from the shore before a storm. If he stood still long enough, he might be left with nothing—no soul, no power, no victory. Just absence where promise had been.
He didn’t speak aloud; there was no one to hear him, and the words themselves felt dangerous, as though saying them would solidify them into truth. Yet even in silence, a single thought threaded through his mind, unbidden and unwelcome. It rose like a whisper from beneath the weight of his composure, sharp and cold in its simplicity: What if I had waited too long? What if patience—his greatest strength—had become the very blade poised to cut him?
Notes:
Thank you for reading this installment of Ironbound.
As always, this is a WIP without a beta, so feedback is welcome and appreciated.We’re entering deeper waters now—threads are fraying, choices are approaching, and both Jareth and Sarah may soon have to confront the cost of what was done. Stick with me here because it's about to get so good! (If I do say so myself.)
Chapter 5: Chapter Five- The Soul That Refused to Fade
Summary:
The fire burns low, and with it Jareth’s certainty. What should have been swift dissolution lingers into silence—too long, too still. The Ironbound’s soul refuses to unravel as it should, and the Labyrinth itself begins to stir, ancient and watchful. When Jareth seeks to reclaim what he believes is his, he discovers that some oaths were never meant to be broken—and some souls were never meant to die.
Notes:
Like the Ironbound themselves, this story is still being forged. This chapter remains a work in progress and has not yet been beta read, so expect a few rough edges along the way. Thank you for journeying through the Labyrinth with me.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Excerpt — The Hymn of the Bound King
Fragment from “The Hymn of the Bound King,” recovered from the Eastern Archive; author and century unknown.
He swallowed the star and thought it his own, yet the heavens did not dim.
For the star remembered her sky, and the sky remembered its promise.
In the hollow of his chest he built a throne of silence,
waiting for her light to bend—
but it would not.
For the star burned still, unseen but unbroken,
wrapped in pain and memory.
The king cried out for light, and the earth answered:
You cannot keep what still remembers its name.
And so the heavens withdrew their favor,
and the Labyrinth stirred in its sleep.
For oaths older than crowns must be kept,
and the bound do not fade while they are remembered.
Jareth
The fire had burned low. Only embers remained, casting long shadows that swayed as the candlelight flickered on the desk behind him. Jareth hadn’t moved in nearly an hour. He stood where he had when he sealed the oubliette again—hands behind his back, shoulders straight, gaze fixed on the space between two long-set stones in the hearth.
He did not need to check the hour. He felt it in his bones.
It had been more than a full day.
The texts—what little there were—had spoken plainly. If the soul resisted, the process would still complete within a day. The self would unravel. The magic would integrate. The delay, though unpleasant, would resolve.
But his magic had not changed.
No new strength. No heightened attunement. No echo of her power sliding into his. If anything, it had grown harder to touch. It was slower… less rooted. Like something once solid had begun to decay beneath his reach.
He drew a breath in through his nose—measured, careful, deliberate. The motion was meant to steady him, to remind his body of discipline when his thoughts refused to obey. This was not panic. He would not name it panic. Kings did not panic. And yet, beneath the cultivated precision of his breath, something moved—small, sharp, and unrelenting. A tremor of unease threaded through the silence, too quiet to be fear, too controlled to be dread. Still… he was no longer certain.
He turned from the hearth and crossed to the desk, fingers brushing the spine of the scroll again—that scroll, the one with the note, the one he’d reread so many times it no longer felt like a warning, but a chant. The self dissolved. The magic followed. No further delay recorded.
What if the delay wasn’t resolved? The thought lodged in his mind like a splinter, impossible to ignore once felt. What if it wasn’t a delay at all, but a failure of containment—something subtle, unseen, festering beneath his careful control? The possibility crept through him like cold water, seeping into the cracks of certainty he had built around himself. What if… he hadn’t contained her properly? The notion was absurd, and yet it would not leave him. For the first time, he found himself wondering not whether she would fade, but whether she could.
He clenched his jaw and pushed the thought away. That was absurd. He had felt the oubliette seal. He had checked the structure twice. There had been no fracture, no breach. He had stepped inside it himself. It held. She was whole. Fading, but whole.
And that was the problem.
His eyes closed for a moment, fingers pressing to the bridge of his nose.
He had thought she would shatter. Or surrender. Or burn bright and then vanish, as all Ironbound did. He had even prepared himself for the brief violence of it—souls sometimes screamed before they went. That he could have borne. But this…
This slow unraveling—he could feel it in the air, in the faint tremor of the wards that hummed beneath the stone. This silence that wasn’t peace, but something heavier, like breath held too long beneath the surface. This vanishing that never quite finished, as if the act of fading had become its own cruel eternity. It wasn’t right. Every instinct told him so, but instinct was a treacherous thing, easily mistaken for sentiment. And still, he waited. Because what else was there to do but wait? He had exhausted the texts, the tests, the rational explanations. All that remained was the vigil—the long, helpless watching of something he did not understand slipping quietly beyond his reach.
He had never been one to fidget.
Restlessness was a trait of lesser rulers—those who hadn’t yet learned to weaponize stillness. But tonight, Jareth could not settle. He moved through the quiet of his chambers like a shadow cast from his own firelight, long and thin and wavering.
He hadn’t touched the oubliette again. Not since that brief foray earlier in the day, when the soul within had looked back. He had felt it. Not clearly, not in words. But with enough certainty to mark it as deliberate. It had not lashed out. It had not pled. It had simply… seen him.
And then it had continued fading.
He had hoped—foolishly, perhaps—that a day would be enough. That by now, the resistance would have collapsed. That her will—if it could still be called that—would have loosened its grip, leaving the power free to rise. That he would feel stronger, anchored, and unshakable.
Instead, he felt frayed.
Not weakened, exactly—but hollowed. As if something beneath his feet had shifted while he wasn’t looking. His magic obeyed, yes. But not with the same readiness. It felt pulled… diluted even. As though it resented the reach.
He stood at the long glass window again, looking out at the starlit maze below. The Labyrinth slumbered, turning slowly in its sleep, and for a moment he felt the faintest pulse of memory—her presence echoing through those paths.
But that had been before—when her presence still lingered in the air, when the echo of her will still brushed against his own like a whisper through the stones. Now, she was sealed. Soundly contained. Bound within the quiet geometry of his own making, locked away in the hollow he had shaped for her. Every barrier was intact, every layer of magic unbroken. She was exactly where he had placed her. And still, the power did not come. The silence pressed in, thick and unmoving, and for the first time he wondered whether he had built a prison—or a tomb.
He turned from the window, jaw tightening. It wasn’t defiance he expected; it wasn’t even logic. But what if—the words surfaced unbidden—what if she knows what she’s doing?
The thought curled behind his eyes like smoke.
He had assumed she would break. That she had to break. But what if she had chosen instead to sink? To unravel so slowly that the magic had time to decay with her?
What if she would rather take it with her than let him have it? The thought struck him like a spark in dry tinder—small, improbable, but impossible to extinguish once born. It lingered, curling through his mind with the acrid sweetness of smoke, equal parts warning and wonder. Would she truly choose dissolution over surrender? Oblivion over yielding? He didn’t know if the thought angered him or impressed him—perhaps both, perhaps neither. Only that it unsettled him, because in her quiet defiance he heard something he had not expected to find again: a reflection of his own will.
He could return. The idea took shape quietly, a shadow behind his eyes that refused to fade. Not to study. Not to watch from the safety of detachment. But to confront. To speak. To test the limits of what he had made—and perhaps of himself. To name the thing sealed inside him. The words alone carried a dangerous gravity. To name her would be to admit she was still someone, not a relic or a resource, but a presence that saw him in return. And what would that mean—for the containment, for the magic, for the part of him that had begun, against his will, to care what became of her?
To name her, he would have to admit she was still someone. And he had not asked for a someone. He had asked for a weapon.
Jareth sank into the high-backed chair by the fire, the weight of his coat still on his shoulders. He didn’t remove it. He didn’t breathe deeply. Just sat in silence while the embers cracked low in the hearth.
He would wait until morning.
But the thought was already seeded now, buried deep where even discipline could not root it out. It pulsed with quiet persistence, growing in the cracks between reason and denial. He would return to the oubliette—not as scholar nor sovereign, not with the detached curiosity of one testing his craft. And next time, he would not go as a king in search of power. He would go as a man faced with a soul that refused to die—a man forced to look upon the consequence of his own command and find, to his disquiet, that it still looked back.
Sarah
There was no shape to take.
She had no body. No hands. No voice. But the pain—that she could hold.
It wasn’t loud. Not anymore. The sharpness had dulled around the edges, the way old wounds lose their sting but keep their ache. It sat in her like gravity. Low, heavy, and steady. A quiet pulse in a place that had no heartbeat.
And so, she clung to it.
Not because she wanted to suffer, but because it was hers. It wasn’t given to her. It wasn’t taken from someone else. It wasn’t drifting or slipping or unraveling. It stayed. When memory frayed, when names vanished, when everything else pulled apart—this remained.
So she folded herself around it.
It wasn’t in despair nor in surrender. In fact, it was rather like armor.
She wrapped the threads of her will around the hurt. Wove what little self she had left through its contours. Let it give her edges, however faint. Let it whisper: you were here. You are not finished.
And though she could not scream, speak, or remember what she had been—
She remembered this:
You sealed me. You left me. You are waiting for me to die.
So she didn’t. She refused to give in. Not yet.
Jareth
The morning came hollow.
He rose before the servants stirred, before the bells sounded through the stone corridors of the high wing. There had been no rest. Only stretches of darkness punctuated by the slow erosion of certainty. He had not dreamed, but he had remembered—the quiet brush of something watching him from within, and the way it hadn’t flinched.
He crossed to the mirror without ceremony. Not to admire himself nor to preen. Rather, simply to confirm that he was still himself.
His reflection was unchanged. Hair straight and sharp as ever. Skin pale beneath the firelight. The color of his coat caught the dimness with its usual richness. But still, he studied himself longer than necessary. Searching.
There was no mark on him. No visible sign that anything had shifted—no fracture in the mirror’s surface, no flaw in the sharp symmetry of his reflection. To any other eye, he was unchanged. But he could feel it. The difference was not in the glass, but beneath his skin. The magic that once pooled there, steady and obedient, was no longer lying still. It had begun to pull away from him, subtle as a receding tide, leaving behind a hollow tension in its wake. It was retreating—slowly, deliberately—as though something unseen had begun to call it elsewhere.
Not fleeing, not bursting—but pulling back, the way water begins to drain from a basin with no clear leak. Every test, every spell, every movement through the weave of his own power took more effort than it should have. There was no surge. There was no inheritance of Ironbound power.
She wasn’t fading into him. She was fading away.
He let out a slow breath and turned from the glass, the movement measured but heavy, the hem of his coat brushing the floor in a whisper that seemed louder than it should have been. The gesture felt ceremonial now, part of a ritual he no longer believed in. Another day. The words echoed through the room like a tolling bell—one more mark of time in a process that should have already ended. Another day, and still no sign that the power was coming. The silence that followed seemed almost sentient, waiting for him to admit what he refused to name: that perhaps it never would.
He crossed to his desk again and opened the scroll—that scroll—for the seventh time. His eyes tracked the margin note like a warding charm.
Self dissolved naturally within the first day. Integration followed.
A day. One day. That was what the precedent had said. Yet, it had now been longer.
The first stirrings of anger coiled beneath his ribs—not wild, not hot, but cold and sharp, like a blade left in the snow. He had done what was required. He had waited. He had not broken her. He had not forced it. He had been merciful… or so he had told himself.
He paced to the center of the room and summoned a minor spell with a flick of his hand. Illumination. It should have been simple, immediate.
The light came—then flickered. It dimmed. Then it stuttered. And, finally, it settled.
His jaw clenched, the motion sharp enough to ache. The flicker of light before him guttered once more, dimming to a sullen glow that barely held its shape. It was weaker again. He could feel it in the marrow of his power—the way each command met resistance, the way the air itself seemed reluctant to obey. And now, a thought surfaced—ugly, unwanted, but undeniable. She was not merely fading. The truth settled in him like a blade laid flat against his ribs: She was taking the power with her. Drawing it down, thread by thread, as if she meant to bury it where even he could not follow.
He stood in the middle of the chamber, still as stone, his hands at his sides.
If she vanished—truly vanished—what would remain?
It wouldn’t be power. Not even resonance. It would be nothing. She wouldn’t even have a name.
He had not asked her name. There had been no reason to. Names implied identity, and identity complicated what was meant to be simple. He had not needed it. She was the Ironbound—an artifact, a refinement of will and endurance distilled into purpose. She was the tool. She was the sacrifice. That was the story he had told himself, the language that made it bearable. And yet—somewhere beneath the layers of certainty and ritual, something shifted. A quiet voice, thin as breath against stone, whispered through the hollow he had built around his conscience: you should have asked.
He didn’t hesitate this time.
No preparation. No careful toe against the threshold. No pretext of study or containment assessment. The decision had already been made—quietly, steadily, somewhere between the dimming of one spell and the stuttering of the next.
She was taking it. Not by theft, but by some quiet, terrible act of will—a refusal written into the very fabric of her unraveling. His power. His prize. Everything he had been promised, everything he had already begun to imagine as his own, slipping through his grasp like water through a sieve. And if he waited longer, there would be nothing left to claim. No trace of her, no residue of the magic, only absence—and the hollow echo of his own arrogance staring back at him from the void she left behind.
He extended his will and opened the oubliette.
The space greeted him like breath meeting frost—silent, changeless, and cold.
He stepped in fully now. No holding back. No measured observation. He let his presence fill the sealed chamber of soul and instinct, pouring himself into the hollow he had shaped with his own panic.
It was like entering a tomb.
Not death, exactly. But the after of something—the hollow left behind once meaning has drained away. The air was thick with it, heavy as dust over forgotten relics, the kind of silence that remembered what it had lost. A place memory had been, now emptied of everything but echo. A place where silence had settled too long, becoming almost tangible, a living weight that pressed against his senses until he could feel it pulse beneath the surface of the stillness. And in that stillness—he found her. Not as a shape, not as a voice, but as a presence that refused to vanish, quiet and enduring as the last ember in a dying fire.
She wasn’t formed. Nor was she visible. But she was undeniably present. It was a slow, aching echo of something unraveling in deliberate agony. He felt her will like thin threads stretched across the air—taut in some places, fraying in others. She was wrapped around something now, coiled and quiet. Not resisting him directly, but guarding.
The pain. It reached him before anything else—not as sound, not as heat, but as pressure, like a pulse reverberating through stone. He could feel it, the outline of it, precise and unmistakable: a sharp, inward ache she had forged into a fortress. It wasn’t power. It wasn’t magic. It was something older, something born of endurance and refusal, shaped by hands that no longer existed. It was hers—utterly, defiantly hers. And through it, she held what remained of herself, bound together by agony and will, guarding the last flicker of her being from even him.
Jareth stepped deeper into the oubliette’s inner shape—not physically, but in essence. His soul pressed closer, brushing the perimeter of her unraveling self. It wasn’t an attack. Not yet. But it wasn’t gentle either.
He didn’t speak. To speak would have been to acknowledge that this Ironbound was more than a tool… more than a path to power. So, instead, he reached.
He didn’t reach out to comfort her. Nor to pull her free. But to test the truth of his suspicion.
Was she withholding the power? Did she know that she was taking it with her? Was she choosing this slow death—to take the magic with her, rather than yield it to him?
His will brushed against the threads of her identity—and recoiled.
Not because of pain. The sensation was sharper than that, colder—like touching something alive that refused to yield. But because they did not move. His magic pressed, coaxed, demanded, yet the threads of her will held fast. They didn’t bend beneath his reach or loosen at his command. They clutched—tight as roots around buried stone, fierce in their silence, unyielding even as they trembled. What she held was fragile, unraveling, but she would not let it go. Not to him. Not yet.
She was wrapped around the core like iron vines—coiled tighter than any fear could explain. There was no plea. No voice. But he felt it all the same. The meaning was unmistakable:
Mine. Not yours. I will go before I give it.
He stood in the heart of the oubliette, and for the first time since sealing it, he understood something he hadn’t wanted to consider:
She wasn’t fading despite him. She was fading because of him.
And as she faded, she was taking the power with her… on purpose or not.
He drew back slowly. Not out of fear. Not even out of doubt. The movement was deliberate, as though withdrawing from a precipice whose depth he could finally see. But because there was nothing else to do. Every choice before him led to loss, each more dangerous than the last. He could break her—force the integration, tear through the fragile threads that still held her together—but if he did, the power might shatter, slipping into ruin along with her soul. He could free her—unmake the oubliette, release what he had caged—but that would mean admitting he had been wrong. And for a king, for Jareth, that was a cost nearly as unbearable as defeat itself.
So he left her there, curled around pain, anchored in refusal.
And, for the first time since this began, he didn’t know what to do next.
Sarah
He reached for her.
Not with hands. Not with voice. Not even with magic. But with will.
His will sliced through the stillness like a blade drawn in the dark—sharp, precise, and full of presumption. It didn’t ask or seek. It expected.
It expected to find something waiting. Expected to be obeyed. And, most especially, it expected to own. To own her…to own her power.
The pain she held flared as if it remembered everything at once.
Not just what he had done—ingesting her, sealing her here, letting her unravel.
But what it meant. What he believed about her. What she had fought not to become.
A tool, vessel, and mere acquisition.
She had no mouth to cry out. No limbs to strike back. But the ache inside her condensed, coalesced, hardened. It wove tighter around her core, not resisting him like a weapon, but denying him like a locked door.
Not because it would save her.
But because if she was going to be lost, she would not go quietly.
And she would not go to him.
Something in her twisted—not her body, not even her soul, but the shape of her will.
Where before she had been dissolving, unraveling in threads… Now, the threads pulled inward. They were braiding, binding, and burning.
His presence left.
She knew it not by movement or sight, but by the absence of pressure. The air—if it could be called that—settled again, brittle and hollow.
But the pain remained. And so did she.
She wasn’t intact. Nor whole. But the pain, the remnants of self, were hers… for now.
Jareth
He withdrew with a hiss between his teeth.
It wasn’t pain, precisely. But contact—the sudden, undeniable brush of another will against his own. It struck like static through the air, sharp enough to catch his breath, too intimate to dismiss as mere resistance. Unexpected and unwelcome, it lingered for a heartbeat longer than it should have, a reminder that what he had sealed away was not inert matter but something aware, something that had felt him reach and refused to yield.
The Ironbound was still there—flickering, fragile, and burning. He had felt it, not as magic ready to be wielded, but as defiance sharpened by survival. She wasn’t lashing out. Not fighting, but withholding.
The sting of that refusal bloomed like frost along his spine, slow and crystalline, until it settled beneath his skin. It was not pain so much as awareness—a cold acknowledgment that she had denied him and that he could do nothing, for the moment, to undo it. She was fading, yes, but not fast enough to yield him what he’d been promised. The unraveling was too slow, too deliberate, too filled with intent. Not enough to justify waiting. Not enough to justify this—the long vigil, the silence, the hollow ache of power withheld. It was an insult carved in patience, and it burned colder than any defiance she might have screamed aloud.
He stood motionless in the dark of his chambers, hands slack at his sides, the last echoes of that inner touch still rippling through his thoughts. It had not been the clean, quiet death of a tool’s magic fading into its wielder.
It had been a rejection. And that—that—he could not allow.
Slowly, he turned toward the table strewn with open texts and discarded scrolls. All of them had promised him the same thing: power. If the soul faded, the magic would remain. If she vanished, he would rise.
But she was not vanishing. She was folding in on herself—drawing inward with the stubborn gravity of something that refused to be undone. Every thread of her will coiled tighter, wrapping around what little remained as though she meant to outlast even oblivion. She was taking the power with her, siphoning it from his reach in silent defiance. Hiding it like a seed too bitter to sprout, buried deep where no light could coax it back, where even he could not claim it without destroying the ground itself.
He reached for the nearest tome and shut it with an angry snap.
“Fine,” he said aloud, voice low, edged with steel. “If you will not give it freely…”
He didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t need to.
He would find another way. The thought landed with the certainty of a blade being set aside for sharpening. A stronger way—one that did not depend on her compliance or her mercy, one that would remind the Labyrinth itself whom it served. One that didn’t ask. The words formed like iron in his mind, cold and absolute, leaving no room for hesitation.
She should have faded by now.
Twenty-four hours, the texts had said—no longer. An Ironbound might linger briefly, in pain or confusion, but once their sense of self unraveled, the magic followed. Always.
And yet… there was nothing. No new wellspring of strength, no bloom of power through his veins. Only silence. Stillness. The faint hum of presence just beneath his skin—her presence. Dim, but maddeningly intact.
He stood in the heart of his private sanctum, surrounded by the quiet hum of wards and the faint metallic scent of old magic. Power gathered in his palm, swirling like smoke caged in crystal—beautiful, but brittle, as if the illusion of control might shatter at a touch. For the first time since the ingestion, a sliver of doubt pierced his certainty, fine and precise as a needle through cloth.
She’s not fading. The realization came like a breath drawn too sharply to release. Or worse—she is, but she’s taking it with her. The words echoed inward, heavy with a truth he could neither refute nor bear, and the air around him seemed to still, listening.
His lip curled. "You would spite me even in dissolution, wouldn’t you?" he muttered, staring into the empty air as though it might answer. "A final act of defiance. How fitting."
She was barely even conscious. Just the ghost of a will clinging to shadows in the oubliette. And yet she refused to let go.
Well, her refusal meant nothing. He was a king, and the power of the Ironbound belonged to him through the rite of ingestion. He would take what was his.
Jareth closed his eyes and reached inward—not with care, but with claim. His magic surged toward the oubliette, winding through the metaphysical tangle he had fashioned. No pretense of gentleness this time. He was the vessel. She was the offering. The integration was inevitable.
Or so he thought.
But the moment he reached for that ember—what should have been a flicker, helpless and dim—it fought back. Not as a blade, not even as a scream, but as resistance. A stubborn anchor of will. A splinter of identity that would not yield.
The magic recoiled. It struck him like a whip of heatless flame, a sudden surge snapping back through the channels of his will. Jareth gasped, the sound sharp and involuntary, stumbling a step as the backlash seared along his core. It wasn’t enough to wound—no true damage, no lasting scar—but it burned with intent, a warning written in pain. Just enough to remind him that the power he sought to master still remembered its origin, and that the will resisting him was not yet broken.
"What—?" he whispered, shaken.
It hadn’t been passive. He would know the difference—he should be able to perceive the texture of surrender when a soul dissolved and the quiet collapse of magic yielding to its master. This was neither. Not a natural unraveling.
She resisted. Even now, weakened and unraveling, she had found a way to deny him. And worse—his power still eluded him, shifting just beyond reach like a reflection on water.
His jaw clenched, the muscles tight enough to ache, fury rising not from the sting of the backlash but from the truth it carried. She wasn’t fading. She was withholding. Hoarding the last of what she was, as if daring him to take it by force.
He steadied himself.
No. That recoil was a fluke. A trick of overlapping wills, maybe. She wasn’t conscious enough to resist deliberately. She couldn’t be. He would try again. He would reach deeper. He would strip away whatever thread of identity remained and draw the power forth.
This time, he plunged with precision—cutting past memory, bypassing thought. She was a flicker in his core, and he meant to extinguish her. Reclaim what had been promised. What he needed.
But his magic froze midstream. The current that had been so sure, so precise, locked in place as though the world itself had forgotten how to move. It did not land. Did not seize. Nor did it take. The energy hung suspended between them, thrumming with the tension of an unstruck chord. And then it stopped—not by her will, not by resistance born of flesh or spirit, but by something greater. Something older, vast and indifferent, that reached through the weave of his own power and held it still with effortless command.
The air changed. Not with noise, not with light, but with presence. It curled like roots through stone, threading into every inch of his soul. Its presence was unmistakable.
He was being held back by the Labyrinth. For once, it wasn’t distant. Not some ambient force aligned with his will. This time, it was watching… reaching. And it dissolved his magic like fog under the sun.
"No," Jareth breathed, drawing back, but the space around him held firm—an unseen tension, like the bowstring of the world had just drawn taut.
A second presence bloomed in his awareness, rising slowly from the depths of the oubliette like a tide reclaiming forgotten shores. It was not the Ironbound—not quite. The texture of it was different, immense, threaded through with the quiet patience of stone and the breath of the earth itself. Something was holding her, cupping the fragile ember of her existence in a power older than his own, preserving what remained when even memory should have failed. The realization struck cold and certain. The Labyrinth was shielding her.
"Why?"
The question broke inside him like glass. The Ironbound had no rights. She was not a guest. She was not a subject. She was his.
But the Labyrinth did not flinch.
Instead, it closed—not harshly, but like a gate made of song and stone, sealing the oubliette behind a veil of silent judgment. His bond to her remained, yes. But it no longer obeyed him. It bent around her, buffered and distant, like the Labyrinth itself had stepped between them.
A memory surfaced—half-remembered, fragile as breath on glass. It rose unbidden from the quiet, from some distant corner of himself he had long stopped listening to. A time when he had wandered these halls alone as a boy, tracing the stones with bare fingers and whispering questions to walls that sometimes whispered back. The Labyrinth had seemed infinite then—unknowable, but kind. It had taught him patience, and power, and the cost of both. He had forgotten the sound of its voice until now, and in its return, there was no comfort, only the unmistakable sense that the one who had been the pupil was being judged by his oldest teacher.
“We protect what must not break,” the stones had once whispered. “We protect what is chosen.”
And now—it had chosen her.
Notes:
Thank you all for your patience and for continuing to read Ironbound! I missed last week’s update while wrapping up my final class of the semester, but I’m back and eager to share the next part of the story. Every comment, kudos, and bit of encouragement helps more than you know—it keeps me motivated and excited to keep writing. I’m so grateful to have you here as this story unfolds.
Chapter 6: Chapter Six- The Oath Reclaimed
Summary:
Jareth confronts the Labyrinth’s judgment and the weight of his forgotten oath. As Sarah drifts between dissolution and preservation, the Labyrinth itself intervenes—binding King and Champion once more, and forcing Jareth to face the truth of what he’s taken, and what he must now restore.
Notes:
This story is still very much a work in progress, and as always, there’s no beta reader—just me, my caffeine addiction, and the Labyrinth whispering in the background. Please forgive any typos or rough edges as I continue refining the chapters.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Excerpt from “The Balance of Crowns: A Study of Oath and Ruin”
It is said the Seventh King forgot the law of the Labyrinth and sought to unmake his Champion. In pride, he called her power his own and silenced her name upon his tongue. For a season, the kingdom prospered; his will shaped the stone, and his word became its echo. Yet the Labyrinth is a keeper of balances, not thrones. When the oath between King and Champion was broken, the maze itself turned against him.
The records say his crown was found days later, half-buried at the heart of the shifting sands, the sigil of his binding burned into the metal’s core. None have worn that crown since.
Scholars now agree that the Labyrinth tolerates many kings, but few Champions, for each victory of a mortal upon its path creates a symmetry that no ruler may sever. To rule within the Labyrinth is not to command, but to serve its design. The King is its Guardian; the Champion, its Voice. Together, they maintain its balance. Apart, they invite its wrath. For the Labyrinth does not punish treachery—it corrects it.
—Compiled by High Scholar Maerath, Court Historian of the Third Reign
Sarah
She had no shape.
No voice. No breath. Just a slow pulse of not-quite-thought flickering in the dark.
She had been unraveling—she remembered that. Remembered the ache of it. The thinning of self. Even now, she was still suspended in that aching silence. But something had changed.
She wasn’t falling anymore.
The pull had stopped. It hadn’t reversed. It hadn’t healed her. It just… paused, like the world had taken in a breath and forgotten to exhale. The unraveling threads of her memory were no longer drifting outward. They hovered now, taut and trembling, held in place by something not her own.
She tried to reach for a thought—any thought—but her grasp was featherlight, barely there. But it was just there enough to form the impression of a word.
Why?
The question did not echo. It settled, like dust on stone. And though no answer came, she felt it, a presence—something—press in gently, like hands folding over a shattered vessel to keep the pieces from spilling further. Not to mend her. Not yet. But to hold.
The presence was ancient. It was vaster than the oubliette that held her. Far older than the one who had cast her into it. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t…
Jareth. The name echoed through her, not spoken aloud, but originating both from and within the presence holding her… resonating within her mind.
The presence was colder than Jareth's. Gentler, in a way. And stranger. It did not speak, not in words, but it did not need to. She knew it the way one knows gravity. It was the walls. The weight. The hum of every corner she had touched. The rhythm beneath her dreamless sleep. It vibrated through her, binding the remnants of her self together.
It was the Labyrinth. She knew it more surely than she knew anything, though she couldn’t say how. The Labyrinth had taken her, and it had not let her go.
And in the space where nothing else remained, she clung to that awareness—not with strength, but with stillness. Her unraveling paused. Her name was forgotten. Her purpose was gone. But the hush that cradled her now was not despair.
It was stasis. It was protection. And it was not hers to break.
Jareth
The teleportation carried him not through distance, but through intention. The Heart of the Labyrinth did not reside in one place. There was no path to the Heart of the Labyrinth—only the will to stand in its presence, and the arrogance to believe oneself capable of doing so.
It was a nexus carved of will and memory and stone, pulsing beneath the shape of the Underground itself. When Jareth arrived, it was not through gate or corridor but by blood-right and demand. He tore himself there in a snap of wings and magic, landing hard on spiraled stone. The air smelled of old moss and cut metal. He arrived in silence.
There wasn’t darkness, nor was there light. There was just silence—the kind that devoured footsteps, thoughts, and even magic. The space was circular, carved from impossibly smooth stone, spiraling outward in patterns no architect had designed. There were no doors or windows. There was no beginning and no end.
At the center of the chamber, the floor bore a single spiral sigil, its faint light pulsing like a dormant heartbeat beneath the stone. He took a step toward it, slow and deliberate, and the air shifted—not with wind, but with awareness. It was subtle at first, the kind of change that prickled against the skin rather than stirred it, but unmistakable all the same. Something unseen had noticed him, and in that instant, the silence of the chamber no longer felt empty at all.
A figure stepped from the alcove behind him—a goblin mason, his eyes glazed and his limbs moving slowly. Then another—one of the fae nobles from the eastern court, her robes fluttering despite the still air. Then three more, then five. Creatures, children, courtiers, and scavengers. All drawn inward from wherever the Labyrinth had caught their feet. They circled the chamber in silence, their eyes unfocused, their bodies held like marionettes dangling from ancient strings.
The Labyrinth had found mouths. And through them, it spoke.
“You are here about the woman,” whispered an old scavenger, teeth missing and voice like crumbling mortar. The words echoed around, reiterated by overlapping voices.
"You’ve interfered,” Jareth said, voice low and sharp as flint. “Why?”
A girl stepped forward, no more than ten years old, her gaze ancient. When she spoke, her voice was curiously without inflection. “We protected what remains.”
“She’s mine,” Jareth hissed. “The Ironbound was mine. You allowed it. You said nothing.”
“She is not yours to unmake.”
The words were repeated in chorus. Echoes. Some overlapping, some dissonant. Some in languages Jareth hadn’t heard in centuries. It was not a conversation. This was the Labyrinth’s judgment.
“I followed precedent,” Jareth snapped. “The Ironbound are made for this. The texts say—”
“The texts were written by cowards,” the scavenger hissed. “By those who forgot what the Labyrinth is and what it will not abide by.”
He stood firm, though his stomach turned.
“She is fading,” he said coldly. “That should mean the power becomes mine. This makes her mine. She doesn’t belong to you.”
“She does.”
A chorus of voices, speaking slightly out of sync, assaulted him as a wall of sound from every direction.
“She cannot belong to you. She didn’t ask for you. She didn’t ask to be held by you.” Jareth snapped back.
“No.” said a fae man with a merchant’s crest stitched to his chest. “But neither did she give consent to be Underground. She was forcibly taken.”
Jareth faltered.
The truth of it rang in him like a cracked bell. The ritual hadn’t included a summons. He hadn’t called her by name. She had simply… been waiting at the market. Branded, bound, and ripe for the taking. Too far gone to question, and too precious a resource to waste.
“You’re protecting her,” he realized aloud, voice tightening.
“Yes.”
The speakers did not blink. They stood unmoving, as though time itself had tightened around them.
The dwarven woman lifted her hand and pointed—not at Jareth, but to the spiral carved into the floor. Her gesture was slow, deliberate, and eerily precise, as if guided by something far older than her small frame could contain. The sigil pulsed once, then again, each beat deepening in color until the faint glow thickened into something almost alive. The light seemed to breathe with the rhythm of her silence, a wordless summons that pressed against the air and made the chamber feel suddenly smaller, suddenly aware.
Another figure stepped forward—this one a bent old man, gnarled fingers glowing faintly as his mouth opened and the same chorus poured through. “She is Champion-marked.”
Jareth felt as though the floor had fallen out from underneath his feet. Jareth’s mouth was dry. The words of the Labyrinth replayed in his mind.
“That line is ended, "he said, quiet now. “The last Champion went Above over a century ago. She lived and died there. My oath to that Champion was fulfilled.”
“You are mistaken. You are willfully ignorant,” accused a boy in a butcher’s apron.
The spiral trembled beneath his feet. He backed a step. “Sar… the Champion was mortal. She chose her world. She rejected her dreams. She defeated me and returned to an ordinary life. She died.”
A fae noble with glossy eyes stepped forward, her long black hair flowing behind her. “She did not die, but neither is she alive, save through you. But the oath invoked by beating the Labyrinth — the oath that you are duty-bound to uphold as king — still stands.”
The wind turned inside the chamber. The spiral twisted tighter. The figures around him breathed in unison.
“She carries the mark, though it is not seen. She carries the right. You are oath-bound to protect her.”
And suddenly, Jareth could feel it — the old words buried in his blood, the shimmer in the stone that had answered him since he first became king. But older than kingship was the promise: that should a Champion of the Labyrinth return, he would guard them in the same manner as he is guarded by the Labyrinth itself.
“No,” he whispered. “She was supposed to be gone. Gone for good.”
The figures around him spoke as one. “And yet she remains.”
He could do nothing but argue… deny the words. To spit the truth back in their faces. He had given his service, his name, his crown to the one who was chosen, the Labyrinth’s Champion. And when she left… when she left…
She was simply gone. She had declared that he had no power over her. And so he couldn’t scry, couldn’t check in on her. But she had returned Aboveground to live out an ordinary life.
That was supposed to mean something. A severance. An end. But, instead, he was staring down a ghost the Labyrinth refused to bury. And somehow, this ghost — this fragment in a crystal — had called the oath, the one automatically tied to any Champion, back into force.
“She’s broken. You know that. Half-faded. A ghost caught in her own curse.” His argument was laced with despair.
“Then restore her.” Came the answer.
“I tried!” he snapped, a bitter edge cracking through his voice. “I gave her the chance to merge — she fought me. She tried to take my body, my power—”
The scavenger snorted in derision, the sound rough and low, like stone grinding against stone.
“She resisted destruction,” she spat. “You offered her oblivion instead — a means to lose her very self, eternally suspended in limbo, all to feed your power.”
The accusation rang through the chamber, raw and unvarnished, and it struck harder than Jareth expected. He flinched — not visibly, not enough to satisfy his judges, but inwardly, where the words found purchase. The truth of them sank deep, heavy as lead beneath his ribs. He could not deny it. The silence that followed seemed to stretch around him, thick with the echo of his own intent, and for the first time in centuries, Jareth felt the weight of what his logic had cost.
A child’s voice took up the singsong words next, brittle and bright and inexorable: “You took her without asking. She survived the forging. You devoured her and expected silence.”
The stone glowed as the chorus of voices chimed in. “But some part of her remembers. And so do we.”
Jareth’s throat was dry. He swallowed nothing.
“If I do nothing?” he asked, soft now. “If I let her fade?”
“We will take her. We will keep what you would destroy. She will become the stone beneath your feet. But you will gain nothing. Not the Ironbound power. And you will face the consequences of breaking your oath.”
He stared at the spiral, at the pulsing stone, at the living echo that threaded every voice. That was the choice. There was no alternative now. He could restore her and uphold his oath. Or he could relinquish her and face the consequence of breaking his word. Neither option felt appealing.
He could bind his soul to hers anew—or let her be taken by the Labyrinth, sealed away until some other time, some other form, some other madness that might make her whole again. And if he let her go… he would never have the power he needed to save his kingdom. He would be utterly alone and defenseless against his enemies.
Again. Without hope and without options. Forever. The word felt heavier now than it ever had—no longer abstract, but real, a weight pressing against his chest. It wasn’t as though he could afford to buy another Ironbound; few remained, and fewer still survived long enough to be sold. And truth be told, he wasn’t certain a second integration would even be possible after what had happened with this one. The process had gone wrong in ways he still didn’t understand. And now—now he did.
She hadn’t been a failure of alchemy or will. She wasn’t merely a mortal caught in a gem. She was the Labyrinth’s answer to something older than he had remembered, older even than his crown. She bore the Champion’s mark—subtle, hidden, but undeniable once seen. And by taking her in, by binding her soul to his own, he had reawakened an oath he thought long buried. A geas he had neither remembered nor recognized until it was far too late.
“She was Sarah,” he breathed, and the name fractured the silence.
The air itself seemed to recoil; the wards around him rippled, startled by the invocation. His knees buckled under the sudden weight of recognition, as though the world had just shifted its axis, and for one fleeting, shattering instant, he felt the Labyrinth breathe her name in return.
“She still is.” The voices of the ensnared around him began to dwindle.
Jareth stood in the silence that followed, the spiral beneath his feet dimming. The figures that surrounded him began to fade, one by one, returning to their lives with no memory of what they had said.
He was alone again. But not truly. He doubted he would ever truly be alone again. Because somewhere inside him, beyond the oubliette and stasis, she waited. Sarah waited.
And this time… he would not pretend her return meant nothing.
“…So be it.”
He exhaled slowly, the words bitter in his throat.
He did not teleport back.
He could have. He could have blinked through shadow, stepped sideways through time, ridden the leyline current back into the palace with a thought. But his hands were shaking, and the weight of her name—Sarah—still rang like a curse inside his skull.
So he walked down hallways that re-formed around him in silence. Through doors that opened of their own accord. The castle did not speak. It had already spoken. And it had made itself very, very clear.
He was bound.
He always had been, from the moment she took up the mantle, from the moment she refused her dreams and still chose to run. The moment she confronted him in the Escher Room. The Labyrinth had marked her then—and him.
It had never required ceremony. The Labyrinth did not ask for spoken vows or written contracts; it recognized action as truth. When a mortal conquered it, the balance shifted, and the king—whether he wished it or not—was bound in turn. It was not her voice that had sealed the pact, nor his consent that made it binding, but the ancient law woven into the foundation of the maze itself. To rule the Labyrinth was to answer its choices, to serve the will it revealed. And when Sarah had claimed victory, when she had refused illusion and broken free of his design, the Labyrinth had accepted her as its Champion. In that moment, he became her counterpart—its Guardian—oath-bound not by devotion, but by the immutable nature of kingship within the maze.
And he had nearly broken it… might still be on the verge of breaking it if he could not restore her selfhood.
He’d watched her soul twist under the weight of compression, had taken her into himself with coerced consent, had called it a sacrifice when it was a theft. All because he needed her power—because she had survived what should have obliterated her, and that survival had made her useful.
He stopped just inside his private chambers, the air still humming faintly with residual magic. The oubliette wasn’t a place he could walk to—not stone and mortar, but something carved within himself. It waited beneath the surface of consciousness, a sealed chamber of will and power that answered only to him. When he reached for it, the air shimmered faintly before his eyes, a veil of light and memory folding open like a wound that had never quite healed. The seal he’d placed on it earlier flickered in and out of sight, faint and fractured, pulsing like a dying heartbeat.
She was still there. Not fading now, not unraveling—the Labyrinth was holding her in some quiet, suspended half-state. Preserved. Protected. But the bond between them had thinned, stretched so far that her presence barely brushed against his anymore.
Sarah.
Until this day, he hadn’t said her name aloud in over a century. Not since the day he lost her. Not since the Above claimed her as she declared his lack of power over her. She had become little more than a memory then. A shadow. A regret buried in legend and time.
And now… she had been beneath his skin. Not merely within his keeping, but inside him, her presence stitched through the very weave of his magic. He could still feel the echo of it—the raw collision of two wills colliding in the same vessel, the way her soul had screamed against his, refusing to yield. It wasn’t just resistance; it was survival made audible, the sound of something too fierce to be consumed. She had fought him, defied him, endured him. Survived him. The memory burned like phantom heat beneath his ribs, and for a moment, he could almost believe the mark of her will was still there, imprinted in the quiet places his power no longer reached. His hands curled into fists, the motion automatic, a vain attempt to hold something already lost.
What have I done?
It wasn’t a poetic question. It wasn’t remorse for show. It was the first splinter of truth he hadn’t let himself feel since the moment he’d ingested her.
He sank inward, crossing the unseen threshold with the ease of long practice. The shift was immediate—cool and muffled, sharp with stillness that existed only within the soul. There was no wind, no torchlight, no sense of space at all, only the vast hush of unmade magic surrounding him like deep water. Here, form and thought were one; the world was shaped by will alone. In that weightless expanse, she hovered—half-formed, her essence suspended in a crystalline shimmer that pulsed faintly with light not her own. He felt her before he saw her, a quiet ache in the air, a resonance threaded through the marrow of his being. And without thinking, he dropped to one knee—not out of reverence, but because the gravity of this place demanded it.
There was no dignity to reclaim here. No power worth posturing for. Only a soul he had taken—and a vow he had almost broken.
“You are fading,” he said, voice low but steady. “Not dying all at once, but unraveling thread by thread. And when you go, you’ll take the magic with you. Not gift it. Not yield it. Take it. Into silence. Into nothing.”
He let the words settle before continuing, softer now. “I thought… I thought you were resisting. Hoarding the power. Maybe punishing me. I don’t blame you, if that’s true. But I was wrong.”
He looked up at the shifting patterns above—the fluid lattice of his own mind folding and unfolding like thought—and then back to the faint shimmer that marked what was left of her. Barely an echo now, a thread of awareness suspended in the dark, pulsing faintly as though even this fragment refused to go still.
“There isn’t enough left of you to rebuild a physical body. Not safely. Not without weeks or months—time you don’t have. But I think... I hope... we can finish the merging you’ve been fighting. Not by forcing it, but by letting you anchor through me. Slowly this time. Carefully.”
He pressed his hand to the ground beside him, the motion helping to steady himself as he offered this option.
“I’m not asking you to disappear. I’m offering you survival. A threadbare compromise, I know. You’ll live within me—not as a shadow, not as an echo, but with presence. You’ll see through my eyes. Share in my strength. And if we’re careful, you’ll grow. Not vanish.”
There was a pause. Then, he continued with the faintest edge of vulnerability, “And maybe, someday, you’ll forgive me for what I have done.”
Sarah
She heard him. Felt him. The words didn’t come as sound, not really—but as threads of thought pulling through the fog, weaving into the faint scaffolding she’d shaped around her pain. And goodness, it hurt to hold shape at all.
But she listened.
You are fading, he’d said. As if she didn’t already know. As if she hadn’t been watching herself unravel, one half-thought, one lost word, one breathless ache at a time.
Still… she hadn’t known why. Not fully.
She curled tighter around that pain, the threadbare idea of herself. She was angry. It was not blazing, righteous fury—but something quieter, colder.
"You did this to me." The words had no mouth, but they still existed, bitter and brittle. He had consumed her. Contained her. And now, because his precious magic wasn’t responding, he suddenly wanted to save her?
No. Every threadbare remnant of herself wanted to reject his offer out of sheer resentment. Yet, she couldn’t bring herself to say no. It was a… maybe.
Because even if he didn’t deserve her trust, the words he’d said felt… real. No twisting. No coercion. Just the kind of honesty that cracked bones instead of bending them.
She turned inward, toward the aching coil of what was left of her name, her self, her will. The Labyrinth had intervened. Not for him—for her. It had held her soul when she could not. It had remembered her.
And so, she asked herself: What does that mean? Not forgiveness. Certainly not trust. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But if it wasn’t trust or forgiveness, it was possibility. And that was something she could work with.
Her thoughts reached back toward the shape of him, her bitter tether.
"You don’t get to be the hero. Not after what you did."
The words echoed from her to him, taut and shaking—but not a refusal.
"But if this is survival, I’ll take it. For now."
There was nothing gentle in the way she offered herself. No grace. Just tired defiance, and a fraying hope that maybe—maybe—this wouldn't be the end.
Notes:
Thank you so much to everyone who’s been following Ironbound and patiently waiting between updates. I know my posting schedule can be a little erratic, but I'll do my best to make at least one post per week while I'm taking a semester break from school—and I appreciate every one of you who stuck around. This story has been such a strange, sprawling journey, and I’m genuinely excited for where Jareth and Sarah’s path is heading next. Your comments and kudos mean more than you know—they’re what keep me writing. 💜
Chapter 7: Chapter Seven- The Sound of Her Silence
Summary:
Silence was never absence—it was occupation.
Sarah lingers beneath his skin now, not as voice or ghost, but as awareness: sharp, listening, alive. Jareth feels her in every motion, every breath, every thought he can no longer claim as wholly his own.When he finally eats, the simple act becomes something sacred and terrible. She tastes through him for the first time in a century—and recoils. In that fragile moment, he learns what it means to share a body but not forgiveness, to breathe with someone who does not trust the air.
It isn’t peace that binds them.
It’s endurance.
Notes:
This chapter is part of a work-in-progress and has not been beta-read. Please forgive any wandering grammar goblins or misplaced punctuation sprites—they haven’t been caught just yet. The tale is still growing, still changing, like a path that shifts beneath your feet. Thank you for reading, and for stepping into the maze with me.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Excerpt from “On the Forged and the Fallen: A Study of Iron Inheritance,”
compiled by Archivist Thalen of the Deep Court Archives“Across the ages, those who have partaken in the power of the Ironbound have been known by many names. In the courts of the High Fae, they are called the Iron-Graced—a title of distinction, reserved for those who have proven worthy of bearing a mortal’s refinement within their own essence. To be Iron-Graced is to master both matter and will: to command the very element that defies our nature and emerge unburned. Such individuals are seen as instruments of progress, for the melding of iron and magic has carried our wars and built our empires.
Among the lesser courts and borderlands, a simpler term prevails: the Iron-Wrought. To them, it is not reverence but practicality that defines the act. The Iron-Wrought are regarded as living weapons—those who have survived the binding and retained enough of themselves to wield the gift effectively. Their names are sung in taverns and training grounds alike, for it is said that to be Iron-Wrought is to have one’s blood tempered by conquest.
In older chronicles, one may also find references to the Ferrum-Sworn, the Tempered, the Blood-Forged, and the Bound-Kings—titles once used interchangeably depending on the culture or court that recorded them. Some of these names fell from favor as the practice became institutionalized; others persist in song or superstition. To call one Ferrum-Sworn is to imply devotion. To call one Blood-Forged is to recall the cost.
Still, debate endures among the learned and the devout. Some argue that to take in the Ironbound is to extend the natural order—a rightful claiming of mortal potential by those fit to bear it. Others whisper that such transference borders on desecration, for what is the difference between inheritance and consumption, between ascension and theft?
Yet the practice continues, as it always has. The Ironbound serve, the Iron-Graced rise, and the Iron-Wrought endure. Whether one calls it evolution or indulgence is a matter of perspective—and history, I suspect, will decide which name endures longest.”
Archival Commentary – Addendum I: Regional Variants of Title and Meaning
The following notes were appended to Thalen’s treatise by later scholars cataloguing linguistic and cultural variations across fae territories.
Ferrum-Sworn — The oldest known designation, originating in the Deep Courts. To swear upon iron or ferrum was to swear upon permanence; thus, Ferrum-Sworn were regarded as unbreakable oaths given flesh.
The Tempered — A term favored by military orders and guilds. It implied balance and control—those whose wills had been “quenched” in the ritual fires without breaking. Often used as a mark of disciplined endurance.
The Blood-Forged — A poetic but somewhat archaic epithet, most common among the Mid-Court balladeers. It carried a dual meaning: valor born of sacrifice, but also the stain of it.
The Bound-Kings — A borderland title applied to commanders who consumed multiple Ironbound over their lifetimes. It spoke less to nobility and more to sovereignty through force. Many who bore this title died mad or hollow.
The Iron-Wrought — The term most enduring among artisans and common soldiery. It carries none of the reverence of Iron-Graced, but all of its practicality. To be Iron-Wrought is to have been shaped for purpose—and to continue serving it.
Jareth
He felt the answer before he heard it. No, not heard. The message came like the shift of a storm front—sharp pressure against his thoughts, a scalding breath of wind that left no doubt.
You don’t get to be the hero.
The words cut, but he welcomed the pain. It meant she was still there—still fighting, even if he was the object of her fury. Then came the second message, bitter and trembling but clear:
But if this is survival, I’ll take it. For now.
His eyes closed as something deep within him began to unwind, slow and uncertain, like a knot loosening after years of tension. It was not relief—he was far from deserving that—but it was something adjacent to it, something steadier. Purpose, perhaps. A fragile sense of direction after so long standing still. Beneath it came the quiet weight of understanding, and with it, responsibility—terrible in its clarity. She had given him leave, if only just. Not forgiveness and not trust. But permission enough to act. And for now, that was enough to begin.
Jareth stood slowly, steadying his breathing until the rhythm matched the quiet pulse of magic stirring beneath his skin. This would not be like drawing power or casting a spell; there was no incantation for this, no sigil to guide him. What he meant to do was far more intimate—and far more dangerous. It would be like threading a half-broken melody through his own blood, forcing discord into harmony by sheer will. He would have to carve a space within himself where none should exist, shaping his soul around the remnants of another. One wrong note, one moment of hesitation, and the fragile thread of her being could unravel for good.
He summoned the memory of her—not her voice or face, but the resonance of her will. That fierce, impossible spark that had met him head-on in the throne room long ago. The will that had been equal to his own and declared his lack of power over her. As insulting as his loss had been, he relished the memory now. He wrapped his magic around the remnants of her will summoned by his memory, not to trap or bend it this time, but to shield it from unraveling.
A slow pulse of power moved through him, low and grounding. The Labyrinth stirred in response, not interfering—but watching. It would not let him misuse her again. And he did not intend to.
With excruciating care, he reached inward, guiding his will through the delicate weave of his own essence. He began to shape a vessel—not a cage, not another oubliette born of fear and control, but something living. Every thread of it trembled beneath his touch, drawn not from dominance but from invitation. It was not control he sought this time, but coalescence—a merging of will and presence, a harmony built note by note within the quiet architecture of his soul.
She resisted at first—tight with mistrust, brittle with exhaustion—but he made no attempt to override her. When she yielded, it was grudging and temporary, like a truce under siege. Still, he welcomed her into the tethered corridors of his being, allowed her soul to inhabit rather than hide or fade.
As the final strands of her awareness twined through the center of his being, the change was immediate and undeniable. His senses sharpened, every sound and movement around him taking on new clarity. His breath drew deeper, steadier, as though the act itself now belonged to two hearts instead of one. Beneath his skin, his magic began to shift—not swelling into power as he once expected but settling. It coiled in quiet equilibrium, tempered by the pulse of a second presence threaded through his own. The difference was subtle, but profound: he was no longer alone inside himself.
This power isn’t mine, he thought. Nor hers... It’s something between the two.
For the first time since the ingestion, the Ironbound no longer faded. The fragile pulse of her presence no longer slipped through his grasp like water through broken hands—it held. It endured. A faint but steady rhythm against his own, proof that she still existed within him, however faintly, however painfully. The silence inside him was no longer absolute. He was no longer alone, and the realization struck with equal parts relief and dread. What bound them now was not victory or dominance, but survival—shared, precarious, and irrevocable. And so help them both, because whatever they had become together, it was far beyond anything the Labyrinth had ever intended.
Sarah
It was like surfacing through fire.
One moment, she was folded in on herself—frayed thought clinging to instinct, awareness drifting like ash on a current she could no longer feel. Then, without warning, she was present. The world rushed in at once: light without sight, breath without lungs, heartbeat without flesh. Sensation filled her to the edges, sharp and overwhelming. And yet none of it was hers. Every pulse, every rhythm, every breath belonged to him—to Jareth—and she could feel the difference in every beat. His body was the vessel; she was the echo resounding through it. Her awareness shuddered beneath the weight of borrowed senses, uncertain where he ended and she began.
Air rushed into lungs that weren’t hers. Limbs moved with alien grace. Magic flexed through muscle and marrow, and she felt it all. She felt the rhythm of breath, the shift of weight, and the ground beneath boots.
It was his body. His senses. And she was in it.
She nearly screamed. The sound rose in her mind, desperate and sharp, but there was no throat to give it voice. Instead, the panic tore through her in silence, rippling outward in a space that felt both infinite and suffocatingly close. Every thought rebounded against unseen walls, echoing back with nowhere to go. She reached instinctively—without hands, without breath, without anything resembling form—for something solid, something separate, something that was still hers. But there was nothing. There was only the tether. Only the shape of him. The way his pulse thundered beneath skin that wasn’t hers. The cadence of his breathing. The electric hum of his magic moving through their shared blood. Every motion, every sensation pressed against her until she could no longer tell if she was intruding upon his body or being devoured by it.
Then came the memories.
They didn’t strike her like impact—they opened, slow and inexorable, as though rusted hinges were giving way inside both their minds at once. Her name waited on the other side, patient and undeniable. Sarah.
It wasn’t just the Ironbound. Nor was her identity merely a gem. And she certainly was not a weapon.
Sarah.
The sound of it wasn’t hers alone; it carried the echo of how he had once spoken it—low, wondering, and furious all at once. The memory that answered was split between them, threaded from two perspectives into one fragile recollection. A girl’s defiance. A king’s fascination. The Labyrinth between them both.
The truth of it nearly broke her. Her name uncovered something long pressed into dust, and with it came the echo of who she had been: stubborn hands and angry hope. The girl who once defied a kingdom—and who now lived, impossibly, within the heart of the king who had swallowed her whole.
Every breath he took now whispered her existence. She was part of the motion, part of the magic, part of him. But she had no say in what came next. She had no command and no voice. She was just a presence. A soul regrown, rooted in foreign soil…tied to the soul of another.
Is this survival? she wondered. Or something crueler?
She felt his heartbeat beneath her awareness—deep and resonant, a steady rhythm that anchored the silence between them. Each pulse thrummed through her like a drumbeat in borrowed bones, a reminder that her existence now rode the cadence of his life. The power that had once been hers alone sparked faintly at the edges of their shared self, crackling like lightning against glass where her magic met his. The sensation was raw and electric—beautiful and terrifying all at once.
And through it all, she felt the boundary: a line drawn not in flesh but in will. She knew her name now, the fragile weight of Sarah stitched back into her consciousness like a scar. She remembered who she was, but memory was not a means of control. Awareness was not freedom. She could feel everything—his breath, his pulse, his thoughts brushing too close to her own—and yet she could change nothing. She could do nothing.
Not yet, she told herself.
And this time, for the first time since she was swallowed, the thought did not unravel.
Jareth
She was awake.
He didn’t know how he knew it. There were no words rising from within him, no sharp intake of shared breath, no flare of magic to signal her return. It was subtler than that—an almost imperceptible change in the quiet between his thoughts, a second awareness stirring just beneath his own. Yet he felt it as surely as he felt his own pulse: the faint shift in rhythm, the echo that didn’t belong to him.
She was there now—fully, undeniably, unignorably there. Her presence pressed against his mind like warmth through glass, tentative but real. It wasn’t a voice, not yet, but a weight, a watching. The realization sent a tremor through him, equal parts relief and dread, because for the first time since the ingestion, the silence inside him had broken—and he wasn’t certain he was ready to hear what filled its place.
He felt her as a weight behind every movement, a silent tension threaded through every breath he took. Her presence clung like a second shadow—cool and sharp-edged, humming just beneath the surface of his skin.
And oh, she was angry. The emotion burned low and controlled, not the wild fury of a storm breaking, but something colder and far more deliberate. It coiled through the space they shared, taut and waiting, every thought of hers honed to a quiet edge. He could feel it tracing along his spine, a subtle prickle that set his nerves on alert, a constant reminder that she was watching.
The sensation wasn’t violent, but it was unyielding—a pressure beneath the skin, a weight beneath his magic. Every time he reached for power, he felt her there, dragging faintly against it, not enough to resist, but enough to remind him that his dominion was no longer absolute. She wasn’t interfering, but she wasn’t hiding either. She wanted him to know she was there—alive, aware, and far from forgiving.
He clenched his gloved fingers, needing the tangible resistance of flesh and fabric to ground himself. The leather bit against his palms as his hands curled into fists—his hands, not hers. The distinction mattered more than it should have. For now, at least, the boundary held. Her awareness pressed close, but she made no move to reach for control. He wasn’t entirely sure if she could. Still, the thought lingered, unsettling and sharp: the body he inhabited was no longer his alone. There was no comfort in that knowledge—only the uneasy weight of shared existence and the faint, constant echo of her presence beneath his skin.
He had thought this would be easier—that once she was stabilized, once she was bound more fully into him, her presence would quiet. That she would be relieved. Grateful, even. He had saved her, hadn’t he? Lifted her from the brink, preserved what remained, offered her sanctuary when the Labyrinth itself had threatened to claim her for safekeeping.
But she didn’t feel safe. The awareness pulsed through their bond like a cold current, sharp enough that even he could sense it. Her presence recoiled from his, cautious and taut, every instinct in her screaming that proximity to him meant danger. To Jareth, that fear was unmistakable—palpable in the way her consciousness shivered against his magic, in the way she refused to settle fully within him.
And yet he could not blame her. He had made himself into the very thing she now distrusted. To her, he was still the cage and the devourer both. And though she lived within his keeping, she did not feel safe there … neither to him, nor within him.
He adjusted the fall of his coat and took a breath—but it didn’t feel quite like his anymore. Every motion was shadowed. Every sensation shared.
She knew his heartbeat now. The rhythm of his stride. The scent of the wind, the chill of the stone beneath his boots. She felt it all, and he could feel her feeling it.
The intimacy of it was suffocating. This was closeness laced with judgment. Every thought he formed brushed against her awareness, and though she said nothing, he could feel the weight of her knowing. She remembered what he had done—what he had almost done—and the silent reckoning of it pressed like a blade against his conscience. There was no hiding, no pretense left to offer her. She lingered in the quiet between his heartbeats, still deciding whether survival at this cost was worth enduring, and he could feel that doubt coil through him like smoke. It was unbearable because it was justified—and he had no defense against it.
He ground his teeth, the motion sharp with a tension he couldn’t quite name—somewhere between frustration and unease. Her silence wasn’t submission; it was strategy. He could feel her presence coiled beneath his awareness, patient, deliberate, absorbing every flicker of his thought like a student learning a language she intended to master.
“This would be easier,” he muttered aloud, more to the empty room than to her, “if you’d scream, or rage, or try to claw your way out.”
Because anger he could meet. Resistance he could counter. But this quiet study of him—the way she seemed to listen even to his breathing—unsettled him in ways he hadn’t expected. There was no reply, only that steady, simmering awareness, bright and waiting.
She wasn’t trying to escape. She was learning him. And that, more than open defiance, made him wonder how long it would be before this uneasy coexistence turned into a war.
He didn’t return to court. That, in itself, wasn’t unusual. The Iron-Graced would often sequester themselves for an indeterminate amount of time after the ingestion of the Ironbound. Although his position as king wouldn’t have made a court appearance out of the question, he remained in his chambers, unseen by all.
To his mind, he couldn’t appear in court—not with Sarah wound so newly stitched into him, with every movement echoing not only through his magic, but through hers. Through her. The risk was too great. Not just the risk of exposure, but of fracture. If she lashed out—or if he did—if they were off kilter for even a moment, it could unravel what little stability they’d managed to weave.
So he stayed within his chambers, pacing beneath the tall arched windows as dusk stretched long shadows across the floor. The wind curled at the glass like an impatient question.
She hadn’t spoken again. The echo of her voice—if it could even be called that—still lingered somewhere in the hollow between them, like the memory of a vibration long after the sound had faded. But he knew she could. He had felt it: the subtle shift in magic, the tremor in the air as her will gathered shape and nearly breached the boundary between thought and word. For one suspended heartbeat, she had been close enough to reach him. And now… now she chose silence. It wasn’t the silence of weakness or fading. It was deliberate, weighted, a silence that watched him as surely as it judged him. He could feel it coil within him, that quiet defiance—louder than any accusation she might have spoken aloud.
It was a calculated, watchful silence.
He turned sharply on his heel, facing the empty hearth as if it might offer answers. His hands itched—not with magic, but with the need to do something. To act. To command.
But there was nothing to command now. There were only questions to ask and truths to be spoken.
He let the quiet stretch for another breath, then spoke, aloud this time—his voice low, steady, pitched not for the room but for the woman watching from within. “You’re here now.”
The words echoed. There was no answer, but the air around him seemed to tighten, her awareness coiling closer, alert.
“You have your name,” he continued. “Your thoughts. Your senses. This is more than any Ironbound ever recovered.”
Still nothing. His words hung in the air, unanswered, swallowed by the stillness that lay between them. Yet the silence wasn’t empty—it had weight, shape, and intention. He could feel her listening. The quiet pressed against him like a held breath, sharp and expectant, until the moment her focus shifted. It was subtle at first, a ripple beneath his skin, and then it cut through him—clean and deliberate. Her attention turned toward him like the edge of a blade catching light, neither attack nor surrender, simply awareness sharpened to precision.
Jareth’s jaw flexed, the motion a reflex against the prickle running down his spine. It was the first time he had spoken aloud to her since the merging, and though she gave him no answer, he understood the message in her silence well enough: she was listening, and she remembered.
“I won’t pretend this is what you wanted.” He folded his arms, glancing toward the window but seeing only her memory there—faint, fragmented, firelit in his mind’s eye. “But the alternative was oblivion. Dissolution. And I have not clawed my way through centuries of binding and sacrifice just to watch you fade when I am under oath to protect you.”
He turned back toward the hearth, the flicker of reflected light glancing off the polished leather of his gloves. The firelight moved across his hands in restless patterns, catching and vanishing like thoughts he couldn’t quite hold.
“You’re not my prisoner,” he said at last, his voice quieter now, the certainty in it thin and tremulous. “Not anymore. And I’m not your captor.”
The words left his mouth with more hope than truth, as if saying them aloud might make them real. But they lingered in the air between them, brittle and fragile, and he could feel her silence weighing against them. It wasn’t entirely true—perhaps it never would be—but he meant it all the same. Whatever had bound her once, he no longer wanted to be the chain that held her.
And maybe that would be enough to earn a response. The thought hung in him like a fragile thread of hope, stretched too thin to bear its own weight. He waited—first a breath, then a beat, and then another. The air between them remained taut and wordless. Yet something changed. The pressure of her attention didn’t lift; it lingered, heavy and palpable, but the shape of it shifted. Not warmer, not nearer, but altered in some subtle way he couldn’t quite define. It was the difference between being judged and being considered—a silence that measured rather than condemned. The realization unsettled him more than outright anger ever could, because it meant she was still thinking, still choosing, and he could not predict what she might decide.
Yet, even now, there was still no response.
He felt her there—woven through his ribs, his spine, the curl of breath in his lungs—but she refused to speak. Not out of weakness now, but will. And if he’d hoped that offering her space, acknowledgement, and truth would coax her forward, he was beginning to suspect she’d found a quieter power in her silence.
He didn’t blame her. He couldn’t really after everything she had been through…everything he had put her through. But it still grated on his nerves.
Impulsively, he left the chambers with a flick of his wrist, magic coiling around his shoulders like a cloak. The castle bent around him, halls shortening, turns smoothing beneath his feet. He had no desire to be seen. Certainly not by the court, and even less by gossiping staff.
The kitchens, when he reached them, were quiet—hushed in the way only deep night could be, their fires banked low but still breathing the faint warmth of the day’s labor. The air smelled of ash and spice, and the lingering traces of bread long since baked still hung like a memory in the stone. He didn’t call for servants or summon magic. He moved through the dimness as though it belonged to him alone, finding what had been left to cool: a half-loaf wrapped in cloth, a wedge of sharp cheese, a few olives steeped in brine. From a bowl near the hearth, he took a fig, its skin beginning to split with ripeness, and cut it open to let its sweetness bleed across the plate. Not a feast. But something real. Something to remind them both that life could still be simple, even here.
His stomach growled as he gathered his meal. It reminded him that he hadn’t eaten in over a day. Not since he had become Iron-Graced. Not since he had set her on his tongue, though he would hardly consider that consumption for nourishment.
Jareth returned to the tower alone, the quiet of the corridors folding in behind him. He set the food down on the desk, the movement deliberate, almost ceremonial, and stood for a long moment, hands braced on the edge of the table. The room felt different now—not unfamiliar, but occupied in a way it had never been before. Every breath he drew felt witnessed. Every motion, shared. The boundaries between his thoughts and hers still held, but faintly, like a curtain stirring in a draft. He realized, with a flicker of unease, that he no longer knew where solitude ended and companionship began.
When he finally sat and took the first bite, that was when she shifted. The change came as a flicker behind his eyes—too quick to name, too vivid to ignore. It wasn’t a thought, not even a whisper of language, but sensation: the press of warm crust against his tongue and the sharp tang of cheese dissolving at the edge of his palate. And then, layered beneath those sensations, came a second awareness. Not his, but hers. It rippled through him like a reflection meeting the original, recognition colliding with revulsion. For the first time, he felt her recoil—not from pain, but from the sheer wrongness of it, the shock of inhabiting his senses, of being in him rather than herself. The connection trembled, fragile as a heartbeat between bodies that were no longer separate but not yet one.
It wasn’t the shock of pain—it was something closer to fury, raw and bewildered. The emotion struck him not as sound but as pressure, a sudden surge of heat beneath his ribs that wasn’t his own. It carried the clarity of instinct: rejection, defiance, the deep, visceral protest of a soul forced to share what should have been private. To her, even the act of tasting felt like an intrusion, like theft. The simple pleasure of bread and cheese became an assault on her boundaries, and he felt it with startling intimacy—the sharp flare of her anger, the helpless recoil of a self that no longer possessed a body of its own. It wasn’t hunger she felt, but the humiliation of being made to experience through him. Eating, in this fragile coexistence, was no longer sustenance. It was desecration.
He froze at the realization. It was as though the food in his mouth turned to ash, even though the flavor hadn’t changed.
A tremor rippled through the thread of her—indignation, grief, hunger, and helplessness. And Jareth understood, in that moment, the vastness of what he’d taken for granted.
She had not tasted in a century.
He sat back, swallowing carefully. The meal, once simple, had become something else entirely.
“You’ve never eaten like this… not since you were bound,” he said quietly. “You went a hundred years without sensation.”
Her response wasn’t verbal, but the silence that followed carried a different weight. It wasn’t the distant quiet of before—it was alive, too loud, too raw, filled with the pulse of everything she refused to say. He could feel her retreat, curling inward into the corners of his chest as though folding herself small enough to survive within him. Not dimming nor fading. Rather, just drawing back from the noise of existence, from the ache of every shared heartbeat and borrowed breath. Sensation itself had become too much—too intimate, too unbearable—and so she hid from it the only way she could. He sat very still, the taste of bread still lingering on his tongue, and in that silence, he finally understood just how little of her the world was safe enough to touch.
Notes:
Thank you so much for all the comments, kudos, and quiet footprints left upon this chapter’s path. They’ve brought more smiles than I can count during a week spent juggling work and tending to my poor husband, who’s been bravely battling the flu (and losing rather dramatically to it). Your kind words have been little lights in the maze—each one a lantern I didn’t know I needed.
Truly, thank you.
Chapter 8: Chapter Eight- The Weight of What You Are
Summary:
In the quiet that follows the merge, Jareth learns what it truly means to be bound. Sarah lingers beneath his skin, her presence a whisper of defiance and pain that refuses to be silenced. Between them lies an oath that no longer feels like duty, but something far more perilous: remembrance.
Notes:
This chapter ran away from me a little (as all things in the Labyrinth tend to do). It’s a longer one, diving into the tangled, uneasy rhythm between Jareth and Sarah as they begin to share more than words. As ever, this story is a WIP and not beta-read—expect a few wayward commas wandering the halls. Thank you for reading, and tread carefully: the walls have ears now.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Recovered Correspondence
From a letter attributed to Lady Elyrian of the Fourth Circle, addressed to His Majesty the Goblin King.
My king,
Word has reached me of your intent to take in the Ironbound.
I will not presume to lecture a ruler of your standing, only to remind you that some souls do not fade as the scholars claim. I have seen what remains when they do not.
There are fragments in the Labyrinth still whispering from the first forges—the ones who lingered too long between breaking and becoming. They remember what was done to them. They remember how it felt. The alchemists called it resistance. I call it cruelty prolonged into eternity.
You may think yourself strong enough to master such echoes, but the Ironbound were not made to be mastered. Should the soul survive its binding, you will not consume it. You will carry it. And the difference, my king, is vast.
I write this not in defiance, but in hope that you understand the cost before you pay it.
—E.
Recovered from the sealed correspondence of the Fourth Circle. Authenticity disputed; original document marked for destruction by royal order.
Jareth
He did not move. Did not chew. The crust softened in his hand, its heat sinking into his skin, but sensation meant nothing now. His focus had narrowed until the world beyond his ribs might as well not exist. The fire still burned. The tower still breathed its quiet, measured hum. But all of it felt distant—muted by the sudden awareness that something inside him had shifted.
The change was subtle at first, like a ripple in still water. Then he felt her. Not in rage nor in pleading. Not in words at all. Just there—startled and still, like a creature that had bolted straight into the jaws of light and didn’t yet know whether it was trapped or safe.
Her presence was faint, trembling, and sharp with confusion. It pressed against the inside of his mind like a heartbeat that wasn’t his, uneven and fragile. He could feel her flinch from the rhythm of his breath, the pulse of his magic, the too-loud noise of his own existence. To her, even being near life must have felt unbearable.
He stayed motionless, though the impulse to act burned through him like a nerve exposed. Instinct urged him to press, to assert order over this strange, trembling awareness within him—to seize it, to still it, and to make it obey. That was his nature, after all: to command, not to comfort. And yet another part of him, quieter but no less persistent, hesitated. The Labyrinth’s warning still echoed through him, a reminder that force had already cost him more than he understood.
So he did nothing. The bread cooled forgotten in his hand as he held himself perfectly still, torn between mastery and mercy. He told himself that waiting was strategic, not gentleness—that he was allowing her time to adjust, not just yielding ground. But even as he thought it, he knew the lie for what it was. And in that waiting, he realized how fragile the truce between them truly was. One wrong word, one careless thought, and she might vanish again into that deep, unreachable quiet inside him.
And if she began to fade again…the Labyrinth may take her and never give her back.
Jareth had expected resistance. Fury was even reasonable. Perhaps even madness, if her soul had been too fractured to bear coherence. He’d steeled himself for that—had almost welcomed it. Rage, he understood. It was clean… predictable and manageable. But what met him instead was something far more disquieting: rawness. The sudden, startling rush of perception that was not entirely his own.
Through the shared tether, he felt her awareness unfurl, pricking at every nerve like sunlight breaking through closed eyes. The taste of air, the warmth of firelight on his skin—these things he’d long taken for granted—struck her with an intensity that bordered on pain.
And he had made her feel it.
But she didn’t feel it as herself. Not with her own mouth or skin or heartbeat. But through his. From inside him. The knowledge settled heavy and intimate, as if her wonder and horror alike had been poured into his veins. Every flicker of sensation that passed through his body—every breath, every shift of muscle, every pulse of warmth—was now shared, mirrored, and magnified. She experienced the world only as he allowed it to pass through him, and that truth was suddenly unbearable.
For a flicker of a moment, he almost spoke—some instinctive apology rising to his tongue before pride strangled it silent. This was what he had chosen, what the Labyrinth had demanded. She lived because of him, within him, by the power he provided. And yet the faint tremor of her shock against his consciousness felt like accusation enough.
It had seemed… elegant, in theory. It was efficient. A solution, if not a kindness. The merging had promised balance—an exchange of power that would sustain them both. He had convinced himself that it was the rational choice, the only way to preserve her existence without undoing his own. What he hadn’t understood was the cost. Not the loss of autonomy or the strain on his magic, but the unbearable intimacy of it. He hadn’t realized what it would mean for her—to inhabit his body, his senses, his hungers.
She had felt him eat.
She had not simply known it as an observer might, but had felt the taste and texture of it as though the bread and salt were pressed against her own tongue. The realization hit him belatedly, with the quiet force of something undeniable. The act had been simple, thoughtless—an echo of habit—but to her, it was an invasion. The boundaries between them, already thin, had dissolved in that moment into something indecently close. Her shock reverberated through him still, pulsing beneath his ribs like a second heartbeat that refused to steady.
So, he sat there, motionless, the weight of that borrowed rhythm echoing through his chest. He had made her feel everything, and for the first time, he wondered if survival had been the greater cruelty.
But the plan had never been for her survival. This cruelty was of the Labyrinth’s design. Not his own. At least, that’s what he told himself.
His fingers curled reflexively, thumb dragging across the bread’s uneven surface. The gesture was small, almost thoughtless—and yet the faintest ripple of unease brushed through him, not his own. She felt that. Not as pain, not even as protest, but as a quiet, startled awareness, the way one flinches from a touch that isn’t meant for them.
How many other firsts were left to blunder through? How many ordinary acts—breathing, moving, living—would strike her as a violation simply because she no longer had a body of her own? Each shared sensation became a reminder of what he’d taken from her, and the realization clawed at the edges of his composure.
He tried to push the thought aside, but it lingered, heavy and persistent. How long could he expect her to survive like this—bound within him, sustained by a magic she hadn’t chosen—before she began to unravel again? The truth was that he didn’t know. The truth was that he hadn’t cared to know. The Labyrinth had forced his hand, and he resented it for that—for binding him to a promise that felt less like redemption and more like penance.
He set the bread down with slow precision, the movement deliberate enough to mask the tremor in his hand. The act felt absurdly symbolic, as though relinquishing a meal could absolve him of the deeper hunger that had driven him to this point. He told himself it was practicality—that continuing to eat would only make things worse—but he knew better. What he really wanted was silence. Distance. A moment when her shock would fade from his veins and leave him his own again.
He had never shared his body before. Not truly. Not like this. His magic was his own—an extension of will and instinct, no more foreign to him than breath or bone. Transformation had always been a choice, a rhythm of self that answered only to him. But this—this was different. This was an intrusion. It was an occupation. A second consciousness threaded through his nerves, perceiving what he perceived, touching what he touched… alive where she should not have been.
He stared down at his hands, flexing them as if movement might reassert ownership. The gloves creaked softly, too loud in the stillness. They didn’t feel entirely like his own anymore. Every motion carried the faint echo of her awareness—watching, flinching, existing alongside his will. It was intolerable. The body that had once been his certainty now felt like a shared chamber, and every heartbeat struck him as a reminder that his solitude—his sovereignty—was gone.
Sarah
She couldn’t breathe. Though she desperately wanted to, she couldn’t cry. She couldn’t even pull away. Not because she lacked the will—she could feel that burning clearly enough—but because she had no body to move, no lungs to fill, and no throat to scream through. There was only the awareness of breath that wasn’t hers, of lungs that expanded and contracted without her consent or participation. Of a mouth that chewed and swallowed, of a tongue that tasted, of teeth that ground food she did not want. Every motion arrived filtered through him—muted, distorted, but real.
And she had felt it. Through him.
The warmth of bread and the salt of cheese—each sensation threaded through her like a blade drawn across raw nerve. It wasn’t just a violation; it was dissonance, the unbearable paradox of feeling alive through someone else’s life. The world she’d lost came back in flashes of taste and texture, cruelly intimate reminders of what she no longer possessed. The hunger wasn’t hers. The swallowing wasn’t hers. Yet the sensations clung, invasive and unrelenting, until her own thoughts began to splinter beneath the weight of his body’s rhythm.
She tried to recoil, to retreat into the small, silent core where her will had survived the breaking, but even that was futile. His heartbeat pulsed through her like a drum she couldn’t silence, steady and alien. The sound filled her—filled them—until she didn’t know where his being ended and hers began.
She didn’t speak. She couldn’t, as she now existed. But if she had the ability to speak, the words would have been simple and savage: Get out. Get away. Let me be.
The walk itself had been nothing—a blur of motion, faint and distant, like sound heard through water. She’d felt the echo of his steps, the sweep of air against fabric, but not as touch, not as self. That had been tolerable.
But the eating—that was different.
The crust of bread had crumbled over her senses like gravel. The cheese—sharp and wet—had bloomed across her awareness with no warning. The slow grind of his teeth, the shift of his tongue, the swallow that rippled through his throat—it all roared through her like a storm, and there was nowhere to hide from it. She was in him. A stowaway soul, fragile and flayed, forced to endure his every movement like an echo made flesh.
It was violating.
But what made it worse—what made her want to weep, if only she still could—was that it hadn’t been meant to be. There was no cruelty in the act, no intent to torment. She could feel that, unmistakably, in the way his awareness had stuttered when hers flared in response—the startled pause, the involuntary retreat. He hadn’t known. He hadn’t even considered her.
And somehow, that made it worse.
He hadn’t thought. Of course, he hadn’t. This wasn’t cruelty, not deliberate harm—it was worse than that. He hadn’t even imagined that eating could hurt her, that something so simple could reach her this way. Walking hadn’t drawn her in. Speaking hadn’t. But this—this had. And that was the truth that gutted her.
He didn’t think of her as someone who could still feel. In his mind, she wasn’t a person, nor anything that was fragile or that could be wounded. She was simply there—a presence threaded through his power, a thing to be managed, contained, and endured. She was useful… convenient. Something he could live with, now that she no longer lived at all.
And that unthinking certainty, that casual ownership, burned worse than any blade. At least in the market, they had known what they were doing. At least then, she’d understood her place—as a thing, a resource, a prize to be taken. But this—this was different. He had looked straight into the wreck of her and still forgotten she was someone. That was what made it unbearable. He didn’t see her as someone with boundaries. Not someone with any choices.
That truth struck harder than any pain. To him, she wasn’t a companion or a prisoner anymore. She was a condition. A weight. A presence that existed because the Labyrinth had demanded it—and because he had obeyed. Perhaps that obedience was easier to bear if he didn’t think of her as a person at all.
It was the same pattern he’d always followed: turning living things into instruments, wrapping purpose around power until both felt inevitable. But in doing so, he’d convinced himself that detachment was wisdom, that compassion was weakness, and that necessity excused everything.
He’d never asked if she wanted to survive. He hadn’t even thought to. She wasn’t meant to want. She was meant to be used.
Survival had never been a gift; it had been an assignment. First from the forgers who learned to shape will into stone, then from the buyers who saw only the shine of what she could become. Even now—especially now—it was the same. He had offered her life not out of mercy, but necessity. Because the Labyrinth demanded it. Because power demanded it. Not because she had chosen it.
And that, more than the pain, was what hollowed her. She had fought to live, yes—but not like this. Not inside someone else’s will.
She curled tighter around herself within the shared expanse, the ache of it spreading like cold water through stone. She wasn’t fading anymore, but she wasn’t living either. She was occupying, and that felt worse than death.
Sarah wanted to howl. She wanted to claw her way out. To make him feel even a fraction of the panic flooding her veins. But there was no out—no air to gasp, no skin to tear. Only this strange, half-formed state of sensation and self, bound within a body that wasn’t hers and a pulse she couldn’t command. Every movement, every breath, reminded her that she was trapped in someone else’s rhythm. She could feel him think, feel him be, and it left no room for her own existence.
Her name still clung to her like a fresh wound—Sarah—raw and tender but achingly real. It flickered through the dark like a heartbeat refusing to stop. For the first time in she didn’t know how long, it meant something again. It meant I was here. It meant I still am. But the meaning was fragile, an ember in a storm that could be snuffed out at any moment.
She understood now: survival wasn’t the same as living. Not like this.
The thought rang through her like the toll of a bell, low and resonant. If she remained only an echo in his shadow, her name would fade again, and this time there would be no portion of her self left to remember it.
And yet—and yet—beneath the chaos of fear and fury, something inside her began to steady. It wasn’t acceptance, not yet, but the fragile instinct to endure. Her soul, once splintered and drifting, found the faintest purchase against the tide of him. It was an anchor born not of trust, but of necessity—the smallest whisper of structure threading through the dark. The power Jareth had bound her with—his magic, his soul-thread—hadn’t consumed her after all. It had held. It was fragile, uneasy, but real.
She could feel it now, a quiet pulse deep within the shared current, a rhythm that refused to break. It was his strength, yes, but it wrapped around her own like scaffolding around shattered stone, keeping her from collapsing completely. The realization was unbearable in its intimacy.
She wasn’t alone in it.
The thought curdled in her chest. She hated him for that—for being the only thing keeping her from dissolving into nothing. She hated that her survival had become intertwined with his, that every breath she borrowed came through him. The connection that sustained her was also the chain that bound her, and the weight of that contradiction made her want to scream.
And beneath the hatred, under the layers of bitterness and disbelief, lay something worse: the faint, trembling recognition that she needed him. She needed the tether and the structure his presence provided, however unwillingly. And it was that need—raw, humiliating, undeniable—that terrified her most.
Jareth
He shouldn’t have picked the bread back up. He knew it the moment his fingers closed around it again, knew it in the quiet pulse of awareness that shivered through the link between them. But defiance had always come to him more easily than restraint. He was the Goblin King, the master of indulgence and control both, and he refused—refused—to let a presence inside him dictate the terms of his existence.
So he took another bite.
The crust crumbled softly against his tongue, the faintest trace of rosemary and salt cutting through the dryness. The cheese followed—sharp, oily, rich. It was an almost forgotten pleasure, something that was grounding in its simplicity. He hadn’t expected it to feel foreign. The motion was so familiar—bread to mouth, teeth to crust—that for a heartbeat it almost felt like his own again. Almost.
Then the awareness hit, doubling back through him like an echo made of nerves and breath. It was not his alone. Not anymore.
The recoil was subtle at first—a shudder deep in the center of him, a tightening of breath not his own. Then came the wave of raw resistance, flooding through his senses in borrowed panic. It was her panic. The echo of her revulsion and disbelief struck him like a mirror cracking from within. He froze mid-chew, the simple act turned strange and profane by the knowledge that someone else—Sarah—felt it too.
A jagged, involuntary flinch tore through him—like being jolted from within. It wasn’t his. The reaction threaded upward from the hollows beneath his ribs, from the space where her awareness coiled unseen. It struck like lightning beneath water: silent, bright, and impossible to localize. What he felt wasn’t revulsion exactly, but something worse—dissonance. There was confusion, violation…. resistance. As if two sets of nerves were fighting for the right to belong.
His fingers froze around the crust, the motion arrested mid-gesture. For the span of a heartbeat, he didn’t move, scarcely breathed. The wrongness hung between them—inside him—like a string drawn too tight, humming with the echo of her recoil. It wasn’t pain, but it was close enough to it to make his pulse stumble.
Slowly, deliberately, he set the bread back onto the carved wooden plate. The sound it made was too soft, too ordinary for what had just passed between them. His hand stayed beside it, fingertips braced against the grain as though he were steadying the world—or perhaps, steadying himself. He could have hurled it in his frustration, broken the thin veneer of composure he still claimed, but what good would that do? It would change nothing. The bread, the silence, the presence inside him—none of it would yield. The simple act of stillness became its own defiance—a fragile truce against the awareness that he was no longer alone in his own body.
And the worst part was that he knew that she felt everything he was feeling, all that he was doing.. She didn’t experience it distantly. Not like a ghost echoing through a hollow. This had been immediate—visceral and alive. Her response to his eating had struck him like the clang of a dropped sword, reverberating through his chest until the air itself seemed to ring with it. There was no mistaking it now: this was not passive awareness or the faint bleed of empathy through magic. It was a reaction—instinctual, undeniable, and shared.
Though her emotions were still muted—diffused by the haze of her half-formed state—it was enough. Enough to make his throat tighten, and to turn the simple act of breathing into a negotiation. She was aware. She was excruciatingly present. Enduring this alongside him, not as a silent echo, but as a consciousness trapped in a body that refused to be hers.
He sat back in the chair, elbows resting on his knees, every motion deliberate and measured. His breath came slowly, steadied by will rather than calm.
The fire crackled low in the hearth, the sound suddenly too loud in the quiet. Shadows drifted across the stone floor in restless shapes, curling and reforming like thoughts he couldn’t quiet. The room felt smaller now, heavy with the awareness that solitude—his oldest ally—was no longer his to claim.
So… she hadn’t spoken. She hadn’t spoken her refusal, but her silence was not consent. Not to this. Not to being a vessel, or a tether, or the living scaffold his magic now depended on. The absence of words wasn’t permission—it was endurance. A kind of quiet, bitter survival that existed because the alternative was dissolution.
And yet, she’d come this far. She had chosen, even if only from desperation, to keep existing. To live inside the very man who had destroyed her. It wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t even trust. It was the smallest act of defiance against the void.
Jareth leaned forward, rubbing a hand down his face. The fire’s dim light painted everything in shades of amber and gray—the desk, the half-eaten meal, the untouched wine. He could feel the weight of the day pressing behind his eyes, the kind of ache that came not from fatigue but from awareness. Every heartbeat reminded him that she was still there, woven through the rhythm of his own pulse.
The thought settled heavily, unwelcome but immovable. This was the consequence of survival—not victory, not salvation, but coexistence. Two beings trying to inhabit one life without breaking it. And neither of them had asked for it.
“Not as separate as I thought,” he murmured aloud, the words scraping softly against the quiet. His voice sounded wrong in the stillness—too human, too breakable. As though some part of her had already begun to change him.
He tilted his head toward the empty air, though he knew she wasn’t there. Not in any visible sense. What he felt was subtler than shape or shadow: a shimmer just beneath the surface of his magic, a faint, unblinking awareness hovering inside the same breath he drew. She was within him, around him, watching him.
“I felt that. The flinching… the revulsion when I ate,” he said softly, eyes unfocused, gaze drifting toward the dying fire. “You didn’t like it.” The admission hung in the room like smoke—half statement, half apology.
His mouth twisted faintly, more habit than humor. “A pity,” he murmured. “Even simple fare is finer here than in the Above. Bread and cheese are hardly a cruelty.”
The words might have been a jest, once. But now they sounded hollow, like a man talking to ghosts.
Silence answered, but it wasn’t empty. It carried pressure, a waiting stillness that prickled against his skin.
Then, almost gentler, almost wondering: “You tasted it, didn’t you? That’s what caused your reaction.”
He hadn’t meant for it to sound like that—quiet, almost reverent—but the words slipped out before he could stop them. He was probing the boundaries between them, testing the new reality with words because thought alone no longer felt private. He wanted to understand, but even more, he wanted to define it—to remind them both that he could.
Sarah
She did not answer in words.
In truth, she had none—not words that could be shaped or made whole. Her voice remained scattered, buried beneath layers of instinct and bruised memory. But something stirred.
The sound of his voice reached her not as vibration or tone but as warmth against the inside of her awareness, as if the world itself exhaled through him and brushed against the place where she hid. Each syllable resonated through her like light seen through water—distorted, distant, yet impossibly near. When he spoke, she felt it in the hollow of her being, as though the words had passed through her throat instead of his. He was speaking to her. Not to a gem, not to an echo, but to her.
And that truth—small, undeniable—shifted something. It wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t understanding. It was motion, the first ripple of identity in a sea that had been still too long. His words wrapped around her like a current she hadn’t expected to feel again, pulling her toward the edge of awareness, toward shape.
She didn’t yet know how to speak back. But her silence changed. It was no longer an absence. It was simply… waiting.
And the catalyst had been bread and cheese.
Salt and warmth, the crumb of texture across a tongue that was not hers, through teeth she did not control. She had known hunger in a hundred silent, senseless ways—but not like this. She hadn’t known taste in over a century. And now she had now even briefly felt satisfaction humming at the edges of someone else's breath.
And now she understood. The world she perceived was filtered through him—his senses, his sight, and his touch. Every flicker of awareness passed through the same conduit that had devoured her. What he saw, she saw. What he felt, she echoed. And though she could not control it, she could no longer pretend it wasn’t happening. The boundary between them was thin as breath, and it terrified her.
And, somehow, acknowledging that realization made it worse.
Because even now—locked within him, her existence bound to his senses and movements—he was the one who chose. He was the one who felt. Every breath, every flicker of sight, every heartbeat that carried her along was still his. And she could only reel from the impact, swept up in the motion of a life she did not control.
Grief rose like heat through her—slow, choking, and molten. It wasn’t the sharp agony of loss anymore, but, rather, something heavier, older: the realization that her emotions now pulsed through his body as much as her own mind. What she felt existed because he lived—his heartbeat giving shape to her ache, his breath carrying the rhythm of her sorrow. Survival itself had become another form of captivity. He was living, moving, and being—and she was dragged along in his wake, an unwilling passenger in her own persistence.
So she reached. Instinctively and reflexively. Across the tether that bound them, she flung the only thing she had left—presence. It wasn’t thought. It wasn’t a word. It was the pure, trembling assertion of self: a pulse of awareness pressing against his consciousness, electric and undeniable. A tremor just beneath his skin.
It was not a plea. Nor was it forgiveness. It was something far more primal.
I felt that.
It wasn’t language, not yet, but the meaning was unmistakable. It struck through the bond like a heartbeat echoing inside a hollow chamber—faint, furious, and alive.
And beneath it, the echo of a truth she hadn’t wanted to acknowledge: she was no longer fading. The shape he’d given her held. The sensations came through clearly. She was still here. Still angry. Still helpless.
Still herself.
Jareth
He had stopped eating long ago, but the memory of the act lingered on his tongue—salt, bread, and the faint tang of rosemary and guilt. The silence that followed had stretched between them like a held breath, heavy and waiting. He thought it was done. He thought she’d retreated again, folded back into the quiet.
Then he felt it.
A flicker—subtle as the shift of air before a storm. It was her. A tremor of awareness brushing against his own, tentative and raw, carrying the faint echo of sensation. It wasn’t words. Nor was it thought. But something alive and deliberate. Until that instant, he hadn’t realized she could reach back to him.
I felt that.
It wasn’t a voice so much as a pulse of will, a vibration deep inside the space they now shared. His breath caught, though he wasn’t sure why. The response shouldn’t have startled him—though, admittedly, it shouldn’t have been possible—but there it was, undeniable.
He sat utterly still, afraid even the turn of his head might break the fragile thread between them. His thoughts spun faster than his breath could keep up, each one circling back to the same impossible truth: she hadn’t truly spoken, the message wasn’t formed of words, but of pulse and presence… a ripple through the magic that bound them... but she had reached for him, nonetheless. She didn’t reach with her voice, but with her awareness—and he had felt it.. And yet—she had answered.
“Of course you felt it,” he murmured, the words slipping out half under his breath. “That’s the point, isn’t it?”
But even as he said it, the justification tasted wrong. Bitter. Too thin to hold the weight of what he felt. He’d meant it as reassurance, or maybe defiance—proof that he was still in control of what bound them. That she was meant to feel, to react, to feed into the power he’d fought so hard to claim. But saying it aloud only made the lie more obvious.
His gaze dropped to his gloved hands, resting motionless on his knees. “The point,” he repeated softly, almost to himself, “wasn’t supposed to hurt.”
The admission was barely audible, but it filled the space between them all the same. For the first time, he didn’t know if he was speaking to her or to the echo of his own regret.
He hadn’t meant this food, this bite, to be a test. He hadn’t meant it to be anything at all. But she had felt it, reached for it, and recoiled from it—and now the act itself felt indecent. Pointless. He could survive a day without food; he’d gone longer with less reason. The hunger twisting through his gut wasn’t for sustenance but for control, and that was far harder to feed.
He leaned back slightly, folding one hand over the other, forcing stillness.
“Fine,” he murmured under his breath, a concession not to her but to practicality. “Then we’ll wait.”
The words weren’t gentle. They carried no compassion—only a tired acceptance of what the situation required. If her presence couldn’t bear even the smallest act of living, then he would simply stop. For now.
“I’m not trying to torment you, Sarah,” he said at last, the name catching faintly in his throat. The words came softer than he meant them to, frayed at the edges with something that wasn’t quite sincerity and wasn’t quite lie. He wasn’t sure if it was truth or prayer—or simply another act of self-preservation dressed as reason. His oath demanded he save her, but the saving itself felt like punishment. For both of them.
He exhaled slowly, gaze unfocused on the dying fire.
“But I won’t apologize,” he continued, quieter now. “Not for proving you’re still real.” It wasn’t kindness. It was stubbornness—the refusal to accept that the woman whose existence had cost him everything could fade into myth even now that she lived inside his skin.
She didn’t answer, but the flicker remained. Stillness, watchfulness, and presence. Like a heartbeat just beginning to stir beneath ice—soft, rhythmic, and waiting. It wasn’t forgiveness, but it was life. And that was more than either of them had expected to find in each other.
The bread sat untouched on the plate beside him, the firelight painting its crust in muted gold. He had no appetite left. Not for food, not for comfort. But the act of breathing—that, at least, he could manage. It was grounding, controlled, a choice. Something she could feel if she chose to, something that might remind her what it meant to be.
He speak again, his voice low and deliberate, each word chosen with care—as though language itself might disturb the balance they’d only just begun to find.
“You must be furious.” The words slipped out rough, almost mocking in their quiet. A huff of sound followed—half a laugh, sharp and hollow, scraping the air like glass. “You should be.”
He looked down at his hand, flexing his fingers as if the movement might remind him which parts of him still belonged solely to himself. The gloves caught the light, smooth and impersonal, but he could feel her there—faint as a pulse, constant as a thought he couldn’t quite silence.
“I wasn’t supposed to want anything from you,” he said finally, tone brittle with exhaustion rather than regret. “That was the point. That’s why it was done this way. They never last, the Ironbound. They don’t live.” His jaw tightened, the bitterness leeching into his voice. “They burn. They fade. They leave behind power, not conscience.”
He exhaled through his teeth, something between a sigh and a curse. “You weren’t meant to be.” The words came quieter now, almost a whisper. “And yet… here you are.”
He let the silence linger, expecting it to push back, to swallow his words as it had so many times before. But it didn’t. It held. Listening. His lips twisted into something that wasn’t quite a smile.
Still, he kept speaking, if only because the alternative was thinking. “You weren’t supposed to be real enough to fight me,” he said, more to the firelight than to her. “And yet here you are, haunting my veins like a promise I never meant to make, making it impossible for me to so much as eat when I want to.”
The words hung between them, quieter than the fire’s hiss. He hadn’t meant them as confession, but the truth in them rang louder than he intended. For a heartbeat, he wished she could answer—just to make it less one-sided, less like speaking into the bones of his own regret.
The admission cracked something open in him. He hadn’t meant to say it. Hadn’t meant to give shape to the truth that had haunted him since the Labyrinth’s judgment. The silence that followed was sharp as a drawn blade.
His next breath came shallow, uneven. “And now,” he murmured, almost to himself, “I find I can’t forget it. Not your name. Not your presence. Not even the weight of what you are.”
It wasn’t a choice anymore—wasn’t sentiment or mercy. The oath had bound it into him, burned her name into his veins until forgetting became impossible. And perhaps that, more than anything, was what frightened him most.
Notes:
Thank you so much for reading and for continuing to walk this winding path with me. I know we’re in that awkward middle space of establishing a new “normal,” and I promise the story will begin to pick up its pace soon. Please bear with the characters (and myself) as we navigate this strange, shared existence between Jareth and Sarah.
Comments and kudos mean more than I can say—they truly keep me motivated to keep weaving this tale.
And for those who recognized the author of the letter that opens this chapter—yes, it’s Elyrian! If you haven’t yet read The Hollow Thorne, it’s a short seven-chapter companion piece that takes place long before Sarah’s time and shows the early, imperfect stages of the Ironbound process. It provides some insight into the echoes that linger in this story’s world.
Chapter 9: Chapter Nine- The Bond That Cuts Both Ways
Summary:
As Sarah begins to push back against the reality of her new existence, Jareth learns the cost of the bond that ties them. Bound by oath and haunted by what he’s done, he’s forced to confront her rage, her endurance, and the unsettling truth that neither of them can escape what they’ve become. Survival, it seems, will demand more than control—it will demand understanding.
Notes:
Welcome back to Ironbound! As always, this chapter arrives in true work-in-progress fashion and has not been beta-read, so please forgive any rough edges or wandering commas along the way. We’re beginning to step into the strange, tangled equilibrium between Jareth and Sarah now, and some of these scenes are unfolding almost as fast as I can write them. Thank you for your patience—and for being willing to read along as this story finds its shape.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Recovered Correspondence
From a letter preserved in the archives of the Royal Academy, attributed to Master Auren of the Arcanum, addressed to Jareth of the Goblin Court.
You were never impatient, my lord—only unwilling to wait without control. That was always your gift and your ruin. You sought mastery in all things, even stillness, as though the world itself should move when you willed it.
I remember the first time you bent the current of a spell to obey your tempo rather than its own. It worked, of course—it always did for you. You said harmony was merely a slower form of command, and that you had no patience for a world that refused to keep pace.
You were right, in part. The Labyrinth favors those who act. But it also remembers those who force its hand. Magic has a long memory, Jareth, and the balance it keeps is older than any throne. I worry that you mistake precision for mastery—and that one day, you will find yourself refined by the very forces you tried to shape.
I write this not in rebuke, but in remembrance. You were my finest pupil—clever, exacting, relentless. Yet even brilliance must yield to what it cannot command. Should that lesson come for you, I pray you recognize it before it is too late to turn aside.
— Auren
Recovered from the sealed correspondence of the Arcanum Instructors. The parchment shows faint traces of residual enchantment, consistent with proximity to royal magic. No evidence of intentional damage.
Sarah
Furious didn’t even begin to cover it. The feeling sat too deep for that—too jagged and too tired. She hovered on the edge of herself, threaded through the cadence of his breath, caught in the rhythm of his heartbeat, but not of him. Not yet. Not ever, if she could help it.
It wasn’t trust that kept her tethered. It was necessity. There was nowhere else to go and no other vessel left to cling to. The Labyrinth had chosen this—had chosen him—and all she could do now was survive inside the decision.
But even then, it was hard to hate him the way she wanted to. Hard to summon the clean, bright fury that used to drive her forward. The things he said weren’t kind. They weren’t even meant to be. But they carried weight—truth, unvarnished and ugly—and that made them hard to dismiss.
The words unsettled something deep within her—old echoes stirring where even the memory of self had frayed thin. It wasn’t the idea of being remembered that struck her. He hadn’t spoken of her as a person, not truly. He’d only admitted what the Labyrinth had already shown him: that she endured. That he hadn’t unmade her, no matter how thoroughly he’d tried.
It shouldn’t have mattered. It shouldn’t have felt like anything but proof of his arrogance. And yet, the simple acknowledgment—that she had held on—cut through the haze like a blade through silk. It didn’t heal. It didn’t forgive. But it gave shape to the ache inside her, boundaries where there had been only blur.
And shape, she was learning, was power in its own right.
Her awareness flickered around Jareth’s like a candle caught in the draft of his breath—wary, uneven, but alive. He didn’t know the half of it. Not truly.
He didn’t know what it meant to be locked away for a hundred years in silence, to be silenced. He couldn’t know what it was like to forget what hunger felt like. To forget how to want or to remember pain before memory. To fight for every scrap of self against the erosion of time and magic.
And now, to exist again… not as her own creature, but bound inside the very one who had nearly destroyed her.
The realization struck like iron against bone. She wanted to spit, to scream, to rail against the unfairness of it—against him, against the Labyrinth, and against every choice that had led her here... whether the choice had been hers or not.
But the fury had nowhere to go, so it burned inward instead—sharp, silent, and consuming. Every flicker of his breath, every twitch of his pulse was a reminder that she was trapped within her enemy’s skin, and that her only weapon left was endurance.
And yet—he had spoken to her. Not kindly, nor gently, but to her. Directly and deliberately. As though she were still something that could hear, could answer. And somehow, that mattered more than it should have.
So she did the only thing she could. She let herself feel.
The ache of it was almost unbearable—there was too much awareness in too small a space—but she reached anyway. She pressed faintly against the thin, thrumming thread that tied her to him. She didn’t send words or thoughts. Just… presence.
I’m here, it said without language. And you owe me everything.
She couldn't speak—not properly. At least, not yet. Not in actual words that curled into shape, that carried cadence or rhythm or control. Not in the way he spoke.
And now he sat there, speaking of her survival like it was some riddle meant to be solved—so certain of his own burden, so careful in his reasoning, and so utterly blind to the weight of what he’d done. He spoke as though her endurance were an inconvenience, a mystery to catalog, rather than a miracle wrung from pain.
A pulse of something old and furious rose up within her—hot and sudden, nearer to identity than anything she had felt in decades. It coiled around the sharp edge of his arrogance, feeding on the taste of his certainty. The hunger for power still burned in him, even when he dressed it in apology.
No. If he wanted to understand what she was—what he had made her—then he would.
She reached— Not with fingers, but with the jagged, splintered edges of what had once been herself. And she pushed.
She wasn’t gentle with the push. Nor could it be considered particularly graceful. But she ensured that she pushed onto him the weight of a hundred years spent being pared down, pressed thin, and remade into something less than memory. Every fragment of her screamed against the shape he had given her, and she hurled that scream into the hollow between them.
She sent him what she had lived. The sensation of being too small to hold a name. Of being too scattered to weep. Too forgotten to scream. She let him feel the hunger without teeth, the grief without breath, and the rage that had outlasted the body that once contained it.
He would feel it. He had to feel it.
Because this was her—the truth of what he had made, what the world had left behind. There was no mercy in it… no forgiveness. There was only the bare, brutal fact of survival.
She gathered it all—the pain, the cold, the ache that refused to die—and flung it through the tether between them like a blade through fog. And for the first time since waking into this half-existence, she hoped it cut deep enough to make him bleed.
Jareth
It hit like a storm front. There was no warning and no grace.
One heartbeat, he was still—hands idle, thoughts circling the same bitter truths, the room heavy with the quiet of fire and stone. The next, the world inverted.
It was cold. It wasn’t the type of cold that brushed against the skin, but the kind that sank into the bones and hollowed it—emptied marrow, stripped meaning, and left only an echo. It hit him in a single, suffocating surge, a collapse of everything solid inside him. It wasn’t wind, water, or sound. It was absence masquerading as touch. It was a void so absolute it roared through him, tearing his breath from his lungs before he could remember how to draw it back.
His magic faltered, caught mid-pulse. Every nerve screamed—not from pain, but from the body’s confusion at existing with the absence of feeling…or of any sensation. His chest constricted. His heart stuttered, then thudded on as though under protest. The world tilted inward, closing around him until there was no horizon, no air, and no self.
It was not a single image, but an endless reel of sensation—darkness pressing close, a silence so deep it became its own kind of sound. The absence of change. The absence of motion. Thought folding over itself, devouring its own echoes because there was nothing else left to fill the space. He felt her there, mind stretched thin across an eternity of nothing, aware but unanchored.
There was no passage of time, no measure of days or years. Only existence without sequence, awareness without relief. The kind of stillness that didn’t soothe but suffocated—endless and complete.
He gasped, shuddered, and for one terrible instant, he wasn’t sure where her emptiness ended and his began.
Jareth staggered. The motion wasn’t theatrical—it was instinctive, the body’s raw rebellion against what the mind couldn’t process. His hand shot out, catching the edge of the desk before he realized he’d moved. For a heartbeat, the world tilted with him. The fire blurred, the floor seemed to breathe, and every wall of his composure cracked wide.
He forced himself upright, spine straight, expression schooled by decades of habit—but the control was hollow, a mask stretched thin over panic. Inside, everything reeled. The world within his chest lurched sideways, unmoored, as though the gravity of his own body had betrayed him. He flinched from the force of her, from the sheer, unbearable realness of what she’d shown him.
It wasn’t words. It wasn’t even sound. It was history. Her history.
It poured through him like floodwater breaching a dam—a century of silence, a thousand moments of erasure, every heartbeat that had stretched too long inside the dark. He felt the compression, the crushing weight of being turned into a thing, the echo of breath that never reached lungs, the ache of awareness pressed thin as glass.
His magic faltered, stumbled over itself trying to contain what had no edges. This wasn’t pain he could block or power he could absorb; it was truth, raw and foreign, and it struck him where nothing had dared to touch in years.
The instinct to defend himself—to seal her out—flared hot and immediate, but he couldn’t. His oath forbade it. He could no sooner force her back into confinement than he could separate her from where she was woven into him. So he stood in the wreckage of her fury, tasting the echo of her endless confinement, and knew—without language and without reason—that he deserved every blade of it.
The threadbare silence. The fraying of time into nothing. The dissolution of self, slow and grinding and total. She gave it to him exactly as it was, not polished or measured, not shaped for his comfort.
And he felt it all.
Not as an observer nor as a witness—but as if the boundaries between them had dissolved, and her memories poured through the cracks. The oubliette unfolded around him in silence, infinite and suffocating. He saw the void she had drifted in, mind unraveling thread by thread. He felt the tether fray until her soul melted into whatever shape someone else demanded—until even that act of yielding had become too heavy to bear.
He had known she was damaged. He had told himself that made her fragile—too fractured to hold form, too weary to fight. He had believed that letting her fade was a kind of mercy.
But this— This was not fragility. This was endurance honed to a blade. It was will sharpened by pain until it could cut through centuries.
He had expected fragility, but this wasn’t weakness. This was a kind of strength the fae had no name for: the strength to survive being unmade and to throw that truth back into the hands of the one who had done it.
He gasped—just once—but the sound tore itself from his chest like something breaking loose. The air caught halfway, too sharp and too real. His spine bowed before he could stop it, fingers clawing against the edge of the desk as his magic shuddered outward, reflexive and unbound. Light flared along his palm, gold veined with shadow, and died just as fast, leaving only the echo of its failure.
It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t even pain. It was recognition—the violent, unmaking kind that left no room for denial. For one suspended instant, he saw everything she had endured reflected in himself, and the understanding hit so cleanly that it stole the breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding.
He’d hurt her. He’d always known that. The Ironbound process left no room for innocence. Every binding required a sacrifice, and he had told himself that understanding was enough—that acknowledging the cost absolved the act.
But this was different. This wasn’t theory or consequence. This was experience. It was the living knowledge of pain, the kind that stripped language from meaning and left only endurance behind. He had felt it. He had been it.
The truth hit not as revelation but as recognition—an ancient, terrible comprehension that settled into his bones and would not be moved. Her torment clung to him like frost, burrowed into his lungs until every breath cut. He wanted to retreat behind the armor of intellect, to file it away as another necessary cruelty—but he couldn’t. The bond held him open, raw and defenseless before the magnitude of what he had done.
He had built oubliettes before—dozens, metaphysical and real—and never once imagined what it felt like to live inside one. Now he knew.
She hadn’t wielded her suffering like a weapon. She hadn’t even aimed it. She had simply thrown it to him, laid it bare across the thread that bound them, and forced him to see what he had refused to imagine.
He sat motionless—but it wasn’t stillness born of control. It was shock. His hands trembled once, just enough for the light to catch on the tremor, before he forced them flat against his knees. Inside, the silence pressed closer, denser, until it felt like a second heartbeat pulsing under his ribs. Every breath came ragged, shallow, the ghost of her endurance scraping along his lungs as though the void still lived there.
She hadn’t shaped that memory for him. She hadn’t translated or explained. She had hurled it—raw, intact, merciless. And it had landed. The weight of it carved through him, reshaping things he’d long believed immovable.
It took a long time—too long—before he drew a full breath again. When he finally did, the sound of it filled the room like a confession.
The air entered his lungs like something foreign, dragged in more from instinct than will. Each inhale came shallow and uneven, the rhythm of control reasserting itself only by degrees. His magic quivered faintly beneath his skin, searching for its old patterns and finding none.
His mouth shaped the words before his mind could stop them. “I didn’t—”
But the rest wouldn’t come. The air caught, searing in his throat like glass. His magic recoiled, tasting the falsehood before it left his lips. Fae cannot lie, and this—this was a lie. He had known. He had simply chosen not to feel.
The truth trembled there, demanding breath. He forced it out, raw and stripped of grandeur. “I didn’t understand.”
The correction left a scorch in its wake, a reminder that even honesty could wound. The silence that followed was thin and sharp as broken crystal.
He let his gloved fingers drift from the tabletop, grounding himself in the grain of the wood, the small scrape of leather against stone. His magic stirred beneath his skin—uneasy, distorted—mirroring her unrest. The echo of what she had shown him still reverberated through his veins, impossible to quiet. It was as though, after touching him so directly, even his own nature struggled to remain smooth.
He spoke again. “I didn’t do that to you—”
The sentence tore itself apart halfway through. His throat seized, magic flaring sharp and cold in warning. For a moment, he didn’t understand why; the words should have been true. He hadn’t forged her, hadn’t carved her soul down to fit a crystal. That had been others—alchemists, merchants, and others of the like.
So why did the Labyrinth bite back?
He froze, realization crawling slowly as frost. Perhaps it was because he had set it all in motion—because every thread that led her to the forge had begun with him. With her wish. With his acceptance of it and her victory over the Labyrinth.
When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse. “I left you in it.”
The words held. The air no longer burned. But the reprieve brought no comfort.
The silence that followed stretched taut, the kind that made breath feel like an intrusion. Yet beneath it, something shifted—a recognition, faint but real… the first stone in the long, hard climb out of a chasm entirely of his own making.
He felt the thread of her presence settle again.
She wasn’t pulling away nor lashing out. She was simply… there.
It wasn’t surrender. He wasn’t foolish enough to mistake it for that. But she had chosen to remain.
So he shifted carefully, letting his body move with deliberate slowness, offering no sudden jolt or flare of magic that might overwhelm the tenuous link between them. She was watching through his eyes, feeling the weight of his limbs, the scratch of fabric on skin, the way the air shifted across his chest with each breath.
“You don’t have to answer,” he said at last, tone measured, almost pragmatic. “But you’ll need to learn to bear it. The living don’t stop moving, Sarah.”
He found himself glancing toward the air as though she occupied space, as though awareness could cast a shadow. But she wasn’t there. She was inside—woven through the quiet architecture of his magic, silent, and unblinking.
“I can’t freeze every time you flinch,” he went on, voice low but steady. “And you can’t recoil every time I breathe.”
He hesitated, the faintest edge of tension rippling beneath the calm. “So—if you can—try to stay with me when it happens next.”
It wasn’t quite an invitation. Nor was it kindness. Rather, it was a command softened only by necessity.
Sarah
His words cut through the quiet like a tremor through stone—low, measured, and almost reasonable. Bear it. The phrase landed with a weight that felt both familiar and unbearable. It was always bear it. The alchemists had said it. The handlers. The buyers. Every voice that had ever pressed her into something unmade had carried the same refrain. As if endurance were a virtue instead of a sentence.
It rolled through her now, vibrating along the fragile thread that tethered her to him. The command wasn’t cruel, not in intent. But it was worse than cruelty; it was ignorance dressed as composure. He didn’t understand that she had been bearing this for a century—emptied, broken down, left to exist without time, without sound… without self. There was nothing left to bear. Only this: the thin, trembling will that refused to end.
Something inside her twisted. The words didn’t have shape, but the feeling did—a coiling pulse of resistance, small and sharp as a spark under ice. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t even think in full sentences anymore. But she could push. She could let him feel it. A flare of emotion, too brief to name, slid through the bond like a shiver of lightning before a storm.
It wasn’t rage, though it might become that. It wasn’t forgiveness, either. It was something more primal—the first instinct of a creature cornered too long: Don’t tell me to survive. I already am.
The force of it brushed against him—nothing violent, but enough to pull the air tight around them, enough to remind him that she was there, still resisting. And beneath that resistance was a terrible, quiet truth: she wasn’t choosing to stay. She simply couldn’t go.
The echo of everything she’d sent through to Jareth reverberated through the hollow where she existed, leaving her trembling in its wake. It wasn’t strength she’d spent—she had none left to spare—but something closer to essence. The pulse of her resistance tore along the edges of her awareness, scattering pieces of her like sparks flung from a dying fire. For a heartbeat—if heartbeats still meant anything—she feared she might dissolve entirely.
But she didn’t. The tether held.
And though the effort left her thin and aching, she felt something new beneath the exhaustion: gravity. She had presence. As if, for the first time since the ingestion, her existence had weight again.
She could feel him now more clearly—the rhythm of his pulse, the steady drag of air through lungs she couldn’t command. It was disorienting, intimate in a way that made her recoil inward. His magic thrummed faintly around her like the echo of a heartbeat she could never sync with. She hated it. She needed it. The contradiction made her dizzy.
She wondered if he felt it too—that flicker of what she had shown him, the thread of her fury winding through his calm like wire. She hoped he did. She hoped it stung. But beneath the sharpness, another thought twisted through her, quieter and unwelcome.
If he could feel her at all, then maybe she wasn’t lost yet.
The realization settled like dust, fragile and dangerous. It wasn’t forgiveness, but it was proof—proof that she still existed, even if her existence was bound to him. She gathered that truth close, the faintest scrap of herself, and held it like a secret too small to name.
The strain hit her only after the push faded. A pull at the edges of her consciousness, thin and relentless, like threads drawn too tight. The bond between them rippled, protesting the dissonance she had forced through it. She wasn’t strong enough yet—not stable enough to bear the cost of fighting him from within. Every pulse of resistance had frayed the tenuous weave that kept her anchored. She tried to retreat, to gather herself back together, but even that motion sparked pain. The lesson was cruel and immediate: the connection demanded balance she didn’t yet have. And still, despite the ache that followed, she couldn’t bring herself to regret it.
Jareth
The surge hit like a current under his ribs—subtle at first, then sharp enough to twist through his lungs. He drew a sharp breath, the movement ragged and unsteady. The air itself seemed to thin, vibrating faintly with the aftershock of her resistance. His magic stuttered, faltered, then reasserted itself with an almost living hiss, trying to right the imbalance she had forced between them. It wasn’t pain, not exactly—more like vertigo. A sudden, visceral reminder that this was no longer a body wholly his own.
His hand found the back of the chair, knuckles whitening against the carved wood. For a moment, he could feel her in every pulse that ran beneath his skin—burning and frayed, like a thread drawn too tight. Her strength was raw, uneven, but it was there. And the realization unsettled him more than the backlash itself.
“So that’s your answer,” he muttered, voice low, words catching halfway between bitterness and wonder. “Not submission and not silence. I should have expected as much.”
The echo of her will lingered, a dissonant hum thrumming through his veins. It wasn’t enough to threaten him—not yet—but it warned him how fragile the boundary truly was. She could reach him. She could affect him. And the bond—this unstable, half-formed tether—would punish them both for every clash of will until they found balance.
He straightened slowly. The motion was deliberate— the familiar armor of composure sliding back into place even as his magic quivered beneath it. “Fine,” he murmured, tone clipped but steady. “Then we’ll learn together how to bear it.”
The realization settled slowly, heavy and deliberate, until it filled the quiet between heartbeats. The bond wasn’t merely a conduit for power—it was a system of balance, a living equation that punished excess and demanded reciprocity. Every time he pushed, she would pull. Every time she resisted, he would feel the backlash in kind. It wasn’t cruelty. It was by design. The Labyrinth had bound him to her restoration not through morality, but through consequence.
He drew in a measured breath, trying to steady the pulse of magic beneath his skin. Patience—he would have to learn patience, or risk tearing them both apart. That, he suspected, was the true trap the Labyrinth had laid. It hadn’t chained him with guilt or duty; it had left him no other path but understanding. She would have to stabilize if he ever wanted his power to return. And to stabilize, she would have to be whole again—no longer a shadow folded through his veins, but a life rekindled from what remained.
The truth was bitter on his tongue. This had never been about possession or mastery. The Labyrinth had forced him into empathy, and there would be no power gained without it.
His gaze stayed fixed on the empty air before him, as if he could perceive the invisible presence that had shaken him from within. The silence between them felt sentient now—an equilibrium the Labyrinth itself demanded. He could sense the truth of it pulsing through the tether: this was no simple act of mercy, no sentimental preservation. If she were to endure, she would have to be restored. And for that restoration to hold, he would have to make room for her, no matter what it cost him. The thought landed heavy, cold, and absolute.
For a long moment, he said nothing. Then, almost against his own will, he exhaled—a sound that was half sigh, half surrender. When he finally spoke, his voice felt foreign in the quiet, roughened by the strain of what he didn’t dare admit.
“Understand this, Sarah,” he said quietly, the faintest tremor threading through his words. “You think I wanted this any more than you did? You’re not the only one who doesn’t get a choice in this matter.”
The air went still. Then—barely there—a flicker brushed against him from within, a pulse that wasn’t thought or word but awareness. It felt defiant, yet listening too—like a held breath poised between fight and understanding.
His breath caught, though he wasn’t sure why. For better or worse, she had heard him. And she was still there.
Notes:
Thank you so much for reading this chapter. Your comments and kudos genuinely mean the world to me—they keep this story moving, and they’ve brought me so much encouragement along the way.
Thank you also for your patience with this slightly-later-in-the-week update. Tomorrow is my birthday, and posting this chapter feels like a small gift to myself… made even better knowing you’re here to share it with me.
Here’s to more chapters, more chaos between Jareth and Sarah, and more of this wonderfully strange journey we’re all taking together.
Chapter 10: Chapter Ten- The Iron That Hungers
Summary:
Iron is moving inside the Labyrinth—alive, hungry, and targeting everything in its path. As Jareth fights to contain the corruption, Sarah is dragged through every heartbeat, every fear, every failure he cannot hide. But the greatest threat comes from within the walls themselves, when the Labyrinth seizes a goblin to speak a single truth: he cannot win this battle unless Sarah is fully restored…and time is running out.
Notes:
Welcome back to the twists and turns of this story! As always, this chapter is very much a work in progress—raw edges, unpolished stones, and all. No beta has braved this Labyrinth with me yet, so please forgive any typos, tangled sentences, or stray goblins that slipped through the cracks. Thank you for walking these halls with me.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Excerpt: Medical Observations, Case Notes (Revised & Lore-Accurate)
Filed by Healer-Magus Rennath Var
Iron Exposure & Magical Trauma Unit
Goblin City Medical Archive
Observation Log, Day 112; Iron Proximity Events
First and foremost, it must be stated plainly: iron only inflicts lasting damage on fae when it makes direct physical contact with their skin, blood, or core magic. Proximity alone causes instability, yes, but never permanence. Even autonomous or will-driven iron—what we classify as Type-Four Event—does not wound unless it touches.
Still, the magical consequences of proximity should not be underestimated. When iron is active within a realm’s borders, even without contact, fae begin showing predictable signs of resonance disruption:
- diminished glamour
- erratic magic output
- difficulty sustaining illusions or shape changes
- heightened sensitivity to realm fluctuations
These symptoms resolve within hours if exposure ends. But if iron remains mobile, the instability persists and may worsen. Rulers suffer this most acutely; their realm-link reacts as though the land itself is flinching from the intrusion.
It should be noted that in none of these cases is the soul permanently harmed unless iron is administered deliberately or in direct physical form. This distinction remains critical. Panic has led to more injuries than the iron itself.
A particularly notable variable: the Ironbound.
Their presence radically alters response patterns. Faes who cannot tolerate a single touch of ordinary iron can, with an Ironbound present, safely handle iron objects— even wield them. Their magic passes through iron without nullification, an impossibility under normal circumstances. I have personally observed a healer conjure a full diagnostic globe while grasping an iron scalpel, so long as an Ironbound stood within three paces.
The Ironbound do not dispel iron’s resonance.
They counterweight it.
They create a stabilizing field that holds the fae’s magic steady, allowing safe contact and even spellcasting through otherwise harmful metal.
But their stability is paramount. An unsteady Ironbound— one whose consciousness, core resonance, or internal structure is incomplete— can cause violent magical recoil if a fae attempts iron contact within their field. Far from mitigating the effects, the Ironbound’s imbalance amplifies them.
For this reason, healers must assess Ironbound condition before allowing any iron-related intervention. Their stabilizing capacity is dependent on their mental coherence and resonance integrity.
Conclusion:
Proximity to moving iron is destabilizing but not permanently harmful. Physical touch is the true danger. When intervention is required, a stable Ironbound remains the single most effective safeguard against iron-induced magical collapse.
Pray we never need more than one at a time.
Jareth
The stillness that followed his words was brittle, stretched thin as glass. Jareth remained motionless, one hand braced on the desk beside the untouched plate, his breathing careful and contained. The room seemed to lean around him, as though the Labyrinth itself was listening for what might come next. The fragile flicker at his core— her— held its shape with startling resolve, steadier than it had any right to be after everything he had done… everything he had asked of her without truly asking at all. He stared into the empty space ahead as if he could see the silhouette of her defiance lingering there, poised between retreat and… something else.
Silence pressed in, not merely absence of sound but a presence unto itself— an ancient, sentient hush that felt as though it threaded through the corridors and stones, watching, weighing, and waiting. His confession still echoed through him, a truth spoken too late, too softly, yet somehow loud enough to reach her. He felt the faint, questioning curl of her awareness respond— a hesitant brush, light as breath against a mirror— testing the edges of the connection neither of them controlled. The contact was fleeting, but it held. And in a way that unsettled him deeply, it felt like she was gathering herself, not pulling away.
He exhaled slowly, a careful release of air, as though even breathing too sharply might drive her back into the recesses of his mind where she had survived on scraps and shadows. He hadn’t expected her to answer him— not this soon, not with the foundation of her being still so fractured. But her small pulse of presence, that tremor that spoke of listening and defiance, reached him with the weight of a blow. She wasn’t gone. She wasn’t surrendering. If anything, she was bracing.
The realization unsettled the delicate balance between them, enough that he almost— almost— reached inward. Not to comfort her— he had no illusions about offering that— but to stabilize her, to pin down the flicker of awareness long enough to assess how much of her remained. It was a habitual impulse, the same instinct that led him to seize control of any volatile spell before it ruptured. But she was not a spell. And if he applied even a fraction too much pressure, her fragile coherence might collapse entirely. He forced himself still.
A sharp knock split the air—too crisp, too deliberate to belong to one of the low-order gutterlings— those small, skittering goblins whose chaos rarely produced anything as coordinated as a knock. The latch rattled once before the door swung inward, and a goblin stumbled through, bracing himself on the frame with trembling fingers.
He was taller than the common goblin subspecies, nearly chest-high to Jareth, with the sturdy build and slate-grey skin of a mid-order Stonehand— one of the guild-trained workers who kept the infrastructure of the Labyrinth functioning. Their subspecies were steady as bedrock, rarely hurried, and never panicked. Yet this one’s breath came in sharp, stuttering bursts, his eyes wide and glass-bright with terror.
Even for a goblin— especially for a mid-order goblin— this level of fear was wrong. It clung to him like sickness.
”Majesty—" His voice cracked, a rasp pulled thin by running. “South corridors—iron—moving—through the walls. Stonehands can’t contain—it’s taking everything—”
He swallowed hard, his shoulders shaking. And that was the most concerning part, because mid-order goblins did not tremble. They were the Labyrinth’s craftsmen and ward-keepers—solid, steady creatures who stayed calm even when gutterlings scattered and low-order goblins shrieked at shadows. If a mid-order Stonehand was shaking hard enough to rattle his own breath, then the situation was not simply urgent.
It was catastrophic.
And this goblin looked ready to collapse.
Jareth was already on his feet, the chair scraping back across the stone with a harsh note that rang through the chamber—and through the tether. He felt Sarah jolt at the sound, her awareness flaring in response to the sudden movement. His own body’s shift—muscles tightening, senses narrowing, adrenaline spiking—reverberated across the fragile connection with brutal clarity.
Too much clarity.
Her presence bucked against the surge, as though the force of his instinctive readiness had slammed into the delicate scaffolding she was holding together. For a breathless instant, her awareness wavered in him—stumbling and disoriented—so closely tangled with his own instinct that he couldn’t tell where the echo ended and she began.
The sensation was sharp enough to make him catch his breath. His reaction had struck her like a blow across the tether, a jolt he hadn’t meant to send. He froze mid-step, teeth clenched, recognizing the falter that wasn’t his own. The stutter of movement he felt wasn’t from his body at all, but the echo of hers—her awareness trying to keep pace with a form she no longer possessed, scrambling to align with him and failing.
His jaw tightened, a single sharp flex.
Damn it. He hadn’t realized she was that unsteady.
“You’ll have to bear it,” he muttered under his breath—not unkindly, but grimly… a warning and a plea in one. Then, without hesitation, he strode past the goblin and into the corridor.
He felt her awareness lurch in his wake, yanked forward by the momentum of his movement. She couldn’t recoil from him—he felt that clearly—couldn’t brace or steady herself. All she could do was strain to keep her fragile presence intact as his urgency dragged her along. The bond shivered with the effort, a vibration that told him just how close she was to slipping apart under the pressure.
The goblin scrambled to keep up, his breath hitching in panicked bursts. “Majesty—there’s more—rumors say—something sent it—something old—something angry—”
Jareth cut him off with a sharp flick of his hand, the gesture slicing through the air like a thrown blade. “Show me.”
And the halls, as if shivering awake, rearranged themselves to obey.
Sarah
The world lurched.
Not the way it had when she was an Ironbound—those shifts had been distant and muffled, like hearing thunder through layers of stone. This was nothing like that. This was inside-out. This was sensation flooding her in a rush she couldn’t brace for, sharp and bright and unbearably immediate.
Jareth moved—and her awareness was pulled with him, dragged forward as though tethered to a force far larger than she could understand. She felt his stride not as footsteps on the ground but as a jolt through every fragile thread of her consciousness, a rhythm she could not match. His breath hit the cold air of the hallway, and the shock of it snapped through her like she had lungs again—except they weren’t hers, and they moved too fast, too strong, and too alive.
She tried to anchor herself, some instinct reaching for balance or gravity… for the familiar sense of being in a body. But there was nothing to settle into. She had no bones and no weight. There was no heartbeat of her own. Just the echo of his.
It startled her—how overwhelming motion could be when it wasn’t hers to command.
It had been over a century since she last occupied a body with muscles, nerves, and breath. A century since she’d felt the world’s impact directly. Even her half-remembered life before the Ironbound ritual felt thin now, like a memory belonging to someone she had once known but could no longer fully claim. She didn’t even remember what walking felt like.
But now she felt his sensations with startling clarity.
His pulse hammered against his ribs, and that vibration rippled through her like an earthquake rolling through a hollow chamber. The shift of his shoulders, the set of his jaw, the flex of muscles along his spine as he lengthened his stride—each movement tugged at her awareness, stretching it thin, pulling it taut in ways she wasn’t meant to endure. Movement, which had once been effortless and instinctive, now felt like a storm she was trapped inside without shelter.
She wasn’t merely riding the sensation. She was drowning in it.
And beneath it all was something worse—something unfamiliar in a way that terrified her.
His emotions.
A gathering coil of anger, cold and honed. Fear—sharp but buried under years of discipline. Focus tightening inside him like a drawn bowstring. All of it pressed against her like invisible hands, pushing her awareness into shapes it did not recognize.
She wanted to pull back. Her instinct was to retreat. To uncurl from him and hide in whatever corner of his mind she had been clinging to before this nightmare began. But she couldn’t—not fully. The bond yanked her forward with every movement he made, tethering her to his momentum as though she were strapped to a runaway carriage with no reins.
Her awareness wavered and then flickered. She felt herself fraying at the edges as she instinctively tried to withdraw. But she couldn’t.
He wasn’t doing this on purpose—she knew that—but he was carrying her into fear and danger and memory at speeds she couldn’t withstand. And the truth hit her with a sickening drop through her center:
She wasn’t ready to feel again. Not like this. Certainly not all at once. And not through him.
But she had no body to collapse into. No breath to hyperventilate with. No hands to press against her chest where panic tried to bloom.
There was just his heart pounding too fast. His lungs filling too sharply. His fear threaded with fury rising like a tide she couldn’t outrun.
She was a spark trapped inside a wildfire.
And movement—simple movement—had become a force powerful enough to break her.
The hallway changed before she could gather herself.
One moment Jareth was striding through shifting stone, and the next, the Labyrinth opened into something she did not recognize. The air thickened around them, turning cold in a way that felt wrong. It wasn’t the natural chill of carved corridors but a deadened cold, damp and heavy, like metal left too long in shadow. She felt him slow—not in hesitation, but in that sudden, predatory stillness that meant he’d seen something dangerous before she had.
The world lurched around her—a world she did not stand in, did not move through, but was dragged along behind as Jareth strode toward the south corridors. His eyes cut through the shifting light, and she saw through them: walls trembling, shadows writhing, and the unmistakable glint of metal where no metal should be.
Iron.
It pulsed along the stone like something alive. Dark, silvery-grey, sinewed vines coiled along the corridor walls like serpents, each tendril pulsing faintly, their surfaces glinting with an oily sheen. They wound over stone, fractured tile, and carved arches, eating into the Labyrinth as though it were nothing more than dry bark ripe for infestation. Any place they touched crumbled like old parchment, dust drifting down in slow, sickening spirals.
And Jareth’s horror became hers.
Goblins scattered across his field of vision—small, frantic shapes scrambling over one another in blind panic. She recognized them dimly, the chaotic creatures she remembered from her youth: shrieking, flailing, and darting without direction. But the fear rolling off them now was deeper, sharper—nothing like the mischief and noise she recalled.
Jareth’s instincts told her more than she could name. A subtle flicker of recognition pulsed through the tether—not hers, but his. These were the lowest caste of goblins, the ones who scattered first, the ones who could not be expected to stand their ground. His assessment slid through her awareness before she could separate it from her own fear.
The goblins fled in clustering waves as the hall cracked under the advance of creeping metal.
A larger goblin tried to herd the smaller ones forward, shouting directions she could barely make out. He looked more like the messenger who had come to fetch Jareth earlier—steadier posture, stronger build, and less wildness in the eyes—one of the kind she’d never seen during her first run through the Labyrinth.
But the fear radiating from him through Jareth’s senses was jagged and wrong.
A flicker of understanding—not hers, but Jareth’s—brushed against her awareness. This type of goblin wasn’t supposed to panic. These goblins held their ground. They stabilized chaos; they didn’t add to it.
And yet the goblin was visibly shaking.
Then a vine struck.
It cracked through the air with vicious precision, and Jareth’s instincts tightened. Sarah felt the motion before she understood it, felt the jolt of readiness ripple through his muscles and rattle her fragile awareness.
The vine hit a small goblin frozen mid-step.
Sarah “watched”—if that word even applied—as the iron wrapped around it in a heartbeat, coils slamming shut around its ribs, pinning its arms, crushing breath from it in thin, desperate whimpers. The sound vibrated through Jareth’s body and knifed straight into her half-formed senses.
Another vine slammed down further along the corridor, sealing the passage with a snarl of twisting metal. Two small goblins huddled behind it—trapped and trembling with no path left to run.
The larger goblin—steady-built, the kind meant to organize chaos, not be consumed by it—shouted instructions again. But his voice cracked halfway through, shaking apart under the weight of fear.
He made one desperate, useless gesture toward the trapped pair, as though instinct demanded he try again. But his feet wouldn’t move. His body hovered between duty and survival, paralyzed by the knowledge that iron did not forgive hesitation.
The vines crept closer. He took a step back. Then another. And soon he was running after the smaller goblins that had fled the area before him.
The Labyrinth was losing.
And through Jareth, she felt that realization like a shiver running through stone.
She tried to look away, but she had no eyes to close. No head to turn. Worst of all, she had no hands to cover her face. She saw everything he saw.
Another vine slid along the wall with a wet metallic scrape, dragging itself forward on barbed edges, carving grooves into stone. It wasn’t just consuming the Labyrinth. It was replacing it, claiming every surface it touched, weaving its own unnatural geometry into the kingdom’s living walls.
Stone should have resisted. It should have held strong. The Labyrinth should have flung it back like a splinter. But the iron… didn’t stop. It moved with hunger.
Sarah’s awareness buckled.
This was not a random invasion nor an accident. There was nothing natural about this corruption.
The iron pulsed again—deep, slow, and deliberate—and she felt the echo of her old world constrict around her chest, a memory of tightness without lungs or ribs to contain it.
Jareth hissed a curse between his teeth, and the sound reverberated through her like a struck bell. His anger burned hot and sharp in her senses, a counterpoint to her rising dread. She clung to it, though she didn’t know why—maybe because it was the only solid, rooted thing she could feel. But even his fury couldn’t drown out the truth vibrating through her from the walls.
The Labyrinth was afraid.
For the first time since her restoration began, Sarah felt it clearly—felt the tremor in the stones, the way the walls seemed to lean back from the advancing vines, retreating as if the castle itself sought to flee.
And inside her—threaded through her psyche like a scar—came a brutal, crystalline certainty:
The truth struck her with sickening clarity. This was the reason she had been made into an Ironbound…the reason that Jareth bought her. She had been made to be used—to let a fae draw power through her, to lend them strength she would never keep for herself. Ironbound weren’t meant to endure; they were meant to be consumed, siphoned hollow until there was nothing left but what the fae needed from them. Her survival had never been the point of the process. Her usefulness had. And feeling that purpose rise with such familiarity, such dreadful recognition, left her trembling in a way no physical body could.
She felt Jareth’s shock the moment her realization hit him—sharp, instinctive, and unguarded. His stride faltered for the briefest heartbeat before he forced the motion back into precision. The emotion that bled across the tether sliced between them with startling clarity: fear, guilt, and a flicker of revulsion he clamped down on so fast she couldn’t tell whether it belonged to her memories or his conscience.
There was no space to unravel it. Her awareness was buckling beneath the weight of recognition she couldn’t explain—instincts rising like ghosts, impressions without origin, purposes she wished she could deny. Something inside her knew, with terrible certainty, that this metal was not spreading by accident.
It wasn’t natural growth. It wasn’t environmental collapse. It was directed, summoned, and moving with intent.
And the intent behind it felt wrong in a way that scraped across every thread of her fragile presence—familiar not because she remembered it, but because it resonated with the part of her that had been made to be used.
Whatever had sent the iron… wanted something. Or someone.
A vine snapped toward Jareth’s boot, grazing stone a breath too late. Sarah felt the jolt of danger coil up his spine—and therefore hers. She flickered, destabilizing, like she might dissolve entirely under the crush of motion and sensation and fear.
But he kept moving. Evading the snaking vines. And she had no choice but to move with him.
Jareth
The corridor constricted around him the moment he stepped fully into its ruined stretch. Jareth felt the walls recoil with a tremor that unsettled him more than the iron itself; the Labyrinth had never pulled away from him before. It had bent, shifted, reformed, and even resisted—but it had never retreated. The withdrawal read like a wince, like a wounded creature bracing for another blow. And he was walking deeper into it, as though plunging into the ribs of a beast in its death throes.
The iron vines writhed across the stone, chewing through the architecture with slow, methodical hunger. Wherever they touched, the Labyrinth’s living walls sagged and dissolved, crumbling into gray dust that streaked the air with a gritty, metallic tang. The scent hit him like a blow—cold, sharp, almost medicinal—and his throat tightened with the instinctive knowledge that he was breathing a kingdom’s dying breath.
A goblin struggled in the nearest vine’s grip, its twisted body pinned so tightly that its limbs trembled with the effort to keep drawing breath. Jareth’s pulse kicked hard, the sensation echoing uncomfortably along the bond. Sarah felt it—he could sense her flinch—but he had no time to soothe her. Not when his people were gasping in front of him.
“Majesty,” the goblin rasped, the word thin and threadbare. The vine tightened, squeezing another broken wheeze from its throat.
Jareth’s hand snapped up, ready to summon light, power, anything that might sever the unnatural metal. But the vines moved faster. Another tendril uncoiled from the wall, lashing outward like a striking snake. He barely pivoted in time to avoid it. The air hissed where it passed—a sound that felt personal and predatory.
He wasn’t just fighting invaders. He was being hunted in his own halls.
A surge of helpless fury rose in him, hot and choking. He had never been helpless in his Labyrinth—not once. Every stone, every stair… every shifting path had always answered to him, bending at his will. To see it now, gutted and smothered beneath iron… it tore at something fundamental inside him, a wrongness he didn’t have words for.
Behind his ribs, Sarah’s awareness quivered. She felt everything—his rage, his terror, his impotence—and the echo of her own horror compounded it. The bond crackled, unstable, like a frayed wire sparking inside his chest.
He forced himself to breathe. The breath was slow and controlled, but it didn’t help.
More goblins dotted the corridor—some struggling, some already unconscious, and some eerily still in the vines’ grip. Every one of them was someone he’d ruled over for centuries. Someone who trusted him. Someone who looked at him with fear or awe or adoration, depending on the day—but always with the certainty that he could fix anything.
And now he couldn’t free even one of them.
He stepped closer to the nearest ensnared goblin, jaw clenched so hard his temples throbbed.
“Hold on,” he murmured, lifting his hand. “I’ll get you out.”
The vine’s surface shimmered in warning, its pulse quickening like a heartbeat sensing a threat. Metal should not have a heartbeat. Metal should not flex and coil and breathe.
Yet it did.
Light gathered at Jareth’s fingertips, but the moment he tried to draw deeper—pulling on the well of Ironbound power he had intended to access—the bond jolted violently. Sarah recoiled in a flash of instinct, not directed at him but at the power he was reaching for.
It wasn’t defiance. It was pain. Nothing but raw, instinctive pain.
Her presence stuttered, flickering like a candle in a sudden draught. Jareth faltered, the light sputtering in his hand. He swallowed a curse, teeth grinding as his momentum faltered under the sharp sting of her distress.
Not now. Not this. He needed her strength—his kingdom needed it. But the moment he reached for it, she flinched like a wounded thing pulled too harshly by a leash.
The vine tightened around the goblin with a brittle, wet crunch. The goblin screamed—a high, panicked, keening sound that clawed its way into the back of Jareth’s throat. And he could do nothing. Nothing but watch… powerless and helpless.
The words scalded him.
He hadn’t realized, until this moment, how deeply the iron threatened not only his kingdom but his own identity. A Goblin King who could not defend his subjects? A monarch who could do nothing but stand still while his walls were eaten alive? It was unthinkable. It was shameful.
A vine lashed across the floor in warning, gouging a brutal line through the stone. The Labyrinth groaned, a deep, painful sound that vibrated up his legs and into his spine.
He was surrounded. He was powerless. And the iron was spreading.
Jareth had never been more aware of how close he was to losing everything—his kingdom, his subjects, his authority, and the fragile, flickering soul inside him that had once been a girl who ran his maze with fire in her eyes.
And as another vine reared back like a serpent preparing to strike, something inside him broke.
He whispered, hoarse and terrified, “Labyrinth… please.”
The corridor vibrated with a low, rolling groan—stone straining, metal tightening, and the very air shuddering as if caught between breaths. Jareth froze, instincts sharpening to a lethal point. He had called to the Labyrinth, pleaded with it, demanded its strength—and something in the walls answered.
But not with rescue. Not with obedience. It answered with presence.
The vine-wrapped goblin jerked violently, as though some invisible cord had yanked his spine straight. His limbs, wedged tight by the iron’s constriction, spasmed once, twice, and then went rigid. His head tilted back against the metal coils, eyes bulging, whites showing in a frantic, terrified roll.
Jareth surged forward on instinct.
“Easy—don’t fight it,” he ordered, reaching out a hand he couldn’t quite make himself place. “Hold on. I’ll free you—just hold on—”
The goblin’s mouth opened in a high scream—but the sound that emerged was not a scream at all. A deep, resonant vibration rolled out of him, far too vast for his small body to contain. It wasn’t a voice shaped by lungs or throat. It was the Labyrinth itself, speaking through borrowed flesh.
The air thrummed with a low, seismic hum, as if the stones were trying to form words. Dust sifted from the fractured ceiling. The goblin’s pupils vanished, eyes turning a flat, milky white as the ancient resonance overtook him, hollowing him into a vessel.
When the Labyrinth spoke, it came as layered echoes—soft, deep, overlapping—stone on stone, corridor sighing into corridor.
“—Not yet, Jareth.”
The floor shuddered beneath him. Sarah jolted inside his chest, awareness contracting into a sharp, terrified spark.
The goblin’s lips stretched as if pulled from the inside, forming shapes he could not have conjured on his own. The words carried the weight of stone corridors older than memory, of doors that had never opened for any mortal or fae.
“You are not ready to face this.”
Jareth’s blood chilled. It wasn’t the reprimand—it was the tone. The Labyrinth had never spoken to him like this: not as a partner, not as a servant… not even as a child chastising a wayward parent.
It spoke like a judge.
A vine snapped across the wall, metal screeching as it burrowed deeper. The trapped goblin convulsed once, but the voice forced him still, as though stone hands pinned him from within.
“Your power is unbalanced.”
Jareth swallowed hard, jaw locking. He didn’t trust himself to answer. He didn’t trust his voice not to betray the tremor building in him, or the raw anger edging into his fear. Behind his ribs, Sarah felt the shift. Her presence tightened—worried, startled, and small.
The walls quaked again, dust drifting like ash.
“Your bond is unformed.”
The word struck him like a blow. It didn’t say incomplete or weakened. It said unformed.
As though everything he’d done—every breath, every desperate act of preservation—was nothing more than the beginning of a beginning.
Sarah’s awareness stuttered. He felt her recoil, felt her tremble like a spark on the verge of extinguishing. It wasn’t an accusation this time. It was dread—the shared terror of a truth neither of them had been willing to name.
The goblin’s body jerked once more, as if the Labyrinth’s hold slipped or tightened.
The voice deepened. “Restore her.”
Jareth’s breath caught, the word striking through him with surgical precision. His heart slammed once—hard enough that Sarah felt the echo ripple through her like a quake.
Then the Labyrinth delivered the final blow. “Restore her. Then return.”
Every vine went still. Every stone fell silent. The corridor held its breath, suspended in an impossible, unnatural pause.
And just as suddenly as the possession began, it ended.
The goblin’s body sagged in the iron’s grip, all tension gone, limbs slack—but the vines did not release him. They held him suspended against the wall, coiled tight around his arms and torso, ribs compressing in slow, rhythmic pulses. His breath came in thin, shuddering whimpers, each one weaker than the last. Whatever the Labyrinth had taken over, it had not, and could not, release the iron’s hold.
Notes:
Thank you for wandering the Labyrinth with me! I’m grateful for your patience while I coaxed this chapter into shape. Comments and kudos are always appreciated—they’re the little boosts (and goblin-bribes) that keep me writing. Until next time, take care and avoid suspiciously shiny vines.
Pat the Spouse (Guest) on Chapter 1 Mon 15 Sep 2025 03:02AM UTC
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