Opening Gambit

[goblin_king]

The window opened out over the dark and tangled maze his Labyrinth had become, shining her bloody teeth in readiness, but for once Jareth paid her no attention. Not now, anyway. Because ... he was tired of defense, in this game with Darkness. His walls were up, his lines were set. All was in readiness, and he had let it sit like that for some time, while he played games of words and short brutalities, content merely to admire his love in her defiance.

No more. Now it was time, he thought, for a little turn of the game. Time to advance a little gambit, a little assault. There were slow, secret games being played by his enemy, if the being had any skill at all, and it wouldn't do to let them go uninterrupted.

So. So. Lets play this game a little further, shall we?

He drew in his magic, pulling it inside himself, letting it sit and settle and ready itself while he thought. His enemy. A creature of darkness, of elemental magic. One of the more ... insideous powers. Secret. The very essence of secrecy in some ways. A subtle power. An unassailable power, maybe. Certainly nothing he could contend with in raw power. But there were more subtle ways, for a prince of nothingness, a prince of dreams, and in that realm of his enemy there were living beings, living minds.

Weak minds, that hungered and feared and above all desired. And desire was his plaything.

His magic stole out across the boundaries between realms, slender threads, whispering, weaving a gentle susurrus of suggestion around weak, contemptible minds, little niggles, little prompts. So afraid. Always so afraid, and why? Why suffer this way? Why? When he is one and we are many, and we have seen him fall. We have seen him fall. Before a mortal, no less. And hungry. We are so hungry. We want. We *want*. Why won't he give us what we want. 

Why don't we take what we want?

Jareth smiled, listening to ugly little minds clamouring with his thoughts, with his suggestions. Every available mind within his reach into the enemy's realm. Not much. Not much. Just a little sally, a little threat. Just to show.

I can touch you, he sent, soft and cold. Just a little. Just enough. In the games we play, Dark One, a little touch is a dangerous thing. Darkness is banished with the light. But dreams, little lordling, desires ... even in your realm there is no destroying dreams, no defeating them, no driving them back.

As long as you desire, little lordling, as long as your minions desire ... I can touch you at will.

Comments

[lord_darkness]

An uprising? Such an amusement to deal with, Darkness thought. He brought the ones too afraid to be tainted by foreign dreams and threw them into the bloody fray as starving, dream warped goblins rose up.

the strongest would survive...and then he would break them to his will, ready them for the next gambit.

After all, it wouldn't take much to take the one human the woman did care for, despite her protests to the contrary. A simple boy, already touched by magic at so young an age...

[goblin_king]

Sensing the frenzy through the threads of his magic, sensing the slaughter egged on by the Dark One, he wondered if the creature had missed the point. Perhaps it was too old, too decrepit, for subtlety to be effective. Ah well.

Desire ... it hummed through the thread he'd laid, hummed through the Dark One's mind, and in its wake he stole forward, a presence lost, drowned in the creature's own lust and need to win, a nothing in a world of emptiness. He slipped in among the shadows of the creature's dreams, and settled in to examine them at his leisure.

Examine them, and plan against them.

[lord_darkness]

The greed of the goblins, the hunger, the need to take and conquer yet never being allowed to keep and hold what was won...all this reflected their master. Just as Night gave way to Dawn every day, losing the ground it had taken, so Darkness was left with nothing of his own in the end.

No clarity, only lies and shadows, never revealing the full truth or understanding...that was Darkness's domain, left as fleeting and empty as a summer night.

[goblin_king]

Jareth shuddered inside that mind, reminded a little of the Unseelie Court, of the pain and craving and hopelessness of bitter struggles that never ended and were never won for more than a moment, and could be lost for eternity. This creature was what those struggles were made of, what they were born from, what they became when they died their sordid little deaths.

It was a creature who knew how to do nothing except lose, while Jareth had lost and in losing found a victory that could never be taken. Really, Darkness should have given up before he started.

But all that was incidental. What was important, at least for the moment, was the threads of plans in the Dark One's mind, and the image of someone ... well, someone the Darkness was more than welcome to, in Jareth's opinion, but for Sarah's sake would have to be protected. Damn the creature anyway. As if he wanted that bloody brat knocking around. Couldn't the thing have picked a less annoying target?