‘The dead who die like this do not want only to be remembered,’ the woman answered.
With her own blood she drew a design on Jareth’s back—the back of his corpse; he had observed all of this from a strange position, drifting in the air, as though watching a performance on a distant stage through muddy opera glasses.She closed the circle of blood, and he felt at once a sudden inward pull, as though afflicted by a new gravity that drew him not towards earth, but towards her.
There was a blurred moment.A smear in the record of his memory, and then he saw with eyes that were not his eyes, the colours of the world no longer dulled by death, but different, also, from how he remembered them from life.His mind reeled in panic, reached out, and found himself bound within a body as though he were alive again.A body that was not his own.
A thought that was not his thought filled his mind.
Panic swelled within him.He should have suspected she was a sorceress, like Afanan.She meant to bind him to one of these stones and use his soul for a weapon.He had let his guard down for a moment, disarmed by the kindness of her lies.
He was a howling wind of terror and outrage.He could feel her body as once he had felt his own.The chill breeze on her cheek.The scent of earth and grass; even the stink of his own corpse.And, along with all her other senses, he felt the strength of her limbs.
There.He seized upon that strength, tried to twist her arms, her hands to her own throat and rip and tear and—
Silence.Darkness.Again a disembodied spirit, now bound in a void absent all sensation.
Then a voice.
He roared, thoughts lent volume by anger and grief.
Fola demanded again, and he felt a surge of compulsion.Some spell she worked to bend him to her will.Or perhaps only a need to unburden himself.To share his pain, even with this witch-woman who tortured him in death.
He called the memory to mind.Not his final memory—there were, afterwards, the blurred and agonised hours dragging himself towards the road on weakening arms, pulling legs behind that preceded the rest of him into death—but the sharpest, the most painful.The burning seed at the core of him.
The girl.Her freckle-splashed face.So innocent.So unassuming.And then the spike bursting from his belly, the spray of his blood.A glimpse of her monstrous wolf, and then of her face, changed now.Sharper.Rougher.Freckles and innocence replaced by shallow, uncaring cruelty.
The memory hurt too much.He felt it changing him, twisting him into nothing but gnashing teeth and a hand grasping desperately for vengeance.
Fola told him.
The memory faded, and then sensation blurred again and he was free, floating in the air beside his corpse.The others gathered around.Harwick placed the last stone to complete the ring around him, then stood back and folded Spil’s hand into his.Spil leaned his head on Harwick’s broad shoulder.Siwan and Damon, too, held hands, but more subtly, still in that first nervous blush of a new relationship.Llewyn sat and watched, his breathing laboured, while Fola drew the final line of her spell.
The ground within the ring of stones began to ripple, then to heave, the surface breaking open with a scent of moss, of clover and wild flowers and sprouting trees, of rich loam and peat and all the bounty of good soil.Earth roiled up, as though boiling, to cover Jareth’s body in a barrow like that of an ancient king.The weight of it settled on Jareth’s soul.A comforting blanket against the cold of the void.
Guilt caught in him as his wrath faded.In its place, more memories bubbled up.Watching Siwan fumble at the gittern, her face scrunched up in concentration, her little fingers too small and soft to firmly hold the strings.The night when the takings at the inn they’d played had been so poor that the innkeeper had no way to pay them but by opening an old, unwanted cask of bitter cider that Jareth, Trick and Harwick drained in a night of laughter and bawdy songs.The day when he had caught Damon behind the wagon with a playbook ofHow Soft Blows the Eastern Wind?gesticulating grandly and practising Polon’s opening soliloquy.The boy had turned bright red in embarrassment, but after a burst of surprised laughter Jareth had sat him down and worked him through the lines, helping him draw out the deeper meanings of the text.
Damon stepped forward now, the flat stone he had been carving balanced between his upturned hands.He laid it gently on the face of the barrow and pressed it into the earth, then read:
‘Here lies Jareth of the Silver Lake Troupe, who deserved a kinder death, a longer life and a grander stage.’
They stood a while longer in silence, then began sharing their own stories.Fragments of who he had been, carried in these disparate, other souls, reassembled for a moment.While they laughed and wept and held mournful, sombre quiet, Jareth found himself wondering where the other troupers were—not from resentment of their absence, but a sense of incompleteness.Ayden, Mirelle, Trick, Roni and Tula.Afanan.They held pieces of him, too.He would have liked to see them once more, here at the end.
At last they returned to their horses.They rode east, the same path he had hoped to travel back to Afondir.Back to The Rose.To the dream he had dreamed since childhood.Now forever unfulfilled.
He saw her, then.His mother.Golden curls full of stage light.But this time, he caught her eye.She turned, looked down upon him from the stage, smiled, and knelt, and extended a hand.
An end to one life.To one dream.
He reached out to her and felt himself begin to fade.
IV.Companions in Misery
Cracks in the Kingdom
YC 1189
Indeed, the cultivation of virtue ought to be its own reward, as the Heresiarch so wisely observes in her treatise.What a blessing it is, then, that in addition to providing moral certainty, civilisation and a future for mortalkind beyond the shadow of the First Folk, the virtues convey as well the blessings and powers of the Venerated Agion.
