108. Left or Right?

THE GATE OF THE LABYRINTH

Just inside the gate, the path, hemmed in by a thick gray wall of brick, branched two ways: left and right.

"Which way?" Applejack asked Sarah.

Sarah pointed to the right. "That way," she answered.

"Hang on," Twilight pointed out. "Sarah, you said you know ONE way into the center of the Labyrinth. And Hoggle, you even said you didn't know everything about every path. What if there's a quicker way down one of the roads you didn't take?"

"There might be," Sarah agreed, "but I don't know if we can take that chance."

"It is certainly possible, though," Hoggle admitted.

"What if we split up?" Twilight suggested. "Some of us take the right path, and some of us take the left path. Maybe if we try different things, somepony will end up finding a faster way. I think only one of us has to get to the center."

"How do you want us to split up?" Sarah asked.

"Hmm…" Twilight thought it over. "What if Rainbow Dash takes the right path – "

"What?" Rainbow Dash spat. "I don't wanna take the predictable road! If there's a faster way, I'm gonna find it! I'll go left!"

"Okay," Twilight amended. "Rainbow Dash goes right. Hoggle goes left – "

"I'm not going that way!" Hoggle insisted. "I'm going the way I know is the right one!"

This discussion went back and forth for quite a while. In the end, after much arguing and bargaining, teams were selected. Twilight, Sarah, Applejack, Hoggle, and Richard were to go down the right-hand path: the one where Sarah knew the way. Bastian, Rarity, Helena, Fluttershy, and Rainbow Dash were to try the left-hand path to see what they could find on that route.

"See you at Goblin City!" Rainbow Dash crowed. "When you catch up, that is!" She took off at a quick gallop down the left path.

"You HAVE to remember," Sarah told Rarity, Bastian, Fluttershy, and Helena. "You can't take anything for granted in this place. You have to look at everything like it really is. There are doors hidden here that you can't see if you expect them not to be there."

"How are we supposed to expect where the doors are if we can't see them?" Fluttershy asked nervously.

"We just have to always be on the lookout for a door, then," Helena resolved. "I think we've got it."

"Good luck!" Rarity said with an earnest nod.

"Good luck to y'all too!" Applejack replied.

The two teams split. As Rainbow Dash's four teammates struggled to catch up with her, Twilight, Sarah, Richard, Hoggle, and Applejack headed off down the more familiar road.

"How long do we go until the way out?" Twilight asked.

"I don't remember exactly," Sarah confessed. "But I think I know how to look for it. It's in that wall somewhere." She pointed to the wall hemming them in on the right.

The team moved briskly in silence for a short while before Sarah, still having a million questions about this whole situation, began with what was to her the most obvious: "What was your friend like? The one who got taken."

"Pinkie Pie?" Twilight affirmed. "Well…" She presumed Sarah probably hadn't seen many of her ilk. "She's a pony like the rest of us. She's not a unicorn or a pegasus, though. She's just an earth pony."

"Isn't there only one Pegasus?" Richard asked, confused.

"The pegasi are an entire race of winged ponies that I was told was descended from the original Pegasus," Twilight explained. "Anyway, Pinkie has a bright pink coat, a wild pink mane, and a Cutie Mark that looks like three balloons."

"What's a Cutie Mark?" Sarah asked.

"These symbols on our flanks," Twilight indicated. "They correspond to our special talents. Mine means magic. Applejack's is related to her home and her family on an apple farm."

"They're the same as your necklaces," Sarah observed.

"The amulets are connected to them," Twilight clarified. "They took on the shapes of our Cutie Marks when we first got them. I think it's a sign of how they've bonded specifically to us."

Sarah wanted to ask more about the amulets, but she still hadn't gotten her first question answered, not truly. "You told me what Pinkie looks like," she pointed out, "but I want to know what her personality is like."

"That's part of the problem," Twilight sighed. "Pinkie Pie is…well…"

"She's loads of fun," Applejack interjected. "Pinkie Pie's always up for a party. She loves singin', dancin', sweet treats, swimmin' pools, bouncin' on trampolines, and carnivals and funfairs of all sorts. She likes throwin' us parties for every occasion she can think of. She's prob'ly the best singer out of all of us, and she knows just what to say to make a pony laugh."

"She just…doesn't know when to be serious, sometimes," Twilight threw in. "And sometimes, she's just plain loud. That's why I made this stupid wish in the first place. Because I was studying, and she thought I'd have more fun NOT studying, so she wouldn't leave me alone!"

"You're singing a different tune from earlier," Hoggle pointed out. "I thought it was all your fault, and you regretted it immediately!"

"I DID regret it immediately," Twilight said quickly. "It's just…okay, so there are a lot of times that I wish Pinkie Pie would leave me alone. But what I REALLY want is for her to go find somewhere else she can be happy and loud for a few minutes. Like another room. NOT for her to get kidnapped by some crazy Gobl – "

Hoggle clapped a hand over Twilight's mouth. "I wouldn't go around calling him crazy!" the dwarf hissed. "He might hear, you know, and if he turns up, he'll just find a way to make it worse on all of us!"

Twilight nodded her understanding, and Hoggle let her go.

"She really is one of my best friends," Twilight sighed. "She's like a sister to me. For every time she annoys me, there are two more that she's really the best pony to be around. I want her back, flaws and all."

A new voice chimed in to this, high-pitched and friendly, not to mention quite British. "'Allo! What's all this, then? You've finally come back for that cup of tea?"

"What?" Richard, startled, looked this way and that for the source of the voice. "Who said that?"

Sarah knew exactly who said that. "No way…" She moved toward the left wall and crouched near a small ridge. Upon it was a fat blue worm, about as long as Sarah's hand would be from the base of the palm to the fingertips. While most of his body was off-white, his back was blue, and tufts of blue hair sprouted from the top and sides of his head. The whites of his eyes were not actually white, but instead deep crimson, and the color was an exact match to the tiny red scarf he wore looped around his neck. "I remember you!" Sarah said happily. "You offered me that cup of tea six years ago! How did you remember that?"

"Six years, was it?" The worm blinked. "You do look older, come to think of it. Guess it has been a while. You look a lot happier, too. Question still stands: do you want a cup of tea or not?"

"Is this seriously happening right now?" Richard whispered.

"I guess," Twilight whispered back. "Must be a friend of hers."

"Worms," Hoggle huffed. "They're always indirect exactly when you need to be direct!"

"Heard that, I did," the worm said sharply. "That's a bit of an offensive stereotype, don't you think?"

"I can't come in for tea today," Sarah told the worm. "I actually have to solve the Labyrinth all over again."

"All over again!" the worm repeated in disbelief. "How do you end up doing a thing like that twice?"

"A stupid unicorn makes a stupid wish," Hoggle grunted.

"But thank you for speaking up!" Sarah said earnestly. "Now I know where we are! The way forward is just over there!" She stood and pointed at what looked like a blank wall.

"Are…you sure?" Richard asked.

"Look!" Sarah walked at the wall, and it turned out there was actually an opening in it that led to a parallel hallway; the other hall's wall gave the illusion through the opening that it was part of the wall of the path they were on. This one also seemed to go left and right. "The quickest way to the castle is this way," she said, pointing to the right. "The worm told me that last time!"

"I most certainly did not!" the worm huffed. "I specifically told you to go that way so you WOULDN'T end up at the castle! Who in their right mind wants to go to Goblin City? 'Sides goblins, that is. All that loud partying and waving sharp weapons about. And that Jareth! Always causing mischief and being disruptive, he is! The OTHER way was the road to Goblin City, and I saved you from going that way by mistake, that I did!"

The silence in the air was palpable. Sarah broke it with a surge of rage: "You mean you told me to go exactly the OPPOSITE way of where I wanted to go? You mean if I'd taken the other path, it would have saved me ALL THAT TROUBLE?"

"Noooooo," the worm reiterated, "I saved you the trouble of having to go to Goblin City! Are you sure you wouldn't rather have this conversation inside, over that cup of tea we talked about?"

"No, I don't want to talk about it over TEA!" Sarah cried.

"Ah, that's more like I remember," the worm pointed out. "You complaining, that is."

"Sarah," Richard pointed out, "if what you did was anything like what I did, then I think you should be glad you went the long way. What if going right to where you wanted to be meant you missed out on learning to be braver?"

"And what about Hoggle?" Applejack asked.

"Yeah, what about me?" Hoggle insisted. He then realized he didn't know why Applejack had brought him into it. "…What about me?"

"Would you've met him if you went the other way?" Applejack posed.

Sarah thought it over. "I guess not," she realized. "Or Ludo or Sir Didymus."

"Are those other friends of yours?" Richard asked.

"Yes!" Sarah nodded. "Maybe we'll run into them. I'd love to see them both again."

"If we're lucky, it'll just be Ludo," Hoggle huffed. "Don't know what's so lovable about that other one. He's all noise and nonsense!"

"That complaint sounds familiar," Richard pointed out, looking at Twilight.

"I didn't say Pinkie was ALL noise and nonsense!" Twilight retorted.

"If the other path goes to the Goblin City," Sarah realized, "we need to take it. Right now!"

"Sarah, use your head about it, will you?" Hoggle commanded. "Think! Would Jareth give anybody thirteen hours to figure it out if there was a road that just went straight from the gate to the castle? It's too easy! He'll have put all sorts of traps in on the way, damn him! I should know! I used to help him set those up!"

"I don't know Jareth all that well," Twilight added, "but I agree. He's already proven that he likes to toy with us. Any road that leads right to the castle can't really go that way. It has to lead to some kind of trap."

"It sounds too suspicious," Richard concurred.

"Besides, can you really trust directions from a worm?" Hoggle added.

"What's your problem with worms?" the worm huffed. "Sure, we've got our bad apples, but so's everybody else! You don't hear me going on about dwarves, now, do you? No! All I've done is be nice and give you helpful directions and offer tea, and, come to think of it, I should also offer you a chance to use my house's back door! It's a bit of a shortcut. I think."

"Wait, what?" Twilight latched onto the worm's words. "There's another door out of here in your house?"

"What exactly is it a shortcut to?" Applejack asked.

"Well…" The worm thought it over. "Not quite sure. But it's short."

"It looks like we have three paths," Twilight pointed out. "There's the road to the Goblin City, which seems too dangerous to use. There's the road Sarah knows. And then there's the worm's house."

"I want to try the road to Goblin City," Sarah insisted. "Even if it is a trap, we still have to try!"

"I don't think it's safe," Twilight reiterated. "I'd rather check out the worm's house."

"Aren't we all a bit big for that?" Richard asked.

"I actually know a spell," Twilight told him. "It can change ponies into Breezies, which are creatures about the size of the worm. It would probably turn humans into something like pixies." She gave the worm a smile. "And as long as we're there, it'd be rude to turn down a cup of tea. Just so long as it's quick."

"I'll go put the kettle on!" the worm cried happily. "The missus will be so glad to hear we've got company!" He scooted into a hole in the wall that was obviously an entrance to his dwelling.

"I think we might as well stick to the safe road," Applejack said.

"I'm with her," Hoggle stated, pointing to Applejack. "She's actually being sensible about all this!"

"Then maybe I should go with Twilight," Richard suggested. "I'm kind of curious about what a worm house looks like, anyway."

"Then it looks like I'm taking the fast road alone," Sarah resolved. "I still think I have to try."

"But then if you get there," Richard pointed out, "none of Pinkie's friends will be with you."

"I might be able to convince Jareth to set her free anyway," Sarah told him. "If I could talk to him…we have kind of a history."

"Is it a good history?" Applejack asked in concern.

"It's…a weird one," Sarah admitted. "But he might just listen to me."

"You are the reason most of this world looks the way it does," Hoggle reminded her.

"So if you go that way," Applejack told Sarah, "an' me and Hoggle go the other way, an' Twilight and Richard check out this worm's house, then…" She looked to Hoggle. "You know which path she took the first time, right?"

"Roughly," Hoggle admitted. "Here and there."

"If I had paper, I could draw you a map," Sarah suggested. "Or write out a list of directions."

"Then I've got exactly what you need." Richard proudly removed a small flip notepad from one of his jacket pockets; a pen was tucked into its spiral binding. "I find it's good to be prepared no matter what."

As Richard held the notepad out, Sarah accepted it with a grateful "Thank you!" She then began the task of documenting her past travels on its small pages in as simple of words as possible.

"You can keep it," Richard told her, Hoggle, and Applejack. "Twilight and I should get moving."

"Right," Twilight agreed. "So, if you're ready…this might feel weird at first."

"Okay," Richard replied, only somewhat nervous.

Twilight lowered her head, and a bright sphere of swirling magenta energy grew at the tip of her horn. It inflated to about the size of a beach ball before suddenly growing large enough to dissolve into the air around Twilight and Richard. Both were surrounded in a bright magenta aura. Concentrating on what she'd read about this spell, Twilight fired a beam of energy directly into Richard's chest. Then she concentrated on herself.

First, she felt a pair of wings erupt from her back: a strange sensation, but it was over quickly. Then each of her limbs shrank, and finally her body as a whole. She had no doubt the same was happening to Richard. The last change came in the form of a pair of antennae sprouting from her forehead.

When the aura of magic cleared, Twilight was able to get a better look at the results of her spell. She now perfectly resembled a Breezie: small enough to dance in the open petals of a flower, her body was long and lanky, with lengthier and thinner limbs than what she'd had before. Her mane and tail had grown longer by contrast, flowing out behind her like banners. A pair of lavender antennae curled up and out of her head.

Richard, by contrast, looked more like a pixie. He too had shrunken, bearing a pair of his own diaphanous wings. While his limbs and body were not quite so stretched as Twilight's into new proportion, his hair was a bit longer now, a blonde mane that fell past his shoulders.

"What did you say these creatures were called again?" Richard asked Twilight.

"Breezies," Twilight answered.

"Okay," Richard repeated: "Breezies. Got it." He faltered a bit on his wings, feeling a little more unsure about this whole plan, but he knew he was too far in to back out now.

"Just so long as you don't bite," Hoggle commented.

"Okay." Sarah flipped the notepad closed. "This should have everything." She handed it over to Hoggle. "Good luck."

"Same to you," Hoggle replied, somewhat mournfully. "I'm afraid you'll need it more."

"I can take care of myself," Sarah reassured him.

Twilight and Richard fluttered over to the ledge, nimbly perching on it. "Mr. Worm?" Richard called out.

"Can we come inside now?" Twilight added.

The worm crawled back to the ledge, taking in the sight of the two travelers who were suddenly much more his size. "Of course you can!" he insisted. "Tea's just got done."

"Thanks again," Sarah told the worm. "For the directions." She felt it would be too petty to bring up that these directions were much more helpful than the worm's last ones. After all, the worm had sent her on the much more interesting route.

"Think nothing of it," the worm replied. "I like to be of help when I can. Now come in, come in! Can't let the tea get cold!"

He turned back around and crawled back up into the hole that served as the door to his dwelling.

"See you at Goblin City!" Twilight called out as she waved up to the larger members of the party. She and Richard then followed the worm inside the wall.

At the opposite wall, Sarah, Hoggle, and Applejack walked together to the fork that branched off in the parallel hallway. They exchanged a simple nod before Sarah went left and Hoggle and Applejack went right.

...

The worm's house was warm and cozy. The stone that made up the walls was a pleasant sandy color. It was furnished throughout with wicker chairs, couches, and tables. Every room was carved with a domed roof, and the doors from room to room were arch-shaped, so it was like being inside a series of eggs that were all adjoined.

In a room that served as both kitchen and dining room, a second worm had taken a kettle (miniscule to humans, but proportionate for worms) off of a stove (proportionally sized for the kettle) and was pouring its steaming hot contents into four china teacups arranged on the round wicker table. How she carried the kettle was a mystery, as she had no hands; it just seemed to move along with her. This worm looked almost identical to the first, but where he was blue on his back and in his hair, she was red, and where his eyes were red, hers were sky blue. She kept a soft-looking blue scarf draped around her neck. "'Allo!" she greeted, and her voice was exactly identical to that of the other worm; were it not for the colors, Twilight and Richard might not have been able to tell the difference between the two. "You must be the guests! It's been such a long time since we've had guests!"

"Apparently over six years," Twilight remarked.

"Not quite sure," the red worm admitted. "Never did have a real grip on measuring time. Now sit, sit!" She was practically glowing from the happiness of having guests to host.

And so was the blue worm. "We've always had four chairs in case we had guests," he explained. "And now we actually get to use them, instead of having them just set up there and making things awkward!"

Twilight and Richard were thoroughly disinterested in making things awkward, so they sat down on two of the chairs and sipped the freshly brewed tea as the worm couple took their places at the other side of the table. The tea tasted very good, and served to add more of a feeling of comfort to the tiny home in the wall.

"So…" Twilight looked from one worm to the other. "What's the deal with Jareth, anyway? Why is he so obsessed with Sarah?"

"Don't know," the blue worm answered.

"Do you know why he looks nothing like any other goblin I've ever seen pictures of?" Twilight asked.

"Don't know that either!" the blue worm said cheerfully.

"Do you know what the rest of the Labyrinth is like?" Richard asked. "We should probably be prepared."

"Don't know anything about that," the red worm answered. "We don't know much about what goes on outside of here. We're just worms."

"Oh," Twilight said, trying to hide her dismay politely. After that, an awkward silence reigned over the table, but the tea was still good.

"Though this is the longest we've had this particular view," the red worm commented at last. "I remember when our house was just outside the Bog of Eternal Stench. That wasn't pleasant at all! It was just two weeks before that girl showed up – "

"You're thinking of ten years before she showed up," the blue worm corrected.

"Close enough!" the red worm decided.

"That's…not close at all," Richard commented.

"We'll just call it an average," the blue worm decided. "Three months."

"Actually," Richard broke in, "if we're assuming that a year is 52 weeks exactly, then the average would be 261 weeks, or about 65 and a quarter months, or five years plus a little bit."

"Wow! NICE!" Twilight complimented. "Are you a mathematician back home?"

"Nah," Richard answered. "I've got a head for numbers and statistics, but I think I actually wanna do something more creative. Either writing or illustrating stories. I love books, so I wanna work with them."

"I love books too!" Twilight cried happily. "Ever since I was a filly!"

"Would you judge me if I said it actually took me until I was a bit older to actually get into reading?" Richard said sheepishly. "But I'll take anything I can get my hands on. Historical fiction, the classics, fantasy, mythology…hmmmmmm." Something had just occurred to him. "Actually, I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier. Twilight, do you know the story about Theseus, the Minotaur, and the labyrinth?"

"I know about minotaurs," Twilight answered.

Richard wasn't surprised; he figured that both the library of books available and the creatures that lived in a world where a unicorn came from would be different from what he knew. "So it's a maze, right?" he explained. "In the story, Ariadne gives Theseus a string to tie to things and mark his way so he doesn't get lost in a maze. If we had a string, we could tie it to where we started out, then follow it back if we get lost."

"Great idea!" Twilight complimented.

"I've got a ball of yarn I can spare!" the red worm cried happily. She crawled away from the table and toward a basket of crochet materials set atop a shelf; this basket must have been the birthplace of the red and blue scarves. "Here you go!"

Neither Twilight nor Richard saw exactly how she threw the ball of purple yarn without any hands, but it came flying at them all the same. Richard tried to catch it, but fumbled it; Twilight stopped the yarn ball in midair.

"Will it grow with us if we go back to normal size?" Richard asked.

"I have a spell for that," Twilight reassured him. She then turned to the worm couple. "Thanks for the tea. It was really great. But we have to get going."

"Right, then!" the blue worm said with a nod. "You wanted to see the back door, did you?"

"That'd be nice," Richard confirmed.

"Right this way!" The blue worm made his way through the house, and the red worm followed immediately. Twilight and Richard took the paths they indicated through a few more egg-shaped rooms until they were looking out of another arched doorway. This led directly into a tunnel carved out of dirt, stretching ominously into darkness.

"Thanks again," Richard told the worms.

"Drop by anytime!" the blue worm insisted. "We can always put the kettle on!"

On that note, Twilight and Richard trotted out into the new passageway, feeling the moist earth squish beneath their feet. Some ways down the pathway, it branched out into a five-way fork.

"Looks like we've got some options," Twilight pointed out.

"And a failsafe!" Richard tied the end of the yarn ball tightly to a twig that jutted up from the dirt at the fork.

"Let's go," Twilight encouraged, and the pair set off into the depths of the maze, unraveling the yarn all the way.

...

GOBLIN CITY, THE LABYRINTH

Out of curiosity, Jareth had conjured up a larger sphere, about a foot and a half in diameter, when he was in his private quarters, and he used this to take a look at the five ponies he'd left at the Labyrinth outskirts to see how far they'd gotten and if they'd run into any particularly entertaining trouble yet.

What he didn't expect was to tune in just in time to see them teaming up with allies. The dwarf who'd betrayed him, he probably should have expected. And three of the humans he did not recognize. However…

He hadn't expected her. His heart leapt. He was almost afraid. While he had hoped one day she would return, the very act of her return did not work in his favor. She was most certainly set on working against him. After all, she was leading the others through the maze, the very way she had gone.

She'd gotten older, and only more beautiful.

But she was so dangerous.

Jareth had believed she was done with the Labyrinth for good; that she refused to tread his ground, and would only allow her friends into her world. It seemed he'd guessed wrong. He wondered how long it had been for her. For him, it had been a very, very long time. After all, as thirteen hours passed in the Labyrinth, practically none had passed in the world she called home.

He'd tried to erase all thoughts of her, but he couldn't bring himself to erase the most poignant physical memories: the parts of his own world he'd tailored, first to torment her, then to amaze her. It was a matter of convenience, he told himself. It was a setup that didn't need to change.

She more than likely hated him. It was unlikely that she'd forgotten him, but she couldn't have grown very fond of him during all that time away. And by all rights, he should hate her. After all, she was about to ruin his game by giving away the solution to every puzzle. She wanted to cut the thirteen hours in half and take Pinkie Pie back. And she was making him afraid. Him, Jareth, the Goblin King! No paltry human had the right to do that.

So dangerous.

When she chose her path of solitude, the most direct route to the castle, Jareth was overjoyed. The foolish girl…how could someone be smart enough to foil him, but be so foolish as to not see his trap coming?...had taken the ideal path. He needed to show her that he wouldn't be as easily pushed around as she believed. He needed to show her that it was his world, and she was merely an adventurer in it. He needed to show her that this time was not like the last time at all, and she was now merely a side attraction to the main event. She hardly mattered anymore.

If she mattered, then she became dangerous.

...

THE GATE OF THE LABYRINTH

The left-hand branch of the initial pathway did not extend as far as its twin. Rarity, Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash, Bastian, and Helena were only a few minutes' worth down the walkway before it made a sharp turn inward. Around the corner, it turned into a stairway that escalated high; if it were in a house or office building, it would have spanned fifteen stories at least.

"That's a lot of stairs," Fluttershy remarked, rather worriedly.

"Race you to the top!" Rainbow Dash cried.

"Um…I'd rather not…" Fluttershy said softly.

"You're on!" Helena told the eager blue pegasus.

Just as Helena began to run up the stairs at top speed, Rainbow Dash took off as fast as she could, disappearing upward in a matter of seconds. Helena slowed, then halted. "Not sure I really have a chance," she remarked with a shrug.

Rainbow Dash waited as patiently as she could at the top of the stairs. At long last, her four companions made their way to the landing, all breathing heavily. "What took you so long?" Rainbow Dash teased.

"Very funny," Rarity groaned. "Now. Shall we have a look around?"

The quintet glanced about. They were walled into a circular area; the only visible opening in the wall was the way back down the stairs. Above them, the sky was no longer orange but bright blue.

"No door," Rarity remarked. "Then again, that's hardly new."

"We just have to know what we're looking for," Helena reminded her.

"What if it's a hidden door?" Fluttershy suggested. "We should look for it. With all five of us, it shouldn't take very long."

Rarity, Helena, Fluttershy, Bastian, and Rainbow Dash fanned out, feeling along the wall for any aberrations, whether it was a loose stone that triggered a secret doorway or a gate that had just been there all along. It took them little time to come up with nothing and return to the center of the circular landing.

"Any other ideas?" Rarity asked.

"Hmm…" Bastian turned a full 360, looking at the walls and then back at the stairway from which they'd come. "I have an idea. It's a little crazy. I knew it would work somewhere else, but I don't know if it's the same way here."

"Try it anyway," Helena encouraged. "It's a bit of a crazy place."

"Okay." Bastian turned back to look directly across the room from the stairs. He took a deep breath, then began: "The five heroes came to the top of the stairs, and there, they saw a golden gateway with silver arches. It was locked, but when they approached it, the gates opened wide, as though waiting for these particular people and ponies to show up for it, because even the gates knew they were meant to be here."

Helena, Rainbow Dash, Rarity, and Fluttershy were a bit confused at Bastian's methodology, but watching the same wall as he, they half expected such a gate to appear. None did.

"It was a good try," Rarity said reassuringly.

"What even was that?" Rainbow Dash asked. "Was that some kind of magic?"

"Not really," Bastian admitted. "Not here, anyway. That would have worked in Fantastica, but this isn't the same."

"I had another thought," Helena realized. "Sarah and your purple friend – "

"That's Twilight, dear," Rarity gently corrected.

"Sarah and Twilight said we had to look at things as they were," Helena pointed out. "This is the sort of spot you'd exactly expect a door to be. We just rushed all the way up those stairs to get here. But there isn't a door here, and we didn't get a good look at the walls by the stairs. It's all about taking things for granted, right? And we just took it for granted that the door would be at the top of the stairs instead of somewhere in the middle!"

"You're right!" Fluttershy realized. "We completely missed the point of it."

"Then let's go back down," Bastian suggested, "and this time, we'll be sure not to miss anything!"

As the quintet made their way back down the stairs, much more slowly this time so as not to miss anything, Rainbow Dash brought up, "I wanna hear more about this land where Bastian was able to just talk about stuff and make it happen."

"Okay," Bastian agreed, though he was then struck with doubt; "Shouldn't I wait for Richard and Sarah to tell it?"

"We can tell it to them again later," Helena assured him. "We might not see them for a while, and I'm certain we all have questions now."

"Okay," Bastian said once more. "When I was twelve, I found a magic book. I was trying to run away from bullies, and I ended up inside a beautiful old bookstore."

"I love walking around that sort of shop," Helena said happily. "You never know what you might find."

"I saw a book I'd never seen anything like before," Bastian went on. "It was called 'The Neverending Story.' I wanted to read it so badly, I stole it and ran away with it to school."

"You, a thief!" Helena crowed. "No offense, but it's a little hard to swallow. You're a bit of a goody-two-shoes!"

"I know I shouldn't have," Bastian admitted. "And I knew I shouldn't have back then. But things were complicated back then. It had only been a short time since I lost my mom, and after she left, my dad became so distant, it was almost like he died with her. I was being bullied every day for anything they could find to pick on, between the way I looked and the way I loved reading and fantasy stories more than anyone else at school. I got caught drawing unicorns in my notebook once. My teacher wrote me up for not paying attention, but that was nothing compared to how the other boys hassled me. I didn't realize just how much I wanted to get away from my own life. I knew that books were a way to do that, at least temporarily, and I thought 'The Neverending Story' would be the same. But it was more of an escape than I expected.

"I cut class and hid in the attic so I could read, and everything felt more right than it had in a long time. A good new book will almost always do that to me. The story was about a boy named Atreyu on a quest to save a magical land made up of hopes and dreams. It was ruled by one girl, the Childlike Empress, and she was dying of a sickness nobody recognized. Atreyu had to travel across the land of Fantastica in order to figure out what was wrong with her and find a cure. I remember being almost desperate when I wanted him to do it. I think in a way, it reminded me of my mom. I wanted there to be an Atreyu to find a cure for her, but there wasn't."

"Didn't that make you mad?" Rainbow Dash asked. "That this Empress lived, when your mom – "

"Rainbow Dash!" Rarity scolded. "Don't be rude!"

Bastian shook his head. "It didn't make me mad or jealous. I just didn't want the same thing to happen to the Empress that happened to my mom. Atreyu won in the end, after a long story where he faced a lot of monsters and other tests. He learned that the only way to save the Empress was for someone outside of Fantastica to give her a name. Things got a little weird then. I kept finding hints in the book that it knew I was reading it."

"How does a book KNOW you're reading it?" Rarity asked skeptically.

"Maybe not the book, exactly," Bastian corrected. "But if I screamed for real in the attic, the characters would hear it. Atreyu looked into an enchanted mirror that showed him his true self, and the way his reflection was described, it sounded exactly like me. When Atreyu got back to the Empress, things got even weirder. When I read a book, I can always see what's happening on the page playing out like a movie in my head. But for a minute, when I saw the Empress' face, it wasn't inside my head. It was like really looking at her. She spoke to me through the book. She told me that I had to be the one to give her a name. By following Atreyu through his story, I'd become part of it. I was afraid of giving her the wrong one, or being the wrong person, but she kept trying until I finally…said her name. The one I knew was hers.

"Doing that brought me inside of the book. For the first time, I was physically in Fantastica. For real. I couldn't believe it was possible. And the Empress gave me the power to create there by wishing for things. I could shape the story myself. It was everything I'd ever dreamed of. It was a chance for me to reinvent myself. I didn't have to be a fat little boy who got bullied anymore. I could be a handsome hero!"

"Oh, don't sell yourself short, dear!" Rarity interrupted. "I might be off base here, but I get the feeling you don't quite believe you're handsome now. And I must assure you that you are, and quite so."

"I'm really not," Bastian said sheepishly, for that was what he believed. "But that's…that's off topic. When I got to Fantastica, I had the power to change the story to whatever I wanted just by telling it. That's what I tried at the top of the stairs, just in case we were inside another story that could be shaped by people from Earth. The more time I spent remaking myself in Fantastica, the more I forgot about the Bastian I used to be. It got so bad, I threw away all my friends. I even wished my heart away because I thought it would make me wise if I couldn't feel anymore. That's when I learned the Empress was missing. Instead of trying to look for her or moving on to find another story to be part of, I tried to become Emperor myself. I was that far gone. There was somebody else, a villain of the story, who tried to convince me to do it, and sometimes, when I think back on it, I really just want to blame her, but her tricks never would have worked on Atreyu or even on me the way I am now. I WANTED to dethrone the Empress. I WANTED to make Fantastica mine. The only reason I failed is because Atreyu was a good enough friend to come and fight me before I could be crowned.

"I figured out then that humans aren't supposed to rule Fantastica. They always try, but it breaks their minds. Atreyu saved me from going crazy and becoming trapped in Fantastica forever. I didn't know what I wanted after that, and I spent a long time trying to figure it out. Who I was and what was in my heart. Eventually, I did figure it out. What I wanted all along was something back on Earth." He considered saying what it was, but that was rather a personal detail to tell to a group containing three relative strangers. "Once I figured it out, I was able to leave Fantastica and go back home. I don't think I could have learned what I wanted without that trip through Fantastica. I didn't know how important it was to be who I am until I was able to be somebody else. And everything I faced there made me strong enough to face the things that bothered me at home. The book disappeared after I left it, and the bookseller told me he thought it was a magic book. He said maybe I'd find another way to Fantastica someday, through another book. I was wondering since I got here if this was just another part of Fantastica. But if it was, I think I would have been able to make a door. I don't think this is a land inside a book at all. But it does feel familiar. It feels the same way that the Night Forest of Perilin and the Silver City of Amarganth did. I made it through all of that, and that's how I know I can make it through this."

"That's AWESOME!" Rainbow Dash cried. "Oh man, if I could actually go inside of a Daring Do book and MEET Daring Do…it would be the best thing EVER!"

"You'd have to be careful," Fluttershy warned. "What if you lost yourself there, the way Bastian lost himself?"

"I'd be careful," Rainbow Dash argued. "Besides, I'm too awesome to want to be somepony else."

"You're going to have to tell me more of the details later," Helena practically begged. "Like what a Night Forest is. Or who that villain was that talked you into being Emperor. Or what Atreyu's story was in the first place."

"I will," Bastian promised. "I'll tell you the whole story, from beginning to end. But I want to wait for Sarah and Richard first."

"Hang on!" Rainbow Dash interrupted, zipping ahead of the group. "I see something!"

Her eyes were focused on a small gray door set into the wall. It camouflaged perfectly with the stone, and was easy to miss if you weren't looking for it. Rainbow Dash suspected it was probably also under the same spell the entire gate was under, and it couldn't be seen if you didn't see it the way it was.

"Great!" Helena ran toward the door and pulled it open.

All five knew they were quite a ways up from ground level. However, they didn't know quite how high they were. The door opened up to a view of clouds in the uppermost level of the sky; a green and grassy plain was seen far, far below.

"Oh…oh my…" Fluttershy murmured, looking at the drop down. Even knowing she could fly didn't lessen the fact that it would be a far fall indeed, should someone slip.

"I don't understand," Helena sighed. "Where are we supposed to go?"

"The clouds kinda look like they make a path," Rainbow Dash realized. The nearest cloud, a large and fluffy cumulus, was only two feet away from the door. She easily leapt onto it. Looking out over the distance, the view became clear: the clouds formed what was more or less a road, grouping close together in a line that twisted and turned.

"That's all well and good for the pegasi of the group," Rarity pointed out, "but what about the rest of us? Are we supposed to just turn around and find where the others have gone?"

"If this were a story I was making up," Bastian pointed out, "everybody would be able to walk on the clouds. Not just the pegasus…es. This would be the path to the next place."

"You're not thinking of just jumping out, are you?" Rarity said worriedly. "If you're wrong, you'll fall right through that cloud and all the way down!"

"I do think he's on to something, though," Helena commented. "It does look like a path, and it does look like something we can walk on."

"What if Rainbow Dash and I spot whoever makes the first jump?" Fluttershy suggested. "That way, we can catch you if you fall, and we'll know that the clouds weren't meant to be walked on at all."

"Do you think you could carry me if I fell?" Bastian asked. "I want to make the first jump."

"No sweat!" Rainbow Dash assured him. "Fluttershy and I are plenty strong. Give it a shot!"

Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash maneuvered into position at the edge of the cloud closest to the door. Helena and Rarity moved out of the way as Bastian took a few steps backward onto the staircase. Bastian then broke into a run, leaping when he reached the frame of the door, sailing through the air. Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash both flinched, but when Bastian hit the cloud, it was as solid for him as it was for either of them. The cloud was soft and springy, and when Bastian's feet planted into its surface, he wobbled, then fell to his knees. He turned to flash a smile to Helena and Rarity: "It's solid! You can walk on it!"

"Here goes!" Helena took the next running leap, not even bothering to try and land on her feet. She belly flopped onto the soft cloud, laughing as she did so. "It's bouncy!" she remarked.

Rarity was the last to charge out of the door and jump onto the cloud. She landed so hard that the cloud's surface bounced her up and caused her to faceplant on the next landing. "Not one of my finer moments," she grumbled.

Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy landed next to Bastian, Helena, and Rarity as the latter three got to their feet and relatively steady. "Let's go!" Rainbow Dash urged.

They tried walking, but that proved somewhat difficult. The cloud was as stable as a spring mattress, but not as flat by a long shot. Walking was slow and involved a lot of shaking and stumbling. "This is NOT working," Rarity growled.

"I think we've got to bounce," Helena realized, thinking of the trampoline artists back home at the circus in Brighton. She experimentally took a few hops and found that this was a much more efficient way to travel across the cloud. "Come on!" she encouraged.

Soon the whole quintet was bouncing across the cloud, laughing all the way, making swift progress down the road marked out for them. The bouncing even gave them the height to travel over large gaps between clouds. They were on their way to somewhere for sure, though time had yet to tell exactly where.

...

THE BUG TUNNELS, THE LABYRINTH

Twilight and Richard had gone some distance, taking every far left turn they could, before they ran into a dead end. Time to follow the string back. They'd made a knot at every fork in the tunnel, having found some protrusion on the wall to hook the string on, in order to more easily trace their progress. But it seemed as though it was taking them further to walk back than it had taken them to get from the last fork to the end of the road, and then, all of a sudden, they were at a fork between four tunnels where the string had not been tied anywhere.

"Wait a minute…" Twilight muttered. "This isn't right."

"Maybe we just missed one?" Richard didn't even believe that himself.

"Let's keep going," Twilight suggested.

They came across the string tied to a pebble in the middle of a tunnel, with no branching paths to be found.

"Somepony's messing with our string!" Twilight cried.

"Does this mean we can't even get back to the worm house?" Richard's hands trembled, and he dropped the yarn ball, knowing it was now useless.

"There's got to be a way out of this," Twilight reassured him. "What if we follow the way the string is going? Maybe whoever retied it wants to help us out!"

Richard shook his head. "This HAS to be a trap. Nobody would undo our string unless they wanted to lead us exactly in the wrong direction."

"So…which way do we go?" Twilight asked. "I have no idea where we are now. Not if following the string led us right into the middle of another maze."

"I guess we go…forward," Richard sighed. "But we're getting away from the string first thing!"

At the soonest opportunity, they took a pathway that branched off from the direction the string was leading. Their choices were basically random, as they had no way to know what pattern would lead them to a location of worth. And eventually, they turned into a tunnel where they saw the purple string strung up against the wall, leading on.

"Not that way," Richard said with a shake of his head.

A few more minutes of wandering put them back into another tunnel with the string. It was tempting to follow, as it was the only thing in the convoluted maze that looked at all like a landmark, but Twilight agreed that it was probably a red herring, and she and Richard moved on.

But a few minutes later, the pair was singing a different song. It seemed as though without some sort of direction, they'd never find anything but more walls and ceilings of dirt, with the occasional giant mushroom, pebble, or twig to break up the scenery. They began to fear never making it out to see the light of day again, let alone reuniting with their friends and getting to Goblin City to rescue Pinkie Pie. When the string turned up again, it was the only hope of finding anything else at all.

"At least if it is a trap," Twilight sighed, "it'll give us some idea of where we are. Besides, I'm pretty sure my magic can get us out of any trap Jareth has prepared for us."

"I still don't like it," Richard sighed, "but it's better than starving to death down here."

They followed the path laid out by the string. It took them through so many twists and turns that they wondered if perhaps following it was just as futile as avoiding it, and it was either being retied in new directions when they weren't looking or somehow looped back on itself. However, at long last, it brought them somewhere new. The tunnel ended before a great chasm in the soil that went quite a ways down and quite a ways up. Luminous mushrooms provided faint lighting. The string went over the edge of a sharp precipice and plunged downward, toward whatever was at the bottom of the chasm.

"Good thing you gave us these wings," Richard remarked.

"Let's try 'em out," Twilight said boldly before jumping off the ledge and hovering downward, following the path of the string. Richard gingerly followed.

Soon, something became clear below them. The string was tied to a larger net of strings, and these strings, these strands, formed a distinct pattern that both Twilight and Richard were able to recognize right away, though it did not bode as a friendly sight.

"OH, NO," Richard balked vehemently. "You are NOT getting me to go down there. NO. WAY."

They were looking at a spiderweb. It was probably average sized, but to the pair in their magically miniaturized state, it was enormous, spanning the entire chasm from end to end. The string tied right to it, joining the semi-spiral pattern. While Richard averted his eyes from it, Twilight observed the web more carefully. Little white cocoons – no, they were larger than just cocoons – were spun up around the edges, almost in the form of houses in a village. If one looked very hard, one could see the spiders from above, using the strands of the web as roads to get from silken building to silken building.

"I think it's a civilization," Twilight observed. "We could at least go down and ask them for directions. Maybe they know the way out! Or at least they might make good tea."

"I am NOT going to go down and try to talk to giant spiders," Richard reiterated. "In books, spiders are always the bad guy! 'Lord of the Rings': what's the undefeated monster at the end of the second book? A spider! Stephen King's 'It': what does the monster turn into? A spider! 'The Black Spider': just take a guess what the representation of evil is!"

"And you're saying there are absolutely NO books anywhere about good spiders?" Twilight asked, a brow raised.

Richard opened his mouth to argue, but then was struck with a realization, and was silent for a moment before mumbling sheepishly, "'Charlotte's Web.'"

Twilight and Richard kept on their current course, down and down, until they rested on one of the strands, which was the equivalent of a path several feet wide. As soon as they touched down, their landing sent vibrations through the web, alerting the spiders to their presence. All of the spiders, and there were exactly fifteen of them, scurried toward them on spindly legs. They didn't look at all like the spiders Velma commanded. These spiders were covered in pastel fuzz, making them look almost cuddly, and they each had only three big eyes, set in a triangle, instead of eight beady ones. Each was only about as tall as Richard.

"Hello," Twilight greeted when the spiders assembled. Richard trembled slightly, but steeled himself, mentally reprimanding himself and digging for courage.

"Hello!" one of the spiders replied in a high, feminine voice; she was the same shade of purple as Twilight. "What brings you here?"

"We're trying to get to the center of the Labyrinth," Twilight answered.

"Ohhhh!" a pink spider gasped. "Do you have a friend there?"

"Yes!" Twilight nodded emphatically. "Jareth took her away, and now we're trying to get her back before time runs out!"

Twilight hadn't expected any particular response from the spiders. However, what they did came as a complete shock to her nonetheless. The lavender one extended a leg to point at the pair and yelled, "GET THEM!"

Before Twilight and Richard could cry "WHAT?", the spider squadron had produced neat balls of colored silk and enveloped the pair of travelers in it completely, cocooning their limbs so that they could not move.

"I knew something like this would happen!" Richard grunted as he struggled against his bonds. "In Dante's Divine Comedy, guess who one of the sinners is that he meets in Hell!"

"Let me guess," Twilight sighed. "A spider?"

"Yup," Richard confirmed. "Arachne, who got turned into a spider by Athena. They're ALWAYS THE BAD GUYS! And now they're gonna eat us!"

"We're not bad guys!" the pink spider said indignantly as she and her kin backed away to observe the trussed-up prisoners. "And we're not going to eat you! You can talk, and so can we! What, do you think we're cannibals? And you look like you taste DISGUSTING anyway! Blech!"

"We just want to stop you from reaching Goblin City," the lavender spider explained.

"But WHY?" Twilight asked in exasperation.

"We live underneath one of the goblin roads," the lavender spider explained mournfully. "When the goblins cross it up above, the entire web gets shaken. That wasn't so bad, but when we went up there to try and tell the goblins to walk around this spot, they thought it would be funny to run as fast as they could over it each time so that we get shaken up even more."

"That's awful!" Twilight gasped. As she looked around, she could tell from the somber looks on the other spiders' faces that the story was true.

"But if the Goblin King doesn't want you to get to the center," the lavender spider went on, "and we stop you, maybe we can work out a trade, and he can tell his goblins to stop stamping on the ground over our web!"

"There has to be a better way to do that," Richard told her. "This makes you no better than Jareth!"

"Well, what choice do we even have?" the pink spider asked in frustration.

"We need to think of a plan," Twilight suggested. "Some kind of strategy – "

"It'll be easier if we can just keep you here until Jareth works out a deal with us," the pink spider huffed. "So that's what we'll do."

Twilight could have easily broken the bindings keeping her and Richard in place, and she bet she could have taken the spiders in combat, but that would have solved nothing. She'd fallen right into a troubled civilization, and she didn't want to leave – or worse, beat them up and leave – without finding a solution.

She wasn't given much time to think.

...

THE STONE MAZE, THE LABYRINTH

A troop of goblins marched down one of the roads between the stone pillars and walls that made up a fair part of the Labyrinth.

"Is here the place?" one of them asked, stopping over a tile.

"No!" Another shook his head. "It's here!" He walked several paces forward and then halted. "Right here! This is where Jareth said those two got lost when they went tiny!"

The other goblins crowded around the spot. "Let's give 'em a real hard time!" a third cackled. "On three! One…two…THREE!"

The whole troop began jumping up and down, laughing madly, thinking of how many cave-ins they were probably causing in the insects' tunnel network down below.

...

THE BUG TUNNELS, THE LABYRINTH

It was as if an earthquake had struck. But the spiders and their prisoners knew that was not the case, as the shaking was accompanied by the laughter of goblins from up above. The entire web was rocked, vibrations sending the strands undulating up and down. Pebbles dislodged themselves from further up the wall and came raining down, punching holes in the web. The entire web finally tore in half, the two segments falling to lie flat against the wall. The cocoon-esque buildings rolled down off the web and into the blackness below.

Twilight and Richard tumbled, screaming, toward the abyss, but a lasso of pink silk roped around one and purple around the other. The spiders had all managed to catch hold of the walls, and the pink and lavender spider who had explained the reason for the capture were now responsible for saving their very hostages.

As the pair of spiders reeled Twilight and Richard in, the pink spider was beside herself. "Why would they do this?" she moaned. "They knew we had you! They should have been grateful!"

"That's exactly why they're doing this," Twilight explained. "They know we're down here, and it's us they care about. They just wanted all of this shaking and these falling rocks to affect US. They don't care about you."

"What are we supposed to do now?" the lavender spider practically sobbed.

The answer came to Twilight immediately. She wondered how she hadn't thought of it before. "Hold on," she directed the spiders. "It's about to get weird."

...

THE STONE MAZE, THE LABYRINTH

The goblins whooped as they jumped up and down, sure that they were giving Twilight and Richard quite a horrible time. It stunned them when they felt the ground shaking at such a level that they could all feel it.

"An earthquake?" one of the goblins wondered aloud.

They backed off from that patch of ground at the moment it exploded. A magenta bubble of plasma emerged, and floating within it was a very angry Twilight, horn aglow, now a fully sized unicorn instead of a Breezie. Following her was a bubble containing Richard, who was also full sized, his pixie characteristics gone. And following him, one by one, came fifteen bubbles containing fifteen spiders that had been blown up to such a size that they were taller than the goblins.

Once all seventeen made it to the surface, the bubbles popped. The lavender spider, enraged, charged toward the goblins.

"You leave us ALONE!" she roared.

That was all it took. Looking at the army of spiders, the goblins screamed and turned tail, scampering away as quickly as they could.

"You think they'll be back?" the pink spider wondered audibly.

"I don't know," the lavender spider sighed.

"I think they'll think twice about jumping on this spot again," Twilight theorized. "That's if they ever get it paved over. Now, we should probably get you back to your regular size – "

"Why?" the lavender spider asked. "Our home was completely destroyed. We don't have anything to go back to."

"We might as well just stay this way and find a new home up here," the pink spider agreed. "At least this way, we can defend ourselves if there are any more goblins."

"Are you sure?" Twilight asked. "What if that disrupts the natural order of things?"
"Twilight," Richard pointed out, "I'm not sure this place even has a natural order."

"Well, I mean…" Twilight sighed. Richard was right. She was still concerned that the spiders simply weren't supposed to be that size, but who was she to say why? She gave them a smile. "Good luck out there."

"Thank you!" a sky-blue spider said, speaking for the first time. His remark was joined by a host of "Thank you!"s before the entire pack of spiders crawled up and over a wall and out of sight.

"So we just unleashed a bunch of giant spiders on the Labyrinth," Richard pointed out. "But, hey, we solved their problem. Good thinking."

"Thanks," Twilight replied. "Now we just have to figure out how to solve our problem. Where are we now?"
The area they found themselves in was composed of earth tones. Stone walls and pillars marked squarish paths that branched off every which way. This segment looked once more like a traditional maze. Having no yarn with which to mark their way, Twilight and Richard decided to pick their path at random once again.

Though they both knew at this point that if they tried to mark their progress in any way, it would probably get defaced.

...

THE GREAT CLOCK, THE LABYRINTH

As Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash, Rarity, Bastian, and Helena bounced over the clouds, they got a better idea of exactly where this path was leading them. And at first, it didn't seem auspicious at all.

"Um…is it just me, or are we getting closer to the sun?" Rainbow Dash wondered out loud.

"Oh, dear," Fluttershy squeaked. The pathway did indeed seem to be bringing them toward the sun, which was not a faraway heavenly body, but a great sphere suspended within the layer of the sky that still contained breathable air. "I think we should turn back."

"Doesn't it seem to be getting duller, though?" Helena pointed out.

It was true. Though the sun had seemed too bright to behold from afar, as the quintet got closer and closer, it paradoxically became much easier to look at. Its light was dimmed to a gentle glow of gold.

"I think we're supposed to go there," Bastian suggested.

"And you're certain it's not one of Jareth's traps?" Rarity asked with doubt.

"We can't be sure anything isn't," Bastian pointed out. "We just have to be sure we can figure our way out of whatever he throws at us!"

"YEAH!" Rainbow Dash cried in agreement, and the others accepted this as the proper way to approach the situation.

As the soft, cloudy road culminated at the edge of the sphere, it appeared to be little more than golden stone that emitted a faint luminous glow. Set in it was a rectangular door with no handle or hinge. Before anyone could ask about it, it slid out of the way, revealing a rectangular entryway for them much in the way Bastian had hoped he was narrating earlier.

A short passageway connected this entryway to the innards of the sphere, which consisted of one incredibly spacious room. The walls were painted sky blue, and the entire room was filled to the brim with clocks. Crooked shelves filled with antique clocks and gleaming hourglasses crawled up the rounded walls. Tables held smaller devices while tall grandfather clocks broke up the middle of the floor. One entire wall held a gigantic clock face, perhaps twenty feet in diameter, with ornate hands that ticked over its twelve intricately painted numbers. From the ceiling there hung a bizarre arrangement of brass rings, somewhat reminiscent of a model of a solar system, that circled around each other lazily and perhaps made up another type of three-dimensional clock.

Shuffling amongst the myriad of clocks was a crew of tall creatures wearing brown burlap cloaks. They appeared to be humanoid in appearance, if a little taller and thinner, but they were so covered in silky sky-blue fur that it was hard to make out their features beyond a pair of shining black eyes on each and the occasional spindly arm that would reach out from the folds of cloak and fur in order to wind a clock.

"Uh…hello?" Rainbow Dash asked.

One of the blue creatures turned to look at her. "Hello," he said in a deep, masculine voice. It had a wholesome quality to it, amplified by its reflection off the curved walls.

"Pardon us for our intrusion," Rarity broke in, "but we're somewhat lost. Would you mind kindly telling us where we are?"

"Not at all." The blue man shook his head. "You are in the Great Clock. From here, we keep the time."

"As in you always know what time it is no matter what?" Helena asked.

"Or as in you make time happen in this world?" Bastian followed up.

"It is more like the latter," the blue man answered. "Here is where we guard the flow of time and shift it when necessary."

"You can CHANGE time?" Rainbow Dash was awestruck.

"When necessary," the blue man repeated. "The Clock circles the entire Labyrinth so that we may observe every part in turn and monitor its flow."

"WAIT!" Rainbow Dash cried. "The WHOLE Labyrinth? Like…all of it?"

"All of it, in time," the blue man confirmed.

"Even Goblin City," Rainbow Dash tested.

"Even Goblin City," the blue man said with a nod. "Though I must warn you. The Clock travels as it wills. We cannot predict where it will be in an hour or a day. Only that we shall be sure each hour and day proceed as planned."

"Would you mind if we stuck around anyway?" Rainbow Dash asked. "Maybe it'll come around to Goblin City. We're trying to get there."

"You may stay," the blue man said with a nod. "But do not tamper with the clocks. They are what we use to keep the time."

"We promise not to touch them!" Fluttershy said adamantly.

"It's almost too easy…" Bastian muttered uneasily.

"Might we know your name?" Rarity asked.

"I am Horatius," the blue man answered.

"And I am Rarity," Rarity replied. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Horatius. These are my traveling companions, Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy, Helena, and Bastian. We're quite grateful that you let us stay aboard your flying clock."

Horatius only gave a nod before saying "I must return to my work" and then doing just that, gliding to the other end of the room in order to wind a clock.

"Well, I suppose now we wait," Helena pointed out.

They waited a while. Every now and again, Rainbow Dash would track down Horatius and ask him where they were in terms of the Clock's positioning over the Labyrinth. The answer changed each time, but was never Goblin City.

"I'm starting to think we'll never get there," Rainbow Dash groaned.

"It's only been a few minutes," Helena pointed out. "This clock travels quite fast."

"I suppose that would be the advantage of being able to move throughout time," Rarity mused. "You'd become quite an expert in saving it."

"I just realized something," Fluttershy broke in. "Jareth controls everything in this Labyrinth, doesn't he?"

"Yes," Rarity confirmed. "What is your point, exactly?"

As this discussion took place, Bastian found himself overcome with curiosity about the inner workings of the Great Clock. He sated it by exploring the room on foot as best he could. Careful not to touch anything, as Fluttershy had promised, he visually examined each and every clock. Most were of the traditional variety, and featured a face with two or three hands that moved clockwise between twelve hours.

"That means he probably controls this clock, too," Fluttershy went on. "And if he knows we're here, he'll make sure it NEVER gets to Goblin City."

There was, however, one clock with a round face that was different. Bastian found it nestled in what was practically a forest of grandfather clocks. It too was a grandfather clock, with a pendulum of gold that ticked back and forth.

"Oh, dear," Rarity said softly. "I suppose you're right. This won't work at all."

"Hey!" Bastian called back to the group. "I found something!"

"Like what?" Rainbow Dash answered before leading Rarity, Helena, and Fluttershy over to Bastian's discovery, temporarily ending the discussion about the futility of the decision to ride the Great Clock's course.

"Like this." Bastian pointed to the clock. At first glance, it looked like any other clock in the vicinity, but once Bastian singled it out, its unique factor became clear.

It was the only clock in the entire room that had numbers set in it for thirteen hours instead of twelve.

There was a sudden and frantic knocking at the door.

...

GOBLIN CITY, THE LABYRINTH

The castle may have been a prison, but it was a large one, and Pinkie Pie admittedly found it a fun one to explore. There were rooms filled with all sorts of things. Some had mountains of gold or jewelry, which made sense for a Goblin King to hoard. But there were more bizarre items in other rooms. One of them was stocked full of intricately made wind-up toys in the shapes of various magical creatures. Pinkie spent a while winding them up and letting them march across the floor, taking note of their varied walking cycles. Another room was almost completely given over to a giant feather bed that proved excellent for bouncing on.

There were many rooms that were entertaining, comfortable, or both, indeed. However, Pinkie Pie never felt quite right settling down in one for too long. It could have been taken as the impression that she wanted to stay in the castle, which was most certainly not the case.

Her wanderings brought her to another courtyard: an open, grassy field that seemed to be set up for warriors to practice, as straw dummies with targets painted on them were planted into the ground at awkward angles at the field's edges. Several goblin soldiers were occupying the field at the time, performing a rather strange sort of exercise. One at a time, they would step to the front of a line, picking a spiky metal ball out of a wooden crate. The holder of the ball would hastily throw it at a larger crate with a hole cut in its lid; most of the time, the ball would land inside, and there would be a muffled "boom." If the ball missed, there would be quite a flagrant explosion as it exploded somewhere outside the box. Pinkie realized the metal balls were grenades of some sort, and that was why everyone who picked one up was in such a hurry to throw it. From what she could tell, it was like the beanbag game – throwing the "beanbags" into the hole, only a more dangerous and explosive version.

"Whatcha doin'?" she asked, trotting out into the fray.

"Playing launch-the-bomb!" a goblin explained. "The bombs go live as soon as you pick 'em up, so ya gotta throw fast, or – "

One of the metallic grenades went off in a thrower's hands. He was wearing enough armor not to be damaged at all. The same went for the goblins he crashed into thanks to the recoil.

"Or that happens!" the goblin explaining the game said happily.

"Mind if I try?" Pinkie asked. "I do like a good game of hoof-eye coordination. I also like things that go boom. And this is BOTH AT ONCE!"

The goblin shrugged. "Why not?"

A few minutes of reorganizing found Pinkie Pie at the front of the line. She surveyed the target for a moment, then looked at the box, which held a large quantity of the grenades. Then she scooped up a hoof-ful and began to juggle them.

"CAREFUL WITH THAT!" several goblins screamed.

"THEY'RE LIVE NOW!"

"THEY'RE GONNA GO OFF!"

"YOU'RE NOT EVEN WEARING ARMOR! JARETH WON'T BE HAPPY!"

Keeping one eye on the target crate, Pinkie began to pitch the grenades one by one toward it as they descended into her hooves. All of them hit the mark, falling neatly inside of the crate and exploding one by one in what would have been a brilliant chain reaction to witness were they in view.

This earned Pinkie Pie a rousing wave of applause. "No one's ever pulled off a stunt like THAT before!" another goblin gushed. "You're a launch-the-bomb CHAMPION!"

"Y'know," Pinkie remarked, "I'm starting to think being stuck here might be more fun than I thought!"

...

THE CASTLE FIELDS, THE LABYRINTH

The route that Sarah had taken led down a narrow, twisty hallway for a few minutes before opening onto a beautiful vista of green grass rolling beneath bright blue skies (Sarah was used to the sky changing as it saw fit over this maze), bordered by lush trees. Across a wide, open field, Sarah could see the skyline of Goblin City itself in the distance, and nothing else between her and it. Presented with this path to her goal, Sarah broke into a direct charge toward the shadowy city on the horizon.

And then she pulled up short, for he was there in her path, standing directly before her where there had previously just been open space: the Goblin King himself. Jareth regarded Sarah with a cruel, amused smile, his eyebrows arching in what appeared to be twisted delight. As confident as he seemed, Sarah found herself unable to truly read him.

"Did you really think it would be that easy?" he taunted. "Did you think I would simply let you run toward the center without any obstacles at all? Did you REALLY think there would be a single path that would lead you directly where you wanted to be?"

Hoggle had warned her, and Sarah was about to kick herself, when she realized Jareth was making a mistaken assumption. "I am where I want to be," she informed him. "I wanted to talk to you. And you're here. I wasn't the one you told to get to the center to find Pinkie Pie, after all."

"And what did you want to talk to me about?" Jareth gave a single laugh. "Were you going to ask me to let her go?"

"I was…" Sarah answered softly. "I was hoping you'd listen to me."

"Hmph." Jareth shrugged, the plastered-on smile never leaving his face. "All right. I shall hear you out. Make your demand."

Standing before him was almost unbelievable. He was a presence, even when he wasn't trying to be, Sarah realized. She felt somewhat weak-kneed, but steeled herself. He might have been the Goblin King, but she'd outpaced him before. She could do it again. And maybe, just maybe, he would listen to reason just once. "Is this really what you want?" she asked. "What if they don't make it to her? Are you going to keep her forever?"

"Perhaps I will," Jareth mused.

"Do you WANT her to stay with you forever?"

"Perhaps I do. Or perhaps I'll throw her away."

"NO!" Sarah paused to gather her composure after her outburst. "No. Then you'll have done all this for nothing but thirteen hours of…twisted fun."

"Perhaps thirteen hours is all I need," Jareth suggested. "After all, it's hardly ever that anyone calls for me to take someone away. After years of waiting, any diversion is welcome."

"Years of waiting for what?" Sarah asked. "They said you didn't change anything since I left, and you used to do it all the time. What were you waiting for?"

This caught Jareth off guard. He hadn't expected anyone to point out to Sarah that the Labyrinth had been standing still, let alone imply why. His grin faded for but a moment. Then it returned, full force. "This," he said. "Exactly this."

"I think there's more to it that you're not saying," Sarah pressed.

"And how would you know?" Jareth taunted. "Do you think you know me? Do you think your little journey taught you all there is to know about me? Do you think you UNDERSTAND me, Sarah?"

"I think I meant something more to you than just a game," Sarah told him frankly. "And I'm asking you, as ME, to let her go."

"So that's it!" Jareth crowed. "You think that you can use what happened in the past as leverage? That you can manipulate me in return for me manipulating you? That you're smarter and more powerful than the Goblin King, and can make him kneel at your feet for it?"

"No!" Sarah said desperately. "That's not what I meant at all!" And yet she couldn't figure out how to better word it.

"Do you remember what you told me to end our last adventure?" Jareth began to pace a circle around Sarah; she stood still, letting him walk behind her, letting his voice sound from all around her. "'You have no power over me.' That was what you told me. And now I'm saying it to you. YOU have no power over ME, Sarah Williams."

They both knew it wasn't true.

"Just let her go," Sarah tried once more.

"And you'll offer me what in exchange?" Jareth asked. "Or are you attempting to threaten me?"

"I'm asking you as a…" She trailed off. She wasn't a friend. She only knew she had been important to him. And it hit her full force that she was trying to manipulate him, though it seemed the ends justified the means, and it wasn't as though she was dealing with someone straightforward in the first place.

"Just because you made it to the center once doesn't mean you can take shortcuts." Jareth returned to his starting point, staring right into Sarah's eyes. "You'll have to deal with the obstacles just like everybody else." He held out his right hand, and two crystalline spheres were in it, rotating round and round on his black-gloved fingers.

"Then that's what I'll do," Sarah resolved. "Whatever you have to throw at me. I can beat it."

Jareth looked down at the spheres in his hand, then back up to Sarah, and his smirk was more mischievous than ever. "I think you'll regret saying that."

She stared him down: "I don't think I will."

Without a word, Jareth launched both spheres high into the air. They kept twirling round and round each other, moving apart from each other, growing larger and taking on the texture of black metal with spikes jutting out: twin maces, now each five feet in diameter. High above the ground, the maces sprouted chains that snaked toward a centerpoint, and when they met, a great cylindrical, metal titan began to form out of thin air, its body gelling into a set of spheres that made it resemble a snowman in construction. At its base, great treads allowed it to roll across the field. The central sphere of the behemoth's body began to spin round and round, the maces spinning with it, and then it tilted, aiming both maces for Sarah.

Sarah had been so busy watching the great mechanical weapon form itself that she hadn't even noticed Jareth disappear.

Her survival instincts kicked in, and she turned and ran. The maces scraped up the ground where she'd stood, and then the machine began to follow her, treads cycling. Doubting she would be able to outrun it for long, Sarah made for the nearest copse of trees, hoping it would give her some cover. However, when she made it to the tree line, the machine responded by raising the maces high enough that its spinning cut into the woods, slicing the trees down in an avalanche of wood and leaves.

Sarah kept running, not knowing what else to do. By sheer luck, she came upon something she hadn't expected: not a tree but a spiral staircase made of wood, one that seemed to be growing out of the ground and sprouting its own leaves. The machine was gaining, and Sarah knew that keeping on going forward would end in her being swatted by a deadly mace or crushed beneath the machine's treads. The stairway, however, seemed to go up higher than the trees. On the chance that it led somewhere, she stepped onto it and ran upward.

The trees did slow the machine down ever so slightly. As it cut its way into the woods, Sarah went up and up, through the canopy of leaves, hoping this stairway did in fact lead to something, anything at all. Horror pierced her heart as she realized she'd basically taken it for granted that stairs had to lead somewhere. In a place like this, they didn't have to.

But they did, and it seemed the place they led to was only just arriving. A great golden wall with a rectangular door set into it was sliding into place at the top of the stairs just as Sarah reached their pinnacle. Hearing the crashing of the tree trunks behind her, she hammered desperately on the door, praying it would open. And it did, though the wall it was part of kept moving. Sarah crossed the threshold just before the structure the wall was part of moved away from the stairs completely.

And as her foot left the stairway, a mace crashed right into the centerpoint of it, bringing it down in a shower of splinters.

The door closed behind Sarah, and she found herself in a long hallway, one shielded from the pursuing machine. She braced herself, expecting the foundations of this building to come in contact with the maces, but she needn't have worried. The building was floating.

Curious, she walked down the hallway until she entered the spacious room of the Great Clock, where Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy, Rarity, Helena, and Bastian were examining Bastian's strange find.

...

Chapter 108:

· Before we do the usual spiel, I have a plug for a project a friend of mine is making here on (and I'm helping with!). Do you like RWBY? Because I like RWBY! And so does TheDirtGuy! That's his name here on ; he's known as "Dr. Freeman" or some variant thereof in most other places, and yes, that's the guy who helps me pick out the mood music for most of the chaps of EoH. He, 73Windman, GAvillain, and I all came together with an idea for a RWBY comedy/adventure fic, and now we're doing creative collaboration on it with DirtGuy/Freeman as the head creator and the one who actually writes the story down. The premise involves four OCs based on us and four more based on our friends, and follows the enrollment of the students in these two teams at the same time that RWBY is happening. The goal is to have the story fit seamlessly with canon without interrupting it in any way – we don't interact with the main cast (unless one of the main cast has a gap in canon; e.g. if Roman Torchwick was absent for an episode, we can battle him in that time period) and we don't affect the main story. It's basically a story about "While all this was happening to Team RWBY and JNPR and the people the show is about, what was happening to the rest of the Beacon populace?" The fic itself is called "DERT," and is, once again, by TheDirtGuy. The title comes from the main team focused on in the story, and yes, there will be jokes aplenty about how the color they're named after is dirt. If OC-heavy fics aren't your thing, maybe this isn't the fic for you, but as I said, there's no interference with RWBY canon as a rule, and DirtGuy is really good at fresh humor and cool world-building. So, RWBY fans and fans of the work of me or GAvillain, head on over to check it out when you get a chance! WE NOW RETURN TO YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED AUTHOR'S NOTES

· I will be doing a lot of splitting up and mixing the team in this storylet for the full experience.

· You can probably already tell I made a lot of new locales for this chapter alone (the Bug Tunnels, the Great Clock). But one of the first things I thought when mapping this out was "I'm getting somebody into the worm's house for that cup of tea."

· My headcanon is that after the events of The Pagemaster, Richard became obsessed with reading everything he could get his mitts on.

· Yes, I wrote Jareth's scenes while listening to liberal doses of "Sarah Smiles" by Panic! At the Disco. Why did you ask? You didn't ask, did you? Whoops.

· Cementing here that I'm mostly using the book for TNS, but like I said, some stuff will still be film-based (there is in particular a joke I have to make based on the film sequel now that it was pointed out to me).

· I do have my personal interpretation for what Bastian's heart's desire was in TNS, even though it wasn't made explicit in the book. I debated on keeping it ambiguous, but I actually think I will reveal it later.

· Fun fact: I came up with names for the spiders in advance of this. The purple one is Lavender and the pink one is Foxglove. But introductions never became relevant to the story. The one I did NOT have a name for was Horatius, and he decided he wanted to have a formal introduction, so I had to just search time-related names on the fly while writing that scene.

· Also, so many OCs I had to make here to fill the space. I can promise you most of them won't die. Probably none of them will die, but we'll see how it goes.

· Jareth/Sarah is a complicated ship. I love it for the angst. I don't know at this point if it can endgame. It might. It might not. There would have to be a lot more development beyond this to know for sure. That's where I stand at the moment of writing this chapter.