Nobody's Children

Sarah had been coming to the Labyrinth for over half a decade by the day on which she found its king, with a freshly stitched cut on his right cheek, playing with a wished-away child -

- widdershins thirteen times around her room, colourful walls pinwheeling together, and dizzily through the mirror; forget which way is up (the dizziness helps) and hop twice to the left, because it's Tuesday (maybe) and play skip-rope with the ceiling fan, then out through the skylight into the long dimly-lit gold stone hatcheries of the False Alarms.

Three

I.
Hoggle came with the kingdom (when it had barely become a kingdom at all,) with a greater baggage of guilt, sorrow, longing and helpless rage than should have fit within a pubescent dwarf. He stood sullenly stone-faced at Grita's funeral – a boy who lied as easily and badly as he sang, who wept to get out of trouble and was scared of toads, dry-eyed at his mother's death.

Jareth Sculpt: Part III

Jareth Sculpt: Part II

One of my favourite portions of this sculpt; the scars on his back, souvenir of the ritual scarification through which he shaped the wild magic-vortex and the wasteland it created into the kingdom of the Labyrinth, under his sovreignty.

Jareth is covered in scars.

I wanted his sword, which is of iron (a fact that has earnt him a certain degree of mingled terror and acclaim amongst fae who have faced him in battle) to have a kind of essential, visceral look to it.  Unfortunately, due to the limits of clay, by which I mean my rank amateurism, this would have no balance as a life-sized prop but oh well.

A better view of the sword and amulet, accompanied by that gorgeous goddamn scarf/belt/thing.  The sunset colours are breathtaking.

During the casting for Labyrinth, Brian Froud first met David Bowie right after the costuming people had given him a bone flute they'd made for him; at the time, Froud and Henson were still trying to decide who to cast as the Goblin King, and as soon as Froud walked in, Bowie introduced himself then picked up the bone flute, hopped up on the table, crouched down and winked at Froud and proceeded to play the bone flute at him, evidently with such mischievous otherworldliness that Froud decided on the spot that yep, this is our Jareth.  So of course I decided my version of Jareth has to have a bone flute, though I've yet to decide how he got it.

The sculpt came out with rather an expression of pathos here.  I wish I'd done his mouth differently though.  Oh well.

A few eons into a reign whose length is best measured  in geological ages, Jareth and the Unseelie monarch whose many names include Mab and Morgana fought to a standstill, and at immeasurable cost,  a terrible monster from the worlds before, the living incarnation of malice and despair, which during its last awakening epochs before had left a terrible mark on the world and bid fair to do so again.  The thing cannot be killed; however, they exiled it to a deep slumber in a far, supposedly uninhabitable corner of the world Above, which had only recently drifted into any semblance of its current configuration.

In the instants before it vanished, it looked Jareth in the eye and rasped "I leave you my hatred," cursing the entire coastline along which it had lain dormant with its blight.  To erase that mark and prevent its otherwise inevitable spread, he undid entire epochs - the greatest manipulation of time he has ever attempted, far less accomplished, as such things are not undertaken lightly, even to one of his power and skill.  And when all was said and done, the earth for miles to either side still-warm lava and the sea barren of any life, far less the schools of fish on which the equally vanished, he found, in his pocket, the skeleton of a fish, which had washed there in his battle with the monster.

Props - the fish's skeleton, souvenir of the horror known in what is now Orkney as the nuckelavee; the iron sword, forged by goblin smiths for one of their own kind in the days long before they had a king; the bone flute; the crystal; and the staff, embedded with a crystal, used for support both magical and physical for centuries subsequent to his battle with the nuckelavee.

Jareth Sculpt: Part I

For no discernible reason, while visiting my best friend in La Jolla, I took it into my head to make a sculpey Jareth.  He's my first go at sculpting anything and turned out surprisingly well, though the arms are subpar with the rest of him.  Obviously, the trousers aren't intended for him, but the scarf, which is of hand-dyed silk my friend got at university in Santa Cruz, might stick, costuming-wise.

HORRIBLE ARMS.  However, I'm somewhat proud of his face.  The eyes are cat's eye beads I had kept for ages, doing nothing with, then gave to her this summer and, in typical fashion, proceeded to steal back and use.  However, they contribute to a sort of mutable expression on him so I gues that's all right.

The beads, backstory-wise, are made from his own bone, during his days as a freelance mercenary; he'd broken a bone quite badly and the enemy commander who captured him turned him over to the resident torturer, who threatened to make beads of the protruding bone, to humiliate or intimidate him, whereupon Jareth, who was too mind-numbingly tired to care, cordially invited him to knock himself out.  Preferably literally.

Just a couple shots of the thing standing.  The fact that he actually stands makes me a bit proud, though it's slightly wonky. Wonky's a completely legitimate, dictionary-authenticated word, riiiight?

I made a tiny version of his amulet from the film, of course; there are better shots of that, and the other props, later.

No words can suffice for how fucking much I hate those fucking arms.  My friend has sworn to fix them at some point.

The best that can be said is that his hand does at least sort of hold the crystal.  Sort of.  The more I look at it the more I loathe it. 

And now, on to Part II - the details!

Ginger Peach

Spring came on suddenly, like desert rain. Sarah, forever in love with the turning of the seasons, woke up full of light and floated to the window, with breath bated until the rush of cool air twirled her around, and she breathed out a laugh and, inhaling, felt her eyes sting at the cold. It could not be much above freezing, but the world had shifted. It was spring, spring, spring!

The Road Through the Maze

Of the realm of Jareth the Goblin King (a border kingdom and thus half dependent upon the hopes, fears and fantasies of mortals Above,) some will look at its construction and say, "But it is ill-named! It is not a labyrinth at all, but a maze! A labyrinth is supposed to have a straight line to the center!"

As with so many other statements about this bizarre kingdom, that is only half true.

There is a road.

No One Remembered

He would not mourn her.

Hers had been a heroic death, all told – valiant and selfless, if hardly picturesque. Two out of three wasn't bad. But he would not mourn her. He would not grant her such an early death; he would not let her go so easily, nor lie so heavy on his conscience. He would keep her exhausted and beautiful, radiantly defiant, not angry but joyous in her epiphany, denying him. He would not mourn her.

After all, he had no power over her.

Thunk!

It was not so much administration as entertainment, but he'd grown expert at getting them to accomplish some approximation of what he wanted, albeit that this frequently involved a dramatic lowering of expectations on his part. The disturbing thing about ruling goblins, however, is that one must think like a goblin and, after innumerable eons, he still wasn't at all sure that goblins thought. And then he realised that he had, on the first attempt, conjugated that as 'thunk'. Jareth briefly considered throwing himself off the nearest cliff.