Preface – Author’s Note:
Labyrinth was never just a movie. It was a spell disguised as cinema. A story about dreams and growing up, about choices and regrets, and about the strange, glittering tension between fantasy and responsibility. It was beautiful, absurd, dark, and tender. Like many who grew up on it, I never quite let it go.
Labyrinth: The Heir of Shadows is my tribute to that world. A continuation, not a retelling. A story that grows from the quiet places between scenes and the unanswered questions left behind. It follows a new voice, Aria, who has never set foot in the Labyrinth but who carries its legacy all the same.
This book was written with reverence for the source. Sarah remains Sarah. Jareth is exactly who he always was. The magic still lies in mirrors and mazes, in riddles and forgotten names. This is a story about legacy, about the children of those who once believed, and about what happens when a fantasy is left behind but refuses to die.
Though inspired by Labyrinth, this is an unofficial, fan-created work. No copyright infringement is intended. All rights to the original characters and world belong to their original creators and rights holders. This story exists only as a tribute, made from a place of deep admiration, creative curiosity, and lasting love for the world that shaped so many of our imaginations.
If you are reading this, then perhaps you are one of those who remembers. If so, welcome back. The Labyrinth has been waiting.
Prologue:
A handwritten, and weathered letter, found tucked away in an unlikely book:
“I wish the Goblin King would come and take you away. Right now.”
So she said it. And so I came. You see, I do not cross into the waking world uninvited. I am not a thief by nature. I am an answer. And Sarah… Sarah asked the question. She summoned me. And I granted her wish.
I took the boy. Toby, he was called. Soft and small and crying in his cradle. He had no part in it, not truly. But he was the key. I needed him. I needed her. The child was to be my heir. The girl, my queen. Yes, that is the truth of it. The Labyrinth had begun to crack. Not in ways you would see at first glance. Not the stones, or the bridges, or the riddles. No. It was something underneath. A pressure. An emptiness. Something pressing in, patient and vast, waiting for me to falter. And I did.
I had ruled too long. The maze lived through belief, and belief had begun to fade. I needed Sarah’s fire. Her imagination. Her will. She was strong enough to change everything. But I did not ask. I lured. I tempted. I trapped her in a dream and called it a gift. I offered her eternity in a cage built from my desire.
I told myself it was love. But love does not bind. Love does not manipulate. And Sarah, clever girl that she was, saw through me. She refused me. She broke the spell. She spoke the words and took the child and walked away. And in that moment, I saw what I had become. Not a king. Not a guardian. A shadow of what I once was. A beautiful lie.
She could have saved this place. She might have saved me. If I had trusted her. If I had not tried to own her. But I held too tightly. And in doing so, I lost everything. The Labyrinth remembers, but less with each passing year. Its paths are twisted now. Its heart grows cold. I can feel the thing beneath it all, stirring again. The force I once held at bay is rising. It will finish what I began, and there is no strength left in me to stop it.
This is why I write to you. Whoever you are, if you have come to these halls and found this letter, then the story is not yet ended. There may still be a path through the maze. But you must walk it freely. You must earn what I could not. Do not take the crown unless you are willing to bear its cost. Do not seek love if you mean only to possess it. And if the girl comes again, or one like her, listen. Do not try to shape her. She will shape the world if you let her.
The Labyrinth needs her, or someone very like her. It always did. I see that now. And I see that I was the one who could not find the way.
— Jareth
Chapter 1: The Girl Who Did Not Believe
“I thought your mom lived in a castle.”
The boy’s voice carried easily through the hallway noise. Aria Morrow didn’t look up. She kept turning the dial on her locker, slow and precise, as if the numbers actually mattered.
“Hey, Aria. You gonna wish me away next?”
More laughter. Not cruel, not loud. Just sharp enough to stick. Aria closed the locker with a soft click, adjusted her bag, and walked away without answering.
They all thought they were clever.
School wasn’t unbearable. It was just exhausting.
The teachers liked her. She was quiet, thoughtful, and got good grades. The kind of student who blended in without being forgotten. But the other students remembered the story. Or some version of it. No one knew all the details. They didn’t have to.
Everyone in town knew about Sarah Williams.
When she was fifteen, Sarah vanished for two days. She came back disoriented and confused, claiming she had walked through a maze. She spoke of goblins and riddles, and of a king with eyes like starlight. Her parents sent her to the hospital. The doctors used words like delusion and dissociation. She was kept for evaluation, then therapy. When she returned to school, she spoke less. Learned what not to say.
But Dunford was a small town. And small towns had long memories.
Sarah’s oddness followed her. Not loudly, but closely. When she got married, people called it brave. When her husband left, they called it inevitable.
Now she was just the strange woman at the edge of the neighborhood. The one who gardened barefoot and lit candles in the windows. The one people still whispered about behind closed blinds.
And Aria was her daughter.
It was snowing again when the final bell rang. The sky sagged low and gray over the hills, thick with clouds. Aria pulled her scarf tighter and made her way out the back of the school, past the maintenance sheds and dumpsters, toward the gravel path that led home.
The houses along the route were old. Birch and pine lined the yards, their bare branches rattling in the wind. Roofs slumped under the weight of too many winters. The sidewalks cracked in the same places every year.
Her house waited at the end of Larch Street. Small. Faded blue. A covered porch leaned away from the wind, the screen door too loose to close properly. A narrow garage hunched beside the house, its roof sagging in the middle like a tired breath. Snow gathered on the tarp that covered her bike, tucked behind a stack of old boxes they had never unpacked.
Most of them were her mother’s. Books. Journals. Childhood keepsakes. Costumes from another life. There had never been room for all of it in the new house, and Sarah had never quite found the will to sort through them.
Inside, the warmth was soft and immediate. It smelled of woodsmoke and lavender, thyme and something faintly sweet. The living room was narrow, the kitchen smaller. The stairs creaked when they shifted, and the walls carried every sound. But the color was everywhere — on the curtains, the rugs, the cushions piled in corners. It felt like a house that had been decorated not all at once, but over years of memories.
It was just the two of them now. Two bedrooms upstairs. One bathroom, with a cast iron tub and a rattling old fan. Enough space to stay close without crowding.
Sarah was in the kitchen, humming over the stove, stirring a pot of something that smelled like roasted garlic and rosemary. She wore a long skirt and a faded cardigan with elbow patches. Her hair was tied back with a ribbon the color of brick.
“Hey, moonbeam,” she said. “The world still spinning?”
“Barely,” Aria replied, pulling off her boots.
“There’s soup,” Sarah said. “That helps.”
They ate together at the kitchen table. Soup and toast, same as always. A single candle flickered beside the salt shaker. Sarah always said it made the room feel warmer, though Aria suspected she just preferred it to overhead lights.
They talked about easy things. The neighbor’s cat, which had taken up residence beneath the porch. Whether the frost would kill the rosemary again. Aria didn’t bring up the graffiti in the girls’ bathroom. Sarah didn’t ask.
They also didn’t mention Toby.
His name sat quietly between them, like an unopened envelope.
It had been months since anyone had heard from him. Sarah still checked the mail every day with a certain kind of hope, but the lines on her face had deepened with the waiting.
She had received a letter once, shortly after his last call. Aria hadn’t seen it, but she’d noticed the way Sarah had hidden it in the cedar box under her bed. Not locked, just tucked away. Like something too dangerous to burn but too heavy to hold.
Aria wanted to ask, but she never did.
Some silences were too tightly wound.
After dinner, the snow came heavier, soft and quiet against the windows. Aria settled into the couch with a blanket over her legs and her textbook open across her lap. The fire in the hearth had caught well and filled the room with a gentle, flickering glow.
She looked at the stones that framed the fireplace and let herself imagine.
They had come from the ruins of an ancient kingdom. Hauled across endless wilderness by silent caravans. Set in place by fairies under a blood moon, their songs woven into the mortar. The fire knew the songs, and that was why it stayed warm even after the coals had died.
Maybe the whole house had been built around the hearth. Maybe it had been waiting for her.
Then she sighed and shook her head.
They were just stones. Cut from a quarry twenty miles out. Delivered in the back of a rusted truck before her mother had ever met her father. Laid by hand forty years ago by a contractor who probably hadn’t believed in anything at all.
Still, the story made the room feel warmer. Her eyes drifted up to the mantle. The crystal orb was there, exactly where it always was. A perfect sphere, clear and cold, polished to glassy smoothness. The firelight passed through it, bending in strange ways. Not distorted. Just softened. Shifted.
She didn’t know where it had come from. She had never asked. But it had always been there, through all the moves. Sarah had probably bought it at a flea market. Or a consignment shop. A paperweight, maybe. One of those strange things her mother picked up during the quiet months after the divorce.
But sometimes, when the moonlight slipped through the front windows just right, Aria thought she saw something inside it. Not movement. Not light.
Depth.
Like it was deeper than it should be. Like it was not hollow, but full of something waiting. Something of… of what? Of Dreams.
Watching. Her eyes lingered a second too long. Then she blinked and turned back to her notebook. The orb sat still. Silent. Patient. Waiting.
The HolloWords of the Mad 
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