Chapter Text
Plane H-6271986
Kingdom of The Owl King
Outer Gate
Mobius stepped out of the time door and into a dusty clearing. On a distant hill stood a tall, jagged castle beneath a gloomy sky; winding around it like a serpentine snare was a vast, elaborate maze of topiary and stone. He checked the TemPad against the coordinates on the dispatch.
“This is definitely the place,” he announced as Loki stepped through behind him. "And look, it's got a castle! You like castles," Mobius said playfully.
"Awfully tall, for an outhouse."
Loki looked down at her hands, curling her fingers open and closed, feeling her magic returning. A few large insects buzzed about, but upon further inspection, she realized they were very small fairies. One drifted right up to her, hovering eye to eye, and they studied one another for a moment. Mobius cleared his throat.
"I'd watch it with those. I'm pretty sure they bite."
Loki turned to him with a raised eyebrow and he shrugged matter-of-factly. She leaned away from them, and when they persisted, blew a freezing cold breath across them. They squeaked indignantly and fluttered away.
"Making friends already, huh?" Mobius said with a snort.
Loki gave him a face and glanced around, turning up her nose at the sight of a short, dirty statue beside a nearby fountain, fashioned to appear as though he were urinating into it.
"That is some of the most hideous statuary I have ever seen," Loki said, grimacing.
The statue turned to scowl at them.
"Who you callin' hideous?" he demanded, scrambling to close his trousers. They both looked away politely and Mobius put up a hand.
"Excuse us, we didn't mean to intrude."
The dwarf stood roughly half his height, dressed in well-worn medieval-style clothing and a leather cap. He drew closer, eyes widening at the sight of Loki.
"Sarah?" he asked in disbelief.
She and Mobius traded glances.
"Who?" she asked, and Mobius shrugged. She looked over at the dwarf; his face fell as doubt set in and he shook his head.
"Oh, uh, n-nothin'," he mumbled sheepishly.
"Who runs the castle?" Mobius asked. He glanced down at the dispatch in his hand. "Says here, our last contact was with an … Owl King?"
"Owl King's gone, been dead for centuries," the dwarf said. "Goblin King rules the house now."
Loki made a face. "Oh, I loathe goblins."
"And how would I go about meeting him?" Mobius asked.
"Ya walks into the castle," he said curtly.
Loki rolled her eyes. Mobius scanned the wall for an entry point.
"You wouldn't happen to know where the door is, would you?"
"What door?" the dwarf asked gruffly.
"You were far more useful as a statue," Loki interjected flatly.
Mobius smiled politely down at him. "Would you be able to show us to the gate?"
The man shrugged. "No gate, just a door."
Loki sighed loudly and turned her attention to the outer wall. It was certainly scalable, but there was no telling what might be waiting on the other side. She tilted her head and studied it, pocked and filthy beneath a film of shimmering slime. Something wasn't quite right. Illusion being nothing more than an unspoken lie, Loki knew that she was staring directly into one. She stepped closer and extended her arm, working a runic charm under her breath as she brushed her fingertips across the stone. It rippled like an image reflected on water, and faded to reveal a pair of tall, heavy doors flanked by thick stone pillars.
"Guess that answers that," Mobius said, taking a step back.
"So it's that sort of place, is it?" Loki said with a grin. There were no visible handles or knobs with which to open the doors. She turned to the dwarf.
"You there."
The dwarf shuffled nervously. "W-what?"
"Open the doors."
"Please," Mobius added.
He looked back and forth between them, Mobius smiling and Loki giving him her most imperious stare. He sighed and waved an arm, and the doors creaked open slowly with a dramatic puff of fog. He grunted and turned to walk away.
"Thanks, uh … sorry, I didn't catch your name," Mobius said.
"Hoggle," he said over his shoulder.
"Well thanks again, Mister Hoggle."
Hoggle waved them off, muttering as he made his way past the fountains.
"What a strange little man," Loki said as she watched him go.
Mobius turned to her and gestured to the doors. "Shall we?"
They stepped cautiously into the maze, glancing up and down the long outer corridor. It was as gloomy as it was barren, save for the sparse, bedraggled plant life sprouting randomly along the drab brick walls. The ground was littered with fallen tree limbs and broken bricks as far as the eye could see.
"Charming," Loki deadpanned.
The doors swung shut behind them loudly, startling a nearby bird and sending up a cloud of glittery dust where they stood contemplating the way.
"So," Mobius said, rubbing his hands together. "Which way do we wanna try first?"
"Both appear equally miserable," Loki said.
"Yeah, I know. Worst birthday party ever." He reached into a jacket pocket and produced a large coin stamped with the TVA logo. "Heads, we go left. Tails, right."
Loki shrugged. Mobius flicked the coin into the air and caught it, clapping it down onto the back of his other hand.
"Right it is.” And off they went. "I wonder what happened to the Owl King," he mused as they walked.
"If he was anything like the others we've encountered so far, he was probably done in by one of his own subjects," Loki chuckled.
"Doesn't look like the new guy's big on maintenance."
"Why would he be?" Loki asked. "Not as though he's expecting anyone to see it, anyway."
A slimy rustling from behind them caught Loki's attention and she turned to find a bizarre sprig of lichen rooted in the opposite wall, which in turn was studying her with eyes of its own at the tips of each of its tendrils. She glared at it sternly until it slowly redirected all of its eyes away.
Mobius snorted and gestured toward the cowering lichen. "Why are you bullying the indigenous flora?"
"It was staring at me," Loki said. "Have you ever had a plant stare at you? It's unnerving."
Mobius shrugged. "It’s probably harmless."
"Easy for you to say, you're not the one being ogled."
"Well, I mean … you don't know that," Mobius said, straightening his tie.
Loki looked at him doubtfully. He feigned offense. "Ouch."
"Ello!" a tiny voice piped from somewhere below. They looked down at their feet, and then back up at one another.
"You hear that?" asked Mobius.
"It sounded like someone saying hello," Loki replied.
"No, I said 'ello, but that's close enough," the voice said cheerfully.
They turned to find a plump, brightly colored worm no bigger than Mobius' thumb, perched upon a small ledge jutting out of the nearby wall. It blinked up at them with large, expressive eyes and a friendly smile across its tiny face, its blue tufts of fuzz swaying with the motion of its head. It glanced up at Loki, and momentarily beamed with recognition, then appeared doubtful and turned its eyes back to Mobius.
"A worm that speaks," she said quietly.
"This place is just full of surprises," Mobius said.
Loki squinted at the thin strip of red cloth wrapped around the worm's body just below its head and wondered how, without arms or shoulders, it had even gotten a scarf tied around itself in the first place. She opened her mouth but quickly closed it, deciding that she didn't actually want to know anything about worm fashion. Mobius cleared his throat.
"I got this."
He crouched to eye level with the creature and smiled.
"Hi."
"Ello," it said again, tilting its head as they studied one another. “Don't often get visitors 'round 'ere. Come inside for a spot of tea?”
Mobius smiled modestly, shaking his head. “Thank you, that’s very kind of you. But I’m afraid we don't have time.” He looked up and down the stone corridor. "You wouldn't happen to know the quickest way through this maze, would you?"
"Me? No, I'm just a worm," it said, shaking its head. "Come on inside, 'ave a nice cuppa tea with the Missus."
"We appreciate the offer," Mobius said. "But we've got to make something of this maze, and so far, we can't even find any openings."
"Oh, the labyrinth's full of 'em. There's one right behind you," the worm said.
Mobius exchanged glances with Loki and they turned to study the wall. Mobius reached out and touched solid brick, right where he'd expected it to be.
"No, there isn't," he said.
"Course there is, it's right in front of you," it said, smiling helpfully.
They turned back to the wall and paused. Something was different. Loki traced the toe of her agency-issued shoe along the ground, nudged a piece of brick around, and kicked it past Mobius. It tumbled impossibly far across filthy stone and smacked into another wall, farther away. She stepped forward, through what they had thought were bricks into a parallel corridor, and turned back to Mobius, with a smug grin and her arms out. Mobius shook his head with a sigh.
"Anamorphosis," he said under his breath. "Shoulda expected that."
"It's what I would have done, were it mine," Loki smirked. Mobius shook his head.
"Oh, whatever. You didn't see it either, until the worm said—"
He turned back but the worm was now gone, and the corridor where they had come from was now cut off in the other direction by a dead end a few yards down. There was no leaving through the doors now, unless they wanted to climb. He stepped beside Loki and gazed back and forth down what appeared to be another empty corridor.
"This is gonna be a long day," he sighed. Loki minced her jaw, her irritation growing.
"No, it isn't."
She leapt from the ground and flickered into the shape of a raven, black wings beating down as she ascended. Mobius smiled up at the sight.
"I always get a kick out of that," he said to no one in particular.
The labyrinth proved no less disorienting when surveyed from the air. As she noted the twists and turns leading inward, she discovered that they were in constant fluctuation whenever she took her eyes off them for even a moment, so memorizing any part of the route would be useless. In between the layers of rapidly changing maze were forests and groves, a sputtering bog, and some scattered courtyards; encircling the castle compound was a small city of primitive houses within a steep security wall. The castle itself was tall and imposing with multiple spires rising like sharpened spears into the leaden sky.
She dipped back down into the corridor where Mobius stood watching and led him around a handful of corners and between hedges, keeping her eyes on the path in case it suddenly changed. They passed increasingly bizarre statues and topiary sculptures until she heard a loud whistle from the ground and looked down to see him waving to her from farther back than he should be, apparently boxed in by walls that hadn't been there when she had passed over. She descended and touched down gracefully beside him, back in her Asgardian form.
"What happened?" she asked. Mobius shook his head with an irritated sigh.
"Heard a noise. Took my eyes off it to look behind me, and when I turned back, it was walled off. Turned around to double back, and suddenly that was walled off, too. And now this side is a dead end—"
He looked over his shoulder and paused, blinking. The wall had disappeared, and in its place was a pair of tall, ornately carved wooden doors. Each was situated behind a battered shield, one with a crest in red, the other in blue. Each had a hat and fingertips peeking out along the upper and lower edges, and a strange series of runic symbols etched across the crest. Many were not even runes at all, just stylized cuneiform with a childlike flourish.
"What fresh nonsense is this?" Loki asked.
"It sure beats turning the corner and meeting the Minotaur," Mobius said pragmatically. "We probably just have to guess a password or something."
Loki rolled her eyes.
"At this rate, I might as well just fly you with me to the castle doorstep."
"Oh, uh… I kinda have a thing about heights," Mobius said hesitantly. Loki waved him off.
"Eh, you'd be a hazelnut."
His eyebrows twisted with utter confusion. Loki cleared her throat.
"It appears the walls are closing in, and we are hopelessly trapped!" she declared dramatically, keeping the doors in her periphery. "Perhaps one of these mysterious doors could be of help."
Mobius smirked and played along. "Which one do we want?"
"If only there were someone to ask," Loki said, with an eye on the creatures whispering behind the shields.
"Well, you can't ask us!" one of them called from behind the red shield.
"You can only ask one of us!" called another, from behind the blue one.
"Choose!" another said. "But be warned: one of us always tells the truth, and one of us always lies!"
"Yeah, I know the feeling," Mobius chuckled. Loki cast him a look; he was clearly starting to enjoy this.
"A liar's gambit," she said and raised her chin, grinning over at the doormen. "How entertaining! And what would be the stakes?"
"One of these doors leads to the castle at the center of the labyrinth!" declared the doorman at the bottom of the blue shield, trying in earnest to sound ominous. "And the other one leads to… certain death!"
"Well, that's a bummer," Mobius sighed. He turned to Loki. "So, uh… what do we think?"
"They are all lying," she said with a bored sigh. "And I doubt either of them actually knows anything about what lies beyond their doors."
"What? I've never told a single lie in me life!" the blue doorman cried as the others burst into snickering.
"Tis all you ever do, you filthy liar!"
"Says you!"
"I liked the Greek version better," Mobius sighed.
Loki stepped in closer to study their checkered helmets and long canine snouts, and tilted her head. There was something odd in their manifestation, not unlike the illusions she had already encountered around the entry gate and shifting walls. They were physically present—that much she was sure of—but when she reached out telepathically, she encountered an awareness in each that felt strangely artificial, a mere sliver of consciousness running in an endless loop of limited purpose. She shook her head as it finally occurred to her: this was servitor magick. These were no more real than hallucinations given flesh, a quartet of fabricated servants carrying out the orders of their creator. Clever, that.
Then she studied the doors behind them: one adorned with fanciful carvings of knotwork, the other bearing a symbol of infinity; within these were also carved four half-faces, two of them menacing and the other two looking rather bemused, cleaved together in a pair of glaring mismatches. As a being of many faces herself, the effect gave Loki a grin. Both of them two-faced.
She turned back to Mobius.
"Give me the coin."
Meanwhile, at the heart of the castle.
The Great Hall was hardly what one might imagine for a castle of such infamy. At its center sat what could only generously be called a throne—a circular chair sparsely adorned, from which dusty, fraying velvet hung. On the wall above it was the garish effigy of a crown, currently serving as the nest of a rather ambitious vulture, and a pair of ram's horns wrapped in dusty cobwebs.
A gaggle of feral goblins, armed with kitchen utensils and wearing colanders for helmets, were in clumsy pursuit of a chicken that left a cloud of feathers in its wake as it fled. The floor was strewn with battered dishes and trampled food, snoring comrades, and filthy rags. The remnants of an old royal banner hung drearily from a nearby pole. The place was crawling with every manner of goblin miscreant, laughing and shouting as they demolished everything in their path.
This was the land of a thousand jesters and just one king, seated languidly in his throne with a gloved hand over his tired face. He had long ago learned to tune out the everyday chaos, for the sake of preserving what remained of his sanity. Where his predecessor had spent every waking moment brooding about in the upper floors, plotting petty triumphs against anyone and everyone, Jareth had found that the business of running a kingdom such as this was barely enough to keep him occupied past breakfast on most days. There was no one to talk to—or at least no one worth the effort: even his best and brightest were barely capable of understanding orders, let alone following them. Introspective conversationalists, they were not.
He had spent half the day perusing his personal library, thumbing through arcane tomes and meticulous histories, and swatting away the dust that seemed to follow him everywhere. He had plucked idly at the array of antique instruments in the parlor, gazed up at the same old portraits in the royal gallery, and even added to a few of his own works with the carefully preserved artist's chalk left behind by an interloper he never knew. He had even taken a lovely flight across the grounds, and now he sat frowning in a cavernous room overtaken by a horde of shrieking goblins, all of them oblivious to their own hubris.
Jareth sighed. He desperately craved fresh mischief, lest he perish of ennui.
A strange feeling slowly crept over him, as though a breeze had passed through, bringing with it an exotic essence from a faraway place. He leaned up from his slouch and reached out with his senses; it was neither a scent nor a sound, but something far more interesting: someone had just opened a portal into his kingdom, and, against all odds, had dared to set foot inside it. He swiped his hands together and produced a crystal sphere, holding it up like a looking glass.
Show yourself.
He watched a gray-haired man and a dark-haired woman pass through the outer gate. He followed their movements through the eyes and ears of his terrain—every brick and vine, every creeping thing in the land—and observed with great interest as the two worked their way past the first few layers of illusion. He grinned, nearly impressed. As the woman passed closely by one of his nosy lichen, Jareth caught his breath at the sight of her.
Impossible. He'd strictly forbidden anyone to speak her name once she'd slipped away, and his subjects had faithfully adhered to this decree, though less out of obedience and more out of forgetfulness. He gazed in disbelief at the image in his hand, taken aback by her commanding glare into the many spying eyes of his lichen, her long black hair framing bright eyes set with cruel determination, just as he remembered her.
How long had it been? The question itself was of course meaningless, as his realm existed far outside of the regular flow of both time and space; for all he knew, it could be days, years, or even centuries later on the other planes. She had indeed grown older, well into womanhood, yet still carried herself with that same headstrong spirit, one which seemed to have since sharpened her into something far more dangerous in the intervening years.
If it was her, then she had returned for a reason, and if it was not, well… that was another game entirely.
Back at the doors.
Mobius tossed her the TVA coin and she caught it in the air, slapping it down onto the back of her hand just as he had done. She looked up at him expectantly.
"Tails," he said. She nodded and lifted her hand away, revealing the coin had indeed landed on tails. He grunted in resignation, nodding in the direction of the door behind the blue crest. Loki turned the coin over in her hand, finding the other side was also tails. Mobius raised an eyebrow and leaned in, addressing her quietly.
"What are you up to?"
"This was not me," she said under her breath, glancing at their ever-changing surroundings. The only thing more dangerous than the illusion of choice was the illusion of chance. She handed him the coin and watched as he turned it over in his own hand, finding the other side was once again heads. They shared a look.
"Blue, you say?" she asked, clearing her throat conspicuously. Mobius pocketed the coin and grinned with understanding. Loki continued toward the blue crest and cast a stern look at the creatures behind it. They moved aside hurriedly as she laid her hands on the heavy door and shoved it open, letting it clang against the bricks of the corridor beyond it. Mobius smiled politely at the doormen as he walked past. In the distance, the castle's sharp silhouette did indeed appear closer than it was before.
Mobius sighed with cautious relief and checked his TemPad. "Looks like this place might be a cake walk after all."
The only warning of anything amiss was a faint rumbling from somewhere down at his feet; a split second later, the cobblestones gave way and he cried out in alarm as he plummeted down into the dark space between them, the TemPad clattering to the ground nearby. Loki spun around and dove to grab him, but landed hard on the cobblestones, the dust and grime undisturbed as though nothing at all had happened. She pounded her fists against them and growled in frustration. When she looked up, she found that the corridor had become a wide open courtyard.
There came a tiny snicker from the ground behind her, and in an instant she sent a dagger at it. A small fey creature, no more than ten inches in height, was frozen in terror against a lower segment of wall, the dagger pinning its hat to the stone.
She leaned forward, sneering. "Not so funny now, is it?"
"No," it squeaked, shaking its head.
Loki smiled darkly. "Now," she continued, "How would you like for me to spare your little life?"
The creature nodded rapidly, swallowing hard. Loki stabbed her finger down angrily against the dusty bricks into which Mobius had just disappeared.
"Where does this go? And do not dare lie to me, or I will know it."