Chapter 2 : Goblin in the Garden

Welp, it sucks to be me. The whole unstoppable goblin power thing came to a crashing halt in Frontenac Provincial Park. I was honestly feeling pretty godlike, and that is when life kicks you in the nads. Once that “real me” died in Fairy, whatever was keeping me under the chains of being mostly human as the changeling snapped. All of what should have been mine as a goblin was back. I know why they needed me back in fairy though, because everything the “real me” had when he died came snapping home too. I don’t know about much about how the stolen Jareth Bowie lived, but the little bastard was a badass. That little elven lord whose heart I ate may have had the potential to be an elven knight of legend, but he was a lap dog and easier to kill than any of the evil bastards in the airborne cadre. Those utterly human bastards were a real threat hand to hand, even as superior as I was with the new goodies because they were stone killers, and that elf was just a lap dog. Well in the time I have been alive here on earth, the stolen Jareth got himself enough power to have made himself the reality of what that little elf poser I killed should have been. Then somebody killed him. There is always someone better, or something that just has your number.

I was learning the limits of what I was. I was leaping from tree to tree, swinging from hand to hand, kicking off and clearing thirty foot gaps like they were nothing. The thing I had to work hardest about was keeping my laughter down, because when I didn’t work at it, mad laughter tore from my throat and all the animals of the forest scattered as if they remembered what it meant for a goblin to be loose in the woods at night. I had taken a stag at the edge of Frontenac Provincial park, the run from CFB Petawawa where the airborne trained and Kingston Ontario where dad and mom lived was long when you stayed in the bush, and I was powerful hungry. The stag was magnificent, he ran and jumped like he felt the same song in the forest that I did, and we danced it together. The dance of life and death, predator and prey. He was at his peak, the full mature power of the herd lord and there was no equal in his forest, none that could catch him. The few wolves around would fear the coming hunger as he stood between them and the foals in the birthing season, the younger males would see him between them and any hope of claiming the herd and despair, for he was not for them to best. It was not in me to toy with him, he did not deserve that.

I put my all into a leap past him into an old oak to his right, he saw me flash past, and I knew when he landed from his leap he would bound to the left away to open distance, but I timed it right. I would hit my tree before he hit the ground and I could react faster. I hit the tree and bounded straight across to where he would be, his body and already gathered for the new leap, and he had completed it and was in the air before his brain processed my new direction. I could see his head start to turn, his great eye tracking me as he leaped. The knowledge of his death was in that eye, and the defiance of one who would not submit, ever, but fight on until his last flashed in his eyes. We hit, I used our combined momentum to snap his proud neck like a twig and I landed on top of his body in the forest loam. I wondered how I didn’t break anything as I felt the stags ribs shatter on our combined impact, but the reality was, my bones had never broken. It was odd when I was growing up, but I guess it made sense now. I ripped open the stags throat and drank his blood like whiskey. God it felt good. It fired my body and soul. I reached into his chest and ripped out his heart. I ate it, throwing back my head and howling to the night like a wolf, I sang my respect for this king of beasts I had slain this day. Honestly, as I ate the heart, I felt the weight of his years. Long summers of power, winters of privation and battle against wolf and bear, the autumns of the human hunters and the gun, the springs of challenges, battles, of mating and the pride of seeing his herd grow under his protection. I had killed a king, and he was worthy of his kingship. Makes me wonder why that little elf shit I ate gave me no visions of greatness at all, no moments of glory and perfection. Given endless centuries, he had been a lacky and a spectator, earned no glories, fought no battles, and died on a fetch quest for a placeholder changeling. Makes you feel kind of bad for him.

I thought about making a fire and roasting the old boy up, and decided why the hell not. Sure goblins can eat meat raw, but this guy was a freaking stud. Venison is better than steak, and this guy was lean like a gym nut and toned like a triathlete. I had my knife on me from the jump rig so I hung him with paracord, because the reason we make those pretty little lanyards you see on our combats is because they store enough paracord to sling a tank. Paracord is awesome, the power of a tow rope in the diameter of a shoe lace. I hung and dressed the beast, made a nice pyramid of old branches, twigs and lichen to start the fire. I was about to old school the thing into a fire when something stirred within me. Not my memories, or not my “me” memories. Other me memories. I reached out to the fire I had built and sung a little song. I called out to the sun, to the spirit of fire, to the memory of the sun that filled every branch, the dream of it that slumbered in every leaf, and I asked them to remember. They say in science that all respiration, all cellular activity is actually just fire tricked into slowing down a bit so it can let us be alive while it is happening. Fairy magic can wake it up and set it free. It is a surprisingly easy charm, not really a spell, sort of a reverse lullaby, asking your child to wake up and dance, because all children want to dance. Soon the fire was burning and I was roasting the king stag in the heart of the forest. I was a fucking goblin blessed with the magic of an elven lord, I was a god on earth, life was perfect.

I slept a few hours, lord of all I surveyed, apex predator of Frontenac Provincial Forest, then took off towards home. I pushed myself to go even faster, there were elven charms to the wind you could sing. Elves didn’t have the raw power of the goblins, so they used charms of the elements to lend them their characteristics. I sang the charms of the wind and I flowed, I sang the charms of the earth and the way before me was so clear it was as if I had run this route a thousand times. I was close to eighty kilomters per hour in the ancient forest, better than any highway speed I had ever been able to achieve on a mountain bike even on a big hill, speeds I needed a car to equal, when I got ambushed by the fucking mushrooms. I felt the mushrooms of the fairy ring, they shone in my sight like memories of moonlight, the mushrooms themselves part of a greater truth that slept beneath the earth even as the trees above were part of a greater truth that was a forest that the humans somehow could not hear. I felt the connections implied in the mushrooms of the fairy ring, the paths were closed to me, the mushrooms despised changelings and the cheat we represented. Well fuck them, I ate your cousins on my cheeseburgers so take that!

CRACK! Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt BOOM!

I hit the fairy ring like it was a brick wall. No, like it was the concrete of a retaining wall with a mountain behind it. I hit it like a bug hits the grill of a big rig. The world was pain. I felt my heart crush, my brain slam into my skull and my breath blast from my body as my lungs flattened as my spine tried to punch through a chest that stopped moving unexpectedly. Then the lightning blasted from the fairy ring, blowing me backward a good twenty feet, then the thunderclap of the air returning to the gap the lighting tore provided the cherry on top to my bad day. I was too deaf to hear the desperate animal sounds coming out of me, or deal with the fact my uniform had melted to my chest around the scar the lightning made when it hit me.

The mushrooms hadn’t liked me when I was a changeling that didn’t know who or what I was. I could not cross them when I was a child, no more could I lie or cross the threshold of a proper home (tricky definition that one, more demanding than you think) without invitation, but they had never shown any awareness of me. They did now, and they really didn’t like me.

I crawled out of the clearing, dragging my goblin ass, too shaken from the lightning to trust my legs walking. As I crawled from the clearing, once proud goblin lord of Frontenac Provincial Parks, through my new fairy senses, I could feel the mushrooms laughing at me. I thought about shouting an obscenity back at them, but I had no idea the range of their lightning, and the idea of getting a lightning enema was not one that appealed to me. So badass airborne soldier, goblin forest hunter, slayer of a no-shit elven knight, and changeling outlaw, I crawled out of the glen, until my legs were strong enough to hold me. I crossed the rest of the forest at a somewhat sedate 60kph because there were mushrooms in the deep woods, and the fuckers were all connected. The fairy rings were a thing, I didn’t know how they worked, and my other self, the absorbed and sleeping memories of my human turned elflord “brother” were full of all sorts of elven prose about them that boiled down to mushrooms do mushroom things, sometimes they love an elf so much they allow him to steal off from place to place to do wickedness, for mushroomy reasons, isn’t that marvelous? Honestly, elves are weird. Mushrooms are just….wrong. They don’t like me, I get it. That is enough to know.

I ran along side Highway 10 down to Kingston. Now I know what you are thinking, how in the hell do you do that? Honestly, its easy. You drive with your headlights on, under the street lights doing an easy 100 kph, and what happens twenty yards away to your side in the dark may as well be happening on mars. I was wearing mostly intact Canadian Forces digicam battle dress (with a big melted hole in my chest, thank you fucking mushrooms), and it was designed to blur my outline and it did a good job. I didn’t have to slow down until I got to the outskirts of Kingston, then I had to walk. I had checked in the waters, and I still seemed to have my glamour on, I mean, the reflection was me. When I thought about my goblin self, the reflection shifted and I saw my goblin face leering back and buddy that was enough to make me think about pissing myself. I mean, not cute. Full on goblin slayer moment of ick. So, the glamour thing was controllable (good) in the sense that if I thought about me as me, I looked human, but if I thought of myself as a goblin, I looked like the real me. I sucked at this sort of thing. I mean, I had struggled with my inner self my entire life, and cycled into my “am I a monster” debate whenever my inner emo wanted a picnic. Now that could have actual consequences, like screaming, 9-11 calls, and maybe a visit from Alpha Flight (the Canadian superhero team). That one worried me. Alpha Flight’s leader Vidicator wore a battle suit that was on the Iron Man level of dangerous, the two speedsters were both faster than him, Sasquatch was Hulk level strong, but the bit that scared him was that Shaman was a no shit First Nations shaman and Snowbird was a no shit Innu demigoddess. They would see through his glamour and the chance that whey would go instant goblin slayer on his ass was real.

Why couldn’t he be born a yank? I mean the healthcare sucks, the judicial system is a joke, the educational system is broken, but at least they are rabidly Christian enough to have almost zero integrated magical practitioners in decision making positions. No one in the states gave a toss about old world traditions and ancient wisdom. They cared about money, and technology, global dominance, money, their own awesomeness, and money. I mean it could be worse. England and Japan were pretty much still tied to their ancient powers, not all their ancestral guardians stayed asleep when the superhero age started. A lot of them started stirring in WWII, or maybe earlier. China was hard to read from the outside, but there were hints that that the Asian powers never really went all the way to sleep. Canada was not a hotbed of superhero activity, but what it had was way too close to nature for a young goblin to feel safe around.

So here I go, jogging sedately in my CF battledress, thank god I kept my beret in my thigh pocket even though we jumped in helmets, thanking the sun, moon, stars and the first goddamned tree that mom and dad raised me in the shadow of CFB Kingston so a soldier jogging in battledress didn’t draw too much attention. Dad retired out of the forces to work in computer security. His rants on the uselessness of people putting a security budget for major financial institutions that was less than that employed by low tier porn producers were a constant source of amusement growing up. Dad should know, he did high profile and unsatisfactory work for some of the big banks, and low profile amazing work for some of the better mid tier porn producers. Mom was a forensic accountant. Basically a ferret hired by people who think their own financial house was not in order, or who get brought in by the RCMP (federal cops) OPP (Ontario Provincial Police) or various government agencies to find out who has been misdirecting what. Do not blame me that I became a computer nerd, I come of nerd stock. I do not doubt that I was conceived upon somebody’s computer desk, but I will NEVER ask for confirmation of that. Although, I suppose technically HE was conceived over that computer desk, but that doesn’t make it less awkward. They are still mom and dad, and that is still full on creepy to contemplate. I mean I may be a goblin, but I am not a creep.

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I got to the old block and I froze.

Oh fuck. I am an idiot.

A black Canadian Forces staff car was parked out front. National Defence licence plates, jet black. I knew what this was. Fuck FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!

I dashed around the block and jumped into the tree inside our yard and crawled to where I could spy into the house. What I feared most in the world was happening right in front of me. A Canadian Forces chaplain in full uniform was there with my own OC, my unit officer. Mom was sobbing on dad’s shoulder, while dad was doing his veteran face-of-stone thing. One of the things he taught me was that when you had to deal with things, you shoved your emotional responses into a little box to deal with it when the emotions would not get in the way of dealing with the actual dangers. The second thing he taught me, and the first thing that mom taught me is that if you didn’t deal with the emotions stuck in those little boxes they would eat you alive, and hurt everyone nearby while they did. I felt like the deer I killed. I felt like I was watching someone reach into my chest and rip out my heart, but unlike the deer, or that little elf shit, I was left alive afterward.

There I was, watching my parents be told I was killed in a training accident. How proud they could be of their son’s service, and the details about my funeral and death benefits. This is Canada, don’t get your hopes up. We had enough veterans in WW1 and WW2 that it was a voting block you had to be worried about and looked after soldiers. Since we decided we weren’t going to war no more, there weren’t enough to really matter and the benefits went accordingly downward. Lets just say if I had been killed cleaning the drive through at my local McDonalds I would be worth more than as a dead soldier. Mom and dad didn’t need the money, and I wasn’t actually dead, but when your mother is an accountant it is hard not to translate how valued someone was into an equation of lifetime earning potential and realize that a dead soldier was sort of a dollar store level commodity compared to any other profession, including burger flipping. Kind of a sobering thought, but while my emotions were in a storm right now, at least one that kept my glamour from going goblin mode.

I jumped to the roof of the house and ran across. I saw dad shake hands with my OC, then the chaplain and shut the door. I waited until the two officers got in the car and drove away, then dropped down from the roof to the steps in front. I could just open the door. I mean, I had the keys, and this was one house I could enter without permission. This would always be my home. But I couldn’t. Not like this. This would hurt. I would hurt them, and that would hurt me. I would have to tell them the truth. I was a changeling. Their real son was dead, and I wasn’t even human. FUCK. I was not ready for this, rage welled up so deep I wanted to bury myself in blood and entrails, shame so deep I wanted to let dad kill me for the monster I was, fear. Fear that mom and dad would see me for the monster I was always afraid I was and reject me. Fear that they wouldn’t and the trouble I represented would follow them home and hurt them too.

I became a soldier out of a desire to use what I was to protect others. I became a soldier because I chose to stand into danger not run from it. I CAN RING A GODDAMNED DOORBELL. Soon. Any minute now.

Fuck.

Shaking like a leaf, I pushed the button.

My dad opened the door, his face a stone mask. His eyes had the thousand-yard stare that belonged on sharks and undead, not human beings. His mind was in there, but the emotions that make a human were shut off right now because someone had to get things done while his world was falling apart.

“Jareth?” He asked, his voice shocked, his eyes widening, fear, hope, distrust flashing past in a whirl that senses less enhanced than mine would have missed. Suspicion won out.

“No, that is impossible. My son is dead, they showed me the photos. They did an AUTOPSY!” He was flaring in anger, stepping towards me in rage. Dad didn’t do rage. Dad was about consequences, but he was always deeply rational. He cared about his family, and he did his best to protect us, even from ourselves. There was a line, and apparently fucking about pretending to be his dead son was the line. Here I was, the son he raised, here to tell him I was alive, and good news, the son that he never met, the son of his body, the baby mom never got to hold was stolen away to fairy land and got his ass killed. You raised a murdering little goblin and guess what? I’m home!

I snarled, my hand clenching, my glamour failing, and the wrought iron hand rail I never touched on the steps bend under my hand when I punched it like it was rubber. The scent of burning meat and the feel of the burn of the iron on my skin shocked me into silence as the horror that passed for my face hit my dad full on. I expected him to hit me, to slam the door. I braced myself. I would not defend myself. Their son was stolen, their son was dead, I was the monster they were tricked into taking in, I was the lie now laid bare.

He hit me like I hit the fairy ring, not with a fist, but chest to chest as he pulled me to him squeezing so hard I couldn’t breathe. He was shouting.

“Connie, Connie, it’s Jareth!” He dragged me inside. What the actual fuck? Dad’s mind could be a weird place sometimes. He taught me the old fairy tales like he taught me computer games, small arms, chess, and how to chat up pretty girls and to both hear and accept a no when it was given. Now he was dragging my goblin ass across the threshold of my human home, and I felt its welcome close about me like the blanket it had always been to me. Home is where you are loved, and when you are a thing of fairy, that was a place of some power.

Mom was a wreck. She seemed like a hollow shell. Her face was ugly. She was a naturally beautiful woman, heavier than she liked, but definitely in the MILF territory from what my barracks mates had always stated when I brought them home for real food, but she cried ugly, and she was just about cried out when I came in. My glamour was flaring off and on, rolling over me in ripples so that parts of me were in each form as my identity and magic warred. She looked at dad and dad nodded. “Its Jareth.”

She hit me with the soft squishiness of Mom. Burying her face in my chest she held me, no shit smelled me (which I wouldn’t. I had literally ran hundreds of kilometers through the woods, killed deer with hands and teeth, lost a fight with mushrooms, and torn the throat out of a no shit elf lord. I smelled. A lot). I smelled somehow, like me. I could feel her relax as she gripped me. Then looking up she felt my face, the fangs, the skin, the ears. She really gave the whole pointed ears a going over. Then, she giggled. Smiling softly, she whispered under her breath.

“It’s like, on some level, I always knew. I knew when I named you.” She said, and just like that. Mom accepted me and the glamour fell away.

I suppose I should explain. Mom has told me, and told me every time we watched the movie, that I was named for Jareth, the Goblin King in Labyrinth the David Bowie fantasy movie that she and dad did for a first date. That movie made them a couple, was directly responsible for me, both of me I guess, and was about the Goblin King stealing away a baby that the heroine had to go through a whole fairy labyrinth to win back. As a kid I loved the movie, it was all kinds of fantastic. As a teenager, it was a little creepy to watch mom fan girl over David Bowie in tight pants with his goblin junk pretty much framed for display, but watching it with mom was something that happened at least once a year, usually more.

They dragged me in, mom had me shower and change, pulling up my shirt without notice to inspect my chest for damage as she tossed out the melted combats with the big smoking lighting hole. There was no damage to me, as proved my mom’s glaring and jabbing repeatedly to make sure my intact chest was not some sort of illusion. The shower was enough time for my burned hand to heal too(go go goblin healing!).

We talked about what happened. Mom collapsed on dad again as they cried for the baby they never knew, then hugged me hard enough to hurt because they one they were trying to process having lost after the army’s notification of my loss just walked back in their door alive and, well, goblin. It was a lot to process. At one point, dad’s stomach growled. He laughed softly, mom looked at the kitchen, then shook her head. In times of crisis, mom had the attitude that you ate out; no one needed to do dishes with real issues in front of you.

“Lets go to Tommy’s!” Mom burst out. That was my favorite burger bar on Princess Street in Kingston.

I agreed with mom, Tommy’s sounded like a bloody wonderful idea. There was one problem. I either looked like a monster from a horror movie, or a really well recognized regular at the restaurant who was just declared legally dead.

“Mom, I can’t exactly go as me, or as, well, fake me.” I argued reasonably.

Dad punched my shoulder and laughed. “Jareth, stop being an idiot. You know the stories, I told enough of them to you. You have fairy glamour, I guess you always had, but it didn’t answer to you. It answers to you now. You could look like whoever you wanted, as long as you had a strong enough mental image of them, and you could probably sound like them too. Fairies were good at that, half the problem with fairies is they were so good at faking being someone else that half the time they got invited in just on the implication of who they were. They can’t lie, any more than you can, but you don’t have to work that hard to let people believe what they think they see. Just let them decide who you are and roll with it. You could be anyone you like!”

Fuck. Well that figures. Half a conversation in and dad is better at being a fairy that I was. Some goblin lord I am turning out to be. While I was trying to figure out what to be, mom leaped off the couch and ran to the TV stand. She came back with a DVD case in her hands and puppy dog eyes turned on high beams.

“NO!” I shouted.

“Jareth please?” Mom asked, batting her eyelashes at me.

“Fucking not doing it!” I protested, blushing hotly, and turning to look to dad for the voice of reason.

Dad, that filthy traitor buried his face in his hands and was laughing so hard tears were streaming down his face.

“Please Jareth, you know I never ask you for anything!” Mom said, batting those eyelashes at me again. I laughed when she did this to dad. I mean, when she stopped being hard core forensic accountant professional woman and turned into squeeing fan girl dad’s resistance to her went to zero. It turns out, mine was inherited from him. Fucking hell. I gave in.

She beamed as she stood holding the case to Labyrinth. I had been named after Jareth the Goblin King played by the late, great, David Bowie. I turned on my glamour and tried to become a young David Bowie. Mom turned glaring and started to tap her foot like she did when dad was busy arguing himself into a night on the couch. I finally understood what she was demanding and wanted desperately to change places with the fake me on the autopsy slab. Surely being cut open by steel scalpels had to be less painful than this? Not an option apparently. Finally, I caved in.

Mom full on fangirled. I stood, now wrapped in glamour as Jareth the Goblin King, in the dance tights that looked painted on with a whole lot of my junk thrust way out in front for inspection. I had the full elf lord hair do, the too perfect for human beauty of the Goblin King that made me wonder if David hadn’t been one of the elf lords bastards, I mean, the dude was too pretty to be purely human you know? I looked more like the Goblin King than the Goblin King did in the movie because the fairy magic knew what they were trying to capture and wove it all into the image. My voice was a thing that wove spells, that is not poetry, or hyperbole. I mean the elf lord power my dead changeling partner had claimed in life now rested in me and knew how to do just that. Worse, he didn’t know how not to, or if he did, that wasn’t the part of him that got called up when I wrapped myself in Goblin King mode. I grew up watching this movie, I knew in the depths of my soul what David Bowie was portraying in that role, the wild untamed power of fairy, the wonder, the magic, the danger, the madness. The old wild magic unbound by mortal laws, drawn like a moth to the flame of mortal need, mortal passion, and mortal hearts. When I drew this on, it meant too much for me to have any control over how deep it called upon my connection to that realm. This was the memory my own mind used to process the unknowable thing I had turned out to be. I could not be half a Goblin King, if I wore this, I wore the whole damned thing.

Mom had dad taking pictures like this was Comic-con and I was her Cosplay win of the century. Dad was enjoying the photo shoot with a right good will that showed him to be more sadistic than I am at my worst, but he was picking up the bill for the coming meal, and he had no idea how much I could eat now. I would make him pay. That is how I came to pile myself into the back of the Ford Fusion with mom, as dad played chauffeur, and headed downtown for burgers. Mom, dad, and the straight off the big screen Jareth the Goblin King.