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A long time ago, seven hundred fae generations to be prescise. A Goblin King was betrothed to a Seelie princess. they had known each other since childhood like many courtiers do and over the centuries they had fallen very much in love. However the High Prince of the Seelie court was also in love with the princess and grew insanely jealous at the pairs engagement. He sent his own private army to kill the loathesome goblin and rescue the fair maiden. What he didn't reckon on is that goblins are harder to kill than cockroaches and if the world were to suddenly explode they'd probably wonder what all the racket was a bout.
After vanquishing the Prince's entire guard, the Goblin King decided that he needed to protect his bride from anything that could harm her. So he began plans for a magnificent Labyrinth to be built around his city, so that any invaders who breached it's walls would be lost forever. The Goblins worked tirelessly to build it, but the magical walls seemed to go on forever and the Labyrinth was almost impossible to finish and it is still being built to this day.

Well that's what the fairy tale says anyway, but the present Goblin King was a little more skeptical about these things. What he did know was that his ancestors were indeed a mixture of fae and goblin stock, and that the Labyrinth had been intended to be a lot bigger but the plans had disapeared. There was also the unsettling little detail of the hereditary insanity that cropped up in his family from time to time.

He would not have given it a second thought, had he not been rummaging through the more decrepid parts of the castle library only to find a mysterious tome filled with maps, plans, designs and protection spells and seals. Right down to the very last stone. Only then did the idea occur to him that the Labyrinth could very easily be finished...

"When I agreed to stay with you, I most certainly didn't expect to be doing masonary work." Leoven complained, wiping the sweat from his brow.

"Well would you entrust this kind of work to goblins?" Jareth replied, waving his hands enthusiastically and dropping his trowel in the process. "This isn't ordinary brick and mortar, this is an important spell casting ritual."

"From that magic book of yours again?" Leoven retorted with his usual cynisism. They had been working on the Labyrinth together, with the help of several other sorcerors in the area, for about six months now, and b
y now they were all thoroughly exhausted. For it was not just manual labour but an awful lot of complicated spells, some he had never even seen before or heard of. However if today went well they would be finished by nightfall. But the light was fading fast.

"It's been lost for thousands of years. This isn't just history, this is an experiment. Just imagine what the Labyrinth could do if it was complete and working properly." said Jareth, he was getting way to excited about all this.

"Let's see, it'll be bigger and harder to get through." said Leoven sarcastically "The mind boggles, Jareth, it really does."

"Oh shut up, we only have a few more bricks to go." cried the Goblin King. And so the monarch and the unseelie lord carried on until the last stone was in place.

((This is my re-write of the original post, which was so much better. This one sucks, I swore for about half an hour when my computer died on me.))

"Well now what?" said Leoven as the last stone was aset in place. "What's this amazing thing that's supposed to happen once it's finished?" He had heard that madness ran deep within the Goblin King's bloddline, maybe this was the begining of something bad.

They waited in a tense silence for a few minutes. "See, I knew this was a waste of time." said the Unseelie angrily but he was cut off when a large crystal orb bounded out from the shadows and bounced off the side of his head, knocking him to the ground while the little orb landed neatly in Jareth's palm.

Jareth let out a startled cry, at first he had thought getting his hand burned was weird, but now there was a.....thing standing in front of him and staring at him. What on earth was it? Had it somehow come out of the crystal? He gave Leoven a pleading look but the Unseelie lord seemed to have lost consciousness, what a great help he was.

"Who?...What? Who are you?" he said, looking rather gormless for a King, but to say he was shocked was a massive understatement. But oh well, at least he hadn't fainted, so he could retain some dignity.

Jareth froze as his personal space was horribly neglected. He wasn't used to such informality and it had been years since anyone had put their arms around him, except Macy when he was still a kid, but that didn't count at all.

"Hey, this is uncalled for. What are you doing!" he said, blushing angrily. Goblin Kings didn't blush. He hadn't blushed since he had hit puberty, it was against the whole bloody natural order.

Jareth looked away. He had always loved the Labyrinth, every wall and every plant and every animal that lived there. There was not a road or path that he hadn't explored, no grove where he hadn't rested. He knew where things grew and lived and how to care for them, and how the light looked at different times of the day, and it's rhythms and how it changed. Macy boasted that he knew his way around, but only Jareth ha memorised every single dtail the place had to offer. It was his childhood, his heritage and his life.
"But I loved a building. A building!" he said, confused and angered. "I don't even know who you are."

"The voices?" said Jareth, not quite believing what he was hearing "They were all you?" he felt surprisingly guilty as that look appeared on Eidolon's face, the poor thing looked so hurt.
"And you were the one who helped me, all those times. And left me the book." It was all a little much to take in. "Have you been here with me, all this time?"

He looked away again, back to his comatose companion who was beginning to wake up. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you, I was just surprised, that's all."

"Oh Jareth, I had the weirdest dream. There was a crystal and this creature popped out of it and..." Leoven looked up at the other two, bleary eyed and disorientated. "Oh never mind."

"This is Eidolon, Leoven." Jareth explained "He's the Labyrinth's...soul made manifest, I think."

"Is that right?" said the Unseelie and raised an eyebrow. "I was always told that walls have ears but didn't expect them to be quite as long as yours, sir." he was going to need a stiff drink and a nice lie down when they got back to the castle.