(This little story of mine was originally made by me on AO3 and I decided to add it here too to reach a wider audience. This story updates there first then afterwards ill post here :) So be sure to check it out on AO3 if you have the time!)
You alre...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The Prince of the Land of Stench did not like it when people kept secrets from him.
He wasn't stupid, far from it. He knew Jareth and Mairia were hiding something from him, he'd known them long enough to know their tells. Mairia calling him willingly to her kingdom knowing his stench would kill her beloved pets was a red flag in of itself.
Jareth's avoidance of him altogether was another one. Especially since he all but threw a new human toy at him without any explanation as to where he had gotten it.
The Fae love information almost as much as they love humans, so being denied one of the two by another of their kind was considered a grave offense.
How rude of them.
They had tried to hide certain things from him in the past, whenever Jareth got a new runner or when Mairia got a new pet were such occasions when they did not share. But the Prince did not have a fixation on humans like his allies did, he did not care for games or relationships, he had even made it a point in the past to break said toys should they be kept away from him.
No, he was a collector of a different sort.
His body was a living yet reluctant museum, full of all sorts of creatures gathered from different points of time in his endless life. The sensation of their struggles to free themselves from him was akin to the feeling of a heartbeat, it was a sensation that he did not even notice anymore, that's how natural it had become to him. He prided himself in his wide variety of beings within his cage of moss and rotting flesh, even reveled in it at times.
No, his fixation was not of humans themselves, but the flesh and bones that made them.
Kings, beggars, innocents, murderers and all those inbetween had become his. All had fallen to this fate in follys of their own making. whether from failing Jareths maze to save their loved ones, falling out of favor with Mairia's fickle personality or simply unlucky enough to stumble into his realm. It didn't matter how important they were in the human world, they all became his new arms and mouths eventually. Succumbing to his body was an inevitable as death once he got his hands on them.
As much as they screamed, none of them were never let go.
Jareth and Mairia considered him a lonesome, pitiful thing due to his recluse nature, a fact that had them inviting him to their kingdoms every now and then for 'company'. But they couldn't ever understand he was never truly alone. Not really.
How could one be lonely when there were so many people trapped in your body?
Regardless of company, he supposed in terms of 'friends' he could be considered extremely lacking, there has never been a being who willingly spent time with him besides the other two rulers. But it wasn't like he minded, he preferred people being scared and disgusted of him, it's what he counted on.
Still, he didn't like that his two 'friends' were doing something behind his back.
Hence, he had done a bit of snooping of his own, sending out creatures from himself that had been a part of him for so long they had forgotten they had ever been anything else. Looking through their eyes, They told him of strange occurrences within the Goblin Kings Labyrinth. How things had started growing from the once barren ground, how the once dead air was enlivened with wind and smells. How Mairia's favorite throne room had been consumed by a strange tree that suddenly popped out of the ground.
