Disclaimer: I don't own Wicked.

A young girl with light brown hair, probably only the age of nine or ten, was rummaging through her mother's things, searching for a pair of ruby slippers her mother had described in her stories about a wonderful land of Oz where witches lives, and little people existed in great numbers. She didn't believe her mother when she said these were merely stories, nothing more, and that they had never happened. However, the ten year old felt that the emotion in her mother's voice was so real that these mysterious slippers had to exist.

The girl's name was Elena, but was usually called Ellie for short. She was an adventurous, but a very sad girl and desperately wanted to visit this wonderful land her mother had taught her about. And most importantly, she wanted to meet the good witch, Glinda, whom her mother, Dorothy, spoke highly of.

Ellie sighed when she thought she had come across the last box. The whole reason why she wanted to go to Oz too was because Dorothy had passed away due to a terrible case of the flu. Dorothy had just died the night before, so she knew people would be coming to take her away to go live with another family. Her father wasn't around, and quite frankly, she never cared for him when he was.

Ellie didn't want to live with another family, she just couldn't. Dorothy had been the only person in her life that she deeply cared about, and now she was gone. Poor Ellie never grew up knowing any relatives due to the fact Dorothy moved to South Carolina when she found out she was pregnant with her so called boyfriend's child, following him to try and track him down but to no avail. Kids at school weren't very nice to her, either, calling her a bastard child; even a sinner. This caused the poor girl to become antisocial with kids her age, older, and younger. She was called the Devil's Child by other parents simply because she was born out of wedlock. And to make things worse for herself, she was of a mixed race. Her father was supposedly African American. Interracial children (especially in the South, she learned) was one of the worst things to be. And the fact that her mother was only fourteen years older than her only made things worse.

Things couldn't have been easy for Dorothy, either, but Ellie doubted that it was as bad as she had been treated. Kids were crueler.

A box in the far corner caught her beautiful chocolate brown eyes. She reached for it and opened it quickly, revealing the ruby slippers. She gasped and was so happy that her mother's stories might be true. She quickly put them on her feet. They were a few sizes too big at first, but somehow they shrunk to fit her feet perfectly.

Ellie heard the door open and heard a police officer's voice saying things that were muffled by the closed door. She knew that they'd come into this room soon, since it was Dorothy's and all, plus, Dorothy laid dead in her bed. Ellie walked over to her mother and stared into her eyes; she didn't bother to close them, she didn't want to. She kissed Dorothy's cold cheek. "I'm gonna go to Oz, mama, just like you did," she whispered and stroked her hand with her small thumb. "I'm gonna go live there, mama, I'm going to go find Glinda and I'm gonna go live with her and she will be my new mama, but she won't ever replace you. I can't stay here. I hope you'll be very proud of me, mama. I'll grow up in Oz and have a lot of friends."

With that said, she tried to remember how Dorothy had gotten home. She closed her eyes. There's no place like home. She opened her eyes and clicked her heels together, already knowing they were magical. "There's no place like Oz," she tried. However, nothing happened. She was running out of time. She closed her eyes and clicked the heels again. "There's no place like home," she tried, thinking that if Oz would be her new home, it would work.

Ellie didn't feel a thing. She didn't feel herself floating or spinning out of control. She sighed, thinking that maybe only a tornado would bring her to a wonderful new land. Or maybe her mother was right; maybe they were just some stupid, yet breathtaking stories her mother had created. Ellie opened her eyes and gasped at what she saw.

She saw that she was standing on the infamous Yellow Brick Road her mother had been talking about! She looked around and saw the trees that created forests and those automobiles she rarely got to see in South Carolina.

Ellie didn't see a town, little people, or a giant bubble coming towards her containing Glinda as Dorothy described. However, the Yellow Brick Road was all she needed to find the Wizard of Oz so that he could bring her to Glinda, just like he had given Scarecrow a brain, the Tin Man a heart, and the Cowardly Lion Courage. With that thought and wanting to start her new life, she started running down the Yellow Brick Road.

Little did she know, she wasn't traveling in the right direction. Instead, she was traveling west towards a very large, black castle that certainly did not contain the Wizard or Glinda.

Hope you liked the prologue :)