A/N: This is a totally random idea that I had…consider it our reality's answer to Wicked…cough including the plot elements and names that really don't belong to me…

Disclaimer: Most of it is the property of whoever made the 1939 movie, and some of it's Gregory Maguire's.

It is difficult to believe that I am now a thirty-eight year old spinster. Of all my possible futures, this is one no one would have predicted for bright, vivacious Almira Gulch, raven-haired radical expatriate writer living in Paris and traversing Europe on a whim in 1924.

I had a pen name, then: Elvira Ravene. A simple twist of letters for the first name, chancing me from a prim princess (princess is what Almira means) to an elfin one, a fey creature, wild and hidden and strange. The surname was derived from Raven, one of my lover's pet names for me, for my hair- and from ravine, a synonym for Gulch. Empty, a hole in the ground.

But I was not always the bereft, loveless, childless woman in black, the witchlike figure of children's nightmares, a fixation for their fantasies. Doesn't every town need a house like mine for the children to dare each other to run up and touch, to disabuse them, eventually, of their fairy-tale notions of good and evil but to keep alive, even later in life, that little seed of fear that maybe, somewhere, witches are real? I was only too happy to provide that, after everything. But before that…I was different. The people of this small, close-minded town were not with me, when, at sixteen, I went to university, no small achievement for a woman in 1917. They were not with me when I went to Paris and lived in what can only be described as a garret. I lived off of baguettes and wine and hideously strong coffee and wrote feverishly and was loved, loved, loved with ferocity by the man I am waiting for, still, though he will never, can never come. The man whose child I carried and lost once, whose child I carried and bore, and had to give away for the sake of goddamned propriety.

Oh, hell.

And they wonder?

They wonder why I do not speak of trivialities with them, or, worse, of their children? Didn't anyone ever wonder what made those witches of fairy-tales want to curse infant princesses in their gilded cribs?

I was a princess once.

I was an elfin princess, and I was a raven.

A raven.

A harbinger of doom.

…

Finley, my dear heart's name was; Finley Dubois. Magic of the woods, it meant in its entirety, like my name, in its entirety, means Princess of emptiness.

He was half Irish and half French, and he loved me thousands of ways and gave me a name for each one.

My own name, Almira. My princess, he would say, my queen. Mira, my father's name for me, he used when he wanted my attention, to call for me in a crowd. Raven, his code for me because he needed to believe in his own importance and need for such a code, and in love. Fiachra, Gaelic for raven. Elvira, my elf¸ he would say; my faerie, my Fae.

Amour, he would say; cherie. Ma coeur, he called me; my heart. And I melted.

I would drop my pen, letting ink dark as midnight engulf the page, and let him engulf me.

…

I became pregnant, and lost the baby. His baby, mine.

…

He died. It has never been clear quite how. Officially, they called it a random homicide. But chance could never be so cruel.

…

I discovered that once again I was carrying his child, so I shut myself away from the world and wrote for the remaining seven months of my pregnancy, letting no one see me. And when I knew that the child was coming, I calmly set aside my papers and went to a convent to give birth.

They asked me no questions, so I didn't have to lie. I left them my daughter, whom I told them to call Faith, but to me, she has always been Fae.

And then, bereft, barren, Princess of Emptiness, I came back here.

I gardened and read and kept to myself and wore mourning for my lover and my lost children, dead and alive.

I would watch the children of the town, happy and laughing, walk to and from the schoolhouse, past my window. I watched their joys and triumphs and small defeats.

And I hated them, because they were not mine. They were not Fae.

I imagine her daily. She will be tall, as Finley was and I am; she will be thin and lithe and quick, like Fin always described me. She will have my raven hair and his dark, brooding eyes. She will be fair and freckled and out of place.

She will write, as I will never do again. Poetry, not prose; fragments of stories are better, in the end, than the whole thing.

We do not want to feel sorry for the witch, after all. We want someone to hate, someone to blame, and it's better if they are empty, if they have no story.

So that is who I am, that is the purpose I serve. It must have been preordained. I am, after all, the Princess of Emptiness.