The Land of What-Might-Have-Been

by Straightjacketed

After spending so many years wishing that things had been different, what happens when, halfway through their final meeting, Elphaba and Glinda find themselves unexpectedly plunged into the worst of all possible worlds? AU.

74. Worlds Collide

A/N: Ow. I'm back, and... somehow, I managed to finish this chapter.

We're in the home stretch, folks, and at this point, it's like pulling teeth: it took me a whole month to get this damn chapter exactly to my satisfaction, and I am certain I may have gone completely made in the process. I was sorely tempted to chainsaw this in half to make two new chapter, but I couldn't do it without disrupting the flow of the action. Consequently, this is a long chapter with a lot of revelations - brace yourself for a lot of craziness crammed into a short space of time.

Anyway, without further ado, the latest chapter: read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: only my aches and pains are my own :)

---

The vault was exactly as Elphaba had seen it in her dreams.

From where she stood, she could clearly see that this concourse-like living room led off to many other rooms, most of which Alphaba had only glimpsed once or twice in her many visits: a library, a bathroom, a gymnasium, a kitchen, a dining room, a garden, an engine room for generators and life-support, and a bedchamber fit only for the daughters of the Empress herself. From the very beginning, this place had been intended to be the zenith of physical luxury, and no expense had been spared. Here there could be found top-of-the-line exercise equipment, the best literature Unbridled Radiance had to offer, beautiful oil paintings on the walls, five-star food and drink available from the dumbwaiter, and beds enchanted to ensure total relaxation.

Here, Elarose and Essella would want for nothing in the world – except of course for the freedom to leave the complex, for once the two were inside, there was no way of opening the door and no alternate exits. For all intents and purposes, this place was its own secluded little world, with all the comforts of home and all the security of an oubliette.

It also had a distinctly uncomfortable atmosphere vaguely reminiscent of an insane asylum, for everything here was white. Every single shade of the colour from milk to bone could be seen here in one fixture or another, from the expensive-looking wallpaper to the plush couches, from the ankle-deep carpet to the curtains shrouding the windows. Of course, given that they were still several feet underground, the windows looked out on nothing but painted landscapes on a wall lit entirely by artificial daylight, but the Empress had done her best to make it look convincing for the sake of her daughters all the same.

Standing amidst the dazzling glow of her surroundings, Elphaba felt like a shadow, like a blob of mud tracked over the snowy-white carpet. The dream-memories only made it worse: the longer she stood here, the clearer these recent glimpses became, until she couldn't help but remember them just as effortlessly as the rest of Alphaba's recollections of the past… and with that came horrifying new certainties.

But just as she was starting to wonder a bit about why the Empress had imprisoned her daughters in a complex attached to the Crèche, there was an excited yell from the bedchamber.

"Mother! Essie, to the front room, quick! She's here! She's here!"

A moment later, Elarose and Essella appeared in the doorway.

As expected, they had been brought up to mimic the Empress, both being slender, graceful and pretty, but they both sported their own distinguishing elements: Elarose had clearly inherited Fiyero's easy smile and star-of-the-stage composure, while Essella was shyer, slightly shorter, and preferred to let her sister take the lead; Elarose wore her hair tied back in a single braid, while Essella kept her dark tresses loose and glossy; Elarose had clearly been exercising, for she was still dressed in her sporting gear and a faint rime of sweat layered her brow, while Essella was clad in a white dress and keeping a rather dense-looking book tucked under her arm.

Both of them still sported the deformities that the Mentor's bioweapon had awakened in them: their hands, arms and legs were green, disrupted here and there by large patches of pale skin – courtesy of the latest efforts of the Empress to restore them to "normality." It evidently hadn't been successful, for already the pale skin was sporting a faint green tinge. All of this was exactly as Elphaba had expected.

What she hadn't expected was for Elarose and Essella to still be children.

It had been decades since the two of them had been interred here in the vault; by now, they should have both been adults, probably pushing forty if Elphaba's calculations were correct. And yet somehow, they'd spent the last twenty-odd in this cell without aging a single day. No, more than that: they were actually younger now. In the last clear dream-memory of a visit to this dismal place, Elarose and Essella had been somewhere in the vicinity of twelve to thirteen years old. Now they couldn't be much older than nine.

This couldn't be possible, at least according to the standards that the Empress had set herself… but looking at the girls' clothing, Elphaba couldn't help but noticing hastily-covered stitching on the sporting gear and the dress – signs of being taken in to fit a much younger wearer. And with the memories growing clear and clearer by the minute, there was no mistaking what had happened here.

Meanwhile, the two girls were excitedly hurrying up to her; though they couldn't yet see her face under the brim of her hat, they could definitely recognize her figure and her long dark hair. No doubt they were probably a little confused as to why the Empress was dressed all in black, but right now, the children were too excited to ask questions in any detail.

"We didn't think you were going to visit again so soon, mother!" Elarose gabbled excitedly. "Just wait 'til you see what Essie drew today, you're going to love it!"

"Come on, 'Rose, it wasn't that great; I'm still learning how-"

The two stopped short, finally noticing the face under Elphaba's hat. For a moment, Elarose and Essella could only stare in horror at their "mother's" face, as if unable to comprehend the fact that the Empress now possessed their own deformities.

Then, Elarose blurted out, "Mother, you… you're like us!"

Essella, now a pale shade of tea-green, very slowly collapsed onto the nearby ottoman and sat down in shock. "Did the Mentor get you too?"

"What's going to happen now?"

"You can cure this as well, right?"

"Have they already caught the people who did this?"

"How soon can the mage-surgeons have all three of us cured? You were saying it'll only take a week to make a proper cure, so it shouldn't take that long for you, should it?"

"Does this mean you can stay with us for a little longer?"

"Rose!"

"I'm just asking, Essie, I'm just asking. I mean, there's gotta be a good side to this, right, Mother? You'll at least be able to stay with us while you're being cured, right?"

Elphaba took a deep breath, almost overwhelmed by sheer volume of questions. She'd almost never encountered children this eager to ask anything of her: even Dorothy had taken a little while to warm up to her and indulge her curiosity, having been too terrified to ask any questions, much less the kind that Elarose and Essella were asking her right now. But there was another side to her hesitation that Elphaba couldn't quite put her finger on, a strange sense of mingled nostalgia and attachment; it was the same emotion she'd felt when she'd been carrying Dorothy out of the Hellion's lair, when the girl had sleepily hugged her – what Glinda had called "getting parental."

Perhaps this wasn't so surprising: after all, she'd seen so much of Alphaba's memories, lived through so many moments of her other self's life that – on very rare occasions – it was hard to tell if it was Elphaba or the Empress who'd really been there. She had experienced the moment of the twins' conception; she had lived through every day of the pregnancy, seen her belly swell, felt her infant daughters kick and stir within her, right up until the Empress had given birth. She could even recall holding baby Elarose and Essella in her arms, as if they really were her own children. Was it really so shocking that she felt an echo of how Alphaba no doubt felt towards her daughters?

But something Elarose had said was gnawing at her, and she held up a hand for silence. To her surprise, the two children instantly went deathly-silent; there was no trailing off, no reluctance, no grumbling, no attempts to continue talking – only an instant plunge into silence, as if they'd been trained to that end.

"One moment please," she announced, trying to sound as much like the Empress as possible. "How long did you say it was going to take?"

"Just one more week."

"One more? Uh, Elarose, this might sound like a stupid question, but there's been – uh – some slight confusion in the timekeeping department. How long have you been down here?"

"Just a week, Mother," said Elarose, smiling guilelessly up at her. "Exactly seven days and fifteen hours."

"And we'll be cured and free to go in another seven," chimed in Essella, who was clearly trying to regain her confidence.

Once again, the most recent and murkiest of the dream-memories were growing clearer, and being joined by new ones that Elphaba had yet to experience. It took all her might to keep the surge of recollections from dominating her consciousness as it had before, though it probably helped that she hadn't been taking dream-pills for a while. Eventually, as knowledge streamed into her brain like water from a burst dam, Elphaba understood the truth – not just why the heirs to Unbridled Radiance were now younger than ever, but why they'd been imprisoned in a facility meant exclusively for regressed children.

All those years ago, Empress had been foiled time and again in her effort to cure her daughters, but as time went on and the failures stacked up, she'd been forced to confront the fact that Elarose and Essella were still aging. Though the fear that her scions might one day grow as old and ugly as the Mentor had hounded her from the moment her daughters turned eighteen, they could not be Purified, for the sacred surgeries could not erase the green; even the flesh-porcelain concocted specifically for the twins was tainted by the Mentor's bioweapon.

So, where ideological purity failed, hypocrisy stepped in.

Just as she had with the newest prisoners of the Crèche, the Empress had used Morrible's botched immortality serum to make her daughters younger – but at a greatly-modified dosage, heavily diluted in comparison to the amounts that the Childlike Researchers and their ilk had taken. It did not cause their ages to fluctuate as the Researchers did, but merely reduced them to children.

This had been intended only as a stopgap measure, a means of ensuring that they would not be lost to the imperfections of old age before a cure could be found and Purification could ensue… but as the years went by and cure after cure failed, the Empress began using it as a means of maintaining a clean slate. It had soon become possible to modify the twins' memories through direct applications of the distilled youth serum to their brains, erasing any undesirable elements and reducing them to the level of innocence they'd possessed when they'd arrived in the vault – give or take a few manufactured memories just to ensure that no verisimilitude was lost in the process.

Every time Elarose and Essella became aware that the cures were failing, they were regressed; every time they began to lose hope, they were regressed; every time they began to resent their imprisonment, they were regressed; every time they expressed an opinion that suggested Deviant sympathies, they were regressed.

How many times had this happened in the last few decades? By now, it was so routine that the Empress had long since lost count, and likely hadn't even attended for most of these operations, nor had she cared enough to keep precise records of them: it could be done in the space of a minute by now, as risk-free as trimming toenails and every bit as casual. Over and over again, Alphaba had wiped the slate clean, resetting the bodies and brains of her children to manageable levels whenever their bodies got too old or their minds grew too rebellious – all in preparation for the day that they could be cured. They had been raised to be Alphaba's heirs, to rule over her original territories when the Empress finally moved on to greater heights of conquest, and nothing less than total perfection would satisfy their mother's standards.

Staring down at these two poor, neglected children, her mind alive with memories of the imperial heirs being held down and injected against their will, Elphaba felt a newfound wellspring of hatred for the Empress. Had she not witnessed the horrible things that her counterpart was willing to do in order to see her principles triumph, she would have considered this unfathomable, impossible to consider from even the most deranged perspective. As it was, this represented just another new low… but still, Elphaba couldn't help but feel the first stirrings of rage thundering to life.

The anger must have shown on her face, because Essella's pallid features instantly froze in an expression of pure horror. "Was this my fault?" she asked, almost in tears. "Did I… infect you somehow? Oh mother, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry…"

Elarose put a protective arm around her sister, gently shushing her. "Hey, I was around her, too – this is on me as well-"

At this point, Elphaba held a hand again: she didn't want to use whatever instincts that the Empress had conditioned these two girls with, but she desperately needed to put an end to the self-castigation before it got out of hand.

"None of this is your fault, girls," she said gently. "This happened by itself, and as long as I'm like this, I'll be staying down here with you."

"You mean it?" squealed Elarose, practically bouncing with excitement.

"Of course."

"But what about your work?" asked Essella. "What about all the people who need you to make decisions for them? What about the Radiant Laws? What about the war?"

"Paragon and my courtiers can deal with all that for today: I've gone to a lot of trouble to make sure they're fit for the job – it'd be a shame if they never got to prove me right, wouldn't it?"

Elarose giggled, but Essella was still pensive. "But you've got a country to run. We can't be that important, can we? I mean, you said you had higher priorities, and…"

It took a superhuman effort of will to keep herself from screaming in outrage. How could anyone, much less a parent, actually say that to a child's face? Was the Empress really so deprived of empathy that she couldn't understand the damage she was doing to her own children, that she couldn't be bothered to spare their feelings? She wasn't raising daughters – she wasn't even raising heirs to her empire, but slaves in all but name. Even if they were ever cured and released from captivity, this gilded cage of a half-life would be all they'd ever know: a plush, bleak eternity spent managing territories that Alphaba could no longer be bothered with, ruling in the name of a distant, unpleasable mother who loved them only for what they could do for her perfect world – which she loved more than her own children anyway.

In the end, there was only one thing Elphaba could do under the circumstances. Without saying a word, she knelt down and flung her arms around the two girls, drawing them into a reassuring hug – and once again feeling as if these children really were her own daughters.

"Of course you're that important," she whispered. "There's no higher priority in the world than you: you're worth more than all of Unbridled Radiance, more than the world itself. I'm sorry I ever told you otherwise, and I'm sorry for staying away for so long."

For a moment, it looked as if Essella was going to disagree – no doubt years of conditioning in effect. But then she blinked away tears, and buried herself in Elphaba's arms.

Had Elphaba planned to embark on this from the beginning? Not exactly, but now that she was here and she recalled the layout of the vault exactly, she knew that there would be no escaping. The only exit led back through the Crèche, and security was no doubt converging on the place at this very moment, accompanied by the Empress herself. As soon as the rioting Childlike Researchers were under control, they'd unseal the doors to the vault and have Elphaba cornered like the proverbial rat. Nor was she planning on taking hostages; after all, now that she'd seen that Alphaba's daughters were still children – innocents in every sense of the word – she wouldn't have been able to raise a hand to either of them, even before she'd started feeling maternal about the two.

But as long as security was focussing on her, they weren't focussing on Dorothy – and if security around the wall had cleared out as much as Elphaba hoped, she'd have the time and freedom to eliminate the remaining defences. And as long as the Empress was busy dealing with Elphaba, she wouldn't be able to stop the Deviant Fleet from converging on the city until it was too late.

So, for what little time she had left, Elphaba would be the mother that the Empress couldn't be; she would give the twins her undivided attention and she would care for them better than her counterpart ever had in the last few decades. And if there was still time enough in the day, she would tell them the truth and finally give Elarose and Essella a chance to recover their lives. By now, they deserved a chance at freedom – not just from this vault, but from the sham that was their existence and the joyless, cold-hearted design that was their future.

And so Elphaba let the twins lead her away, already feeling as if they really were her children, as if they were finally reunited as a family again...

---

Dorothy had no idea what Elphaba had done to get the guards to leave, but whatever it was, it had worked so well that she hadn't encountered a single guard in the last few minutes: the chambers were empty of guards, the walls and watchtowers were unoccupied, and on the rare occasion she did end up triggering an alarm, nobody arrived to investigate.

More than once, she'd seen Vigilant Eyes soaring through the air, and she'd thought for sure that she was about to be caught, killed or worse, but the Eyes didn't even spare her a second glance: they were all bound for the very heart of the city, and all of the seemed to be travelling via the underground. It was a welcome sight, but after witnessing a swarm of no less than thirty Eyes pouring into the Sepulchre, Dorothy had to wonder a bit about what Elphaba was up to: there was only so much her burgeoning insight could tell her, apart from the fact that her friend was alive and safe.

In the end, though, there wasn't much that Dorothy could do about the situation. She'd asked for help, and she'd gotten it; now she had to make it count: she had destroyed seven of the enchantments in place, and with five to go, she had to keep moving.

Forcing air into her lungs, she sped onwards, back up the stairs and along the wall to the next chamber in line.

---

Thankfully, it didn't take too long for her troops to suppress the Childlike Researchers: against overworked orderlies and surprised guards, they were a startlingly effective force (especially once they'd managed to break a few more of the anti-magic enchantments) but when pitted against an army of trained adults with magicians of their own by their side, the Researchers were all too easily outmatched. After all, the maturity-challenged professionals of the Crèche might have been armed with a lifetime's worth of scientific knowledge, mechanical skill and magical power, but in the end, they were just children running rampant; as soon as they found themselves up against determined adults with more power than them, they backed down and stood in the corner like good little boys and girls.

Of course, there were still a few Researchers running free somewhere in the Sepulchre, most prominently the inhabitants of the solitary confinement block, and there were some very messy casualties to mop up as a result, but that could wait until Elphaba was disposed of.

With the way through the Crèche clear, the Empress immediately strode through the complex until she finally reached the door to the vault in which her most precious possessions were hidden. As she feared, it had already been opened, and Paragon confirmed that there was already someone inside; fortunately, Paragon assured her that neither Elarose nor Essella had been harmed.

However, something in the thinking engine's tone made her hesitate as she made for the doors. "And why," she asked coldly, "are you able to tell me this when you didn't alert me to Elphaba's presence in the Sepulchre? Why is it that I didn't hear that a hostile intruder was in danger of breaching the vault until my automated alarm clued me in, Paragon?"

There was an uncomfortable silence from the overhead speakers.

"You're resisting my control mechanisms," the Empress snarled. "I don't know how, but you've been keeping facts from me again: you didn't tell me Elphaba was here because you didn't want to. How? How is this possible?"

There was a pause, and when Paragon finally spoke, it was with the Wizard's voice. "I'm sorry," he said softly. "But there are some things even I can't do: you might have overridden me, kept me from holding the Vigilant Eyes at bay, but you can't make me condemn my own children to death."

The Empress let out a hiss of rage, barely stopping herself from taking another bite out of her lip. "She's not your daughter, old man! She's not from your world, remember?"

"All the same, she's my daughter – as are you. The same programming aegis that protects you also shields her; I cannot bring myself to harm her any more than I could bring myself to harm you." Paragon hesitated, and then Dr Dillamond's voice added, "Besides, the two of you are more alike than you think…"

This time, she just managed to save her bottom lip by forcing all her anxiety into her jaws, grinding her teeth together until one of her molars cracked in two with an audible crunch. This would have been the perfect juncture tor the Empress to use the thinking engine's punishment systems, just so the rebellious little gestalt had something to think about – but for once, she had neither the time nor the inclination to do so. Right now, all he hatred was reserved for Elphaba.

"Cute," she growled, unable to think of a witty rejoinder. "Really cute. Enjoy this little triumph while you can, Paragon: the technicians will be making contact with your hate any minute now, and we'll soon see just how much Frexspar Thropp likea your darling daughter when he's fully manifested once again."

And with that, she turned back to the door. By now, she could see that Elphaba had locked it behind her and probably ruined the mechanisms for good measure – either through enchantment or through good old-fashioned sabotage. Either way, there'd be no way for any mundane force to enter the vault. Fortunately, the Empress didn't qualify as a mundane force.

Judging by the mangled wreckage strewn across the corridor outside and the crumpled heap of reinforced steel half-embedded in a wall, Elphaba had broken into the Creche by wrenching its doors right out of their housing. The Empress did better: with one almighty flex of magic, she sent a solid wave of dazzling white light down the hall towards it, a hurricane of purest thaumatugical puissance thundering across the floors and walls, burning so brightly and so powerfully that tiles in its path shattered like glass, that the metal of the door was already glowing cherry-red long before the wave hit it.

There was a roar of sound, a cacophony of metal shrieking in protest and ceramic tiles cracking apart and cement crumbling and internal mechanisms straining to compensate-

-and when the light finally faded, the door was gone, melted, dissolved and evaporated into a rapidly-dissipating cloud of gas – along with most of the wall around it, a sizable chunk of the ceiling and floor, and at least two guards who'd been unlucky enough to be standing too close to the Empress at the time.

Smiling in spite of herself, the Empress stepped forward to face what could only be the ugliest of hostage situations, ready to face whatever atrocities that Elphaba had inflicted upon her children.

But when the smoke finally cleared, she was met with a sight that nothing in her wildest nightmares could have prepared her for.

---

For a little under three quarters of an hour, Elphaba lost herself in the role of mother to the twins.

With most of Alphaba's memories fully assimilated by now, she knew Elarose and Essella so well they might as well have been her own children, and it was easy to keep them happy. Quite apart from the fact that she knew everything they enjoyed and despised off by heart, the twins were so unaccustomed to having their mother around for long periods of time, and the prospect of having her around long enough to give them a little more attention than usual filled them with such delight that they were virtually bouncing off the walls with excitement.

In the thirty minutes that had followed her reintroduction, Elphaba had been taken on a tour of everything the twins had been working on over the course of the last week, from the four-foot-high stack of completed homework to the novella-sized book of magical exercises they'd been studying. They'd even shown her some of the personal projects they'd been busy with: Elarose, ever the more hands-on of the pair, had been hard at work in the gymnasium and was very eager to show Elphaba her trick of cartwheeling across the balance bars; Essella, meanwhile, was progressing quite rapidly through her piano studies, and was already moving on to increasingly complex works; not to be outdone, Elarose then showed Elphaba how she'd been trying her hand at sculpture, and had already producing some surprisingly realistic depictions of human faces; in the spirit of good-nature sibling rivalry, Essella then demonstrated her attempts to compose music of her own, at first simplistic but gradually becoming more and more inventive with every stanza.

And though she clapped her hands and hugged the twins with every performance, Elphaba was barely keeping her rage at bay: from the dream-memories, she knew that the twins had worked on these same projects over and over and over again for years on end, and had never had the chance to finish any of them. The moment they were regressed to their pre-incarceration settings, they lost all memory of the prior days: the books they'd read, the music they'd listened to, all the hard work they'd striven to produce were erased from their memory, just so the Empress wouldn't have to tolerate her daughters growing in ways she didn't approve of.

For good measure, the newly-unlocked dream-memories indicated that any evidence of their lives prior to each regression had to be erased, including their creations: sculptures were smashed, textiles were unravelled, manuscripts and paintings were incinerated, and sheet music was torn to shreds, all of it happening over and over again in another hypocritical display of the need for control outweighing any real appreciation of beauty.

But of course, Elphaba couldn't afford to let them know how angry she really was, nor could she reveal the truth to them: quite apart from the fact that they were still loyal servants of Unbridled Radiance and might just sound the alarm the moment she explained everything, she honestly didn't want to frighten either of the twins. So, she simply hugged them, held their hands, listened to their conversation, and offered what little help she could with their work. She knew she wasn't their mother – she was under no illusions in this respect – but as long as she was trapped here with them, she knew that they deserved more than what their real mother had given them. Then again, even if she had been able to find another way out of the vault, she probably wouldn't have made her exit anyway: frankly, Elarose and Essella had suffered enough abandonment and neglect in their lives without Elphaba adding to it.

Thus, the performances gave way to board games, and sibling rivalry was lost in gales of laughter and the rattle of dice. After forty-four minutes, a muffled commotion from behind the door finally alerted Elphaba to the fact that the Empress had taken the bait. A moment later, the vault shook so violently that all three of them were nearly flung to the ground by the tremors, forcing the twins to hang on to Elphaba until the chaos had finally subsided.

Hurrying to the concourse, the three of them were immediately greeted by a massive cloud of smoke, dust and other airborne debris. Elphaba raised a hand to magically sweep it aside, but no sooner had she done so, someone else beat her to the punch: the cloud rapidly dispersed, the dust cloud thinning until the three of them could see the gaping crater that had replaced the door, the wall and a sizable chunk of the floor and ceiling… and the figure now standing in the middle of it, quivering with rage.

The Empress wasn't looking her best today: her once-pristine white robe was now layered with dust from the explosion, the collar ringed with bloodstains, the hem scorched by minor magical blasts (presumably from the rebelling Childlike Researchers). Her once perfectly-groomed hair was befouled with dust and no longer reordered itself into its usual combed perfection, for several disarrayed strands now hung across Alphaba's face. And it was in her face where the full extent of her growing rage could be seen: her left eyelid was beginning to twitch and shudder ever-so-slightly; every so often, she would grind her teeth into her lower lip, biting down harder and harder until Elphaba swore she could hear flesh beginning to tear; for good measure, her chin was now crimson with drying bloodstains, a sight which didn't exactly inspire faith in her sanity.

Behind her, Colonel Gloss stood at the head of an army: several dozen armed soldiers had crowded into the passageway, and were awkwardly pointing their rifles directly at Elphaba – no easy task, considering that the Empress stood in their line of fire. The overwhelming majority of them looked terrified at the sight of an Irredeemable having breached their defences, while some merely looked enraged at the sight of their city being undermined by one of Unbridled Radiance's greatest enemies, and a few (most of them traitor mercenaries under Colonel Gloss's command) looked as if they'd missed too many paychecks to give a damn. However, all of them looked confused: thanks to Alphaba's work on the memories of her people, none of them knew about Elarose and Essella or the curse they had suffered; in fact, most of them probably hadn't even known that this chamber existed up until now. Obviously, the Empress must have been too panicked and too enraged to bother keeping her usual secrets, opting to bring an army with her rather than take risks with the life of her heirs on the line. That might work in Elphaba's favour… but unless she could buy enough time for reinforcements to arrive or figure out some way of twisting the confrontation to her advantage, this little contretemps was probably going to end with Elphaba dead or worse.

For a moment, the four of them remained frozen in tableau, with the Empress staring balefully at Elphaba with eyes aglow with hate and rage, Elphaba coldly returning her gaze without so much as blinking, and the twins struggling to tell the two incarnations of their mother apart. Then, snarling like a rabid animal, the Empress broke eye contact with Elphaba just long enough to fix Elarose and Essella with an imperious glare.

"Get away from her now," she hissed.

"Mother, what's going on? Why does she look just like-"

"NOW, Essella! Get away from that thing before she hurts you!"

Essella, ever the obedient one, instinctively started to edge away from Elphaba – but at the last minute, Elarose grabbed her hand and held her in place. "Just a second," she said loudly. "Who is this really, mother? Why does she look like you? And why hasn't she hurt us already?"

Elphaba almost smiled: Elarose had clearly inherited an atom of her mother's long-smothered rebellious streak, and even all the days of reconditioning she'd suffered hadn't been able to erase it.

Meanwhile, the Empress was fuming in rage. "She's nothing," she snarled through gritted teeth. "She's an Irredeemable who had herself sculpted to look like me, just enough to confuse the righteous and the innocent. She's been lying to you all this time, children: she's no mother to you. She's just using you, hoping to get something she wants from you, to bind Unbridled Radiance to her own twisted design-"

"Psychological projection is a wonderful thing, isn't it?" said Elphaba, dryly.

"Shut up!"

"But she didn't hurt us," Elarose protested. "She didn't even try; she's been alone with us for half an hour and she could have done anything to us in all that time, but she didn't."

"She was trying to corrupt you, Elarose! That's what these Deviants do: if they can't destroy something, they distort it instead. They undermine innocent children like you with doubt, corrode their thoughts with lies until they can make you just like them. They're like viruses invading healthy cells, converting them into factories for more of their own kind. Their speech is poison, their conversation nothing more than propaganda. Whatever she told you, Elarose, it was a lie."

"But she said that we were worth more than all of Unbridled Radiance," said Essella, confusion overriding her usual tendencies. "She said she was sorry for staying away."

There was an awkward pause.

"Is this the moment where you pretend you're incapable of making mistakes?" Elphaba remarked cheerily. "Because for someone who's supposedly attained perfection, you're slipping badly, Your Radiance."

"SHUT UP!"

"You never told us why you couldn't stay for longer," said Elarose; there was a subtle note of anger in her voice now, a hint of Elphaba's old bad mood slowly stirring to life. "If she's supposed to be a spy, or an assassin or whatever, then why was she here for us while you weren't? Why was she paying more attention to us than you ever have?"

Essella gasped in shock.

"That's enough, Elarose," growled the Empress.

"But she's been treating us better than you ever have! You never said we were worth more than your work! You never stayed with us for longer than a few minutes, but she-"

"I don't care how long she's been here!" Alphaba bellowed. "Do as your mother commands, NOW! You know what happens to disobedient children!"

Instantly, the demeanour of the twins changed: in near perfect unison, the two girls bowed their heads in shame, their arms clasped behind their backs and their feet locked together. Suddenly, they were no longer rebellious or even tentatively insubordinate; now they were every bit as obedient as the Empress had wished of them. And though they kept their faces neutral, Elphaba could clearly see the terror in their eyes no matter how hard they tried to avoid meeting a single gaze in the room.

Then – once again in perfect unison – they murmured, "Yes, mother," and began marching to Alphaba's side. At that moment, Elphaba knew there was nothing she could do to change their minds: from the moment they'd been born, the two had been raised as heirs and servants of the Empress, and no disobedience of any kind had been permitted. They hadn't been conditioned into slavery – after all, that would have made them useless as eventual rulers – but they were expected to jump whenever Alphaba said "frog." Time in the vault had eroded their conditioning ever-so-slightly, and the appearance of Elphaba had given them the will to question the Empress, but it wasn't enough to make them revolt. For now, the twins were beyond her reach… and she probably wouldn't get another chance at trying to open their eyes a little more blatantly.

But then Elphaba remembered what had happened during her journey across the worlds, how she'd learned to transmit memories, how she'd showed her mother the truth-

(How had she learned, though? She couldn't precisely remember how she'd mastered the memory-transmission technique, no matter how hard she wracked her brain; every time she seemed close to unearthing the moment, it seemed to slip through her fingers, leaving her with nothing but ashes and the faint sound of laughter)

-and at once, she knew there was one trick left up her sleeve.

She had only a brief window of opportunity before the twins were out of reach and the soldiers flanking the Empress had a clear shot at her, but thankfully, there didn't need to be much thought put into what she was about to do.

Summoning up the memories she'd witnessed in her dreams, she darted forward at lightning speed, arms outstretched towards Elarose and Essella – more specifically, towards their heads. Her fingers only brushed their foreheads for a moment before the Empress swatted her away with a blast of magic, but that had been all that Elphaba had needed: the relevant information was already making itself at home in the minds of the twins.

And by the time Elphaba's feet left the ground, the two of them were already beginning to see what the Empress had forced them to forget:

The first time they'd been forcibly returned to childhood, and from there, the first time their memories had been wiped clean. Through Alphaba's eyes, they witnessed the pain and the fear they'd experienced, the awful crunching sound of their bones contracting inwards, and the fact that their mother hadn't even bothered to comfort them in their agonies – for after all, she didn't see that her children were in pain: all she saw was that a problem was finally being corrected.

The second time, the two had actually figured out what going on and tried to convince the Empress not to go through it, had pleaded with her to realize that what she was doing was wrong. They'd tried everything: they'd appealed to her compassion, they'd promised that they wouldn't question her again, they'd even pointed out that there might be other ways of preserving them without having to destroy who they were. In desperation, they'd even cited the Radiant Laws, suggesting that preventing them from achieving their full adult potential could be a violation of Alphaba's own rules – only for the Empress to coldly remark "I make the rules, I decide when the rules apply." And with that, she'd injected them with the modified Morrible potion, ignoring their pain and fear once again.

The third time, a few snippets of poorly-suppressed memory returned at the sight of the needle, and the twins panicked. They screamed, they'd cried, they begged for mercy, they'd even tried fighting their mother off – to no avail. The Empress had simply held them down with her powers and delivered the injection without the slightest hint of emotion.

The fourth time, Alphaba didn't even bother with letting them see what was about to happen: she drugged them in advance, performing the procedure while they were unconscious. And so it was for every single iteration from then on, with Elarose and Essella being gassed, treated and waking up as children with no memory of their life before incarceration. Every so often, one of the twins would regain consciousness during the procedure just enough to sleepily protest, sleepily clawing their way out of a nightmare only to be forced right back into another one.

And so the story went on, one violation after another...

By the time Elphaba hit the wall, Elarose and Essella had seen all that they'd needed to, and were looking at their mother with undisguised horror. There was a stunned pause, as they tried to process what they'd just seen. Eventually, a frightened and teary-eyed Essella asked, "Is this true, mother?"

The Empress looked blank.

"It hasn't been a week at all, has it?" Elarose demanded. "It's been years since you sent us here."

"Tell me it isn't true, mother, please, tell us she's lying. This can't be true, can it?"

But for once, the Empress of Unbridled Radiance had nothing to say: Elphaba could tell that she wasn't horrified that Elphaba had managed to completely break her hold on the twins – after all, there was still a chance for her to restore her control if she could give them another dose of cure – but the fact that she'd managed to so thoroughly undermine it not once, but twice and get them to rightly suspect the worst of their mother infuriated her beyond words. She could only quiver in silent rage as her daughters begged her for answers she couldn't give.

And then, as if the situation couldn't get any more confused, a figure began pushing its way through the crowd of soldiers behind Alphaba, coughing anxiously for attention. It turned out the interloper was one of the junior officers, quite young and still not yet Purified, so in the end, only she could have asked the question that followed: "Um, Your Radiance, some of the troops have been asking what this place is; it's not on the official blueprints for the Sepulchre. And who are these Distortions?"

If anything, the twins looked even more horrified. "You mean they don't even know who we are?" Elarose yelled. "They don't even know we've been down here all this time?!"

"Then it's true, then?" said Essella, looking more despairing than ever. "You really did do all that to us! You've been keeping us here for decades – we'd been all grown up by now if not for you! And what else have you been keeping from us?"

"And who's she?" Elarose demanded, pointing at Elphaba. "Who is she really?"

In spite of herself, Elphaba smiled. "I'm who she should have been," she replied.

There was a sharp intake of breath from the Empress, as another trickle of blood began to ooze from her lower lip. "You think you're so clever, don't you?" Alphaba hissed, her voice a glacial whisper. "You actually think you're better than me. That's the level of your conceit, Elphaba: that you, a foul-tempered, self-destructive abomination can actually stand here in the heart of my empire and think herself better than the living avatar of beauty and perfection. No doubt you think you've claimed some kind of victory, just because you've corrupted and debased that which I've tried so hard to cleanse over the years. Well, guess what? You haven't done anything that I can't undo. You haven't stopped me. You haven't even inconvenienced me! I can sweep you out of my capital city in the blink of an eye, and in the next few days, nobody will even think of you ever again – and after that, the Deviant Nations, the Mistress of Mirrors, the Amorphous League, and all other bastions of wilful distortion will follow you into oblivion! You're nothing! Do you hear me? NOTHING!"

Elphaba just laughed; she couldn't help it, and couldn't even pretend to know why the sight of that beautiful face contorted with rage was so hilarious. For whatever reason, it was impossible to meet that fuming gaze without breaking down in a compulsive attack of the giggles.

"Why do I get the feeling you're really trying to convince yourself first, Your Radiance?" she replied. "I mean, maybe you're finally starting to realize that you're not some almighty here to teach the lowly peoples of the world how to attain true perfection, but you're just-"

"Elphaba, I'm warning you-"

"-just the bastard daughter of a travelling salesman-turned-dictator. You're a biological accident, Your Radiance, just like me. And the only reason why you've come to all these mad conclusions about your place in the universe is because Morrible tried to brainwash you and screwed up. Simple as that."

There was a horror-stricken gasp from the crowd; Elphaba doubted that any of them believed it, that the gasps were prompted by shock at the obscenities they'd just heard. Still, she was keeping everyone distracted and delayed, and that was all she needed to do.

Meanwhile, Alphaba seethed in rage. "Blasphemies heaped on top of blasphemies," she snarled. "But however thoroughly you try to befoul the truth and despoil the true faith of Unbridled Radiance, I can wipe away everything you've done in the blink of an eye. Even this atrocity you've committed on my children – I can erase it! I can make my daughters forget again. One jab of a needle, and this embarrassment will never have happened. And if you think you can use them as hostages, believe me when I say that everything you ruin can be repaired, including broken limbs." She took a deep breath. "Elarose, Essella, I'm giving you 'til the count of ten to step away from that Distortion, or you'll spend the rest of the afternoon in the infirmary."

If anything, the twins edged even closer to Elphaba.

The Empress sighed. "Very well then."

Suddenly the vault was ablaze with dazzling white light, a solid wave of pure magical energy blasting out of Alphaba's body and surging towards the three of them like a tidal wave. This was the purest expression of her magic, the rawest and most undiluted manifestation of her true power, beyond gestures, incantations, runes or rituals. Once upon a time, back when she'd first begun demonstrating hints of magical power, this energy had been vivid green and the most it had been able to do were a few odd flexes of telekinesis. Now, this pure magic was stark white in colour and blazed with the power of an exploding sun.

Elphaba hastily pushed Elarose and Essella out of the way, then conjured her own raw manifestation of power – a deep emerald-green aura of magic, billowing outwards like a pyroclastic flow. It struck the oncoming wave of Alphaba's magic head-on, stopping it in mid-flow and even forcing it back ever-so-slightly, eliciting another disbelieving gasp from the observers.

Snarling in frustration, the Empress increased the pressure, magic rippling out of her at such a rate that her entire body appeared to glow. The wave hammered into Elphaba once again, threatening to overwhelm her… but once again, she simply matched her counterpart's move and stopped the onslaught in its tracks. With an enraged howl, the Empress hammered her with all her might, but somehow Elphaba withstood it once again.

If the Empress had been able to suppress her temper as easily as she once had, she would have realized the truth very quickly: this time around, Elphaba wasn't exhausted from a marathon duel with the Hate-Creature around the length and breadth of Greenspectre. In fact, she'd been relaxing in the vault for over forty minutes, and her earlier return to adulthood had left her flush with energy – not that the Empress would have known this. She wasn't Alphaba's equal in strength and experience, but right now, she didn't need to be: all she needed to do was withstand the storm for a little longer. She knew from personal experience that the angrier the Empress got, the more her self-control unravelled.

Still, it was getting difficult to resist the sheer force of the oncoming attack: the Empress had the advantage in raw power, and sooner or later, Elphaba would need an opportunity to push back against the tide – or it would simply knock her flat. Of course, her counterpart would never give her that opportunity now that her temper had finally snapped… but Elphaba had to endure nonetheless: she needed to buy time for Dorothy, and she needed to save the twins from this nightmare; she needed to preserve this stalemate – otherwise all would be lost.

However, just as she was starting to wonder how much longer she could hold out, there was a flicker of movement on the periphery of her vision, and suddenly Essella was right beside her. She was tiny, frail, terrified and clearly outgunned by both combatants… and yet, Elphaba couldn't help but feel a tiny surge of pride at the growing look of determination on her face.

There was an eye-searing flash of green light, and suddenly Elphaba's outpouring of magic was joined by Essella's own energy. She hadn't had much experience in using her powers as far as Elphaba could recall from the dream-memories, but she'd been taught how to harness her raw magical talent for the sake of awing the crowds in the months prior to being "greenified". Now she used the same powers against the Empress; it wasn't much, admittedly, but it was enough to even the odds in Elphaba's favour.

Then Elarose appeared on Elphaba's left, shrouded in her own aura of emerald green energies. Maybe it was just shock on Alphaba's part, but the tide of blazing energy faltered for just a moment as all three of them focussed their power on driving back the Empress.

Perhaps realizing that their monarch and saviour needed assistance, several magicians among the Empress's retinue joined the fray, some joining their powers to the Empress, some pelting Elphaba with spells… only for the Childlike Researchers imprisoned at the back of the crowd to begin blasting the retinue with magic, having belatedly realized that their babysitters were too busy watching the fight to pay any attention to them. Spooked by the chaos, several soldiers broke ranks and tried to suppress the children – without much success. And then the few Researchers who hadn't been recaptured finally arrived back at the Crèche, and with the air of kids arriving late to a party, threw themselves into the fray as if it might end if they left it any later, resulting in a massive magic brawl between them, the "captured" Researchers, the Empress's retinue, and the Empress herself.

Then, weakened by repeated magical blasts from all angles, the roof cracked, crumbled, and finally collapsed.

And that was when things got really confusing…

---

Dorothy had barely finished destroying the latest enchantment when a colossal tremor rippled through the chamber, nearly sweeping her off her feet. For the next few seconds, all she could do was hang on to the nearest wall and wonder what the hell was going on until the earthquake finally passed.

Thankfully, the walls remained determinedly intact, but Dorothy decided not to push her luck on that front. As soon as she was certain the coast was clear, she hurried back up the stairs to the nearest watchtower, and finally realized the source of the earthquake: beyond the glittering towers of Exemplar, a huge plume of smoke and dust had erupted from the centre of the town, and closest to the dust cloud, some of the buildings were beginning to list ever-so-slightly – all in the same direction.

Dorothy couldn't imagine what was going on over there, though she had a very good idea of what might have caused it. Obviously, Elphaba was still doing what she did best. Unfortunately, there was still no way of telling if she was still alive in the midst of all the carnage… and doubly unfortunately, there was no way she could afford to go and look. She had to keep moving and trust that reinforcements would arrive as soon as she'd finished her work – or else this would all be for nothing.

So, on she went, hoping that nobody came to their senses and realized that there was another security breach within the city.

She had only three enchantments left to break.

Why did it feel like three thousand?

---

Utter confusion reigned in the Deep Sepulchre.

By now, the vault was nothing more than rubble, and only the foresight of the designers had prevented the collapse from spreading any further than the Crèche – but that had been enough to reduce the Deep Sepulchre to total chaos: thick clouds of dust fogged the corridors, clogging the vents and obscuring combatants from one other except at extreme close-range; lights flickered wildly as Paragon did his best to reroute power around ruptured energy conduits, postponing efforts to summon the Hate-Creature; without power and the emergency generators still being rerouted, security systems began shutting down one by one – automatically sealing off the Studious Interviewers, armour-plating Paragon's chamber, and opening all non-essential doors. Worst of all, having escaped the cataclysm back in the vault, the Childlike Researchers now roamed freely across the complex, making mischief wherever they went – and though some of the guards were able to restrain a few of them with great difficulty, there was nowhere secure enough to put them now that the Creche was ruined, so it wasn't long before they broke loose again.

In short, a huge kerfuffle – exactly as Elphaba had hoped for. Of course, now that the Sepulchre was in shambles, she actually had to find a way out of here before things go any worse: after all, she had two extremely confused children to look after, and the longer Elarose and Essella stayed in the firing line, the the chances of one or both of them getting seriously hurt skyrocketed.

The moment the roof had startled crumbling inwards, Elphaba had grabbed the twins and started running as fast as her feet could carry her, diving through the terrified crowd of soldiers, ducking a hail of spells and not looking back even as several hundred tonnes of concrete ceiling thundered down right on top of the Empress. By then, she'd knew full well that Alphaba would probably be hauling herself out of the rubble in a matter of minutes, so first priority had been to get as far away as possible before the Empress found time to recover. Now, even with several hundred yards between her and the half-collapsed remains of the Creche, the goal hadn't changed a bit.

Of course, with all of Exemplar on high alert and the corridors flooded with dust clouds, getting somewhere safe was something of a tall order at present. For all Elphaba knew, they could have been running in circles and they'd never realize it until the vents started working again.

Eventually, Elarose tugged on her sleeve and asked, "Who are you really?"

"And why do you look so much like mother?" Essella demanded.

"It's a very, very long story that-" A muffled explosion split the air, and Elphaba ducked as another cloud of dust erupted from a nearby vent. "-that I don't have time to get into right now. Basically, I'm a version of your mother from another world where things are similar yet different, and you think this is completely insane, don't you?"

The twins nodded in unison.

"Look, every single choice we make, every possible outcome creates a new world: I'm from one where your mother turned out slightly differently. I'm the version of her that never became the Empress."

"Then why are you green?" Essella asked.

"Because I was born that way. And so was the Empress."

For the new few seconds, the trio could only sprint along in bewildered silence.

"I'm sorry," Elphaba added, belatedly. "I know this is a lot to take in… but it's the truth. And after all you've been through these last few decades, I thought you deserved some honesty for once in your lives."

"So we're not sick at all?" said Elarose. "We're just turning out how mother used to be?"

"In a way: the Mentor still brought it out, but yes, you're basically just inheriting your mother's true colours."

There was another baffled silence.

"But if all of this is true, then why are you here?"

Elphaba hesitated. Would they try to stop her if she told them the truth? Would they still maintain an atom of loyalty for their hated mother even after discovering all the horrible things she'd done to them? There was no way of telling for sure: the even mixture of conditional and disillusionment they'd experienced probably gave Elphaba a 50-50 chance either way. She wasn't normally a gambler except in the purely figurative sense, and probably wouldn't have put money down on her odds… but once again, the two deserved the truth after all they'd been through, and in the end, Elphaba couldn't bring herself to pull the wool over their eyes a moment longer.

"I'm here to stop your mother once and for all," she said simply. "I'm here to end Unbridled Radiance and help the Deviant Nations win the day, and hopefully change this world for the better while I'm here."

"Does that mean you're going to have to kill mother?"

Elphaba blinked in surprise, stumbling to a halt as she did so. In hindsight, she should have realized that they'd be clever enough to guess the truth. After all, the twins had always been precocious, as was Alphaba's original intent, and given that they'd lived a lot longer than was outwardly apparent, they still possessed a certain worldliness about them that not even the Empress could erase.

"No," she said earnestly. "But if all goes as planned, she'll never be able to hurt anyone ever again; you won't be able to see her or talk to her after that, probably for the rest of your lives." She sighed, and asked the fatal question that she'd been dreading all this time: "Can you live with that?"

Elarose's face was a whirl of emotion and conflict, but in the end, determination won out over all the others; she offered a sad but resolute nod, and said no more.

Essella was blinking away tears, but steadfastly refused to cry; instead, she took a deep breath and said, "I don't know if I'll ever be able to forgive her after what she did to us… but I don't want her dead. As long as she's still alive, I can live with it." She took another deep breath to steady herself, and added, "You promise us you won't kill her?"

"You have my word," said Elphaba, silently awestruck and more than a little proud – even though, as she'd told herself many times, these were not her biological children.

All they could do after that was run on in silence (after all, it wasn't as if any of them would be able to think of another conversation to fit in after all this). Fortunately, it seemed that the rest of the Empress's forces were just as lost as they were, for the only people they encountered in all this time were bewildered technicians and the increasingly excited Childlike Researchers.

Eventually, they turned a corner and abruptly found themselves right outside the portal chamber's main gateway, suggesting that they really had managed to travel in a circle by mistake after all. Seizing upon a wild, desperate hope for the twins' safety, Elphaba hurried inside, wondering if they might be able to use Lintel's portal to get Elarose and Essella to safety within this world; after all, this was supposed to be the same gate that Lintel had used to transport troops to Greenspectre, so it obviously wasn't just used for interdimensional travel.

Unfortunately, it seemed as though Lintel wasn't going to be of much help to them: at the moment, he was cowering behind a large crate of machine components, curled up in a ball and anxiously rocking back and forth, trying vainly to hold back his terrified sobs. From the looks of things, he was stuck in a compulsive repeat of his portal-scissor trick, shearing bits of his robe off with tiny conjured portals. "Snip-snip," he whimpered, over and over again. "Snip-snip."

In spite of everything the portal expert had been responsible for over the decades, Elphaba couldn't help feeling sorry for Lintel: even as an adult, he'd never managed to conquer his own neuroses, which – at least according to the psyche profiles that had crossed Alphaba's desk over the years – had given way to self-defensive narcissism and a bigoted intolerance towards Animals, the only group he could blame for his misfortunes without being conclusively proven wrong by the rest of Oz. After he'd lost both his age and his adult mind, the Empress had taken steps to keep his anxieties smothered by ensuring that he rarely strayed far from the comforting atmosphere of the Creche, maintaining his productivity by keeping him away from anything that could potentially frighten, upset or enrage him. But now that the Creche was gone and his guards had been summoned elsewhere, the creator of the Slamming Door and the mastermind behind the attack on Greenspectre had been reduced to a sobbing child, too afraid to run or even to join his fellow Researchers in breaking free.

Elphaba knelt down in front of him, trying to get his attention. "Lintel?" she whispered. "I'm gonna need you to operate the portal: Elarose and Essella have to be sent somewhere safe before the fighting gets any worse."

"Excuse me?"

"Not now, Elarose: I've already got one precocious child running around the battlefield; three's far too many for comfort, and I don't want either of you getting hurt. Now, Lintel-"

"Snip-snip. Snip-snip. Snip-snip. Snip-snip." More bolts of cloth fluttered to the ground around them.

"Lintel, I need you to concentrate for a minute-"

"Snip-snip," Lintel continued, more insistently. "Snip-snip, snip-snip, snip-snip, I'm not listening to you. I'm not listening to you, because you're not there; you're not there because you're just my imagination. I'm just scared and imagining things like I used to when the Empress let me out."

"Lintel-"

"You'll go away soon," he snapped, clearly trying to convince himself more than anyone else. "All I have to do is wait for a grown-up to find me and then you'll go away and I'll be…. Just… fine. I'll be fine. I'll be fine. I'll b-b-be…" He let out a choked sob and buried his face in his knees, crying helplessly.

Elphaba was already reaching out to put a reassuring hand on his shoulder, hoping that it'd be able to calm him down just enough to be reasoned with. However, no sooner had she extended her arm, there was a muffled click from directly behind her, and a familiar voice whispered, "Move one inch and you'll be dead long before the portal opens."

As instructed, Elphaba didn't turn around, but frankly, she didn't need to. She'd already recognized that smug, cloying countertenor: Gloss had obviously managed to escape the collapse of the Creche in one piece.

Elarose and Essella spun around, their bodies aglow with emerald green energies, only for a solid wave of magic to fling them aside, pinning them to the wall.

Then, the Empress appeared in the doorway: her hair was unkempt, her crown was gone, her lips had been chewed bloody, and her robes were little more than rags dangling from her still-regenerating frame, but for all that, she was still alive and kicking.

"Very considerate of you to come this way," she said, in a tone of forced calm. "I was thinking I might have to chase you from one end of the facility to the next, maybe even call on the hate of Frexspar Thropp, just for a chance to force you into this portal… but once again, providence smiles on me. Now, hold still: it's time you returned to the void."

"Still afraid I might take over your brain if you kill me?"

"I fear nothing," the Empress replied, her voice a glacial hiss. "I'm merely taking steps to preserve the beauty of Unbridled Radiance… beauty that you've already done a great deal to despoil, I might add."

"Yes, because that's so much worse than brainwashing your own children, destroying everything they've ever made, erasing their memories against their wishes and putting their lives on hold until they can be exactly the way you want them. Oh and breaking your own laws several times. Yes, being halfway honest with children and leaving a few holes in the roof is truly the worst thing I could have possibly done under the circumstances."

At this, the Empress glared balefully at her, and Elphaba only just managed to meet that gaze without flinching; already, she could feel her hair beginning to smoulder under the heat of Alphaba's enraged stare, her clothes beginning to singe ever-so-slightly. As angry as she was, the Empress probably wasn't enraged enough to risk killing her outright, but that wouldn't stop her from torturing Elphaba with as many third-degree burns as she could possibly inflict without actually burning her alive. Fortunately, the sight of the Childlike Researcher hiding behind the crate quickly drew her attention away from any thoughts of torture.

"Lintel," said the Empress, "Activate the portal: I want this disgusting creature sent back to the void, where she belongs."

But Lintel remained behind the crate, rocking back and forth and whimpering silently to himself.

"Lintel, now, if you please…"

"Snip-snip. Snip-snip. Snip-snip."

"Lintel, you can have a nervous breakdown later; this is important…"

But Lintel was too scared to respond even to Alphaba's growing wrath. In a rage, the Empress grabbed him by the collar and hauled him upright, neatly snapping him out of his compulsive funk – but only frightening him even further in the process.

"Activate the portal, now!" she roared.

"You're hurting! You're hurting!"

"I'll do worse to you if you don't have that machine running within the next minute! Get over to that keypad and enter the coordinates to the void, before I lose my patience!"

Whimpering pathetically, Lintel stumbled clumsily over to the keypad – and at that moment, Elphaba saw her chance. "Don't listen to her, Lintel: she'll only hurt you more once this is over and done with."

"Shut it! Gloss, if she continues talking, hit her."

"Why? You afraid I might be honest with him as well-"

Without missing a beat, Gloss drew back his handgun and dealt her a stunning blow to the left ear. Elphaba fell forward, nearly cracking her head on the tiles below before Gloss grabbed her by the neckline and hauled her back into a kneeling position.

"Now," said the Empress. "You can continue working, Lintel."

"She'll kill you once this is over and done with!" Elphaba shouted, grunting in pain as Gloss thumped her across the ear again.

"Ignore her."

"Don't you see, Lintel? She'll – ow – keep exploiting you for your knowledge and expertise for as long as you – argh – remain useful. That could the rest of eternity… or it could be next week-"

"Lintel, key in those portal coordinates and ignore the damnable creature. Gloss, keep her silent or I will: tear her tongue if you have to!"

Gloss spun Elphaba around and kneed her hard in the stomach, sending every last atom of breath erupting out of her lungs in one almighty wheeze. The impact sent her toppling the ground in a breathless heap, and she would have vomited if not for the fact that she didn't have anything left in her stomach after Lurline only knew how long it had been since her last meal… but somehow, she still had enough stamina to keep talking in spite of the colossal bruise already blossoming across her belly.

"I've seen her memories, Lintel!" she plunged onwards. Gloss loomed over her, ready to kick her into submission again, but Elphaba just managed to summon up enough magic to shove him away, leaving the mercenary captain skidding helplessly across the tiles in a flailing, directionless dance, hammering him into the wall with a resounding thud. It wasn't enough to kill him, but was just enough to buy Elphaba time to recover her strength – and continue talking.

"If you and any of the other Childlike Researchers ever forget your abilities in the next regression, you're no longer useful to her: she'll kill you and bury your body in the Sepulchre where nobody will ever think to look for it. But even if you do remember everything you've ever learned, your life will still be forfeit at a moment's notice: if you ever remember who you used to be, you're dead; if you show even the slightest sign of Deviant sympathies, you're dead; and if there's ever a better expert in portal magic, she won't need you anymore! Don't you see that by obeying her, you'll be signing your own death warrant?"

By now, the Empress was struggling: her attentions were now strained to their limit by the effort of keeping Elarose and Essella suppressed, keeping an eye on Elphaba, communicating with her scattered forces via the battered radiolink on her wrist, and compulsively sweeping aside the debris. Now, with Gloss clawing his way upright, Lintel once again paralysed with fear and Elphaba talking far too much for her tastes, Alphaba was starting to loose composure again. Blood was pouring from her lower lip like a burst skein, her left eye was twitching spasmodically every tenth second or so, her fingernails were ground so deeply into her palms that she was starting to draw blood from there as well, her teeth were grinding together so furiously that you could almost hear the sound of the enamel itself beginning to disintegrate, and the air around her rippled with the blistering intensity of rage-fuelled magic.

"Shut up, Elphaba," she snarled between gritted teeth.

But even with her hair beginning to smoulder again under her counterpart's enraged glare, Elphaba was in no mood to shut up. "We can keep you safe, Lintel: we can give you a place where you'll be cared for-"

"He already has that! Lintel, IGNORE HER!"

"=where you can be free without having to live by her rules, maybe where you can be cured if that's what you want-"

"LINTEL, ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?!"

"-because that's what this is all about: you'll have a say in your future! You'll have a future!"

"LINTEL! KEY IN THE COORDINATES AND GET RID OF HER!"

But Lintel was officially petrified with uncertainty: like many children, he was easily overwhelmed when given too many choices or too much information, and his neuroses only made it even easier to leave the unfortunate sorcerer/scientist a flustered mess. In the end, he could only look from Elphaba to the Empress, unable to decide who he should listen to. He cleared his throat and opened his mouth as if to speak; maybe he was asking for advice, or maybe he was going to plead for everyone to be quiet so he could concentrate, but either way, all that emerged was a burst of confused stuttering.

"I-I-I-I-I d-d-d-d-don't – I-I-I-I-"

At that point, the Empress lost her temper. Storming out of position, she grabbed Lintel by the shoulder and struck him hard across the face – and not open-handedly-either. Immediately, the little Researcher went rearing back, hands flying to his nose with a shriek of pain as he hit the chamber wall and slid down in a heap.

There was a pause, as Lintel began to sob again… but this time, it wasn't just out of fear and confusion. Now, there was a new tone to his voice, one that Elphaba hadn't heard the old mage use since he'd left adulthood: rage.

"You hit me," he wept, as if unable to believe that it had just happened.

The Empress took an instinctive step back, realizing too late that she'd just made a very serious error. Up until now, she'd been keeping him suppressed through the comforts of the Crèche, the disarming condescension of his jailors, and judicious use of the anti-magic spells; even on the rare occasions where she'd had to be harsh with him, she'd never gone so far as to strike him – not without measures in place to make him realize that it had been his own fault. Now, they were outside the safety net of the Crèche, with no suppressive enchantments, no attendants around to calm him, and the only magician capable of overpowering him was too busy trying to keep Elphaba and the twins under wraps.

For the first time in quite a while, her voice betrayed a hint of nervousness. "Now, Lintel, calm down a minute and think on why I had to do that-"

"You hit me!" Lintel wailed.

Cliché demanded that he repeat the accusation a third time, but Lintel was in no mood for that: with a lightning-fast series of gestures, he began conjuring portals; encumbered with keeping her daughters and her worst enemy from fighting back, the Empress didn't have the time to resist his efforts… but even if she had, she was clearly expecting him to summon something from the portals, perhaps a fire, a flood or some other natural disaster.

She hadn't imagined that the portals themselves would be the threat, and she certainly hadn't expected them to target her limbs.

Classic portalmancy was a difficult art to master and an almost impossible one to use in battle. Oh, retreating, ambushing and even dropping bombs through portals was easy enough, but actually using the techniques to directly harm people simply wasn't feasible for most magicians: living targets just didn't stay still long enough for the portal to coalesce under them or around their throats or inside their bodies. So, most magicians didn't even try using portals in combat unless they had a reliable source of explosives on hand. Unfortunately for the Empress, Dr Lintel was not most magicians: he'd been studying the art for more than a century by now, and he understood more about the vagaries of portal formation more than he understood his own history. Long before he'd masterminded the technique of stabilizing extreme long-range portals through thaumo-mechanical gateways, he'd learned how to use portals at a moment's notice, conjuring with pinpoint accuracy.

So when he aimed for the Empress, she didn't even have the time to duck out of the way. Indeed, she had a grand total of half a second to notice the glowing bands of energy forming around her arms, her legs, and her neck – right before each band erupted into an open portal.

Or, as Lintel might have put it, snip-snip.

Dorothy wasn't sure how she was running after all this time. By rights, she should have run out of breath long ago, but even with fatigue slowly crushing her into the ground, she was somehow still jogging onwards.

Of course, there was a distinct possibility that she was only managing this because more of the Hellion's traits were beginning to bleed through. Hopefully, she wouldn't start manifesting the skinless flesh or giant fangs before the day was over… but then again, she wouldn't mind floating from place to place – it might take some of the strain off her feet.

She took a deep breath, and forced herself to focus.

Two enchantments to go.

Just a little further. She could hear her dolls amassing outside the city walls; all she had to do was break the barrier and let them in…

---

"Run! RUN!"

"Run where?! Everyone's shooting at us!"

"I know, I know, just keep your heads down and stay behind me! We're heading to the portal! Lintel, can you get this thing working?"

"SNIP-SNIP! SNIP-SNIP! SNIP-SNIP! SNIP-SNIP! SNIP-SNIP!"

"Lintel, could you calm down for a minute and focus? Please?"

Utter bedlam reigned in the Deep Sepulchre.

Less than twenty seconds after Lintel's rebellion, soldiers had begun pouring into the room – and not the confused grunts that had piled into the vault a moment ago. No, the reinforcements arriving here were elite troops with glistening silver carapaces layered over their flesh, heavily-armed black-clad traitors from the Strangling Coils, battle mage veterans agleam with sceptres and rings and every kind of deadly talisman imagination, and in the lead, several dozen vicious Purified officers moving at speeds that would have left mundane athletes in the dust.

Then, perhaps sensing that one of their own was in danger, the Childlike Researchers scattered around the area had rallied and poured into the room, bombarding the enemy troops with magic, mechanisms and chemical weapons of every stripe. While Gloss had joined his fellow mercenaries alongside the Purified, Elphaba had managed to get the kids organized enough to actually put up some serious resistance; she hadn't known if it would be enough to hold the line against a professional army, much less win the day, but at least the Childlike Researchers had the expertise to keep them safe. Plus, the Empress couldn't afford to kill her private think tank down to the last member, so they at least had that advantage on their side.

Then the inhabitants of the isolation block had arrived on the scene, jamming life-draining proboscises into the undefended backs of the enemy and tearing through the battle mages with near-psychopathic abandon. And from there, the already-confused atmosphere of the portal chamber devolved into total chaos.

Everywhere Elphaba looked, there was gunfire, magic and brutality.

Prototype mechanical exoskeletons tore through the ranks of the elite troopers and peeled them open like so much canned mackerel – only for the Purified to wrench the operators out of the exoskeletons and drag them screaming to the ground.

Gloss and his men opened fire on several unsuspecting Researchers, aiming for their legs at the request of their new client, and were immediately rewarded by a chorus of agonized screams… only for Dr Ailing to retaliate with a hail of glass vials that sent a billowing, malodorous cloud of gas oozing through the ranks of the mercenaries. Blistered, screaming, agonized and bleeding from every orifice they possessed, the front ranks of the traitor coils dissolved into a confused rout – Gloss only escaping by virtue of a well-timed dodge to the left.

Several of the Creche's best and brightest magicians met the Imperial battle-mages in a masterful duel of spells, only to be caught by surprise by the elite troopers attacking from the side, tackling several of the young sorcerers to the ground and forcing the rest to fall back with vivid blasts of their energy lances. In turn, the elite troopers were sent toppling like ninepins by several magical blasts from Elphaba – and Elphaba herself would have ended up taking a bullet to the chest courtesy of Gloss if Lintel hadn't conjured a portal right in front of her.

And through all the mayhem, the Empress could be seen flopping about the battlefield like the proverbial fish out of water, struggling to find her lost limbs.

In the end, Elphaba realized that it was time to get Elarose and Essella to safety: with the way the battle was going, the Researchers couldn't last forever even with halfway-competent leadership at the helm, and the last thing she wanted was for the twins to be hurt – or worse, recaptured. So, hastily taking the girls by the hand, she made a beeline for the portal with a frenzied Lintel in tow.

"Can we get this working within the next thirty seconds?" she asked, raising her voice over the thunder of gunfire from nearby.

It took a little moment of patient handholding to get Lintel to calm down enough to concentrate at the matter at hand, but eventually he was able to perform a hasty assessment of the portal. "The stabilizer's been damaged and the tethering system is stuck in active move," he said at last. "We can't send anyone through."

"How long will it take to fix?"

"Uh… maybe a day?"

Elphaba groaned and muttered a few choice expletives. "What can we do, then?"

"We can bring people in, I guess."

"…what, as in people from the Deviant Nations?"

"Oh no, not while they've got their magical defences up. I meant people from other dimensions."

There was a stunned pause, as Elphaba considered this. Then, her mind lit up. "We can call for help from other worlds?" she asked excitedly.

"Oh yes, we can easily seek out powerful forces to summon using my thaumatech detector. Mind you, they wouldn't stay here long," added Lintel, muffled slightly by the thud and crunch of explosives tearing chunks off the walls. "The tethering system's stuck online – it's a safety system designed to prevent hostile interdimensional beings from invading, sends them right back where they came from. If we push the settings a bit, we could allow them to stay for about a minute, maybe two."

"That's all we need – just as long as we can bring in as many people as possible!"

"We still need coordinates, though. I can't just summon them from anywhere – we don't know what we'll get, otherwise."

Coordinates? Wait a second…

Once again, Elphaba's mind erupted with possibilities. Suddenly, all she could think of was her time in the void, when she'd somehow found her way back through the dimensions; she couldn't remember how she'd escaped, but she vividly recalled hearing something while she was travelling between worlds – a voice in her ear, whispering a series of numbers. It hadn't made sense to her at the time, but at last, she finally understood the reason (if not the cause).

And just like that, another piece of the puzzle falls into place.

Laughing madly, Elphaba dived for the keypad attached to the portal. "Get this thing started!" she hollered. "I'll key in the coordinates!"

Behind them, there was a roar of triumph from the enemy troops: the Empress was on her feet again, and in the process of reattaching her other arm. Already, she was sweeping aside the Childlike Researchers who hadn't been injured or recaptured, and unless her remaining arm gave her any trouble, the odds would tip in her favour within the next thirty second – at the most.

As Lintel began prepping the portal frame for activation, Elphaba hurried over to the keypad and began typing in one of the number sequences she'd heard back in the void.

What was it again? Oh yes – 0-439.000556387.

A moment later, the portal roared to life… and suddenly, the portal chamber was crowded with dozens of new faces, all pouring out of the gleaming vortex at the heart of the gateway to stand on hazy feet in a new world. None of them were entirely solid nor completely intangible, the tethering system leaving them drifting in and out of corporeal existence as the safety mechanisms struggled to return them to their world. For now, they were present enough to react to the dimension they'd arrived in – and all of them were armed.

Startled by the noise, the Empress looked up in confusion, only to find herself face to face with another Empress, flanked on one side by a platoon of her finest warriors and on the other by a vicious-looking mob of black-uniformed men armed to the teeth with crude-looking weaponry. Even from here, Elphaba could tell that most of them were decorated with the same regalia worn by the Other Empress's much-hated allies – the lightning bolts, the skulls-and-crossbones, the crooked cruciform.

There was a pause, as Elphaba wondered if she'd just made a terrible mistake by bringing the two Alphaba's together, and that this might be the start of a new and terrible alliance – even if this first meeting could only last for a couple of minutes at the most.

But then the Other Empress looked about the room in growing disgust, and Elphaba belatedly realized that an alliance would never be an option between the two iterations.

This version of the Empress had emerged from a world where the Deviant Nations had never existed: Glinda had been Purified and made into the Imperial Vizier, and without her, there'd been no strong figurehead to unite the disorganized resistance movements into a single cohesive force. To this version of the Empress, who'd ruled unopposed and built Unbridled Radiance from an Oz that had never known an apocalyptic war, Alphaba would be seen as nothing but a failure… and the difficulty she'd had in putting down a mob of Distorted children in the heart of her empire would only make Alphaba look even more pathetic in her eyes.

The Other Empress let out a low hiss of revulsion, and then barked an order. A moment later, Alphaba's troops were suddenly peppered with a devastating barrage of gunfire; Alphaba herself readied a spell to counterattack, but the Other Empress beat her to the punch with a spell that sent her flying across.

As the fighting spiralled onwards, Elphaba began keying in new coordinates as fast as her trembling fingers could manage. From what little she could see over her shoulder, Alphaba and the Other Empress were currently locked in stalemate, every gesture and incantation immediately countered by another, equally devastating form of magic. Meanwhile, the troops were hammering their way into the flanks of Alphaba's retinue, and though their bullets couldn't pierce the elite troopers' armour-plating, they were more than a match for the under-armoured mages and mercenaries. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be enough; they'd only be here for a short span of time before the tethering system whisked them back home. So, Elphaba could only put her head down and type as quickly as she could.

A moment later, the final digit clicked home, and the portal roared to life again, this time disgorging three very confused figures. It took less than ten seconds for them to realize they weren't welcome, and lunged into the fray as best as they could. Barely a minute away from escaping from the stalemate with her counterpart, Alphaba turned to see another Elphaba fighting her way across the room, green as the other, but without any of the magic-enhancing crystals dotting her back. Enraged, she took careful aim, preparing to blast the under-equipped witch out of existence – but no sooner had she opened her mouth to begin, a length of rope shot across the portal chamber and landed across her shoulders as a lasso, tightening swiftly into a noose. On the other side of the room, Erik tightened the lasso, wrenching Alphaba off her feet and into the air, her feet kicking helplessly as she struggled for breath. And all the while, the Other Empress was still on the attack…

But Elphaba was already typing in new coordinates: Alphaba's regenerative powers would allow her to recover from being suffocated, even if Erik throttled her into unconsciousness, and the Other Empress probably wouldn't be around long enough to put her down for good. So, on she went: 0-980.9954565399…

By the time the Other Empress was vanishing back to her home dimension, Elphaba the Dragon was already materializing in the middle of the room. Once again, the Dragon was very quick to respond: she was still clearly pregnant, and finding herself surrounded on all sides by armed men with a low tolerance for anything ugly or abnormal was enough to trigger her protective urges.

Having barely managed to cut her way out of the lasso, Alphaba was abruptly knocked off her feet by a blast of fire hot enough to sear the flesh from her left arm and leave most of her torso a sizzling mess. Her body recovered swiftly, but now she was facing down yet another interdimensional doppelganger, this one armed not only with all the magical power she was familiar with but also the strength and fiery breath of a dragon.

And still more coordinates were keyed in:

A tidal wave of animated dolls swarmed across the chamber, engulfing anything in their path; at the head of the army, Dorothy the Hellion marched in all her disfigured glory, scything through the ranks of the enemy with nightmarish magic…

A fresh horde surged out of the portal, instinctively zeroing in on Alphaba as the strongest person in the room. Sporting adult bodies but childish faces, they cooed and fawned at her feet, showering her with kisses and pleas for her to adore them. Alphaba, who was still busy trying to fight off the dragon, the new Hellion and the rapidly-fading Erik all at once, could only scream in disgust and try to kick them away…

The Perfectionites now swarmed in their hundreds, their army doubling by the second, their featureless faces alive with rage and hatred. At Elphaba's command, Lintel and the Childlike Researchers fled in all directions without hesitation, perhaps recognizing the new arrivals as something that could only have emerged from their worst nightmares. Alphaba's troops had been trained to protect their Empress and destroy all Distortions at any cost, and none of them dared to retreat. None of them were prepared with the sheer fury of the assault that followed: not even the most fanatical of the Irredeemables had hit them so hard, so fast and in such colossal numbers. Nearly five hundred of them had already crowded into the portal chamber, and over five hundred more were already pouring in from the portal. The dragon was long gone and the Hellion was swiftly fading, but Alphaba soon found herself overwhelmed, dragged to the ground and ripped to shreds by sheer force of numbers… and though dismemberment did little to stop her, the Perfectionites didn't care. The sight of the Empress furiously wrenching herself back into one piece didn't frighten them, nor did her magical counterattack – even though it was more than enough to kill nearly a hundred of them with a single spell. All that mattered was the destruction of difference, the brutal murder of any who deviated from their image.

Seeing her chance, Elphaba grabbed Elarose and Essella by the hands and ran for the exit, leaving the Empress and the Perfectionites to settle their differences alone…

---

Just one more… just one last enchantment, then I can call in the cavalry… just one more.

God, my feet hurt…

---

"Where are we going?"

"Anywhere the Empress isn't! We need to buy some time for help to arrive, and for that we need to keep moving. At the moment, we're heading upwards; granted, I don't know exactly where these stairs are taking us apart from that, but if it takes us out of the Sepulchre, I can live with it!"

"But we should have reached street level by now. Why haven't we seen daylight yet?"

"Because we're not heading for a street-level exit: we've crossed the border into the central sublevels – we're heading right back into the palace!"

Elphaba smiled grimly; she could have hugged Essella in that moment if the four of them weren't too busy running. The palace was the best-defended spot in the entire city apart from the Sepulchre itself, and if they'd already managed to bypass the defences in the ongoing blackout, it meant that they might just have an unexpected advantage on their side – especially once Paragon managed to repair the energy conduits and restore power. The moment the defences came back online, gates would immediately seal the sub-level entrance to the palace; unless the pursuers were hot on their tail, they'd probably assume that Elphaba and the others had been locked underground and wouldn't think to follow them into the palace.

Of course, it wouldn't last long if Alphaba wasn't still putting herself back together. After all, she wasn't in the mood for making assumptions: she'd have every inch of the city searched for her, no matter where the trail led or appear to stop. For now, there wasn't much the four of them could do about it, of course; all they could do was charge onwards and hope that there weren't too many guards left on duty within the palace itself.

Fortunately it seemed as though most of the checkpoints were unmanned, courtesy of Alphaba's call for reinforcements, allowing the panicked little quartet an express route to the ground floor. Eventually, they emerged from a side-passageway into the dazzling light of the throne room, the cavernous chamber dwarfing them instantly; it took a while for Elphaba to recognize any possible exists, for the hall was so massive and so grandiose that it was almost impossible to find the exit they were looking for at such long range – and practically impossible to do so at close range with all the statuary in the way.

After about a minute of scanning the walls, Elphaba finally recognized the door they needed – narrow archway hopelessly overshadowed by the row of gigantic marble columns that flanked it. "There," Elphaba whispered. "If I remember correctly, that leads to an elevator that'll take us straight to the top of the easternmost tower. You three can hide up there while I-"

"Waste my time a little further?" a voice from behind them snarled.

As one, all four of them turned, magic at the ready – only to find themselves engulfed by a coruscating haze of white light. Elphaba tried to shade her eyes and retaliate, but her muscles refused to respond: the moment the light had touched her, her body had instantly locked up from head to toe, her arms going limp by her sides, her knees collapsing beneath her. She was paralysed, and from what little she could see of the others, so were Lintel and the twins.

From out of the blazing light, the Empress staggered into view. By now, she wasn't exactly the picture of perfection: her limbs had only just been reattached, her face was a mass of swiftly-healing cuts and gashes, and her once-pristine white robes had been reduced to bloodied rags draped over her regenerated body. In the last few minutes, she'd soaked up so much blood that the mangled ends of her mantle now left a coppery red trail across the floor wherever she went, and though her beauty was already reasserting itself as her wounds healed, the blood that saturated her wasn't going anywhere in a hurry.

"Knew you'd be here," she panted, her voice whistling slightly as her shredded cheeks began to heal. "Knew you'd be headed for one of the towers. You've always had an affinity for heights; no doubt you thought it'd be poetic to end your revolution the same way you began the last one: in an attic, frantically searching for the one thing that would validate your iconoclastic designs while guards hammered on the door."

Elphaba struggled to move, but nothing – not even her magic – could resist the paralytic haze that had consumed her. Already, her thoughts were becoming faint and distant as her mind began to drift into unconsciousness, but she tried to hang on nonetheless, if only for the sake of the children she was protecting, if only so that Dorothy would have the time she needed…

"You remember this?" Alphaba laughed softly, but without mirth. "You've used the purest form of your intrinsic magic for many purposes over the years, but this one you haven't used often. It's a simple thing, a trick for playing with the brains and nervous systems of other living beings: when you set out to save the Lion, you used this magic on your class – albeit on instinct – and you made them dance… or rather, you simply triggered a few nerves to make them all flail and spasm in perfect unison. You couldn't do much more with it than that, if I can recall: puppeteering a human body isn't easy, and it was easier to simply hammer a few neurons and leave them to their mad waltzing rather than treat them as marionettes."

Need to stay awake. Just a little while longer. Just a moment… just for another moment…

"And now I have all four of you ensnared. It's not easy even for me, but I can still suppress you, keep you paralysed until you finally lose consciousness. And then… when you awake…" The Empress laughed, a hoarse, rasping, triumphant giggle. "You'll never have to think of rebelling ever again. You'll be back in the void, and my children will have all memory of this incident expunged, and as for Lintel… I'll have to think of something very special for this lowest and most pathetic of traitors. Sleep now, Elphaba: sleep and dream of failure – the one companion you'll be allowed to keep in the void, the one constant to your miserable, hopeless thing you've called your life."

But of course, Elphaba didn't dream.

In truth, she didn't sleep at all. She simply drifted out of focus, her control over her own body suddenly lapsing… and in her place, someone else took control.

---

From somewhere around the city walls, there was a muffled near-inaudible explosion as the last of the enchantments finally collapsed.

Then, unbeknownst to all, the dolls began creeping over the wall… and in the distance, the air began to ripple as every reflection, every shadow and every echo in nature became a portal – just large enough for a capital ship to fly through. And with the sun beginning to set, there were a great many shadows to be found.

Below, Dorothy smiled in spite of her exhaustion.

There, she thought. Job done. Now, all I've got to do is stay alive long enough to help the others. This really has been the busiest day of my life, hasn't it?

---

"There," the Empress panted. "All done. No more rebellion. No more impurity. No more ugliness. Nothing but peace."

By now, all four rebels were unconscious, having collapsed to their knees and slumped forward, almost as if prostrating themselves in penitence before her. Frankly, the Empress couldn't have imagined a more appropriate conclusion to this debacle. She hadn't even had to use the Hate-Creature to resolve the matter, delayed as it was by mechanical failure. As always, all she'd needed was her own strength of will!

"Now," she wheezed, "you enjoy your rest, my little ones; just sit still while we wait for the guards to carry you away. It wouldn't do to rouse you now, not when you're so close to a fitting end to those unwanted tendencies of yours."

And then, just as the Empress was starting to enjoy the moment, Elphaba suddenly began to chuckle.

The Empress blinked in confusion. Was she still awake? Surely not: from what little she could sense of it, her brain was still drifting through unconsciousness. This had to be some kind of reflex action, some response to being curled in a ball and allowed to lapse into enchanted sleep.

But then Elphaba chuckled again, and for the first time, the Empress realized that her counterpart's voice was suddenly much deeper than ever before: a deep basso throb, she could have sworn she felt it rumble through the floor and reverberate through her very bones. Whatever it was, the voice seemed oddly familiar, but the Empress couldn't place it, nor she explain why it was now emerging from Elphaba's mouth.

Suddenly nervous, she reached out to touch the unconscious figure-

-and that very moment, Elphaba lurched upright and grabbed the Empress by her left arm. Instinctively, she raised her free arm to blast her with magic, but her opponent was faster, too fast for human standards, too fast for even the reflexes of a Purified. With a blur of motion, Elphaba's arm lashed out and seized the Empress's right arm in a vicelike grip.

But throughout all of this, the Wicked Witch did not open her eyes, her eyelids remaining stubbornly shut even as her grip on the Empress's hands grew steadily tighter. Whatever was happening to her, Elphaba still hadn't regained consciousness… but somehow, she spoke.

"So nice to see you again, Your Radiance," she purred, her voice impossibly deep and inhuman. "Very clever trick, paralysing Elphaba's mind. Such a shame she had a substitute and never knew it."

The Empress tried to force the witch's hands away, to sear her out of existence, to wriggle away – but for once, Elphaba was too strong. Whatever was speaking in her stead was now boosting her powers, enhancing her physical strength, even dampening her magical powers. In time, the Empress could resist it… but not while the monster was crushing her wrists.

"What… what are you?" she gasped.

"Glad you asked, dear Empress," purred the monster behind Elphaba's closed eyes. "My name is Roquat the Red… and this is for the Nome Kingdom!"

With one almighty wrench, Elphaba yanked sharply towards, snapping the Empress's wrists almost in two: her right bent grotesquely downwards as if made of rubber, whilst the left split open entirely, five inches of shattered bone jutting out of her flesh like a dagger.

And no sooner had the Empress opened her mouth to scream, suddenly the vicelike grip on her arms was gone and Elphaba's hands were flying towards her face. Her arms useless and her mind still reeling from the pain, the Empress couldn't ward her off: she felt the same crushing grip seize her head, felt the long fingers digging into her skull, saw the thumbs draw back like scorpion tails ready to strike –

Too late, the Empress realized what was about to happen and instinctively squeezed her eyelids shut. It didn't matter: two white-holt bolts of pain tore through both eyelids, plunged deep into the soft tissue beyond and buried themselves in her optic nerve, accompanied by a loud, wet squish – almost drowned out by her own bloodcurdling scream of agony.

And as if adding insult to injury, another flex of improbable strength twisted the Empress's head around, wrenching her spine a full 180 degrees to the left.

Only then were the sharp-nailed thumbs finally yanked free from her now-empty sockets.

"Now that's over and done with," Roquat chortled, "You really must excuse me. The children are awakening now, and I'd rather not have to explain things to them. Little too awkward for my tastes. Besides, I think it's time I gave Elphaba control again so she can enjoy the final stage of this battle. Have fun, Your Radiance – and don't be a stranger: call me sometime!"

There was a muffled commotion, as if bodies were being tossed over a shoulder, and then the sound of Elphaba's practical shoes hurrying away across the hall to safety.

And in the agonized darkness she left in her wake, the Empress hauled herself upright, forcing herself to regenerate. It wasn't easy: eyes were a difficult matter to repair, and fixing her spine forced her to twist it back into shape. At least the compound fractures were easy enough to set.

Eventually, her vision returned enough for her to see the path ahead. Groaning, she cast a wearied eye at the throne room around her, trying to ascertain where the four rebels were going now…

…and then, as her eyes drifted across the vast windows, she saw it: it was only a silhouette upon the fiery orange horizon at first, but as she watched, more began to materialize alongside it. And even from here, with their emblems hidden in the shadows, there was no mistaking the design of those terrible airships now amassing beyond the skyline.

Somehow, a fleet from the Deviant Nations was here – in the heart of Unbridled Radiance, right on the doorstep of her capital city.

---

A/N: Up next - GLORIOUS PANDEMONIUM!