A/N: And here we are, ladies and gentlemen. The final round. Get your opera glasses and popcorn ready: this is it - the showdown we've all been waiting for. As always, I hope it lives up to all the hype that's been accumulating all this time, and I hope you have as much fun reading this as I've had writing it, because this is one of my favourite efforts in this entire demented enterprise, the one adrenaline high that I will never be able to top again.

Anyway, enough about my hedonistic aspirations! Without further ado, the latest chapter - and the final battle! Read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: I own nothing, least of all Wicked.

The next few minutes were nothing less than total chaos.

Elphaba barely remembered any of it: by that point, she was so exhausted from all the running, fighting, transformations and trauma that she could hardly work out what the hell she was doing even before the rapidly-warping Empress swatted her across the street and through a shop window. She dimly recalled casting several spells in quick succession as the Mentor ordered them to fall back, one of them drawn directly from the pages of the Grimmerie, which probably didn't help her growing fatigue much. Then, one of the nearest buildings collapsed under Alphaba's expanding bulk, cutting her off from the others, and then Elphaba was hurrying out of the intersection at speed, no longer flying but sprinting down the road as fast as her aching legs could carry her; she recalled looking around in mid-run to see what the rest of the team was up to, but by that point they weren't the only people fleeing the area.

Anyone who hadn't already left the street over the course of the duel between the Mentor and the Empress was now running for their lives, followed closely by several hundred other refugees from the neighbourhood, a good chunk of the palace staff, and at least a battalion of troops. As far as Elphaba could tell, fighting between Unbridled Radiance and the Deviant Nations had all but ground to a halt in that region of the city, for nobody was in the mood to sit still and shoot at each other when a monster the size of a skyscraper was bearing down on them. So they ran, too terrified to focus on where they were going or who accompanied them, and all Elphaba could do was let herself be swept away by the living tide – or risk being trampled to death beneath it.

And somewhere, in the midst of all the confusion, she found herself drifting through her dreams whilst wide awake: over and over again, she saw the portal that would one day take her home, Lintel's finest creation waiting to usher her, Glinda, Fiyero, Boq and Brr back to Oz… and with the portal came other visions, split-second images of war, chaos, triumph and death.

Sometimes she was sitting on the Wizard's throne, but still green as ever, with the Wizard himself cowering at her feet; sometimes she was lying dead in the ruins of Kiamo Ko while the Scarecrow cradled her body; sometimes she could be seen weeping at Frexspar's deathbed, her tears inexplicably leaving vicious burns on her face; and sometimes she was kissing… Glinda?

Eventually the visions cleared and she found herself slumped against a wall some distance from the palace. She must have cut her head in the crash through the shop window or at some point afterwards, for when she put a hand to her forehead to ease the throbbing pain in her skull, she found her fingertips spattered with blood. Judging by the clotting of the wound, she couldn't have been out for longer than five or six minutes, so there probably hadn't been enough time for things any worse. Unfortunately, it seemed that this was the only bit of good news she had so far.

At the moment, she was lying in the middle of a vast plaza, gleaming with white marble, burnished gold and platinum as far as the eye could see, from the gigantic statues of the Empress to the stately buildings that framed the plaza. All of it was brilliantly lit by spotlights at the base of every monument, so Elphaba could tell at once that this place had sustained the least amount of damage, hence why the Mentor and her entourage had chosen to shelter here while they prepared for the final offence.

Everywhere she looked, the dolls were on guard duty, scanning the skies and watching the entrances of the plaza for any sign that the Empress might have found them. In the centre of the square, amidst an embarrassment of statuary and fountains, the remains of the Mentor's colossus had finally collapsed into a useless heap of scrap, leaving the Mentor herself trundling around in a wheelchair augmented with her now-heavily armoured life support system. Around her, the team sat in uneasy silence while a battered-looking Dr Kiln attended to their injuries: Wolton was slumped against the plinth of an especially-pompous looking statue, his right leg neatly severed below the knee; Vara was sporting a compound fracture in her left forearm, a jagged length of bone protruding from her flesh just past her elbow; Glinda was back in human form and sporting a number of extremely painful-looking burns across her arms and legs – injuries that would take days even for a shapeshifter to heal; Dr Coil had been brutally lacerated across his snout; Fiyero, whose new body had been designed for easy repair, was popping his arm back into place with impressive ease; Boq now sported a massive dent in his chest and was struggling to panel-beat his torso back into shape; Brr had broken two out of four paws. The least-injured of them was Dorothy, and even she was sporting some impressive bruises on her face and throat.

Not too far away, Elphaba could still see figure of the Empress rampaging across the horizon, still the in the midst of her terminal metamorphosis, illuminated by at least a dozen spotlights as she tore her way through Exemplar's glittering skyline. One moment she was a giant reptile the size of the palace with seventeen heads erupting from her shoulders and belly, hungrily gnawing at the sides of buildings. The next she was a seventeen-story ball of slime-dripping tentacles surmounted by a single, lidless bloodshot eye on the end of a stalk, each tendril pursuing unseen enemies far below and ripping entire homes apart in its frenzied search. The next, she was a mass of gigantic batlike wings stretching the length of thirteen city blocks, but with no body between the mighty pinions – just a sinewy bridge between the two wings; and each wing writhed with dozens of human faces, all of them screaming in rage, terror and despair. Even from this distance, Elphaba could already tell that every single face was that of the Empress herself.

Back in the plaza, Dorothy had noticed that Elphaba had regained consciousness, and immediately hurried over to help her up. "Are you okay?" she whispered. "Dr Kiln said the cut on your head wasn't too bad, but you've been out cold since we got here."

"I'm fine. Um, where are we?"

"Don't you remember? You brought us here."

"I did?"

"Of course; after you picked yourself out of the window, you told us to follow you and you led us through the streets until we wound up here. Illumination Plaza, it's called. Then you sat down and passed out – "thaumaturgical exhaustion," Kiln said."

"Ah. Might be why I'm so dizzy right now. How's the battle with the Empress going?"

There was a distant explosion, and Dorothy's next sentence was lost in the cacophony of Alphaba's next temper-tantrum. Elphaba looked up just in time to see a storm of missiles roar overhead and erupt against the Empress's flank, spraying the surrounding area with huge chunks of molten flesh, most of them still transforming even as it fell from her body. Not too far away, the Deviant Fleet was bombarding the Empress with everything they had, trying to keep her away from their beachhead and from the city's residential districts in lieu of actually killing her – assuming such a thing was even possible.

Every now and again, the Empress would let out an ear-pummelling howl of rage and send a missile of her own back at whoever was firing at her – a rooftop, a ball of fire, a monsoon of corrosive spittle, a hailstorm of diamond-tipped quills, or maybe something even more exotic. Most often, though, her weapons of choice of the buildings all around her, wrenched out of their foundations and flung at anything that had incurred her wrath. Worse still, her mass didn't seem to be in the mood once the fleet had finished blasting it off her: every chunk of flesh that fell from her protean bulk took on a form of its own and began attacking, often sprouting limbs and charging directly for the distant airships.

"Well, that answers one question," Elphaba remarked. "But how is she still solid? Why hasn't she melted yet? I mean, this is supposed to be an inevitable side-effect suffered by everyone who's ever taken an overdose of the Amorphous League's potion, so why is the Empress immune to even after all the extra time she's gained?"

Dorothy didn't answer. In that moment, she was staring at Elphaba, her eyes narrowed in curiosity… and something a little like suspicion. Come to think of it, the young witch's gaze wasn't fixed on her specifically, but on a point just over her shoulder – but when Elphaba turned to follow her line of sight, she found nothing except thin air and polished granite paving stones.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"I… I thought I saw something, just for a moment… or maybe it was something that only the Hellion could see." Dorothy shook her head. "Nevermind – it can wait 'til later."

By this time, Elphaba's recovery had finally been noticed by the rest of the team, and now that Kiln had seen to the more serious of their injuries, they all crowded around her to discuss their next move.

"You're sure you're alright?"

"I'm fine: I've just been having some weird wide-awake dreams – all these visions of other worlds, like the ones that I saw back in the void."

"Well, there's an easy hypothesis to explain that: I think it's the witch-crystal: you've been taking it for so long that it's begun enhancing your prophetic abilities as well! Now it's started expanding into possible futures in the form of parallel universes-"

"I heard you the first time, Dr Kiln."

"Excuse me?"

"I'll explain later. Now, can anyone explain why the Empress hasn't succumbed yet?" Elphaba demanded.

Kiln hastily reviewed his notes. "Well," he said at last, "my best guess is that the Empress is actively resisting the effects of the potion: her regenerative powers already made sure she didn't begin dissolving within the first minute of exposure, but even that can't protect her from undergoing cellular collapse… so now the only thing keeping her in one piece is her own willpower."

"You mean she's keeping herself intact through her own intrinsic magic?"

"That's the only explanation that makes sense at this juncture. The only other alternative would be to admit that she's completely immune to the effects of the potion and that we're all screwed; under the circumstances, I'm inclined to take the former position."

Fiyero peered up at the Empress, his huge blue eyes narrowing with mechanical precision. "I think he's right, Elphaba," he said. "There's a very faint glow around her head and… claws. It looks exactly like the kind that appears when you used your powers, only white."

"So we at least know why," the Mentor croaked, her voice almost too hoarse to be heard over the roar of artillery and monsters. "Now we need to know if there's anything we can do to stop her from using her powers."

"What if we could distract her?" suggested Glinda. "If we keep her confused enough, she won't be able to focus on keeping herself in one piece."

"It'd have to be a very confusing distraction: she's managing to stay stable even while completely losing her temper, looking for us and exchanging volleys with the Deviant Fleet. Oh, and trying to destroy any cameras she passes by."

"Well, maybe we can pile on as much damage as possible: Dr Coil can attack her from one angle, Leoverus can match her shape for shape, the Mistress of Mirrors can keep her guessing with shadows and reflections, you can blast her with spells, and the fleet can keep blasting her to bits, and with any luck the Empress won't be able to hold her focus-"

"But what if that doesn't work? You'll be risking the deaths of our strongest supporters and the Mentor."

"What about Elphaba?" said Vara. "Maybe she can try the same trick she used down in the Sepulchre – it worked for the Hate-Creature, maybe it'll work for the Empress."

"What trick? Elphaba, what's she talking about?"

But in that moment, Elphaba was no longer listening. Everything, including the carnage that the Empress was wreaking on the skyline, had fallen away into an unearthly silence as the facts crept in. It wasn't often that she had brainstorms of this proportion, but somehow she'd ended up having two of them at once: not only did she have a solution to the problem at hand, but she had the Plan B as well incubating inside her fevered brain.

"The Mistress of Mirrors!" she hissed excitedly. "Wolton, get Nessa on the radio as quickly as possible; have Leoverus ready just in case this next plan doesn't work. You stay here with the troops. Um, everyone else, we're going to need to get as close to the Empress as possible without being seen…"

High above the city, a lone vessel crept slipped away from the Deviant Fleet, out from the cover of cloying shadows and glistening reflections that had hidden it for the last few minutes. The pilot paused for a moment, considering the radio transmission she'd just received; then, it made a beeline for the gigantic figure of the Empress.

For most of the battle, the Mistress of Mirrors had been aiding the fleet and the troops from afar, using her powers in a strict support role. From her orbiting air-sloop, she'd been able to deflect incoming missiles before they could hit anyone, unleash shadows upon the crews of enemy airships, baffle incoming attackers with echoes and reflections, even transport troops behind enemy defences. She'd left the fighting to her mirror golems, if only because she'd known that if she had joined the carnage on the ground, it wouldn't be too long before she was drawn into a confrontation with the Empress… and even after all this time, she didn't know if she could bring herself to harm her sister.

Now it seemed that she would have to fight her anyway. Elphaba's emergency plan was sound enough, and the harm that Nessa would have to inflict on her sister was comparatively limited… but her heart ached as she drew ever closer to that writhing shape on the horizon.

Focus on the plan, she told herself. She's not going to die if it all goes to plan. And once she's melted… just stick to the plan until then.

All too soon, the Empress's gigantic form loomed overhead, now a monstrous chimera of jellyfish and human: beneath the waist, her body was a thousandfold mass of luminous tendrils wriggling through the darkened streets below, shielded by a ghostly curtain of flesh like some ghastly mimicry of a ballgown; above that blubbery, near-shapeless waist, her body was Alphaba – monstrously-muscled and sporting limbs far too long to be human, but essentially the Empress. What mad impulse had conjured up this form Nessa couldn't imagine, and frankly, it didn't matter: all that mattered was distracting her.

And so Nessarose brought the air-sloop to a halt less than a hundred yards away from the monster her sister had become, stood up on the mage's pulpit, and called out "Your Radiance!"

The Empress, who'd been sending her tendrils burrowing into the houses below in search of the Mentor and her entourage, looked up in confusion. After all, she recognized that voice well enough; by now, she'd had several dealings with the Mistress of Mirrors, enough to recognize the hood and the cowl she wore… but the Empress clearly couldn't connect these two details together.

"The… Mistress… of… Mirrors?" she gurgled, her throat bulging and contracting with the effort of speech. "You… should have… stayed away. Now you'll… die with… these traitors you've sided with. You… should have stayed… a mercenary."

"I'm more than just a mercenary, Elphaba," said Nessa.

And with that, she lifted the hood of her cowl, standing unmasked before the Empress for the first time in her career.

There was a dreadful pause. Then, the Empress's eyes widened in shock, even as they began to change again, withering away into her sockets and being replaced with glistening compound eyes. Her form turned inside out, contracted, expanded, and finally hardened into a hideous centaur of moulded bone and carapace, a equid quadruped of grinning human skeletons fused into a single clattering monstrosity… but where its head should have been was the upper body of a gigantic wasp sans wings, its compound eyes surveying Nessa with insectoid fury.

Was it just Nessa's imagination, or was that tiny halo of light around her head beginning to flicker?

"You," the Empress snarled, her voice clearing. "You did this?! After everything I did for you, after all the love I showed you in spite of your Distortion, you betray me like this? I gave you power, wealth, immortality – I gave you EVERYTHING! You never would have walked if it wasn't for me! You never would have stopped pining for your worthless boyfriend if I hadn't stepped in! You'd still be a failure and a cripple if I hadn't helped you to realize your strength, and now you turn that strength against me – and throw your lot in with the Mentor, with Deviants, Distortions and that… that imposter! Why? Why have you done this, Nessa?! WHY?!"

Nessarose sighed; this was the part that what going to hurt the most – for both of them.

"Because I want my sister back," she said quietly. "That's the one thing you couldn't give me, even with all your power and all your schemes and all your designs: you will never be anywhere near as kind or as wise or as good as you were when you were a Distortion."

The Empress let out an ear-shredding howl of indignation; for a moment, the halo flickered violently – but then it stabilized, glowing brighter than ever before. Then, with a howl of fury, she flung herself at Nessa, collapsible arms of fused human skeletons reaching out to swat her out of the sky.

But the Mistress of Mirrors was already gone, leaving only a convincing illusion projected onto the smoke-clogged air.

By way of a riposte, the shadows below reached out, refining themselves into a blade of physical force and sliced through the Empress's arms. Shrugging off these injuries, the Empress put her head down and charged Nessa at a ferocious gallop, her mammoth hooves trampling entire houses into dust as she thundered towards Nessa's new location. But a wave of Nessa's hand opened another doorway in the shadows, swallowing the Empress whole before she could react to its presence. A moment later, the other end of the portal opened in mid-air above the trampled neighbourhood, disgorging the Empress face-down into the ruined houses with a mind-pummelling thud.

"Not a good idea to challenge a mistress of shadow and reflection after dark, Your Radiance," said Nessa airily. "If you'd smashed every pane of glass in the city, you might have stood a chance of killing me quickly during the day, but now? Now the night is my instrument!"

She was boasting, of course, goading Alphaba into losing concentration – and buying time for backup to take aim – but that didn't make her own insults sting any less. They weren't supposed to treat each other this way, they weren't supposed to be this kind of family… but this had to be said if Nessa hoped to set things right.

Meanwhile, bellowing in pain and frustration, the upturned Empress changed again, at once expanding and simplifying into an impossibly abstract shape: a glowing purple hourglass of carapace-like glass, no less than eighty stories tall and floating several hundred feet above the ground, its dazzling body ringed with vast haloes of orbiting spines. Behind the glass, a sandstorm raged in the shape of Elphaba's face, screaming its hatred.

"You will die, Nessarose, you and all the other despoilers of my realm!"

A storm of glass spines shot out, missing Nessarose by inches.

"You'll be erased from every history book in Unbridled Radiance, scrubbed from the world I built as if you were never born!"

Glass blurred through the air in a deadly storm of tiny shards; had there not been enough shadows around for Nessa to sculpt into a shield, it would have been enough to lacerate Nessa into mincemeat long before she hit the ground.

"You're not even my sister anymore – you're just detritus, a worthless cripple with ideas above her station! You were a Distortion in more than just body – you were an aberration in mind!

Thunder roared high above Nessa's wildly-darting ship, and bolts of lightning tore through the air around her, briefly turning the deepening gloom as bright as day. But no matter how well-aimed the bolt, Nessa simply wasn't there by the time it fell.

"No wonder mother died rather than accept the repugnancy she was forced to bring into the world!"

By way of a riposte, Nessa reached out for every last morsel of sound around her, summoning up even the fading echoes of Alphaba's screams and focussing them into a single purified beam of sound – then fired it at the Empress with the force of a meteor plummeting through the atmosphere. For a split second, the hourglass rocked and shook in place as the sonic attack rippled through it, the face within contorted in pain – and then a massive crack appeared on its surface.

"You'll pay for that, you little bitch…"

And then Leoverus burst into view from the left in the form of an enormous mass of living skin, a -five-thousand-foot-wide blanket of woven flesh, muscle and sinew wrapping itself around the hourglass and dragging it to the ground. Within the gigantic constricting mass of living tissue, the Empress could be seen changing shape again, her body warping from form to form as she struggled to escape, but the muscles of the organic tarpaulin refused to let go.

Under normal circumstances, it would have been easy for her to simply burn her way free of the net with a single flex of magic, but right now all her magic was focussed on keeping herself from collapsing into shapeless gunk, and her body couldn't be relied upon to take on fire-breathing shapes in its state of random flux. So, for the next few seconds, all she could do was shift from shape to shape, kicking and clawing and stabbing at the inside of the fleshy blanket in a desperate attempt to tear her way free.

In the end, some mad impulse inside Alphaba's brain must have connected with her protean body, because she abruptly slid free in the form of a completely flat rectangle of matter, thin enough to slide through the miniscule gap between the folds of the giant blanket and flutter free into the night.

And then she was changing again, her wrath driving her body into ever larger, more monstrous shapes: her two-dimensional body swelled upwards like an inflating balloon, sprouting horrendous-looking claws and jaws that could have bitten through a mountain as her expanding physique towered higher and higher above the city streets.

"Traitors!" she bellowed. "Traitors and abominations, all of you! Poisoned as I am, even in this state of shapeless abhorrence, I'll make sure you won't live to enjoy your victory!"

The First of the Shapelessness only tut-tutted his disapproval, even as his body reshaped itself. "The amateurs are always so eager to prove themselves, aren't they?" he sighed. "Very well then. If it's a battle of shapes you want, then perhaps we should see how the newest member of the Amorphous League does against a master of the art…"

"I AM NOT ONE OF YOU! I AM BETTER THAN YOU – I AM PERFECT!"

"Those random clumps of flesh bursting out of you say otherwise, young student. Do try and keep up: I'd hate for you to embarrass yourself on the transitions."

Screaming incoherent expletives, the Empress flung herself at him, gnawing ravenously at his newly-sprouted limbs with at least a dozen fanged mouths, even as crystalline growths across Leverus's flesh erupted in a conductive storm of electricity that left Alphaba's body convulsing wildly in pain.

For the next minute or so, the two of them fought onwards: Leoverus became an eagle the size of an airship and tried to crush the Empress in his talons; the Empress became a hundred-thousand-strong swarm of poisonous insects that passed through the eagle's talons and tried to sting him to death; the eagle became a billowing cloud of toxic gas that enveloped the insect swarm, sending hundreds of them plummeting from the sky; the survivors hastily buzzled out of the way and expanded into a giant pair of bellows the length of fifteen city blocks, projecting giant gusts of wind that threatened to disperse the gas; the cloud became an anvil the size of an office block and came crashing down right on top of the bellows; at the last minute, the bellows lost solidity and became a tidal wave sweeping across the ruins of the district, unharmed by the passage of the anvil through it; the anvil's skin turned as red as molten lava, bulging upwards until it had become an ogre of living magma, the sheer heat of its body threatening to evaporate the wave; the wave turned pale and cold as ice, weaving itself into a blizzard of such intensity that the lava threatened to cool; the magma-skinned ogre became a boulder the size of the Abyssal Titan and rolled heedlessly through the blizzard – not stopping until it slammed into the palace, crumpling the northern wall and tipping over the lower battlements. Screaming in fury, the blizzard reformed into a giant anaconda with the head of a claw hammer and wrapped itself around the boulder, trying to crush the stone in its coils or shatter it to pieces with its head… and so the battle went on.

Unfortunately for the Empress, though the runaway reaction of the serum had given her a malleability that most new shapeshifters couldn't achieve for decades, her opponent had already attained true Shapelessness, and unlike the Empress, his protean physiology was now married to absolute control. As such, for the next minute of their duel, they were utterly unable to do any lasting harm to each other; even when they introduced fire into the mix, they simply ended up taking forms that were immune to flame or evaded the heat entirely. All Nessa could do was do her best to support Leoverus from afar with shadows and keep the duel from spilling over into inhabited areas.

Before long, it was time for the First of the Shapeless to join in on the jibes. "You see?" he cackled, as Alphaba struggled to keep up. "For all your ferocity you're still nothing but a font of misapplied strength! I'm the First of the Shapeless, remember? The forms you take at random, I take at will; assume any shape that pops into your hindbrain – it doesn't matter: I'll match all of them! In fact, I daresay I might be better at being you than you ever could."

As the howls of rage echoed across the city, Nessa anxiously eyed the streets below, hoping that Elphaba's next bright idea would be more effective…

"Okay," Elphaba mused. "Looks like that didn't go as planned. Well, as long as Nessa and Leoverus are still keeping her busy, we can now put Plan B to good use."

"Do we happen to have a Plan C on hand, just in case?"

"Not really, know."

"Then it's as bad as I thought?"

"Kiln?"

"Yes, Elphaba?"

"Shut up."

By now, they'd emerged from an alleyway onto a ruined street less than a hundred yards from where the Empress, the First of the Shapeless and the Mistress of Mirrors were now fighting it out across the skyline. With most of the streetlights smashed or powerless thanks to all the property damage, the district was now pitch-black except for the spotlights from the distant fleet, all of them focussed exclusively on the battle that was now reducing most of Exemplar's mercantile district to rubble.

"So what are we supposed to do?" Vara asked.

"Once again, we'll have to split the party, this time in three: the Mentor, Kiln and Dr Coil will keep the Empress distracted; Glinda and I will launch a sneak attack that hopefully will be enough to break Alphaba's concentration for good."

The Mentor groaned. "This is payback for the time I suggested using you as bait, isn't it?"

"I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about," said Elphaba, her face the very picture of innocence.

Boq coughed loudly. "If you and Glinda are busy trying to launch a sneak attack, and the Mentor, Kiln and Coil are the diversion team, what the hell are the rest of us supposed to do? Don't get me wrong, I'm a little relieved to be warming the bench this time around – tackling a hundred-foot-tall shapeshifting monster's a little bit outside my skills… but what are me, Dorothy, Fiyero, Vara, Brr and all these dolls supposed to do while you're being a hero?"

"I'm glad you asked that, Boq: you'll be dealing with them."

The Tin Man followed Elphaba's outstretched finger, and finally saw the monsters galloping through the deserted streets: scant minutes ago, they had been part of Alphaba's protean body, right up until either the fleet, the Mistress of Mirrors or the First of the Shapeless had blasted them right off her. Now, those chunks of shredded flesh were still active, rampaging through the streets as formless blobs of matter – constantly manifesting new jaws, new limbs, new hides, new tentacles – as they hunted the ruined neighbourhoods for anyone or anything they could take out Alphaba's frustrations upon.

Right now, a huge column of the spawn was parading grotesquely across the street in search of prey, ripping entire houses apart as their hunt became more frenzied. Either they were looking for those responsible for dosing the Empress with the potion, or the Empress had grown so enraged that she was willing to kill her own subject in a fit of pique.

Boq paused as he took in the sight. "Alright then," he said calmly. "You know what? I think I'm actually going to enjoy this; it's about time I got to play to my strengths."

Behind him, Vara readied her knives; Fiyero unholstered long-barrelled Justice and drew his sword; Brr bared his fangs; and as the familiar magical currents began to eddy and swirl around Dorothy, several hundred dolls gleefully prepared themselves for the brutal melee that was soon to follow.

"That's what I like to hear," said Elphaba. "Alright, everyone, just try to hold them back for as long as possible: keep them from defending the Empress or from heading into the populated districts. Everyone else, let's get going!"

There was an awkward pause.

"Um… does anyone have a broom?"

"We didn't have time to enchant one, sorry. Besides, I thought you were up to flying under your own power by now."

"Not right now, unfortunately: I'm currently running on fumes. I don't think I could even manage floating an inch off the ground without passing out. Uh, Glinda?"

"Yes?"

"You'll have to carry me."

"I'm not done yet, do you hear me? I will undo this ugliness you've curse me with! I will make you pay for this blasphemy, and I will ensure that the legacy of your defeat remains for millennia after your deaths, just so nobody dares to even attempt this again!"

The Empress was now being attacked on all sides by no less than three different attackers: the Deviant fleet was riddling her with missiles, the First of the Shapeless was still matching her in their endless dance across the increasingly battered skyline, and the Mistress of Mirrors was summoning up every shadow and reflection to keep her from gaining any kind of advantage over the others.

Right now, the four-cornered duel had transformed into a battle of endurance, a contest to see which of them would run out of ammunition, stamina or concentration first. For the moment, Elphaba's money was on the Deviant fleet being the first to bow out – after all, there was only so much ammo they could be carrying aboard their ships, and they weren't going to pointlessly throw away the lives of their fighter pilots.

Elphaba herself was currently sitting on the back of Glinda's latest form, a six winged bird the size of a rhinoceros; it wasn't exactly the smallest or the stealthiest shape that she could have employed, but it was the only one sturdy enough to carry Elphaba all the way to the target without being seen. Right now, the two of them were perched atop the lowest parapet of the palace towers, waiting for the chance to attack, the two of them almost trembling with anxiety as the seconds ticked by.

Far below them, visible only through binoculars, the ground team was brawling their way through the army of monstrosities spawned from Alphaba's body, all of them fighting with the kind of demented abandon known only to the drunk and those who'd long since stopped caring what anyone thought of them: Boq was mechanically hacking his way through wave after wave of monsters, his axe swinging methodically up and down without faltering or tiring, threshing the air like a piece of farming equipment gone berserk; Brr pounced, tackled, bit, clawed and tore his way across the battlefield, for once too crazed with adrenaline to even notice his own fear; Dorothy and her dolls chewed through the ranks of the enemy army as if they were paper, any survivors of the charging dolls being instantly incinerated by Dorothy's growing repertoire of magic; Fiyero was death on two legs, twirling, rolling, ducking, weaving, dancing through the final battle of the war as if it were just enough night at the Ozdust.

By far the strangest sight was Vara, her broken arm freshly patched up, carving a path through the oncoming horde with a frenzied excitement that Elphaba hadn't seen in her before. Up until now, she'd either been easy-going as hell or a cold-blooded professional – unless you counted the stories that Glinda had told her of the doll attack on Greenspectre. She was shouting something too, something that only Glinda could pick up on thanks to her enhanced hearing – and relay to Elphaba:

"Come on! (slice) Do you think I'm going to give up or die now, (stab, stab, stab) when I'm so close to the end? (eye gouge) I've got a son to find at the end of this war, so (throat-slice) either get out of my way or die (disembowel)!"

And then, just as Elphaba was starting to wonder if she was going to have to ask Glinda questions about this, there was a holler from the direction of the Empress, and she swung the binoculars around just in time to see Kiln wheeling the Mentor's wheelchair into view; behind her, Dr Coil lurked in the shadows, ready to pounce.

There was a pause, as the six-headed dragon that the Empress had become took in the sight of the Mentor: she was even frailer than ever now, a trembling, semi-conscious figure stuffed into an improvised wheelchair and barely kept alive by the life-support system grafted to the back of it. But in spite of all that, the Mentor was still alive enough to issue a mocking smile and ask, "Did you forget all about me?"

By way of a response, the Empress kicked Leoverus aside, sent Nessa darting out of the way with a swing of her barbed tail, and then wrenched a spire off the nearest building. Drawing it back like a javelin, she sent it hurtling towards the Mentor. To his credit, Kiln was quick enough to push the wheelchair out of the way before it landed, but Coil wasn't so lucky: the improvised missile struck him square in the middle just as he was about to launch himself at the Empress, sending him hurtling away into streets – out of Elphaba's view.

Elphaba tried to relocate him, but beyond the current neighbourhood, the houses were still standing and more-or-less unharmed. Unless Coil drew himself up to his full height, he'd be invisible behind all the rooftops, and as he hadn't shown himself yet, he could be trying another approach, unconscious, or dead.

Okay, she thought. We'll have to make do with just the two of them for this part.

As Kiln directed more muscles into his legs, remodelling himself into a champion sprinter just for the occasion, the Mentor began working her own magic: with every gesture, every incantation, every application of purified willpower, it seemed as if the world itself turned against the Empress; gravity inverted, amplified or contracted, leaving entire sections of Alphaba's body to crumple inwards on themselves; fire erupted from one end of the shapeless body to the next, and only the Empress's regenerative powers kept her from scarring; water rose from the drains to drown her, freezing into ice to hold her in place; buildings, vehicles and the very paving stones she stood upon tried to batter her into bloody froth; lightning shredded her body to atoms as quickly as it changed shape…

And as the storm intensified, the other three joined in, hammering Alphaba with everything they had: the fleet's explosive ordinances, Nessa's magic, and whatever the First of the Shapeless could conjure at long range. Even Kiln joined in, occasionally nailing her with darts of solid bone and pustule-bombs whenever he wasn't struggling to dodge the latest ton of masonry Alphaba had lobbed in his direction.

Elphaba waited just a few seconds longer, until she was absolutely certain that the Empress was well and truly preoccupied with battling her five assailants. Then, once she was certain that Alphaba was distracted – and currently manifesting a head – she threw down her binoculars and hissed "Now!"

And with that, Glinda kicked off from the edge of the parapet and launched herself out over the ruined district, soaring towards the distant figure of the Empress at a speed that made Elphaba's eyes water. Face lashed by the chill of the air, practically deafened by the roar of the wind in her ears, all she could do was hunker down in the harness that Glinda had formed for her and hang on for dear life. For the next few seconds, ruined buildings blurred alongside them as they rocketed across the battlefield, one district merging incomprehensibly into the next, until at last, the Empress loomed ahead of them.

By now, she now took the form of a gigantic arachnid bigger than any ship in the Radiant Fleet, but where the monstrous spider's abdomen should have been, it instead had a vast torso curving up into the sky, sprouting into frondlike limbs tipped with glowing barbs; but high above the seven tendrilled limbs, a single ganglion-like skull haloed with tiny red eyes glowed palely in the night… and that was all Elphaba needed.

With the Alphaba-spider-thing's attention focussed entirely on the enemies surrounding it, Glinda approached from directly above, slowing to a gentle glide as she drew closer; as they broached the final ten feet between them and the Empress, Elphaba sat up in the harness, reached out with both hands to touch the glowing, featureless head of the monster-

And in that moment, the Empress's halo of eyes snapped upwards. A tendril thicker than a tree trunk shot out and wrapped itself around Glinda, digging its glowing thorns deep into her feathered body. As Glinda let out a piercing shriek of pain, Elphaba made one last desperate grab for the head, only for last few feet of the tendril to neatly lasso her around the middle, pinning her arms to her side and sending several dozen inch-long thorns burrowing deep into her chest and back.

Elphaba tried to cast a spell, to force the tendrils away, to call for help, to do anything, but she couldn't even bring herself to move: as soon as the thorns had sunk in, her body had been gripped with a searing, burning pain that immediately coursed through every nerve-ending in her body, all but paralysing her beneath the tendril. It was like being electrocuted – a ceaseless, white-hot agony that burned within her veins and threatened to consume her from the inside out.

"Got you," the Empress cackled. "At long last, I have you. Now… now I'm not even going to bother with the portal. I don't even care if your personality takes over mine after you die. Now… you're just going to die…"

Another tendril curled towards her, its tip opening into a barbed tip longer and sharper than any spear, ready to impale her down through the skull.

Below her, the Mentor, Kiln and the Mistress of Mirrors were all frantically casting spells, and Leoverus was struggling to untangle himself from the tendril that now held him at bay, all of them trying to save Elphaba – but none of them could move quicker than the bladed stinger descending towards her skull.

And in that moment, Dr Coil made his move.

As soon as he'd recovered from the impact, Dr Coil had been looking for any possible opportunity to launch the surprise attack that had been required of him, and though it had forced him to take a significant detour through the streets of the city, he was now in the perfect position to strike.

Unfortunately, the Empress was now in a much more formidable shape… and so far, she looked to be holding onto this one a lot more determinedly, at least while she had Elphaba in her clutches.

Coil knew full well that charging this monstrosity would mean facing its full wrath. Unlike the Mistress of Mirrors, he didn't have the speed or the magic to evade like the Mistress of Mirrors, nor did he have the ability to transform and recover from his wounds like Leoverus. He didn't even have the advantage of being a small target like the Mentor and Kiln. He was just a ludicrously oversized python, strong and swift enough to strike, but not enough to save himself.

And yet, he felt no dread as he readied himself for his final attack. In truth, he didn't even think about his own imminent death: all he could think about was his life, and how much joy he'd found in it despite all the disappointments and injustices that had been heaped upon it. He'd gone so much further than a lowly serpent from the marshes of Quadling Country than he'd ever hoped to go: he'd learned science and magic from the greatest Animals of his generation; he'd kept the "gutter art" of mage-surgery alive when the more respectable magicians of the Wizard's regime had tried to hard to wipe it out; he'd even remained ahead of those who had set out to cage Animals, throttling all who dared to chain and torture him. Even in his time of exile, he'd enjoyed countless friendships among other free pythons, even a lover or two. Best of all, he'd lived to see the day when the anti-Animal laws were finally repealed and his people were finally freed from captivity… and even if it had all ended in tears, he couldn't bring himself to regret the day humans had finally regarded him with respect.

And then there'd been his days in the Pottery: the joy of teaching an apprentice, of seeing Boq become Mr Heart; the thrill of experimentation and discovery; the unspeakable delight of knowing that they were changing Oz beyond. The fall of the Wizard, even if it had ended in the rise of a despot even worse than the old fraud, was still one of the greatest triumphs of his life. He'd even enjoyed a few hard-won victories in the civil war that followed, saving hundreds of lives on the battlefield before the experimental magic of a thousand tinkering wizards and witches had begun to mutate him.

He didn't even regret his life as a hermit and a Distortion in the potter's ground, for as lonely as it was, he still had his work and his fair share of meals to keep him going, and after that, the knowledge that he was once again working alongside his pupil – both Boq and Dr Kiln. No matter what misfortunes had befallen him, he'd lived a full and happy life: he was a python with no regrets to be found.

Because now it was time to protect the better of the two worlds he and his fellow researchers had helped to create: their discoveries had sped Unbridled Radiance's rise to power, true, but through the works of defectors like Kiln, they'd given the Deviant Nations the strength to stand again the Empress. It was time to put an end to the tyranny he'd helped create, to ensure that his discoveries would be put to the best possible use and never abused so horrifically ever again.

So, sliding up the side of a building, he positioned himself directly above the Empress, winding back the muscles of his body like a coiled spring. Then, he let out a shout that could have been heard on the other side of Exemplar:

"MADAME DIRECTOR!" he bellowed.

The tiny, ganglionic skull swivelled in his direction, the halo of eyes belatedly focussing on him in mute surprise. And before the Empress could react, the mage-surgeon and one-time member of the Pottery catapulted himself into the air with the best war-cry he could think of:

"YOU OWE ME A SEVERANCE PACKAGE!"

The Empress had no time and no space to manoeuvre: Dr Coil was moving too quickly and Alphaba's current form was simply too big to dart out of the way, much less back off. The giant python struck her right in the middle of her sprouting torso, wrapping himself around her middle and sinking his fangs deep into the undefended flesh of her neck.

Of course, pythons had no venom glands, but that didn't stop the Empress from letting out eardrum-rupturing howl of pain intense enough to shatter every single window within a mile radius.

Instantly, the frondlike limbs released their hold on both Elphaba and Glinda, and as they finally flew free, all seven arms focussed their strength on freeing herself from Coil's grip, with little success: the giant snake had wrapped himself so tightly around her that the tendrils simply couldn't grip at his body.

And then Coil began to constrict, tightening his hold on her until muscles, fibres and bones began to crack like dry twigs in a fire. Swearing and snarling like a wounded beast, the Empress tottered backwards across the ruins of the district, stumbling clumsily across the neighbourhoods and ever-closer to the Palace of Radiance itself – totally oblivious to the fact that Glinda was pursuing them across the wreckage.

At last, overbalanced by the sheer weight of the serpent clinging to her middle, the Empress tipped backwards and fell, crashing into the palace so violently that its towers simply shook themselves in half, raining down on the keep's main roof like hailstones and causing even more damage to the once-mighty citadel. Once again, the Empress bellowed her rage, this time apoplectic at the sight of her beloved palace finally falling victim to the same tide of destruction that had ruined so much of Exemplar… and in that moment, she saw her chance.

Coil's grip must have loosened in the impact with the palace, for one of her frond-limbs managed to seize him around the middle, wrenching him off her torso and hoisting him into the night sky. As one, the tips of the six free tendrils unfolded to reveal their bladed stingers, drew back like a nest of enraged cobras, and then struck as one.

Unable to move, Coil could only hang there helplessly in the tendril's vice-like grip as the stingers slammed home, burying themselves in his body one after the other, impaling him over and over again, moving up and up and up… until at last the seventh tendril released him, sprouted a stinger of its own, and speared Coil neatly through his jaw and up through the top of his skull. For a moment, the giant researcher twitched and shuddered; then, he went still.

Alphaba triumphantly flung Coil's lifeless body aside… and in that moment, Elphaba's hands slammed down on her undefended skull.

She'd been following the pair across Exemplar, Glinda's wings carrying her swift enough to keep pace with the duellers even as they crumpled the palace into wreckage beneath them. Of course, her body still ached from the touch of the deadly thorns, and Glinda wasn't quite back to her usual speed (not until she changed shapes again), but both of them had soldiered on nonetheless, powering through the pain for the sake of this last strike against the Radiant Empress. Elphaba didn't know if this final, desperate gambit would work, or if the Empress would have the willpower to keep herself stable for all eternity; all she knew was that too many people had died already, and she was not prepared to see Coil's sacrifice go to waste.

As soon as her fingers clamped down on the ganglion that currently served as Alphaba's head, she immediately began channelling memories into her counterpart's mind just as she had with the Hate-Creature. This time, there was no real narrative to what she was showing her, no intended message that she intended to send, just a series of recollections chosen at random – but all of them overwhelmingly positive:

Elphaba being given an awkward but heartfelt hug by Nessa, being told her she was a good sister and that one day father would be proud of her after all.

Elphaba at Shiz, almost overcome with joy at being given an opportunity for the first time in her life.

Elphaba dancing with Fiyero and Glinda at the Ozdust, accepted for the first time, the crowd around them following the movements of their dance in spite of themselves.

Elphaba realizing that she had finally made a friend.

Elphaba defying gravity for the first time.

Elphaba being inducted into the Irredeemables.

Elphaba being celebrated and adored by the people of Greenspectre.

Elphaba in the arms of the Alternate Melena Thropp, all vestiges of self-doubt and self-loathing banished for the first time in her life.

Onwards, the memories went, flooding the Empress's brain with the same subject matter over and over again, the same person: Elphaba – her clothes, her voice, her body, her image, herself, repeating over and over again until even Alphaba's subconscious impulses couldn't help but take notice…

With a wild, flailing sweep of her tendrils, the Empress lashed out at her, disconnecting Elphaba from her mind and forcing Glinda to fly away or risk being swatted from the sky… but by then, it was already too late: the Empress had already begun to change, her body simplifying into a more human shape until every last vestige of the spider and the fronds had been absorbed back into her body.

In its place, a gigantic human figure now towered above Exemplar, well over a thousand feet tall; clad in black robes and a crooked black hat, its skin was a familiar shade of green, and though its face was virtually identical to Alphaba's, the features were arranged in an expression that she hadn't worn in over fifty years. This new self could be seen from the very outskirts of the city – and, more importantly, through every camera that the Empress hadn't smashed, on every single viewscreen still active across Unbridled Radiance.

Bewildered, the Empress looked down at her hands in a muddled attempt to work out what she'd transformed into this time, and then let out a strangled gasp as she finally noticed the green tint to her hands. For the first time in five decades, the Empress was once again Elphaba – if only in body, if not in mind.

"NO!" howled the Empress, tearing futilely at her green-skinned body. "NO! NOOOOOOOO!"

And in that moment, Alphaba finally lost concentration.

Her focus only lapsed for a few seconds, but that was all that was needed for the aura of light around her head to wink out. A split-second later, her body began rapidly losing cohesion: back when the potion had taken hold in her body, Alphaba had clearly restrained her cells at the very moment she'd felt them threatening to collapse into meltdown, literally holding herself together through sheer force of will. For nearly half an hour, she had suspended herself over the precipice of dissolution, unable to stop herself from changing constantly but unwilling to let herself plunge the rest of the way into the fatal metamorphosis… but now that the process had finally begun, it was impossible to stop. Some things simply weren't possible even for a witch as learned and powerful as the Empress – and undoing the inevitable was one of them.

Her gigantic hands were already starting to bubble and ooze as her flesh rapidly softened into liquid, her fingertips melting away as her withering bones began to retract back into her body, leaving her arms to slump helplessly into her sides as lifeless flaps of flesh that almost immediately merged with her torso. As if sensing Alphaba's distress, another pair erupted from her softening body and tried to swat Glinda from the sky, but they were already melting even as she raised them to the sky, flesh and bone dissolving into writhing, formless protoplasm that slumped to the ground and joined the growing puddle of molten flesh at the Empress's feet.

At ground level, the monsters that Vara, Dorothy, Fiyero, Brr and Boq had been fighting off suddenly cringed and began to back away, their monstrous features transforming one last time – from rodent to reptile to bird and back again – before suddenly undergoing a rapid collapse of their own. Though they'd been separated from the Empress's bulk, they were still a part of her, kept alive by the power of her will… and now that Alphaba's will had faltered, they were nothing more than lumps of flesh saturated in shapeshifter potion. In short order, they sagged like deflating balloons, their quivering bodies sloughing off limbs, torsos, faces, until at last they were nothing more than expanding lakes of sludge collecting around Boq's ankles.

Above them, the Empress groaned like a dying whale, and began to ever-so-subtly shrink: her feet dissolving into the growing quagmire of protoplasm and slowly drawing her ankles in after them; flesh and clothing began to ooze down her flanks like tallow, her hat sliding backwards off her skull and dissolving into liquid well before it hit the ground; bit by bit, her body was casting off ton after ton of matter and letting it dribble out upon the floor as semi-translucent slime, and though the random shapeshifting almost instantly replaced what had been sloughed off, doing so only cost the Empress more physical substance – and made her shrink all the faster. Already she had lost a hundred feet of height, and she was only getting smaller as she continued to deteriorate.

At that point, Glinda began flying away, trying to keep Elphaba away from her counterpart's wildly thrashing limbs – and to the immense surprise of both, Alphaba began following them. With a horrendous squelching sound like heavy boots tramping through mud, she tore her nearly-liquid legs from the ground and lurched clumsily through the ruins of the residential district, losing everything below the kneecaps in the process as she did so. A host of crumbling towers stood in her way, but Alphaba was too overwrought to even try manoeuvring around them and her body was almost completely liquid by that stage, so she simply walked right though them, leaving pools and puddles of herself strewn on every rooftop in the way.

More than once, the Empress stumbled and fell, losing more and more of herself with every fall: two hundred feet, then three hundred feet, then five hundred feet; by now, her waist was all but melted away, and her instinctive efforts to rebuild her legs only cost her even more of her dwindling body. By the time Glinda had to pause for breath on one of the few towers left standing in the ruined district, the Empress was barely two hundred feet high and already too short to reach them… and yet, Alphaba still wasn't deterred.

Snarling, groaning and gurgling her defiance, she drove her oozing fingertips into the brickwork and began hauling herself up the side of the tower towards them, heedless of the fact that she was dwindling to nothing even as she ascended. By the time she was halfway up the tower, she was barely a hundred feet tall, and her legs had already softened into a grotesque slug-tail of matter oozing down the length of the building. By the time she'd almost made it to the top, she was no more than twenty feet high and struggling to hang on as her hands softened into lumps of indefinable flesh.

And when she finally clawed her way over the guardrail and onto the very top of the building, she was a little over eight feet tall, and getting steadily smaller by the second even as she lunged for the sole remaining target of her hate. As Elphaba and Glinda prepared themselves to fight, the Empress reached out for them, trying to cast a spell… but by that point, her strength finally gave out.

With a weary, defeated groan, she slumped to her knees and collapsed backwards onto the rooftop with a splash, dwindling all the while.

Driven by an impulse she couldn't quite explain, Elphaba found herself edging closer to the shrinking figure, looking down in mingled horror and fascination at the sight of the Radiant Empress's final moments. Even now, with her lower body little more than an expanding puddle of green-and-black protoplasm, she still retained the green skin that her last transformation had branded her with; what now lay before her, helplessly dissolving into nothingness, was no longer her enemy or even her counterpart, but now a perfect replica of herself.

With one final surge of strength, the Empress hauled herself upright on one half-melted arm and fixed Elphaba with a mad, desperate stare. "Don't… look at me as if… as if I was the one that made a mistake," she gasped, her eyes tearing uncontrollably. "Don't look at me… as if I'm the crazy one. You… you would have done the same as me… if you had a chance to create a better world… if you had a chance to make Oz perfect..."

Elphaba briefly considered this. Hadn't she been willing to do whatever it took to dethrone the Wizard and make the people of Oz realize the truth? Hadn't she been leading a one-woman guerrilla movement across the country, bringing down re-education camps and fighting the Wizard's troops in the street? Hadn't she hurt and killed people – knowingly and otherwise?

And hadn't she stopped just short of doing the unthinkable? Hadn't she refused to using magic to force people to do her bidding, to destroy homes and crops, to create plagues and gods only knew what else? Hadn't she at least tried to do the right thing in spite of her many mistakes?

"Perhaps I would," she replied softly. "Perhaps I wouldn't. I wanted a better world, but a perfect one? I don't know if I'd have been able to go that far. There's no way of knowing now… and it really doesn't matter anymore. The world doesn't need to be perfect, and neither do we."

The Empress looked as if it she was about to erupt in hatred again, but then – once again driven by that strange mixture of horror and compassion that had propelled her to the side of her dying counterpart – Elphaba reached out and gently closed Alphaba's eyes.

"Sleep now," she whispered. "And dream of a better world..."

Alphaba's face contorted in puzzlement, and then suddenly relaxed, as if she really were drifting off to sleep. Then she fell back, her body sinking into the puddle, her remaining arm melting away, her face dissolving into featureless protoplasm, until at last she was nothing more than an ocean of matter strewn across the ruins of her city.

And then, even that began to shrink, withdrawing into itself until all that remained was the puddle on the rooftop, the only living remnants of the once-mighty Radiant Empress.

A/N: And now we are on the final two-to-three chapters of this story, ladies and gentlemen. Nyarlathotep only knows how I'll do this any justice, my friends, because I have no idea. Meanwhile, I welcome all your theories on how this story will come to a close.

Until next time, folks!