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.

8. Old Warriors, Old Scars

A/N: This has been another simulteneously exhausting yet fun chapter to produce. As always, I hope you enjoy the developing story so far, and hope you continue to provide the wonderful reviews and opinions that keep my corroded old heart beating. Before we begin, I'd just like to give thanks to the reviewers of the last chapter:

Nami Swann, I'm glad you liked the intensity and confusion of the previous chapter. I'm going to be toning it down a little in this one, but I hope you still enjoy it.

Ms. Helfire, I'm glad you enjoyed the twist, and hopefully the other Might-Have-Beens prove just as intriguing.

Schizzy Godcat... Don't worry. I'll be going a little easier on her in this chapter - key words being "a little."

And WickedlyTragic, I'm glad you like the story so far and I hope this chapter and those to follow continue to excite and entertain. Quite a few of your questions will be answered within this very chapter, but for at least one, you may have to keep your fingers crossed and wait.

So, without further ado, Read, Review and above all, Enjoy!

17/9/14: Made corrections to bungled facial description - now right side of the face. Thanks to guest for picking this up, and sorry for taking so long to correct this.

Disclaimer: Wicked be not mine, nor be the Oz franchise at large.

---

It was strange, when she thought about it.

Had you asked her perhaps four or five hours ago, Dorothy would have said that the men and women who'd saved her from becoming one of the Hellion's dolls were almost as baffling and monstrous as the creature they'd apparently rescued her from. Quite apart from the fact that the Wicked Witch of the West was on friendly terms with them, they were some of the most fearsome-looking people that she'd met in her entire life: what with the bewildering assortment of claws, teeth, tentacles, furry pelts, scales, slime and eyeballs that they wore, they looked as though they'd tumbled out of a nightmare. She'd spent most of the long walk to the airship with her eyes clenched shut, trying not to listen to the conversations playing out around her and vowing not to even glance in the direction of her so-called rescuers – which was easier than she'd thought, given she could barely turn her head at the time.

She'd simmered down a little after her time as a guest in the ship brig, of course (Learning the Wicked Witch actually has a surprisingly pretty name will do that, she thought bemusedly) but she was still suspicious of these "Irredeemables": what did they want with her and Elphaba? Why were they taking them to their capital city? And more importantly, what would make ordinary people want to turn themselves into monsters? The questions kept piling up, and the more Dorothy wondered about them, the more her doubt grew.

Leaving the brig had changed all that. Once they'd seen the Ozian flag out on the plain of wrecked airships (and the inexplicable ruins of the Gale house), Elphaba had decided it was an appropriate time to have a word or two with the captain, and had gone marching off to the mess-hall, where the crew was still partying; faced with a simple choice between remaining alone in the brig and asking to be brought along to the party, Dorothy had tugged on Elphaba's sleeve and asked if she minded carrying her into the mess-hall. After all, as disturbing as she found the idea of rubbing elbows with the crew, spending the next few hours alone in the brig and still unable to walk – and unable to escape from any potential attackers – was an even worse idea. So, biting her lip every step of the way, she was carried through the deserted corridors, up a flight of stairs, under a wooden archway and into the blaring noise and music of the party.

Once they were inside, the witch had turned to her and asked, "Do you mind if I put you down for a minute while I talk to Marl? I just need to give my arms a rest for a clock-tick." She nodded in the direction of the nearest unoccupied chair – which was surrounded on all sides by the Irredeemables.

Dorothy floundered at that point. "But what if – but there's – what happens if..."

"Look, just relax; it's just a party."

"But they... what happens if something goes wrong and they-"

Elphaba groaned. "Dorothy, have we really gotten the stage in which you need to be reassured by me?" She sighed deeply, an incredulous look stamped on her emerald green features; in all honesty, Dorothy couldn't blame her – after all, she'd never thought she'd end up asking the Wicked Witch of the West for protection either. "If it makes you feel any better," the Witch continued, "I'll be about five feet away: if anything goes wrong, I'll be able to help. Now relax and enjoy the party."

And with that, she gently sat Dorothy down in the empty chair, made sure that she was comfortable, and promptly staggered off to talk with the captain.

For about five minutes, Dorothy sat deathly still, watching the crowd milling around her, hoping that she'd been wrong about them, that none of them were going to hurt her. It wasn't easy: because she had her back to half of the crew, she spent most of those first gut-wrenching minutes expecting to turn around and find herself face to fang with an entire ocean of hungry jaws ready to swallow her whole. Thankfully, nothing of the sort happened; in fact, nobody seemed to pay her much attention. Once the Irredeemables had stopped cackling "Watch out, there's a kid in the room – no more swearing, you lot!" or "Hands off each other, you two, there's impressionable youngsters about!" the festivities continued without much change. So, Dorothy helped herself to some more of the food and nibbled agitatedly on each helping as she watched the party-goers about their business.

Some of them were still eating; some drank from tin mugs of what was supposedly champagne; some sang, or played battered musical instruments. Many were passing the time with games: cards seemed to be the most popular, but there were a few checkers players scattered around the room and even the occasional chess-player; two were engaged in a rather heated bout of arm-wrestling; and a tiny cluster of people at the back of the room sat hunched over the tables, whispering and making complicated gestures. Dorothy hadn't the slightest clue what they were doing, until one of them stood up, muttered an incomprehensible word and snapped his fingers, launching a two-foot-long jet of flame out of his thumb. Once the applause and the catcalling had settled down and people had stopped trying to light their cigars with the fire, another member of the little group stood up and waved her crab-claw hands in a rather intricate motion through the air: a moment later, a tiny flock of birds flew through the air and alighted on the table. Even Dorothy, who only just understood Oz and knew next to nothing about this world, recognized magic when she saw it; not for the first time, she absently wondered if she might be able to learn more about it while she was here, maybe even learn a few spells if she got the chance.

But as her eyes swept back across the crowd, she realized that she'd only been focussing on what people were doing rather than what they actually looked like; in fact, she'd only really noticed their "alterations" when they'd become too obvious to ignore. Suddenly curious about the people she'd mistaken for nightmares a few short hours ago, she looked again at the impossible shapes of metal, flesh and patchwork celebrating all around her:

She started with the man sitting left of her; he was playing checkers with blue-scaled Vara, and hadn't spared Dorothy a second glance since she'd first sat down – though that might have been because he had no eyes. Indeed, he didn't seem to have much of a face at all, just a wide mouth full of straight white teeth, and a long, pointed jaw. He didn't have hair either, just skin - and this man's greying skin had the coarse grooved texture of tree bark. Dorothy could tell that it wasn't wood, though, for it moved too flexibly. Meanwhile, at the end of the table to her right, a man with the plump, armour-plated body of a oversized pill-bug was slouched half-asleep in his chair, all eight of the tentacle-fingers on his left hand wrapped firmly around a mug of champagne. Dangling loosely over three of his five closed eyes was a red bandanna with the words "REGISTERED DEMOLITION OPERATIVE" crudely stencilled on it. And across from him, a petite woman with a massive iron bear trap in place of a mouth was contentedly swaying in time to the music, fingers tapping out the beat on table with steel-skewer fingernails. The music itself was being played by a burly figure with a unicycle wheel instead of legs, an accordion clutched between his glittering silver hands, his glass eyes flashing a multitude of colours as he played. And just across from the musician, a man with six arms and a torso pockmarked with gauges and dials was gleefully juggling oranges, much to the amusement of his only audience – the flying monkey that Elphaba had brought into the room with her.

This was not what Dorothy had expected, to say the least: even after she'd gotten used to the idea that the Irredeemables weren't planning on killing her or bent on some kind of wrongdoing, she still couldn't picture them spending their time like ordinary men and women; how could she, once she'd learned that they'd willingly had themselves transformed? She'd never thought they'd be so normal despite their alterations, so... human. This kind of partying was the sort of thing she'd seen from the farmhands her Aunt and Uncle had hired from time to time – without the magic, of course.

In fact, she was so astonished by everything that she barely noticed that the eyeless man next to her was asking her a question, up until he tapped her on the shoulder with a long, thorn-tipped finger. "What's your story, then, young miss?" he croaked.

"I'm sorry?"

"Vara tells me you're from someplace called the Land of Oz." He shook his head, but without eyes, it was difficult to tell if it was meant to look doubtful or gloomy. "An' that's a place I haven't heard of in ages."

"You mean, you've actually heard of it? Most of the people here haven't."

"Aye, sad fate that the Land of Oz was lost to the Deviant Nations; fifty years on, there aren't much people old enough to hear tell of it, and half of 'em are still recoverin' from that head-smeltin' business the Empress worked upon the people." He spat contemptuously. "And I'm of the other half."

"The other half?" Dorothy echoed.

Vara coughed politely, leaning forward to explain. "Granddaddy Harker here is one of the oldest of us Irredeemables, a veritable living slice of history; he's seen more battles, expeditions and uprisings than the rest of us put together. In fact," she whispered theatrically, "I've even heard that he was one of the Great Mentor's personal guards before she helped form the Deviant Nations. But you're not allowed to tell, are you, Harker?"

Granddaddy Harker offered a wry grin. "I can neither confirm nor deny my part in any such activities. You happy now?" As Vara gleefully punched the air, he turned back to Dorothy; "Damn girl's been asking me questions like that since she was your age; still likes to bring out my old catchphrase for guests and the like."

"Why's that?"

"Nostalgia. Plus, she's the resident Miss Kids Gloves; she deals with potential recruits, new members of the squad and visitors to the barracks. She keeps 'em happy, introduces 'em to crusty old Deviants like me – and our funny little habits – and teaches 'em the basics of the basics if need be. I mean, why'd you think the Captain had her explain everythin' to you and your governess? Vara's good at helpin' people adjust." He chuckled. "She's a real people person."

There was a pause as Dorothy slowly digested this information. Then, a question occurred to her: "Why aren't you allowed to talk about what happened?"

"Some stories aren't meant to be told, young miss. Plus, in some cases, there's not enough memory left to tell it with: the Empress saw to that, and not everyone can stand having the curse on them undone. I've seen people die from rememberin' the time before Unbridled Radiance; I was one of the luckier ones."

"But what happened to Oz? You said it was lost to memory, but what actually happened to it? I mean, it can't have been totally destroyed fifty years ago, because I just left it a few hours ago. So –"

Harker shook his head. Even without eyes, it was pretty clear that he was starting to clam up again.

"What happened?" Vara asked, for once sounding almost as intrigued as Dorothy. "Did Unbridled Radiance lose contact with it or something? I heard we lost a lot of safe transit routes during the early years of the war; were we just cut off from Oz? Or did someone try mass-teleporting it?"

"I can neither confirm nor deny," Harker sighed. "I swore an oath before the Great Mentor herself; you want to know, you ask her yourself. Maybe she'll tell you more, maybe she won't – it's a touchy issue among her and the governors."

Now it was Dorothy's turn to sigh. Clearly she wasn't going to get anything else out of this particular conversation, so she changed the subject. "Okay, but who is the Great Mentor really? You said that she's one of your leaders and an expert witch, but who is she?"

"She's more than a leader," said Vara softly; the humour was gone from her voice, now, replaced by a tone of reverence that Dorothy had never once heard outside a church. In fact, she was certain that the noise of the party around them dwindled a bit in respect for the topic, although that could have been one of the spells that the amateur magicians in the corner had just cast. "She's a hero."

"The Great Mentor was the first to speak out against the tyranny of the Empress; she sparked the revolution and became its first leader; and when our supporters were accused of "Crimes Against Beauty", she took the Radiant Laws and turned them on their head – she told us our bodies were ours to do with as we pleased and gave us the right to alter and transform our bodies if we wished. She even converted some of the Empress' own mage-surgeons to our cause, and gave us the means of sculpting our flesh. And she didn't just help establish the Deviant Nations, either; she led its armies into battle, too: she's one of only four people who've ever fought the Empress herself in single combat and matched her power, and out of all of them, she came the closest to besting her. And even though the Mentor was struck down and crippled by the enemy, they couldn't kill her, and they couldn't cripple her spirit. She still works magic for the Deviant Nations, leading our magicians in defending Greenspectre from U.R.'s own spellcraft. And to this day, she still champions our cause in refusing to bow before the so-called Dominion of Beauty." Vara took a deep breath. "And that is who the Great Mentor is."

As the noise and laughter of the party returned to its normal volume, Dorothy slowly reflected on what she'd just been told; for a time, she considered changing the subject to something a bit less explosive. After all, from the passion in Vara's tone and Harker's recognizably bowed head, this wasn't the sort of thing that Dorothy should take lightly, and there was no guessing how these people would react if she said the wrong thing. But Elphaba's tirade over Dorothy's inability to ask questions had hit a little too close to home for her to ignore, and her curiosity was beginning to blossom. So, perhaps it wouldn't hurt just to ask one question. A small one - something that wouldn't insult anyone; something nice and friendly. And she'd ask it politely, too.

So, taking a deep breath, she said, "I, um, I can see why you call her Great... but if you know so much about who is, can you tell me anything about who she was?"

Vara blinked. "I'm sorry?"

"Before she became the Great Mentor, I mean."

A very strange smile crossed Harker's otherwise featureless face, and he muttered a single word under his breath; Dorothy wasn't an expert at reading lips, but it looked as though it started with the letter "B." "B," or possibly "BL."

Out loud, he chuckled, "So the little girl wants to know who our glorious teacher was before the revolution. Well, it's no good asking Vara, missy; it's like Oz – nobody knows the details unless they knew her personally and managed to escape the Radiant Empress' curse. Most of them aren't talkin'. Of course, a few were told the details by the Mentor herself, and they're not talkin' either."

"And what about you? Do you know?"

Harker shrugged enigmatically. "I can neither confirm nor deny. Besides, you'll probably learn for yourself in the next few hours; we're almost out of No-Man's Land. In fact, we might just be crossin' the border into the Deviant Nations right now."

Any disappointment Dorothy felt over the lack of answers was suddenly lost in the surge of excitement she felt in that moment: back in Oz, when she'd still been able to treat her strange journey along the Yellow Brick Road and beyond as an adventure, the point where she'd first seen the Emerald City glittering on the horizon had struck a chord with her; seeing the city up close and walking along its dazzling streets had only deepened the sense of awe and wonder she felt. Perhaps she'd get to see the Deviant Nations and the city of Greenspectre in much the same way? After all, the windows were much larger on this deck of the ship, so maybe she'd be able to get a good view from one of them. Or maybe she could actually be allowed to see it from the top deck itself!

Excitedly, she slipped out of her chair – completely forgetting that her legs were still dead weight; losing balance almost immediately, she would have crashed to the floor had Vara and Harker not managed to catch her by the shoulders.

"Careful now! You haven't fully recovered just yet; I wouldn't try breaking your legs in the meantime."

"How could I?" Dorothy grumbled dispiritedly. "It's not as if I can walk, or even move my feet."

"I wouldn't be so sure about that if I were you," said Vara. She nodded in the direction of Dorothy's feet: there, dangling just a few inches off the floor, the toes of her left foot were slowly twitching to life... and as they did so, Dorothy felt them move, finally achieving sensation in the void that her legs had been hovering in for the last few hours.

Heart leaping once again, she tried moving her left leg from side to side – and almost whooped with joy as her leg finally moved. Immediately, she wrenched herself free of Vara and Harker's mutual grip on her shoulders, anxious to try and walk again – only to immediately topple to the floor.

"As I said," Vara sighed, "You haven't fully recovered yet. More specifically, you've got movement in your legs again, but you haven't got any strength in them yet. Still," she added brightly, "There's no harm in seeing if we can't improve on that..."

For the next five minutes or so, Dorothy's attention was consumed with attempts to stand on her own two feet; of course, it wasn't easy: in almost every single attempt out of twenty, as soon as Harker and Vara set her down on the floor and let go of her arms, Dorothy would either fall forwards or topple backwards to the ground. It wasn't until she finally managed to grab the edge of the table as she fell that she succeeded in staying upright for longer than a few seconds; from there, she went on trying, pushing away from the table when she thought her legs were stable enough and almost immediately collapsing.

And then, on the forty-seventh try, as she pushed away from the table something in her leg flexed; and for the first time since the Hellion had paralysed her, she stood upright. As she very quickly discovered, she didn't have the strength or the balance to walk unassisted just yet, but that paled into insignificance compared to the fact that after so many hours worrying that she'd spend the rest of her life crippled, she could finally stand.

But as she stood there, smiling triumphantly for the first time in a very long while, she couldn't help noticing the all-too-familiar feeling of being watched; as it happened, the watcher in question was none other than Elphaba: having apparently finished off her little chat with the captain some time ago, she was now standing beside the door, idly watching Dorothy's attempts to walk again. And though the Witch's face remained as hard and unsmiling as ever, for perhaps a fraction of a second, Dorothy thought she saw something different in that faraway gaze, a look of...

Sorrow?

Loneliness?

Regret?

Dorothy remembered what she'd been told about Elphaba's sister – about how she'd been "a sweet girl in a wheelchair," before she became the Wicked Witch of the East – and felt the surge of triumph she'd felt at managing to stand fade a little.

"Now that we've gotten that out of the way," said Vara, oblivious to Elphaba's thousand-yard stare, "Maybe we should head out on deck and see how far across the border we've gotten. Do you want me to carry you, or do you want to try walking?"

In the end, they managed a combination of both: with Harker and Vara holding her hands, Dorothy was "walked" out of the room, her feet clumsily padding they ground as they moved. It looked and felt absolutely ridiculous, but it worked long enough for them to make their way into the corridor and up the stairs to the top deck – Elphaba following quietly in their wake. Finally, after many twists and turns, they emerged onto the sparsely-crewed upper deck, now bathed in the orange-gold light of sunset.

Thankfully, the wind wasn't too strong, otherwise Dorothy might have had some inkling as to just how high up they were – and would have probably panicked as a result. But it wasn't until Harker and Vara finally led her towards the guardrail that she finally got a good look at the landscape hundreds of feet below: just as Harker had said, they were almost out of No-Man's Land, for the barren desert of wrecked airships, vast craters and poisonous lakes was slowly dwindling to a halt, ending altogether at the base of a wide expanse of sheer cliffs. It was these cliffs that their own little airship was slowly drifting towards, positioned less than fifty feet above the jagged stretch of rocks that bordered the edge. As they floated closer, Dorothy peered down at the colossal wall of rock below them, and saw that it was dotted with dozens upon dozens of shallow niches and clefts, some large enough to form deep caverns. Once, she was certain that something was moving in the darkness of those cave-mouths, but by the time Harker passed her a pair of binoculars, it was gone.

"Best not to look too closely," he advised her. "Here there be monsters, as they say, and the Hellion isn't the only one to avoid; the war that made the No-Man's Land gave birth to an awful lot of terrible things, and I hear tell that some of them still live in them caverns, just waitin' for food to pass by. Aye, quite a few people have died tryin' to scale those cliffs, and the fall wasn't always the cause of death."

Shuddering, Dorothy hastily looked away from the cliffs; having one enemy among the inhabitants of No-Man's Land was hard enough to live with – having two might just be the death of her. Then, remembering the Hellion's ability to fly, she briefly wondered if it was really safe to be outside at this point. Though Vara reassured her that the Hellion scarcely followed her prey into the Deviant Nations, Dorothy still spent most of the journey glancing over her shoulder and jumping at shadows – until the airship finally crossed the jagged rocks that crowned the top of the cliff-face and arrived at the border of the Deviant Nations.

Here, the rocks slowly dwindled into a wide plain of grassland, deserted except for the well-camouflaged shapes of the border fortresses – which Dorothy would have missed completely if one of the watchtowers hadn't suddenly telescoped out of the ground to watch them. According to Vara, these underground military bases were the only settlements in these parts, and they were always alert for any sign of invasion, whether it was a horde of rampaging monsters or Unbridled Radiance's invasion fleet; the border-fortresses were the first line of defence, equipped with soldiers, artillery, and a sizeable force of well-armed airships. Looking along the plains, Dorothy could clearly see some of those airships herself – silent, grey-armoured hulks that dwarfed the Irredeemables' cargo ship by several hundred feet, cruising through the sky like airborne whales.

And beyond them, beyond the fortresses, the grassland went on for miles and miles on end, unchanging except for the distant shapes of forests and the even-more distant shapes of what could have been cities – or (as Vara hinted) military bases.

Then, just as Dorothy was staring out at the land ahead in excitement, the air around them suddenly sparked.

"Did someone just cast a spell?" Elphaba asked.

"Maybe," said Vara. "I don't think it's hostile, though –"

"EVERYONE INSIDE, NOW!" a voice from behind them shouted; there, standing in the passageway leading back under the deck, was the captain, a megaphone clutched in his hand. "We've just had a priority message from the Great Mentor; apparently she's very eager to meet our newest guests before midnight, so she's sending us an extra burst of speed. It'll be activating in just under three minutes."

"So what's the problem?" Dorothy asked, as Vara and Harker began hurriedly shepherding her towards the stairs, Elphaba once again following closely.

"Oh, nothing: it's just that if you're still out on deck when the spell activates, there's a good chance you'll be flung overboard and splattered from one end of the grasslands to the next. Now get inside and settle yourself down on something soft – down by the observation chamber, if you're in the mood for a good view; just don't be standing up when the first burst of acceleration hits. The last thing you need right now is a set of broken legs..."

Thankfully, it took less than a minute and a half for the five of them to clear the last flight of stairs and ferry Dorothy along to the observation chamber. As it happened, the room itself had once been the dock for the cargo ship's escape-glider, up until both the airship and the glider had parted ways at the scrapyard and the old dock had been hastily patched up with reinforced glass windows and repurposed as a sort of crow's nest for the underside of the ship. For good measure, the chamber was also fitted with soft couches and armchairs, all bolted to the deck to prevent them from breaking the windows; it was in the largest of these overstuffed chairs that Dorothy was placed, with Elphaba and Vara hastily taking seats beside her. Harker and the Captain, meanwhile, hurried off to attend to other matters in the upper decks.

For perhaps a minute, there was silence: Vara drummed her hands on the armrest of the chair; Elphaba idly flicked through a notebook; and Dorothy peered through the enormous windows, at once admiring the view of the grasslands and the sparks of magical energy gathering in the air outside.

And then the acceleration hit.

A solid wave of pressure slammed into the three of them, hammering them into their seats; suddenly, the ship was no longer cruising gracefully above the grassland, but rocketing across it at a speed that made stars flash before Dorothy's eyes. Now the grassland and the sky above it mixed into a vague blur of orange, green and grey, mixed with the vivid flash of energy as the ship continued to accelerate. Overhead, there were yells of alarm from the crew, mixed with whoops of excitement, exhilarated laughter, and the sound of the captain shouting orders; but above it all, Doorhty thought she could hear a ghostly, echoing voice, chanting the words of a spell.

Then, the ship began to slow; they were still moving a lot faster than they had been, but the acceleration no longer threatened to fling Dorothy off her feet, and the grassland, while still moving past them at an impressive speed, was no longer a blur. And now, unless she was deeply mistaken, those cities on the horizon looked a lot closer than before.

"Well," Vara panted. "That certainly cuts a lot of time off the journey."

"How long have we got to travel?"

"Oh, a good few hundred miles, and at least two out of fifteen Deviant Nations; we'll also have to slow down a little around cities to avoid hitting any of their usual airship traffic. So, at the rate we're moving now, I'd say it'll take an hour to reach Greenspectre, maybe half." Vara laughed. "What can I say? I guess the Great Mentor's really anxious to meet you two."

"That makes two of us," Elphaba admitted.

"Any particular reasons? Other than the questions you want answered, I mean."

"Well, if she's able to provide it, I'd like some help from the Great Mentor in finding that friend of mine I told you about earlier..."

---

It was the cold that woke her.

And wasn't just the pervasive chill in the air around her, either; this cold started at the very pit of her stomach and slowly coursed through her veins like a poison, every inch it took accompanied by a jolt of pain in her midriff – as if she'd just been stabbed there. Bewildered and sleepy, she tried to huddle her limbs close to her body, hoping to preserve what little warmth she had left. But she couldn't; the ice that had taken root inside her was now freezing her limbs in place.

The pain in her stomach suddenly crested; the blade there had stabbed a little deeper than before. What's happening to me? she wondered. Where am I?

Quietly moaning in pain, Glinda opened her eyes as far as she could manage; almost immediately, she closed them again – the light above her was almost blinding in its intensity. As she did so, her other senses began to compensate, and she became aware of three things: firstly, she was lying on a very cold metal platform; secondly, the platform was on wheels and being moved somewhere, judging by the shaking feeling beneath her – so it was probably a gurney; and thirdly, there was a very strong smell of disinfectant somewhere.

A hospital, she thought, deliriously, I'm in a hospital. I'm going to get better here. Hopefully, they'll give me a blanket too...

Someone was walking behind her gurney. Three someones, judging by the footsteps; three loud pairs of shoes on tiles, echoing down a long, empty corridor. Question was, who were they? Doctors? Visitors? Well-wishers? Maybe one of them would be able to tell her where she was and what was wrong with her. Blearily, she tried to speak, but the only thing that emerged from her mouth was a hoarse, incomprehensible groan.

"She appears to be regaining consciousness, Your Radiance," said a voice from behind her.

"Not for long, I assure you," said a familiar voice. "The Frostfang will keep her paralysed until she returns to the coma state, just as it will keep her body alive until the time comes for her vivisection."

Elphaba!

With a thrill of horror, Glinda suddenly remembered the events of the day so far, remembering that horrifying meeting she'd had with the Empress – and being stabbed. Suddenly, the pain in her stomach and the frost in her veins made sense; she could still feel the wound on her stomach and the dried blood on the front of her dress. But what did the rest of it mean? Was she having a nightmare, as she'd initially thought? Or was this the descent into hell that she'd feared it was going to be? Neither sounded entirely likely: none of her dreams, no matter how wonderful or horrific they'd been, had ever felt so real. And they hadn't allowed her to feel pain, either: in every nightmare she'd had in her life, she'd always woken up just before she'd hit the ground, or before the monster had taken a bite... or before the dagger of ice tore through her stomach. And if this was Hell... why bother with this madcap vision of Elphaba as Queen of some tyrannical empire? Why not just torture her?

Because if this is Hell, it's doing a perfectly good job of it without having to break out the rotating knives, a nasty voice at the back of her head opined.

"Speaking of which," the Empress continued, "How soon can Doctor Marsh conduct the procedure?"

"He will be here within the hour, Your Radiance."

"Good. And the prisoners that arrived with her?"

"Still in their sarcophagi, Your Radiance, all of them awaiting interrogation just down the corridor."

"Good, good..."

For a minute or so, there was silence, except for the rumble of the gurney's wheels and the footsteps of the Empress and her adjutants. Then, Glinda felt them turn a corner, and a moment later, the gurney rolled to a halt.

"Thank you for your time, Orderly Rennic," said the Empress. "If you would be so kind as to allow me some time alone with the subject, I would be most appreciative."

"Very well, Your Radiance. Once you are done, I -"

"I think my friend and I can find our way back to the palace from here, Rennic. Besides, it's time you went home, don't you think? Your daughter will be missing you."

"... I... thank you, Empress, I-"

"Think nothing of it. Have a good evening, and say hello to Halina for me."

Over the man's babbled thanks, there came the sound of the orderly hastily retreating down the corridor. As soon as his footsteps were out of earshot, Glinda felt a warm grip encircle her own frozen right hand, and briefly rejoiced at feeling the cold in her veins retreat a little; then, another warm hand caressed her face, and a voice whispered "Open your eyes, my child. I hoped you would remain asleep, but as long as you're still conscious, perhaps it's best that we talk..."

In spite of herself, Glinda found herself willingly opening her eyes; squinting against the bright light above, she saw the Empress standing over her, gently stroking her face with smooth, delicate fingertips. Guarding the door behind her and still dressed in his crisp black uniform, meanwhile, was the masked figure she'd seen by the throne; presumably, this was the Empress' bodyguard, but why she needed a bodyguard to confront somebody who couldn't even move on her own was anyone's guess.

"I am sorry about the knife," the Empress whispered, and astonishingly, she actually sounded the part. "But I have my citizens to protect, and my beliefs to uphold; you understand, don't you?"

Glinda tried to answer, but all that emerged from her frozen throat was a terrified whimper.

"I know, I know, my child; the paralysis frightens you. The thought of being vivisected frightens you. I can only ask your forgiveness for leaving you like this... but you needn't fear death. The surgeon may cut you open, but if he finds that you aren't one of Glinda's spies and your mind is untainted by Deviancy, there yet may be a place for you among us. And even if your body is destroyed to uncover the truth, I promise your mind life eternal within the Soul of Paragon." She hesitated, a sad little smile crossing her face. "It's the least I can do for you, my poor, beautiful child."

She leaned forward, and very gently kissed Glinda on her forehead.

"Regardless of what the doctor finds, you will always be an innocent to me. After all, no true disciple of Glinda could ever shed a tear for had happened; I doubt even Glinda herself would cry if we were to even meet again..." She stroked her face one last time. "Goodnight, my child. And remember what I told you: everything is going to be alright."

And with that, she strode away; immediately, the cold returned to Glinda's body – as did the worst of the fear. But as the Empress left her side, she saw that her masked bodyguard was staring at Glinda with an expression of such profound curiosity that even his expressionless silver mask couldn't disguise it. For a moment, it looked as though he was about to approach her... but then the Empress put a hand on his shoulder and whispered, "I'm sorry, my friend. It isn't really Glinda."

The bodyguard bowed his head, his emotions suddenly unreadable again. Then, without another word, he turned and followed the Empress out the door.

If she could, Glinda would have screamed at that point: she would have yelled and wailed and kicked the gurney loud enough for everyone in the building to hear. She would have shouted at the Empress, "Don't leave me here! Please don't leave me frozen like this, it feels like I've been buried alive! Oh sweet Oz, it's so cold, it's so cold, it's so cold... Please, I'll do anything – absolutely ANYTHING, just don't leave me here!"

But alas, her jaw was still frozen, so the most Glinda could do was scream these words inside her mind and wait as darkness claimed her vision once again...

---

After less than six minutes of flight, the airship finally reached the first of the Deviant Nations.

Elphaba wasn't entirely sure what to expect, given the fact that the only inhabitants of the area she'd met so far were the Irredemmables – who were, as he'd proudly indicated, an elite (and decidedly fanatical) group; thankfully, while she'd been questioning the captain, one of the few things the man hadn't been infuriatingly vague about was the nature of the territory they were currently entering. For a start, most of the Deviant Nations were more like oversized city-states than anything else, supporting large interconnected districts rather than individual settlements; only a few Nations had more than one city, or had separate towns and villages. Thanks to the constant bombing raids, border skirmishes and communications blackouts during the earlier decades of the war, most of the Nations had been forced to develop a jack-of-all-trades approach to industry, right down to farming their own crops on the outskirts of the cities – and not stopping even once things had settled down and actual farming sectors had been built in the north.

The first of the Nations they reached was one of the jack-of-all-trades territories, a high-walled city of solid-looking ziggurats and pyramids, each of them built to withstand attacks from any monsters or enemy airships that made it past the border fortresses; for good measure, a vast array of gun turrets and artillery batteries had positioned across the walls and buildings. Thanks to this, its position just behind the border, and the preponderance of step pyramids throughout the city, the Nation had been given the cheeky nickname of "The Deadliest Doorstep in the World," commonly shortened to "Doorstep." Outside the walls, the districts were arrayed in wedge-shaped segments, except for the farming district, which took the shape of a ring surrounding the entire city. However, what caught Elphaba's eye were the factory districts: having seen the industrial towns of Oz from her broomstick, she wasn't surprised to see the towering chimneys, the enormous machines grinding away with their gears and conveyer belts, the squat bulks of factories, refineries, foundries and smelters, and the newly-finished vessels slowly rumbling free of their shipyards for their maiden voyages (though here, airships were used instead of sailing ships and ironclads).

What surprised her were the groups of huge purple jellyfish hovering above these industrial districts, their tendrils waving in hypnotic patterns, their blubbery bodies only moving to avoid airship traffic.

"What the hell are those?" Elphaba asked.

"Smogeaters," said Vara. "They devour the industrial pollution our cities produce and keep it from spoiling the air, the water or the farmland; digestion turns all the old smog and spillage into a wide variety of useful materials. Cement, for one thing. Just don't ask how we go about collecting the... product."

"But where did you find the damn things? How did you tame them? How did you even discover they could eat pollution in the first place?"

"We didn't find them at all: we made them."

Dorothy and Elphaba exchanged disbelieving glances, and then said, in perfect unison, "What?"

"Why so surprised? You've already heard how our mage-surgeons can alter flesh; those tentacles and claws weren't all taken from animals, you know – most of them had to be grown from scratch. It's the same with the Smogeaters, just on a bigger scale."

"Does Unbridled Radiance have these things?"

"Of course; do you really think they'd be able to keep up with their doctrine of Beauty In All Things if they had to deal with industrial runoff turning their drinking water purple? Yeah, they've got Smogbelchers, though I hear they're meant to look prettier, and they've probably given them a much more flowery name, too."

Head spinning, Elphaba turned her attention back to the window just in time to see Doorstep slowly drifting out of sight. Eight minutes, an empty stretch of grassland and one sizeable military base/airstrip later, the next Nation rumbled into view: this one was much less grand than the previous one, being comprised of small mining towns rather than one gigantic metropolis. Known as "Warren" to the locals and "Rabbitass" to everyone else, a good deal of its population made its living underground, either searching for valuable deposits of metal, or growing fields of mushrooms and lichens; in fact, many of Warren's inhabitants actually lived underground, converting caverns and disused mineshafts into houses and apartments, and connecting each settlement (aboveground or otherwise) via a growing network of tunnels and underground highways. With so much activity going on beneath the surface, it was no surprise that this particular nation seemed the quietest from the air; in the villages they flew over, the streets were empty and the buildings showed no signs of life whatsoever – except, of course, for the mines and their attached facilities. The roads connecting these tiny settlements were equally bare, apparently only used by personnel from the nearby military base. Even Warren's only major city looked deserted to Elphaba, its alabaster streets gleaming in the sunset and unoccupied except for the occasional sweeping machine making its way across the boulevards. "At least until tourists decide to pay the city a visit," Vara cheekily remarked. "You'd be amazed at just how much money the Warrenfolk make in renting out the old surface buildings..."

Eventually, though, the last of Warren's humble townships dwindled away into open countryside; slowly, the flat grassland plains gave way to trees, rivers, lakes and hillsides, and before long, a vast tract of forest. Very few people lived out here by choice, according to Vara; though the region wasn't nearly as dangerous as the one on the border of Unbridled Radiance, life out here was still particularly unforgiving: thanks to the denseness of the trees it was very difficult to navigate, forcing ground transports to avoid passing through it at any cost, so anyone unlucky enough to be stationed out here had to live off the land – or wait for the monthly airdrop of rations. At first, it didn't seem as if the area was inhabited at all, as they sped across the verdant woodland, Elphaba caught a tantalizing glimpse of what looked like camouflaged gun turrets just protruding from the canopy, ready to open fire at any hostile airship sighted; remembering that first mind-pummelling dream of being ambushed and brought down by Ozian snipers hiding in the treetops, she only just repressed a shudder.

As she did so, she noticed something else: the airship was slowing down, gradually returning to its original speed as the magic of the acceleration spell wore off. Was this a mistake, or were they getting close to their destination? Judging by the grin on Vara's face, it was probably the latter. Elphaba pondered this as the forest beneath them slowly receded back into the grassland: after everything she'd heard about this mysterious city of Greenspectre, about the righteous cause of the Deviant Nations, and about the power and benevolence of the Great Mentor, she couldn't help but remember the things she'd heard about the Emerald City and the Wizard, before she'd discovered the truth.

Was the Mentor really the hero that the Irredeemables worshipped her as, or was she just as powerless and counterfeit as the Wizard himself? And even if her fears were entirely groundless, would she really be able to help her? Answering her questions about the Ozian ruins she'd seen in No-Man's Land was easy enough, but what about finding Glinda, or sending them back to Oz? Was any of that possible?

Beside her, Dorothy Gale let out a gasp of amazement; Elphaba looked up at the observation window, absently wondering what had caught the girl's attention this time... and saw the plains slowly dissolve into neatly ordered farmlands, pastures and row after row of crops, which in turn gave way to quaint residential zones composed of oddly-shaped houses and apartment blocks; then the squat rectangles that made up the warehouse districts; then industrial regions blistering with smokestacks and factories, the air above them clogged with the luminescent bulks of Smogeaters; then the air-docks, some built flat on the ground, some taking up entire buildings, a few even hovering thousands of feet above the city – all of them receiving a steady stream of airships in all shapes and sizes. And then, past the docks and past the rows of gun-turrets, looming over the iron-grey lake to its north, stood the gargantuan city itself...

Unlike the stocky pyramids and ziggurats of Doorstep, this was a city of towers reaching towards the twilit sky above it; and unlike the Emerald City, there was no overarching style to the place – every building seemed to have been constructed by a different school of architecture: unadorned concrete skyscrapers a hundred stories tall; vast monuments of polished marble and fluted pillars; needle-like spires made from glass and steel, reflecting the lights of the city around them; stucco domes clustered with tall, thin towers ending in corkscrew-shaped tips; ominous cathedral-like structures with high, pointed rooves and gigantic stained-glass windows; ring-shaped towers of granite, the rim of each ring clustered with hanging gardens and greenery; lush parkland flourishing on ground suspended almost five hundred feet above the ground; statues, obelisks, monoliths, and gargoyles by the million, some barely visible from the airship, some dwarfing the buildings they were surrounded by... There were some buildings that didn't seem to touch the ground at all, and a few that stood taller than the rest by virtue of hovering above them. And throughout it all, Elphaba could sense – actually feel the tantalizing spark of magic in the air.

Vara stood, and slowly walked to the window. "Dorothy, Elphaba," she proclaimed, "Greenspectre welcomes you."

She pointed to a distant shape on the horizon. "And that's our destination over there; Greenspectre Palace – home of the Great Mentor."

And as the building came into view, Dorothy and Elphaba's jaws dropped in perfect unison for the second time that day.

Even if they'd never seen the Palace before, even if neither of them had ever even approached the Wizard's official domain, they still would have recognized the building on sight – for the building's walls were still covered in emeralds.

"Vara," mumbled Elphaba, "Just how old is the Palace?"

"Oh, nobody's entirely sure; we don't know when it was built, truth to be told. All that's known is that it was one of the few structures that survived the rise of Unbridled Radiance, so it was probably built decades before the Empress came to power. Why do you ask?"

Elphaba very slowly put her head in her hands; the feeling of awe and wonder she'd been feeling less than a minute ago had been replaced by a crushing sensation of dread. She wasn't sure what was going on, but she had a few theories – and the more she thought about them, the worse they got. And they all started with that infuriatingly cheeky name: "Greenspectre." The ghost of the old Emerald City, she thought. Is this the future or something much worse?

So, with the two guests of the Irredeemables lost in thought, it was in complete silence that the airship descended towards a private airship dock just above the colossal entrance of what had once been the Wizard's Palace...

---

As soon as the airship had docked and the crew had begun to disembark, they were promptly greeted by a cluster of palace guards – instantly recognizable by the immaculate grey uniforms and elaborate pieces of armour they wore, not to mention the deadly-looking rifles they all held. Though they weren't members of the Irredeemables, at least according to Vara, they had undergone alteration in order to make them more effective bodyguards, equipping them with faster reflexes, stronger muscles and a skin almost like chain-mail. Most of it was subtle and under the surface, except of course for their bulky musculature and uniformly thickset builds – the only real hint to their augmentation.

"Probably here to escort you to the Mentor's chambers," the Captain whispered.

"What about you and the others?"

"We've got a meeting with this city's Chapter Master –the head of the Irredeemables in Greenspectre. And that's about all I can tell you; half of its classified, the rest I won't even know about until we actually get in there." He shrugged, the gears in his prostheses whirring musically. "What can you do? Perhaps we'll see you again someday. It all depends on what the Great Mentor decides in the end; either way, it's been a pleasure." He shook her hand, and then strode off down the gangway and into the milling disorder below, vanishing amidst crowds of departing Irredeembables, dockworkers, guards and emergency medical technicians (who currently helping the crew-members who'd been scorched by the Vigilant Eyes).

Most of the crew made similar goodbyes to Elphaba and Dorothy, the most enthusiastic version being delivered by Vara - who actually paused to thank the two of them for brightening up the return voyage. "Remember," she told Dorothy, "Keep up the walking attempts; the more you exercise the legs, the quicker the paralysis wears off."

Harker's farewell was more subdued, consisting largely of a ten-second-long eyeless stare at Elphaba. "When you meet the Great Mentor," he whispered, "Just remember this: no matter what she used to be, she didn't get this far in life by luck alone, and she certainly didn't do so without having to make sacrifices."

"I get it, you want me to show all due respect. You're not telling me anything I don't already know, Harker; I understand perfectly."

The eyeless man just smiled mysteriously. "No you don't," he said. "Not yet." And without another word, he strode away.

Now alone on the dock except for the squad of palace guards and the few remaining workers, Elphaba finally approached the waiting escort, Dorothy holding her hand and tottering awkwardly behind her. However, to their surprise, as soon as they were within arm's reach of the guards, the squad leader turned in Dorothy's direction and rumbled, "Not you, Miss."

"Excuse me?"

"The Great Mentor welcomes you to Greenspectre, Miss Gale, but she has not yet granted you an audience with her; for the moment, she only wishes to speak with Miss Thropp. In the meantime, she has provided the two of you with a palace apartment for the duration of your stay in the building-"

"And you want me to stay there until the meeting's over," Dorothy finished wearily.

For the first time since he'd first spoken, the squad leader's expression finally betrayed an emotion – in this case, sheepishness. "Well, it has been strongly recommended," he said at last. "I am sorry for the inconvenience."

Sighing like a deflating balloon, Dorothy reluctantly agreed. Elphaba could tell that she was disappointed; the girl had no doubt had a hundred different questions to ask the Mentor, and all of them to do with either getting back to Oz or getting home to Kansas. But surprisingly, other than the exasperated sigh and the slump to her shoulders, she didn't show any other signs of disappointment – least of all the tears and the bawling that she'd come to expect from the girl.

One way or the other, the squad was divided in half: the first group escorted Dorothy through the right-hand exit to the dock, which apparently led deep into the palace's eastern wing, the residential/luxury sector of the building where most of the administrative staff and servants lived; the second group guided Elphaba through a door leading into the western wing of the palace. According to the squad leader, who apparently never missed a chance to drone on about the building's layout to anyone too polite to refuse, this was where the actual work of government actually took place, and where the governors of the other Deviant Nations held their council meetings. For the most part, all that Elphaba saw of it was a long, winding labyrinth of red-carpeted corridors and lacquered mahogany doors, populated only by the occasional functionary wheeling trolleys of files and folders down the hall; occasionally, though, a door would creak open, and she'd get a tantalizing glimpse of the workplace beyond: some were just offices clustered with people and paperwork; opulent meeting halls, presumably for conferences and important meetings with visiting dignitaries; and perhaps most fascinatingly of all, a control room filled with equipment and uniformed soldiers hard at work, pouring over maps and whispering into radio transmitters.

But other than those brief moments of excitement, the guards didn't seem to be making much progress in the journey. It took about half an hour of walking before Elphaba finally worked up the nerve to ask "Where exactly is the Great Mentor?"

"She's on the top floor of the building, Miss Thropp."

"Ah. Correct me if I'm wrong, but are we still only on the eighth floor... and moving westwards, not upwards?"

"That's right, Miss. We're taking a slight detour through the medical centre first; the Great Mentor's decreed that you should be inspected before you are allowed to speak to her."

The feeling of dread bubbling in Elphaba's stomach intensified. "What am I being inspected for, exactly?"

"Oh, toxins, contagions, concealed weaponry, anything that could pose a threat to the Mentor. Also, we also have to compare you with your current medical details, just to make sure you really are Elphaba Thropp."

And before Elphaba could so much as blurt out the word "What?" the squad turned a corner, opened a frosted-glass door and pushed her inside. She barely had time to recognize the sterile little room as a surgeon's office, before the white-coated surgeon in question appeared at her elbow and began the "inspection" in earnest: for almost an hour, the doctor and her attendants searched every last inch of Elphaba's clothing and body for any kind of weapon, checking her nails for infective material, patting her skin for objects sewn under it, studying her teeth with dental equipment just in case something nasty had been planted in her molars, even resorting to x-raying her bones for concealed blades.

Then came the identity tests: they measured her height, weight, limb-length, shoe-size, and studied the tags on just about every single piece of clothing that she'd been wearing that day; they photographed her face and eyes, taking close-up shots of the skin on her neck and arms, all to be compared with earlier photos they had on file (And just where the hell did they get those? Elphaba wondered). They took clippings of her hair, scrapings of skin from her hands, perspiration from her forehead, took impressions of her fingerprints, and extracted so much blood from her veins that Elphaba had to wonder if this was some kind of passive-aggressive assassination attempt. They recorded her voice (which no doubt sounded extremely frustrated), tested her eyesight and hearing, double-checked the x-rays, and even applied rubbing alcohol to her skin just to make sure that the green colouration wasn't makeup.

Finally, once she'd gotten her clothes back on, they'd brought the guards in and asked her to demonstrate her magical abilities: first, the wild gift she'd often displayed when confronted with strong emotions until she'd finally learned how to control it at Shiz; secondly, a series of basic spells that she'd learned in Madam Morrible's magic class; thirdly, a spell from the Grimmerie. Elphaba performed all three, apparently to the examiner's satisfaction. Then, without so much as a "Thank you for your time," she was whisked out the door and back along the hallway.

Dorothy, Elphaba thought, something tells me that you wouldn't be so anxious to meet this Great Mentor if you knew just how many hoops they'd make you jump through first. Question is, how and why do these people have a medical file on me? Why do they know so much about me? And is it for the reasons I suspect?

After about fifteen minutes of walking, they arrived at a cage-like elevator – positioned helpfully at the bottom of a very long flight of stairs leading upward. Squeezing inside the cage with considerable difficulty, Elphaba and all five of the guards rode the elevator up to the very top floor of the palace... where they proceeded to walk along another four hundred yards of corridor, stopping every minute or so to pass through a security checkpoint. Finally, the expedition (which was the only thing Elphaba could call it after the distance they'd just walked) rumbled to a halt in front of a set of double doors; protected by no less than eight heavily-armed guards of their own, the doors were made of solid steel and embossed with magical symbols of protection, many of which even Elphaba didn't recognize. Whoever this "Great Mentor" was, she obviously took security very seriously.

Then, as the squad of guards that had been escorting her lined up along the wall in readiness, the doors swung slowly open, and Elphaba was ushered into the depths of the Great Mentor's inner sanctum.

---

At first, she could see nothing: the only light in the entire room came from a tiny spotlight positioned right above Elphaba's head, and beyond that tiny circle of illumination, the darkness was almost impenetrable. However, as her eyes adjusted to the shadows, she thought she could just about discern the shapes of guards standing against the left-hand wall perhaps eight feet away from where she was standing. Further away, something large and imposing was positioned against the back wall, something that might have been a throne or some other piece furniture, but it was too dark to be certain. Presumably, the Great Mentor was waiting somewhere back there, watching her every move, waiting to reveal herself in presumably the most dramatic way possible.

Elphaba wasn't very tolerant of cheap theatrics at the best of times, and the long journey through the corridors combined with the humiliating inspection hadn't done much for her mood. In fact, she was on the verge of conjuring a torch and bringing an end to the whole charade, when there was a loud click from somewhere behind her: turning around, she saw that another small light now illuminated the wall behind her – and what she saw made her heart skip a beat or two.

It was a portrait of her.

Rendered in oil paints, she was dressed in the same pointed hat, black dress and heavy cloak she'd worn at the start of her campaign against the Wizard; her face was clearly visible, and all of her features had been captured with perfect accuracy, right down to the correct shade of green her skin was coloured – a detail that even the Wizard's propaganda had gotten wrong at times. But whereas those aggravating posters had portrayed her as a hag and a monster, this portrait made her look remarkably human; in fact, to Elphaba's surprise, it almost made her look attractive – particularly the tiny, ever-so-slightly mischievous smirk it wore.

Just as she was starting to wonder what the point of showing her this painting was, or even why the Mentor would have it in the first place, someone behind her laughed hoarsely. "You know," said the voice, "When she was first introduced to the good people of Oz – or re-introduced, as the Wizard put it – some of the citizens asked me why she'd been wicked in the first place. I played vague and philosophical, made up some inspirational-sounding gibberish about how some people are born wicked, others have wickedness thrust upon them... it was all bullshit, of course. It took twenty long years of fighting and toiling and suffering for me to realize the awful truth I'd overlooked."

"Some are born wicked; some have wickedness thrust upon them... but all too many people accept wickedness because it was delivered under the guise of virtue."

There was another loud click, and the overhead lights switched on, finally allowing Elphaba an uninterrupted view of the chamber around her. Once she'd taken in the deep green walls and ankle-deep green carpet, she realized that she'd been slightly mistaken in her first assumptions: this wasn't a throne room, nor was it an office - it was a bedchamber; the large shape she'd seen in the darkness was actually a four-poster bed, surrounded by complicated-looking arrays of medical equipment and monitors. But just as she'd seen, there were guards posted by the left-hand wall, watching their newest guest's every move, and Elphaba only had to look at the way they held their rifles to know that they clearly didn't trust her. Meanwhile, standing to attention at the right-hand wall was a short, nondescript figure clad in the familiar white coat and rubber gloves of a physician; he too was staring at Elphaba, but unlike the guards, he didn't seem nearly as hostile or as suspicious – though the opaque lenses of his glasses made his expression difficult to judge.

And at the centre of the room, in the bed...

"Come closer," the voice whispered. It was hoarse and aged, the tone quiet but just strong enough to carry a hint of menace.

Elphaba tentatively approached the bed, padding through the thick carpet to its left side. There, almost lost amidst the pillows and the blankets of the four-poster, the right side of her face resting against the cushioned bed-head, sat the Great Mentor: she was clearly very old, perhaps seventy or eighty years of age if Elphaba was any judge; her body was frail and emaciated, her skin as dry and worn as old parchment, and dotted with hundreds of old battlescars, burns and pockmarks across her shoulders and throat. Her left arm was a withered husk, the claw-like fingers twitching and shaking at random intervals; the right arm was missing from the shoulder down, replaced by a gleaming mechanical prosthesis of brass and steel. Most of her face seemed a ruin, for on top of the usual wrinkles and sagging skin that age brought, it bore almost as many scars as the rest of her: the left cheek alone was almost torn open by a quintet of lacerations stretching all the way to the mangled remains of her ear; the mouth was ripped and striated by dozens of tiny diagonal scars, and a huge chunk of her lower lip had been sliced off; the skull was cleft around the brow and eye-socket, as if someone had tried to put an axe through her left eye but hadn't quite succeeded, for it was still there, if shrouded by cataracts. And just below the few remaining locks of hair on her head, a crater-like burn exposed a sliver of bone.

And then she turned, exposing the right side of her face: here, things were different. True, the jaw, the lower lip and the cheek were withered by old age and the ancient scars of third-degree burns, but for some reason, the scarring stopped just below the cheekbone itself. Above it, from the right side of her nose to the right ear, the face was unscathed. More than that, it actually looked about forty years younger than rest of her: the skin was smooth and pale, the features pleasant, the eye bright and aware. There were even a few luxuriant curls of golden hair dangling from the scalp.

For the second time in as many minutes, Elphaba's heart stopped: she recognized this quarter of the woman's face, the delicate features, the blonde hair, the vivid blue eye...

"Glinda?" she whispered.

The Great Mentor's tattered lips curled into a smile. "What's left of her. And you?"

"I'm sorry?"

"You heard me well enough: who are you?"

Elphaba's jaw dropped open. "You... you know who I am," she said plaintively. "You've got a portrait of me over there-"

"No," said the Great Mentor, voice suddenly cold. "I have a portrait of a woman who's been dead for almost fifty years; in that time, I've seen many bizarre forms of magic on display, but I've never seen anything that can restore the dead to life."

The physician to her right coughed loudly.

"Alright, effectively dead. You are insistent on these things, aren't you?"

"Just trying to convey the facts correctly, My Lady."

Elphaba took a deep breath. "What about the medical examination?" she demanded. "Haven't you seen the results of that?"

"I have. They show that you are physically identical to Elphaba Thropp in every respect: blood type, fingerprints, skin tone, facial layout... but I can't judge your identity by these details alone. A mage-surgeon of skill and experience would be able to mimic them, and our enemies have more than their fair share of professionals that could manage it."

"You think I'm a spy?"

"Or an assassin. I'm willing to consider either possibility."

"But... but... How could anyone fake my abilities?" she burst out. "The wild talent – I was born with that, and I've never seen anyone replicate it successfully. And how many people have been able to cast the spells of the Grimmerie without translating them first?"

"She has a point, My Lady," the physician murmured. "Elphaba's abilities aren't so easily mimicked, even by skilled magicians."

There was a pause, as Glinda's aged doppelganger considered this. She was about to reply, but Elphaba beat her to it: "You think someone powerful enough might just be able to copy my powers? Fine. What about the things I know that nobody else knows? I was born in Muchkinland: my mother's name was Melena, my father's name was Frexspar. He hated me from the moment I was born; she was barely allowed a chance to speak to me, and died giving birth to my sister, just a few years later-"

"You do realize that a sufficiently-briefed operative would know these things?"

"We met at Shiz University!" Elphaba almost screamed. "We shared a room for almost a year; we hated each other for the first few months, do you remember that? You called me "the artichoke," and I said you had more beauty products than brain cells. We used to play pranks on each other: you threw my books out the window; I replaced your hair conditioner with green dye. Do you think an assassin would be told all that? And what about that night at the Ozdust Ballroom? I got this damn hat from you for that night – the reason we became friends in the first place! I told you about my little green bottle!" She reached into the depths of her cloak and held up the offending item for the Mentor's inspection. "You told me about how you were going to be engaged to Fiyero," she continued. "If I'm just some operative from Unbridled Radiance or whatever other country you're at war with, how would I know the little things that nobody would ever bother to record, Glinda? Oh, my mistake - how would I know that, Galinda?"

The Mentor's eyes narrowed. "And what am I to make of this, then? What exactly is your cover story, Miss Thropp? How did you get here, and why are you here? I've heard Captain Marl's explanation for how he found you, but I'd much prefer to hear your version of events."

Elphaba sagged a little: the events of the past few hours were beginning to wear her down. But, once the guards had fetched a chair for her to collapse into, she explained everything as best as she could: how she'd found herself holed up at Kiamo Ko, the final meeting with Glinda, the white light and the portal they'd fallen through, how they'd awakened on the borders of Unbridled Radiance, and how she and Glinda had been separated. Finally, she explained how she first met the Irredeemables, pausing only to babble on about the dreams of capture and hospitalization she'd experienced. By the end of it, she was almost trembling with emotion – mingled frustration and shock being the strongest of it. "I thought I'd just ended up being teleported into another country, or something," she said. "But then I started seeing wrecked airships with the Ozian flag, then this palace that used to belong to the Wizard and now I've found you like this and and and and..." She took a deep breath. "Is this the future? I mean, you've said I've been dead for fifty years-"

"No," said the Mentor. Her voice was almost unreadable now. "It's not the future – not yours, anyway."

"What do you mean?"

"There's one discrepancy with the medical report – another reason why I still suspected you even after I saw all the correct details: your skeleton is quite dissimilar from the Elphaba I knew in one notable respect: around the time the original x-rays were taken, she was recovering from numerous fractures in her arms and legs; even x-rays taken after she healed would have shown signs of the damage. But in your case, there's no trace to be found. And another thing, several events you referred to never happened to the best of my memory: I don't recall Elphaba ever taking shelter at Kiamo Ko; Nessarose certainly wasn't dead around the date you provided, and neither was Fiyero. In fact, by this time, Elphaba Thropp was no longer known as the Wicked Witch of the West."

"Oh. So is this what you meant when you mentioned me being dead for fifty years? I was dead by that time?"

"In a manner of speaking."

"Then why do you think I'm an imposter? Why would anyone bother to disguise an assassin or a spy as a woman who's been dead for half a century?"

The Mentor said nothing.

Once again, the physician coughed for attention. "Perhaps I could venture to explain on your behalf, My Lady-"

"By all means," the Mentor sighed. "You're the only member of my staff that believes that the two of them are one and the same."

The Physician nodded; then, reaching into the top drawer of a large filing cabinet set into the wall, he drew out a small folder and handed it to Elphaba. "These photographs were taken three days ago by one of our deep-cover operatives in Unbridled Radiance," he explained. "They were celebrating the capture of a large stretch of previously unaligned territory to their empire's north – and the Purification of its leaders, of course."

Elphaba scanned the first photograph for about a minute: in full colour, it showed exactly the kind of celebration you'd expect for a major victory, including rallying citizens, marching bands, parade floats, and brightly-dressed guards. In fact, it was so stereotypical that Elphaba was about to ask what she was supposed to be looking for – up until she saw the woman standing on the balcony above the cheering crowd. Her face bore an astonishing resemblance to –

Heart very nearly stopping altogether, she turned to the next photo: the camera was much more focussed this time, and though it had mainly been aimed at the splendidly-dressed collection of generals, diplomats and other conspicuously-handsome dignitaries, the woman was still very visible. Then, a third photo: this time with the woman in conversation with a tall figure in a gleaming silver mask. And finally, by the fourth photo, there was no mistaking the resemblance: the woman in the photograph was almost completely identical to Elphaba. And the only reason why Elphaba hadn't realized this was because she'd been missing the familiar green skin colour.

"Who is that?" she whispered in disbelief.

"The Radiant Empress," the Mentor replied, voice cold and harsh. "Ruler of all Unbridled Radiance; creator of the Radiant Laws; First of the Purified; and sworn enemy of the Deviant Nations."

"But how... why..."

The Mentor sighed deeply. "It all began perhaps five months into Elphaba's crusade against the Wizard: I was still working for him as the darling of the Emerald City Press; Fiyero was still a member of the guard... and as far as I knew, the "Wicked Witch of the West" was still triumphing over her enemies. Then, one day, we heard the news: Elphaba had been shot down and captured by the Wizard's forces, suffering horrific injuries in the process..."

Agony – the bullet wounds in her right leg and right shoulder scream with it, and her shattered left leg send deep, pulsing waves of pain across her spine. She's being beaten, she can feel someone clubbing at her face with a rifle butt and someone kicking her in the stomach; she wants to run, or at the very least crawl for her life, but she's so disoriented she can't even tell up from down anymore...

"... she was both hospitalized and imprisoned for the next few months: the Wizard wanted to give her time to heal while he considered her sentence, apparently. Just about everyone was clamouring for her execution, of course; even the doctors in charge of her recovery wanted her dead – tried to poison her once or twice..."

She can't breathe: her throat muscles are swelling up, cutting off the air to her lungs. Something in her veins burns, and her stomach lurches in pain. Glinda is holding her hand, screaming for someone to help, but everyone's moving too slowly...

"About the only supporters she had were Fiyero, Nessarose... and me. For what good it did," the Mentor added bitterly. "I think I spent more time with Elphie in those next couple of months than I did with anyone else in the entire city. I wanted to help her recover, I wanted to make up for all the lost time when I hadn't been able to help her, but most of all, I wanted to make sure she wouldn't spend the rest of her life in prison. So when an offer of amnesty was made, I urged her to take it." Her eyes gently slid shut, as if in remorse. "I thought it was everything she'd wanted out of life: it meant she'd be free, that she'd have a chance at gaining the respect and love of Oz, that she'd be working for the Wizard with me –"

"But why would I... she agree to it? Why would she just decide to work for the Wizard all of a sudden?"

"She didn't have much choice," the Mentor admitted. "It was either that or spend the rest of her life in prison. I told her that even if she hated the Wizard and his policies, she might just be able to influence him or his government enough to repeal the anti-Animal laws. And there was one other gift being offered to sweeten the deal..." She took a deep breath; she was clearly dreading this part of the story. "In exchange for Elphaba's loyalty, Madam Morrible would use the spells of the Grimmerie– combined with a few subtle surgical techniques – to make her look normal. In the end, she accepted."

For almost thirty seconds, the room was completely silent. Eventually, Elphaba whispered, "What happened next?"

"The procedure was both a success and a failure: the techniques Morrible used removed the green from Elphaba's skin, and left the fact that she was beautiful undisguised for the first time in her entire life. But she didn't survive the treatment; at the very moment the last drop of pigment was extracted from her, Elphaba Thropp died..."

The scarred expression hardened. "And something else was born to occupy the shell she left behind. I didn't know it at first, of course; nobody could recognize the fact that the transformation she'd undergone was more than skin-deep. But then, everyone was too busy celebrating the fact that the Wicked Witch of the West was rehabilitated and made good by the might of the Wizard and the purity of Glinda the Good." She laughed mirthlessly. "And you know something, when I told her that she might be able to change the government from the inside, I was right about that much. As the months passed, she began ascending the ranks and attaining power and influence; and she began to change things from the inside. I didn't notice the direction she was moving in; I was too happy to see my best friend working alongside me, living her life and receiving all the respect and love she deserved – without realizing that my friend, the one who'd really deserved those accolades, was long-dead.

"I won't trouble you with the details of how she went about altering things in her favour, because truth be told, it went on for almost three years before she finally made the decisive move: a coup d'état; it turned out that she'd been acquiring supporters and followers, even securing the loyalty of renegade factions of the guard." The Mentor sighed. "And as shameful as it is to admit it, I'd known this was going to happen – supported it, too. So did Fiyero, hence why she ended up with the guards on her side. But it wasn't until after the Wizard turned up dead and the first of the Radiant Laws was passed that we realized that we'd made a terrible mistake: the monster who'd claimed the throne was – as far as I could tell – a reflection of every bit of loathing and discrimination that Elphaba had been subjected to in life; as far as the newly-crowned Empress believed, she really had been wicked because of her green skin, and any attempt on her part to do good would have come to nothing because of her "inherent evil." She told me that she could see wickedness everywhere she looked, manifest in the ugliness and imperfection of the people, and the only way to cleanse Oz and the rest of the world of it was through similar methods to the ones she'd been subjected to."

The physician handed her another stack of photos: these depicted men and women splayed out on operating tables, their skulls open and their brains exposed, the skin on their faces slowly being peeled away by intricate machines. Worse still, in most of the photos it was alarmingly clear that the victims were alive and very much awake during their mutilation. Elphaba swallowed hard, trying not to let nausea overcome her- or show on her face - and turned to the Mentor for an explanation

"You've heard of Purification before, no doubt, but you haven't seen it in action – the mage-surgeons flensing away the skin and replacing it with flesh-porcelain, cutting out the undesirable sections of the brain and "curing" them of everything that made them people. That was what the Empress wanted: Beauty In All Things. Servants would be allowed plainness; the commonfolk simple prettiness; those who achieved greatness would have to be beautiful, or be made beautiful through Purification. The ugly, the disfigured, deformed and scarred were scheduled for corrective surgery to make them more acceptable... and those that refused were executed."

Another silence followed, before Elphaba finally found her voice: "So you led a rebellion against it."

"Not as simple as you make it sound, but that's the long and the short of it. I tried to reason with the Empress, tried to explain that you couldn't do this without making enemies. And when that didn't work, I appealed to other sections of the populace, first for peaceful negotiation... then for open resistance. Some of my supporters were just angry citizens that didn't want to lose their relatives to Purification; others were political groups and wealthy business-owners that understood just how much the Empress would cost them if they submitted to her demands. And eventually, there came the radicals: the people that the Empress called Irredeemable, who eventually adopted that name in pride, who spat in the face of beauty and willingly disfigured themselves. We started with petitions, blockades, protests, everything we could do to get attention and change the Empress' mind.

"Eleven months later, it was civil war – one half of the population of Oz against the other. Even when we fled and formed our own makeshift fortresses and cities to the west of Oz, they still attacked us: you've seen the No-Man's Land that formed as a result. At the time, they thought they could beat us easily once we were out of Oz." She laughed, a hint of genuine humour in her voice this time. "And look how it all developed from there: fifty years later, the angry citizens, fearful politicians and petty businessmen are now the Deviant Nations, and the fringe group of self-mutilators have become a movement found in every city of our proud union."

"But why doesn't anyone know about Oz?" Elphaba wanted to know. "It's only been fifty years, so it can't have fallen out of public memory that easily."

"One would think... but the Empress believed that her philosophy of Beauty In All Things was more than just the cleansing of the individual's ugliness in body and mind; she believed it was the cleansing of an entire population of ugly influences – including all record of the imperfection that had existed before her rise to power. Oz had already been torn down to make way for Unbridled Radiance by that stage; the Empress did her best to destroy its very memory. Even we weren't entirely safe from it: many of us forgot all about Oz, and the attempts to restore their memories often ended up killing them. And later, Unbridled Radiance took a step further: their magicians tried to cast a spell to destroy every single memory of our citizens; they even worked it in person, on airship fleets right above our Nations. We repelled them – in one of the bloodiest battles in our entire history."

She pointed to the stump of her arm, where the intricate mechanisms of the replacement whirred and clicked. "I lost my arm in that attack; gashed my face all to hell, too. But the Empress wasn't pleased at being beaten: once she was done burning my face to gristle, she left me with this, too..." She pointed to the quarter of her face that remained young and unblemished. "A curse that not even my magic could erase. It kept one tiny fragment of my beauty intact while the scars on the rest of my face were preserved for all time, unchangeable even by the strongest magicians in the country. She wanted it to remind me of everything I lost, to show me that I was beyond redemption in her own eyes, and of course to stab at my pride. I won't lie: it did shake me up; I was still vain then, and vanity takes a long time to strangle. She knew me all too well, you see...

"... Which brings me to the point which I've been building towards: with the Empress still attempting to either wipe us out or force us to capitulate – and very aware of the things which might just persuade me to let my guard down – how can I trust you?"

"But why would she send me? You said it yourself – I'm everything she hates!"

"Or so you seem: for all I know, you're one of the Empress' body doubles, with just a very convincing illusion keeping people from noticing the difference in skin colour. With advances in both technology and magic, certainty becomes that much trickier to maintain. Or perhaps you're a mercenary loyal to the Empress but not one of her believers – it's not entirely unheard of. Or maybe there's points in the Empress' doctrine that she's willing to compromise on if it means victory. You might even be working for a different group altogether as part of a first strike against the Deviant Nations. Plus, let's not forget, I can't exactly confirm your story of arriving in Unbridled Radiance via a magic portal, can I? It's a bit convenient that you ended up bumping into one of my elite squads, too – and convenient that the Vigilant Eyes spared you."

"Mentor... Glinda... whatever you call yourself these days, just listen to me – please. If I'd wanted to kill you, I'd have done so the moment I got in the door; and as for spying, why would I make myself that conspicuous by making myself look like this? I might as well have had a neon sign over my head reading "PAY ATTENTION TO ME." And as for the Vigilant Eyes not firing at me, just because I happen to look like her enough to confuse the damn things doesn't mean I'm anything like the version of Elphaba those things take their orders from –"

"ELPHABA IS DEAD!" the Mentor bellowed. "HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO SAY IT?" A violent gust of magic swept across the room, knocking Elphaba out of her chair and setting fire to the bundle of photographs in her hand.

"She died on an operating table five decades ago, as part of a deal with her enemies that I forced her to accept!" the Mentor continued, voice quieter than before but still loud enough to make the guards flinch at every word. "The creature wearing her skin right now is absolutely nothing like Elphaba Thropp; you might believe otherwise, and my physician might believe otherwise, but that doesn't change the fact that my friend is dead because I all but killed her myself, and Oz is dead because I let a monster take her place!"

She paused for breath; slowly, the echoes died away – as did the flames on the carpet.

"I'm sorry," she said at last. "As you can see, the years have left their mark on me – and not just in flesh, either." She shook her head. "I'm afraid that until we can determine who and what you are, you're going to have to remain under house arrest in the apartment we've assigned you, with your powers monitored and nullified until we're certain of your allegiance."

"But-"

"I know this hardly sounds fair to you, but try and look at it from my perspective: I have no idea who you are, where you came from and what your true intentions are; the only information I have is what you've been able to provide me with, which unfortunately cannot be confirmed as of now. With enemies who can either alter their appearance at will or hire surgeons to alter their appearance for them, what would you do in my position?"

Elphaba opened her mouth, hoping to muster some of her old righteous anger. But it immediately guttered and died before she could call on it; the barrage of grisly information and emotional turmoil had virtually quenched what little remained of her energy. In the end, she could only sigh and mumble, "I'd keep me under observation until I find some evidence of honesty."

"As you say. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have other matters to attend to. In the meantime, my operatives will be searching for any information regarding your testimony, so there's no reason to think that your incarnation need be permanent."

Oh dear.

"What happens if you can't find any evidence? What sentence will you pass?"

"I'm not the only deciding judge." The mismatched eyes turned hard and vicious again. "But if you were found guilty of the crimes you're suspected of, you'd be facing life in prison at the very least. At the most, you'd be in front of a firing squad - and the only reason why that kind of leniency would be permitted is because most of the Governors didn't know Elphaba Thropp as I knew her. They wouldn't understand the insult to her memory such a imposter would represent." She turned to the squad of guards at the door. "Escort her out."

"One more thing!" said Elphaba, as the guards once again began clustering around her. "I told you that Glind – the one I knew, I mean – the last I saw of her, she was on a train heading to Exemplar. Some of the Irredeemables said that you've got deep cover agents in that city, and they might be able to rescue her."

The Mentor frowned deeply. "If your friend is anything like my younger self, then chances are she'll have used her real name in earshot of some Purified security operative. And even if she hasn't, they have almost every existing record of my appearance on file, and she won't get far without attracting attention. I'm sorry; but you may have to face the possibility that she is already dead. Assuming she exists, anyway."

---

It was almost 8:30 PM by the time Elphaba was finally escorted through the doors of the apartment.

Dorothy, who'd been there for some time with little to do but sit around, exercise her legs and try not to avoid jumping every time Chistery knuckled in her direction, was already tottering forward to ask questions about the Great Mentor: her name, what she was like, what they'd decided on, and if there'd be a chance for an audience with her tomorrow morning. But as she did so, she noticed something had changed in the Witch's demeanour: for once, she no longer walked with the usual confident stride or wore the brisk, businesslike expression that was her usual substitute for an enraged scowl. Now, she looked tired, almost dispirited: her shoulders were slumped, her eyes half-lidded and listless. There was a paleness to her skin, too, a sickly greyish tinge to her usual vibrant green.

"What happened?" Dorothy asked.

Elphaba smiled. It wasn't a particularly convincing smile, because more than anything else it reminded Dorothy of that time an unlucky farmhand had gotten an eighteen-inch splinter of wood clean through his thigh. He'd been wearing that same agonized near-grin as he'd waited for the doctor to arrive.

"Nothing much," she said. "They're going to be keeping us here for a little while until they can decide what to do with us."

"For how long?"

"They didn't say."

Dorothy considered this, and then asked a question she'd never thought she'd ever ask of the Witch: "Are you alright?"

The smile grew; if anything, it looked even more desperate. "Perfectly fine," she said; there was a quaver in her voice, though. "Couldn't be happier."

Then, without saying another word, she turned and walked hurriedly over to the nearest bedroom, and closed the door behind her. Dorothy tottered after her, closely followed by Chistery; she wasn't entirely sure what she was doing (although Chistery was doubtlessly certain, given that the Witch was his owner), but something about the pained look in Elphaba's eyes made her worry about what might be going on behind the closed doors. After all, when ordinary people were upset, the most they did was break things and occasionally break people; what would a witch do?

And then she heard it: the unmistakeable sound of someone bursting into tears.

Somewhere behind that door, the Wicked Witch of the West was crying.

---

A/N: I hope you enjoyed this chapter, ladies and gentlemen; if anyone thinks Glinda/The Mentor's explanation was a little short, don't worry - I will expand upon it in the next instalments.

Oh, and WickedlyTragic, congratulations on guessing the twist to this chapter. I look forward to more theories and opinions...

PS: Just realized I forgot to include part of the chapter title in last night's upload. Not exactly my finest moment...

Next chapter - Glinda's fate!