Disclaimer: Didn't own it a week ago, still don't own it now. No copyright infringement intended, no monetary gain, for recreational purposes only.
Spoilers/'Verse: Bookverse. If you haven't read, don't read now - spoilers are too spread out to mention all of them individually.
Notes: This is something I'd been meaning to write since the last time I read the book and it hit me and has since become a parallel that utterly fascinates me. It was something begging to be written, and I couldn't resist. I do believe it's turned out to be one of my favorite things I've ever written. Let the words mean what they will; the story is now in your hands and left to your interpretation. Hope you have as much fun as I did.
A glimpse of light in darkness, inverted colors of ageless images pressed against her eyelids.
It was not a problem brought on suddenly; indeed, she didn't know if she could even go so far as to call it a problem. It was something, she'd give it that, something that had been happening less sporadically as she got older, more tired, more intense, more disillusioned.
The first time it had happened, she had been a child in dried-up and forsaken Munchkinland. A glass spun of one color and then ten thousand others glinted and moved tantalizingly, lifelike, in front of her. She couldn't recall what it was she had seen, even to the time where she now watched an overwhelming blue wash away the garish reds and oranges in the sky. She remembered the sunset sky from the 'then', the 'long ago', in the background, a sun that did not fade and die peacefully but with fire and blood that stained and burned the clouds until the forgiving light of the stars appeared. She remembered a terror of things past and yet to come, something the she-of-today cannot understand, let alone the she-that-was-a-child. The glass had served as a window to things beyond even her.
She remembered understanding up until the time when the glass broke. The glass broke, Turtle Heart died, she grew feral and animal-like, and Nessarose was born. Four completely unrelated incidents, so she believed, until Shiz and Madame Morrible. Until frantic questioning in the Emerald City. Until the eve of insanity and complete non-comprehension at Kiamo Ko. Her window was broken, her link gone, her understanding shattered, never to be grasped or gained again. Later in her Shiz years, she sometimes wondered at Turtle Heart. What he had known, what he had seen; she remembered him being the only one who understood. She'd driven herself nearly to insanity on many a time wondering how he knew, wondering if with his understanding would come hers.
Nessarose tamed her, she was provided with an anchor to a reality of the here-and-now rather than the mysterious and terrifying had-beens and yet-to-bes. She grew in normalcy, began to reverse the unnaturalness of her earliest years: something that could never be completely erased, or perhaps more accurately, she thinks, written over. It was an essential part of her. Had she believed in her soul, she would have believed it did not and therefore would not allow her to forget.
It was Shiz, the road to everywhere and everything in more senses than one, before she'd caught something, not quite a reflection, without staring into the hidden depths of the glass. Her roommate; a sudden flash of glamour and gold locks that did not belong to her. They came as images, pseudo memories of a past that had never happened, voices of people who never existed. It was dangerous, this dream world, this imagined place, in the instances where she could not separate it from reality.
A poor, half-drowned ghost creature she'd never seen the likes of before took sanctuary in the protection of the crook of her pale arm as she walked through the stone hallways of Kiamo Ko. Liir gave her odd glances which she ignored, as she could not see him. The gilded and bedazzled shoes she had so often longed for in jealousy graced her white arches, while she knew they rested comfortably and immovably and perhaps eternally on her sister's feet at Colwen Grounds. Power tingled at her fingertips, waiting to be used, waiting to help, waiting to be needed.
Such things were familiar, instinctively so, but yet her grasp was tenuous at best. Always they receded within moments; never could she grasp at them again, however futilely. It wasn't something she could explain, nor was it something she could mention. She knew perfectly well what her mental status was according to the sisters, and she certainly didn't intend to make it any worse with faint impressions of nothing, dreams from another reality. It was preposterous, as she knew perfectly well.
She'd heard them calling her a witch. The Witch. Kumbricia. Hidden and isolated behind dark hair and the thick forests of the west, mysterious for her isolation and terrifying for her mystery. It fit. For reasons beyond her, she even liked it, so she let it go, laughing raucously, alarmingly, when Two first had the audacity to say it to her face.
She paged frantically through the Grimmerie some nights and even when daylight speared her through the window, cursed with a frenzy born from prolonged insomnia. She didn't know what she was looking for, nor why she was looking, only that she must look. The face of the Kumbric Witch stared intensely back at her, daring her to look away. She did, a cold feeling freezing her heart and that damn nagging feeling tugging at something in her mind.
"Can't you see what this crusade for justice is doing to you? What have you become?"
"The Witch."
Lurlina, whispered her lips in a voice that was not her own. It was the first time she had invoked a religious name, only in this invocation, it was somehow not religious. Or was it? She didn't know. Lurline, Lurlina. Long blonde hair, diamonds sparkling blood red from the bleeding sun, transparent wings that were just that and non existent. Beauty marred by falsification, lies and deceit.
But as always, the woman receded, and when she tried, all she could bring up was an old image of her youthful roommate, long gone and forced from her body by the woman who replaced her. She growled with anger at her defeat to avoid a scream that would surely involve inquiry. The Grimmerie was hurled across the room before she stalked out in a blaze of green anger, only to return hours later and return it reverently to its place.
How does anything become a symbol, she wondered. Her head spun from an equal mix of frustration and confusion, defeat, and lack of sleep, to which none of she would admit. Reassuringly green fingers clutched an equally reassuring green forehead as she climbed into bed, avoiding the dusty looking-glass so as not to see the image of white-turned knuckles mirrored. Her dreams were plagued with familiar things in unfamiliar places, unfamiliar people in a familiar setting, things of which her subconscious could not make sense. She tossed and turned, throwing off her covers in frustration she could not escape even in sleep.
It was preposterous, all of it. The idea of standing, unafraid, while waves crashed violently on either side of her. The idea of dual realities from which she could not escape. But most preposterous, the reality of it, or the way she treated it as reality. A reality that was hers and not hers. Something too complicated to explain, to comprehend. .
Something.
The Witch closed her eyes, trying to drown out distinct voices she could not recognize.