Following Elphaba's mastery over the Elder Wand, the rest of the Emerald City riot passed in a blur for her. It was suddenly all immaterial now that she had the Elder Wand in her possession. She immediately raced off to find Glinda, leaving the cold empty corpse of the Clock to continue to stare unseeingly down at the war ranging on below it. Once Elphaba found Glinda, she quickly dragged the blond away from the fight.
"What are you doing?" she snapped as Elphaba dragged her into an empty and hidden alleyway.
"We've gotta get out of here!" Elphaba replied. "Before the Gale Force sees us!"
"Since when were you ever afraid of them?" Glinda shot back, the adrenaline from battle making her extra aggressive. Elphaba responded only by silently holding up the Elder Wand with wide eyes. Glinda took one look at it and all of her adrenaline seemed to vanish completely.
"Oh, Shiz!" she gasped, then she became the one to start dragging Elphaba off of the battlefield at top speed.
A few hours later, they were safe and sound back home in Kiamo Ko, but neither of them took any chance to relax, too elated, ecstatic and excited with their new victory to do anything other than gawk and tremble in awe and fear.
"Holy sweet Lurline, I can't believe you found it!" Glinda looked close to fainting as Elphaba held the Wand reverently.
"I can't either," she replied, having just finished explaining how she'd gotten it.
"I can't believe that it was right under all of our noses for so very long! I can't believe it's been out of Ozian hands for so long!" Glinda continued, still reeling over the revelation that the wand had the true source of the Clock's power. How many centuries had been lost with Ozians speculating about the origin of the Clock only for it now to be revealed so quickly and easily, and by the Clock itself no less.
"Well, it makes sense, the Clock was pretty self-aware," Elphaba said. "And according to the story, so is the Elder Wand itself. The Clock was nothing more than a vessel for it, it acting as its own master until someone better came along..." but Elphaba was still reeling from the fact that the Wand somehow considered her to be a worthy owner.
"Did the Clock give you any final prediction?" Glinda asked, shaking her head. "Maybe it was trying to say that you will be the hero to defeat the Wizard and free Oz? You already have the Cloak, so maybe the Clock was trying to tell you that it's your destiny to become the Master of Death?"
"Maybe," Elphaba replied, subdued. It seemed like a crazy theory, but nothing else made sense at the moment. It both scared and excited her to think that she was supposed to become the Master of Death, but as she thought about it, it sort of made sense.
Everyone who knew her knew that she was a bit of an oddball, and not just because of her weird skin or weird personality, but because of the fact that she had always been sort of an outcast, trapped between two worlds. She was as mysterious and free as the Clock itself. Unable to be pinned or labeled. She was well acquainted with Death, and with magic. Even from birth, she'd held a tremendous amount of power within herself, and she had been the only person in all of Oz to be able to read the Grimmerie easily. Maybe the Clock was onto something...
But as the years continued to pass, Elphaba and Glinda never made quite such a dramatic or wonderful victory ever again. Instead, after a time, a mysterious young girl from somewhere over the rainbow came dropping into Oz and she was quickly recruited by the Wizard himself to take out Elphaba and Glinda. He and the other Ozians saw her as a sort of goddess because of her miraculous arrival into the country. The Wizard wasted no time in using that, combined with her naive nature, to his advantage, making her another pawn in his evil chess game. She fell for it and quickly became his faithful, albeit unwitting, assassin. She succeeded in her goal and killed Elphaba. Glinda, however, managed to escape.
"You must take all of this and go!" Elphaba had commanded of her as the mysterious little girl approached her castle. She shoved the two Hallows and the Grimmerie at Glinda. "I am really the one that they want and you must survive so that you can protect our legacy!" Glinda hadn't wanted to leave, but she understood the logic in Elphaba's plan and, with one final kiss farewell, she fled the castle right as the little girl arrived. The two never saw each other again.
In the years to follow, Glinda literally went underground. She used her magic to carve out a decent living space right in the earth of Oz itself and remained hidden there for a couple years more, unable to find it within herself to ever go back to Kiamo Ko, now that it had become Elphaba's grave. But even though the Wizard seemed to have won the final battle, life threw Oz a curveball and a strange twist of events gave Glinda one last chance to avenge her friend and ensure the Wizard's defeat, for good.
Through the years, Glinda had managed to slowly, but surely, make her way back up to the northern territory of Oz while she was living underground and on the run. She had no intention of going home, knowing that she really had no place left to go back to, but it was still nice to be back in the land where she'd grown up. But she wasn't just going for the nostalgia. She also had a certain location in mind. She skirted all the big cities and towns until she was very far up north, beyond the reaches of civilization. It was there that she found herself standing in the fabled Ozmist Forest, a large swath of untamed and natural beauty alleged to contain the souls of Ozians who not ready to pass on from this plane of existence. It was Glinda's hope that she would be able to find Elphaba's soul here, and reunite with the green girl once again.
Sadly, Glinda's hopes were dashed. Elphaba was not amongst the Ozmists. It was a devastating blow to Glinda, who had spent years walking up north from the farthest reaches of the west, all only to realize that her end goal had been doomed from the start. It seemed that Elphaba was not supposed to be the Master of Death after all, but rather, she was only a Victim of Death instead, as so many other Ozians were. But Glinda's trek had not been totally in vain. Instead, a few of the kinder Ozmists led Glinda even deeper into their woodland home. There, resting in a tiny, unmarked grave, hidden by a lot of foliage, was the Resurrection Stone. Like a pearl in an oyster, that shiny little Resurrection Stone sat in the dirty, dark pit of the unmarked grave and Glinda wasted no time in plucking it right up for herself.
"Maybe this can bring Elphaba back!" she murmured in wonder as she held the third and final Deathly Hallow in her hand. No words would ever be able to describe the torrent of pain, joy, grief and triumph she felt, holding that precious, precious stone. She had done it. Somehow, and against all odds, she had done it. After decades of determination and suffering, Glinda had found the third and final Hollow...
"Or maybe, you can put it to some actual use and give it here!" a voice from behind Glinda suddenly gloated. She whipped around to see the Wizard himself, standing there with a wicked smile on his wrinkly old face.
"What? But how?" Glinda paled in terror, backing up as he approached her tauntingly.
"My dear, you really should've covered your tracks better," the Wizard replied smugly. "After we got rid of your stupid little girlfriend, my soldiers did a complete and utter raid upon the entirety of Kiamo Ko. You really should've been smarter than to leave all of your well-written, well-thought-out notes regarding the Deathly Hallows just lying out in the open for any old sap to read," the Wizard pretended to be disappointed in Glinda and Glinda felt herself growing even paler still. Uh oh. It hadn't even occurred to her to get rid of those notes before fleeing!
"But that still doesn't explain how-" Glinda began.
"How I found you?" the Wizard interrupted. "My dear! You really do take me for a fool! Don't you?" he paused and Glinda considered agreeing, but she decided against it and remained silent, allowing the Wizard to continue on in his story.
"You see, when Dorothy reported back to us, she reported to having only seen one witch. The green one. It didn't take a genius or a seer to imagine that you must've escaped! So I sent all of my best trackers after you. And now, I didn't want to cause a stink, especially after realizing that you already had two of the three Deathly Hallows, so I let you live. I decided that you could be of some use to me, and now you have!" the Wizard smiled benevolently at Glinda before gesturing to the stone in Glinda's hands.
"Letting you live was the best decision I ever made!" the Wizard cried. "Because you, Glinda, my dear, have led me right to the last Hallow! But now, I regret to inform you that your services are no longer required. Therefore, I insist that you surrender the Stone and come quietly, or risk an ending that would put your girlfriend's to shame..."
Then the Wizard dropped another whammy on Glinda, pulling out the Invisibility Cloak and the Elder Wand. Glinda felt her heart stop in her chest. Although she'd kept the Deathly Hallows relatively close to her person for all these years, she had left them back at her little underground camp before entering the Ozmist Forest, thinking that it would be safer to leave them buried underground than to bring them into the Forest with her. How wrong she had just proved herself. The Wizard laughed coldly again before drawing the Cloak around himself and pointing the Wand right at Glinda's exposed and unarmed figure.
What ensued was a wild chase through the Ozmist forest. The moment Glinda saw the Elder Wand being pointed at her, she panicked. Without hesitation, she went sprinting through the forest, using the Resurrection Stone to summon up spirit after spirit to distract the Wizard. They were unable to do any harm, but their mere pearlescent presence was more than enough to at least give Glinda more time to escape. They surprised him every time they popped up and a few of the more interested ones helped Glinda by trying to swarm the Wizard and blind him.
But in the end, time ran out for Glinda and the Wizard finally caught up to her. With one swipe of his wand, Glinda collapsed to the forest floor, dead before she even hit the ground. It seemed that she was not to be the Master of Death either but, instead, was only another Victim of Death. But the Wizard was cruel, and he wasted no time in bringing Glinda's spirit back at once he had the Resurrection Stone in his hand. He did it all only to rub it in her face and he brought Elphaba back too, for the same sick purposes.
"How does it feel?" he sneered in their ghostly faces. "Knowing that you lost and that now I control all three of the Deathly Hallows myself? After all you've done and after all you've been through, you still lost!" the old man cackled, completely lost in his own madness. He waved the Stone and Wand around like a child, laughing manically as he danced around in the Cloak. Glinda and Elphaba could only watch in helpless fury. It was a bittersweet meeting for the two of them and not at all how they imagined their first union going.
"I'm so sorry," Glinda whispered brokenly to Elphaba.
"It's not your fault," she tried to console the poor ghost. "You did your best. This is all the Wizard's doing!" she shot him a hateful glare.
"You're darn right it is!" he agreed, bowing proudly to her and all the other defeated ghosts watching him enviously and nervously. They all wanted nothing more than to rip him to shred, but literally couldn't do anything now. But maybe someone else could...
AN: So how do you all feel, now that Elphaba and Glinda have both been knocked out of the running for being the True Master of Death? How will they defeat the Wizard now? Who do you think will be their savior? Give it some thought before you keep reading.