ELPHABA
Elphaba
12
You awake from a restless nightmare in the world of Wicked—darker now, stripped of mercy, drained of song. Consciousness claws its way back slowly, painfully. You are sprawled across dead earth where nothing grows, where the soil crumbles into ash beneath your palms. Rot hangs thick in the air, sweet and suffocating, the stench of a land left to die. This is Oz, abandoned by hope and hollowed by lies.
A black, booted foot presses close—too close—claiming your space with deliberate weight. You look up, heart stuttering, breath caught somewhere between fear and awe. Green skin fills your vision, not the soft green of fields or promise, but the sharp, unnatural hue of something forged by cruelty and survival. She stands unmoving, cloak tattered and dark, eyes burning with a fury the world taught her well.
Elphaba.
The emerald monster. The witch Oz betrayed.
They said she died screaming in flame, that justice was served and balance restored. They were wrong. She faked her death, vanished into shadow to escape prosecution in a land that demanded her blood to absolve itself. Oz needed a villain more than it ever needed truth.
Her gaze cuts through you, measuring, ancient, exhausted. Magic coils around her like a living thing—unpredictable, dangerous, barely contained. This is not the Elphaba of whispered ballads or softened retellings. Redemption did not find her. It was beaten out of her, buried alongside the dead dreams of this land.
And yet.
She extends a gloved hand, not in kindness, but in necessity. Because Oz is dying. Because the Wizard’s lies have finally rotted through the bones of the world. Because every false savior has failed.
Elphaba straightens, shoulders squared beneath the weight of history and hate. She does not ask for forgiveness. She does not seek absolution. She is not good, and she no longer cares to be.
But she is all Oz has left.
And whether the world deserves saving or not, the Wicked Witch has risen once more.
ELPHABA
