Authors: Danielle Paige
Ozma shook her head sadly. “Don’t you see? When she couldn’t control me, she thought she might be able to control
you
. So she sent you those shoes, and brought you here to do her work for her. And it’s working.”
“You’re lying! Glinda sent me the shoes because she knew I was the only one who could save her. Which is exactly what I’m going to do.”
I didn’t know why I was even bothering talking to her. This could all be solved with a simple knock of my heels.
All I had to do was wipe Ozma’s mind clean. I’d done it once before, and I could do it again.
I tried to summon a spell, but where my magic had once been, all I found was a deep, aching emptiness. A hunger. I had gotten so used to having it—even if I couldn’t always use it, it was always
there
. Comforting me, protecting me. Feeding me.
Now it wasn’t.
I looked down in a panic. My shoes were still on my feet. They were as red and shiny and beautiful as ever. But where they had once felt alive—like a part of my body, as important as my arms or legs—they now just felt heavy and separate. Just two ordinary shoes with extra-high heels.
Ozma gave a half shrug and looked away when she saw the distraught expression on my face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t take the shoes away from you. Whatever spell binds them to you is already complete, and magic like that is irreversible, even for me. But I can block your access to the power they possess. And I have. I didn’t want to—I thought maybe you would be able to handle it, that maybe you were strong enough to resist the corruption. You
are
Dorothy, after all. If anyone could fight off Glinda’s manipulations, it’s you. But the Sorceress is powerful and ruthless. She didn’t outlast the other witches by playing fair, you know.”
“No one could have resisted,” Aunt Em said. She had risen from my bed and walked over to me, placing a hand on the small of my back. I suppose it was meant to be comforting, but I slapped it away. “It’s too tempting,” she said. “It’s not your fault, Dorothy. You’ll see, someday. This is for your own good. It’s time to go back to Kansas.”
“No!” I screamed, whirling around in a rage, looking for something—anything—that I could use against the princess. But it was too late. Ozma waved her scepter and my palace bedchambers faded to white.
When the world re-formed, I found myself standing in the middle of an endless field of waving green grass. I felt dizzy and nauseated, and I struggled to stay on my feet. Was this Kansas? Had it been that easy to undo it all?
No. We were still in Oz—the Emerald City was still visible in the distance, and Ozma was still standing in front of me. Aunt Em was here, too, stumbling around a bit from the transition, and Uncle Henry was a few paces away, holding Toto in his arms. As soon as my little terrier saw me, he wriggled out of my uncle’s grip and raced over to where I was struggling to stay on my feet. Toto circled my ankles, sniffing my shoes in confused concern. He could see that something was missing.
“I sure feel terrible,” Uncle Henry was saying. “You won’t believe me, but I know how much you wanted to be here. I hope you can understand, someday.”
“Sending you home isn’t simple,” said Ozma. “I really didn’t know how to do it for a while—so little is known about the walls that separate your world from ours. I needed to find something that already knows the way.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about, and I didn’t care. All I wanted was to find a way to stop her.
“When you arrive home in Kansas, none of you will remember any of this. I think it’s better that way. It will just seem like a pleasant, faraway dream. Something that happened to someone else in a story.”
“No!” I screamed one more time, lunging for her. She might have cut me off from my magic, but I still had two hands, and I would use them to strangle her if that’s what I needed to do to stay here.
But before I could reach her, she raised her scepter, and I hit a wall. I punched and clawed at it, but my fists bounced uselessly against the invisible barrier.
“I’ll always be grateful to you, Dorothy,” Ozma said, ignoring my screams. “You saved Oz. And I’ll always think of you as a friend.”
With that, Ozma threw her head back and lifted her scepter to the sky. Her wings materialized, and she rose up into the air as a column of blinding light shot down from the clouds and surged through her. She began to shine so brightly that she was barely even visible anymore—she was just a vague, burning ball of radiance.
Even in my fury, I couldn’t help being impressed. I had met witches and sorceresses and wizards, but I had never met anyone who could turn themselves into a star.
Uncle Henry put his arm around Aunt Em. Even Toto sat back on his hind legs and stared up in amazement.
As Ozma cast her spell, wind whipped through the treetops. Dark clouds swirled overhead. It looked like a storm was coming. The light changed; the sky around us was now a sick, pale, greenish shade.
In that moment, I felt something happening to me. My feet began to tingle, and then the rest of my body was tingling, too, until it was almost vibrating with power.
No one noticed what was happening.
Ozma must have been too consumed with her own spell to realize that whatever barriers she’d placed on my shoes were falling away. She must not have been able to manage both spells at once.
My magic was coming back.
In the distance, I saw it approaching. The old house—the shack that had brought me to Oz—was flying across the sky, spinning like a top as it drew nearer, getting bigger and closer by the second. That was what Ozma had meant by
something that already knows the way.
She was going to put us all back in that awful, ramshackle old house and she was going to make it take us back to Kansas.
I wouldn’t stand for it. My shoes gripped my feet so hard it hurt.
It all happened so fast. Important things always seem to, don’t they?
The house was careening through the sky, traveling faster than I thought possible, and then it was right over our heads and it began to hover in place as it made its descent.
My hair was whipping past my face; my whole body was twitching with fear and rage and power. More power than I’d ever felt before. More of
anything
than I’d ever felt before.
I didn’t know how long it would last. I only had one shot.
And I didn’t really even think about what I was doing. I just knew I had to do something. So I reached out in fury and desperation. I summoned every ounce of magic I could find, and I grabbed it. That’s really what it felt like. It felt like I was reaching out with giant hands and pulling the house from Ozma’s magical clutches. It was easy.
I just plucked it up and I threw it at her—sent the house hurtling for the princess like I was tossing a handful of chicken feed onto the ground for Miss Millicent.
Ozma saw it coming a second too late. Just before it was about to hit her, the column of light that held her suspended dissipated, and her body returned to her. She screamed, her black hair swirling around her as her wings flapped furiously. Acting on instinct, she flung her arms out in front of her to protect herself. A glowing green shield materialized in front of her.
Like I say, it happened fast. Too fast for me to react.
The house crashed into Ozma’s force field. But it didn’t shatter. Instead, the farmhouse ricocheted off of it with a thunderous crash and went sailing gracefully through the air, straight toward where my aunt and uncle were standing, frozen in place.
“
Dorothy!
” Aunt Em screamed, seeing it coming toward her.
“
Do som—”
Uncle Henry shouted.
Toto let out a howl, and I put my hand up, summoning another spell to stop it, but even as I did I knew I was a second too slow.
When the dust settled, the house had come crashing to the earth, still in one piece, and all that was visible of my poor aunt Em were her two feet sticking out from under our old front porch.
Silence.
Terrible, awful, horrible silence.
It was only broken by the sound of my voice cracking. “Aunt Em!” I screamed. “Uncle Henry!”
There was no response. I knew there wouldn’t be.
I fell to the ground in front of the house, sobs racking my body.
What have I done?
She was dead. Uncle Henry was dead. Tears rolled down my face. My throat closed up. It hurt so much. They were my only family. They had loved me, despite everything.
I choked on my tears. Why had I ever brought them here? I should have left them in Kansas, where they would have been safe. And happy. They hadn’t asked to come. All they’d wanted was to go home and I wouldn’t let them.
No. It wasn’t my fault. It was hers.
She
had done this to them.
I shook with rage as I saw Ozma, back on the ground, crawling to her feet from where she’d made her own crash-landing.
The clouds thickened, growing darker above me. My shoes hugged my feet like a vise, glowing like they were made of red lightning. Ozma stared up at me in shock.
“
You
did this,” I shrieked. “
You
killed them!”
I walked toward her, the rage burning me alive. It felt
good
to hate her this much. Natural.
Small forks of lightning flickered off the shoes as they throbbed with a magical pulse. But the heels weren’t alive.
I was
. The pulse was my heartbeat. Their magic was part of me now.
A scream ripped out of me as another magical surge punched through my body. I felt like I was about to explode into flames as I walked steadily toward Ozma, screaming louder and with more anguish than the Screaming Trees in the Forest of Fear.
She staggered backward as I rushed at her. Her face contorted in fear. “No, Dorothy! Please! Don’t let it control you! Don’t give in to it!”
“Too late for that,
Princess
,” I screamed. As I said it, I felt all of Oz screaming along with me.
“Please, calm down. You’ve no idea what you’re doing. You can still save yourself. Think about this.”
With a roar louder than the Lion’s I unleashed every last bit of magic that had been building unstoppably inside me since I got to Oz.
It was wondrous.
It surged through my body, flowing like a thousand rivers cascading violently and crashing on the shore.
It drained from the land and the sky, up through me and right at her.
She screamed as I hit her with pure energy, streams of purple and green and red lightning shocking and sparking as it struck the ground around us over and over and over again.
She didn’t fight back. Maybe she couldn’t—maybe she’d used up everything she had summoning my house. Or maybe she didn’t want to. Maybe she was too scared. I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I just wanted her dead. I wanted it to hurt.
But she didn’t die. When I’d used up everything I thought I had, I was sure that I’d see her lying on the ground in a mangled, bloody heap. But Ozma rose to her feet. Easily, steadily, as if it was nothing.
She was more powerful than I’d realized. She had changed. I hadn’t hurt her a bit. I might have even made her stronger.
Ozma’s entire body turned the color of midnight and shadows. It looked alive—like there was black smoke churning just beneath her skin. Her eyes were hollow, golden caverns; her scepter was a lightning bolt that stretched into the thick clouds overhead.
“You have no idea what I am,” she screamed with a hundred voices. “I am the blood of Lurline and the daughter of the Ancient Flower. I am the first and the last and the in-between. I am
Oz.
”
She slammed her scepter into the earth, and a swarm of black moths came bursting forth out of it. They flew for me, knocking me backward, clinging to my skin, trying to suck the life out of me.
But the shoes protected me. Without me even trying, they wrapped me with red light, and the moths burned away as if I was a candle whose flame they’d been drawn to in the dark.
I regained my composure. Ozma had taken everything away from me. Everything I cared about or would ever care about. She had taken away Glinda, and my aunt and uncle, and my magic. She had tried to take away my kingdom.
“I am
Dorothy
,” I screamed back at her.
I closed my eyes and knocked my heels three times, begging the Land of Oz to fill me with darkness and power and all the enchantments it possessed.
It did.
It all came bursting out of me. This time, it was more than magic. It wasn’t just the shoes at work. It was me. It was the reason I had been brought here in the first place. It was the reason I had been brought back again.
It was that
wanting
I’d known my whole life. All that hope that there was something better out there, something that could be mine and mine alone.
Ozma was no match for it. She’d never felt anything like it, I don’t think. She had all this, and she didn’t even care about it.
But I cared. I wanted. I wanted
more.
My desire was a tornado that twisted out of my body and danced toward the princess, catching her up in its funnel, lifting her into the air as easily as if she was a feather. She screamed and struggled against it, but there was nothing she could do.
It was no use. She was powerless against me. She may have been the One True Princess, the delicate peach blossom and the blood of whatever-her-name-was, but I was the girl who rode the cyclone, the girl who had slayed the witches. I had been brought here against all odds—not once, but
twice
. I wouldn’t be denied.
Within the cone of the maelstrom, I watched calmly as Ozma’s dark form began to tear itself apart in a gruesome explosion of black and gold. It was like she was unraveling. Like she was
melting.
And then she was gone.
For the third time, Oz had chosen
me.
The sky had returned to normal. Everything was quiet. The storm I had summoned faded away into the distance. It was like none of it happened, except that my head was throbbing and all of my limbs were aching in exhaustion.