Encounter with the Dwarf and the Clock

After murdering Madame Morrible, a drunken Elphaba stumbles upon the Clock of the Time Dragon in a Shiz park and confronts its dwarf keeper, who reveals himself as the immortal guardian of the Grimmerie. He stages a private three-act puppet show that rewrites Elphaba's origins: her mother was seduced by the Wizard, making Elphaba a half-breed from two worlds. The dwarf gives her a cracked looking glass showing her lost love Fiyero, then refuses to reveal the story's ending, leaving her to face the implications of her hybrid identity.

The Encounter with the Dwarf

Wandering across the greensward after the dinner party at Avaric's town house, Elphaba came upon the construction Avaric had mentioned: an old, early tiktok thing, a sort of portable stupa made of carved wood and figurines. A dwarf stood in her way with a cudgel. When she asked how he knew Yackle, he answered dismissively, "Oh, Yackle. Who doesn't know Yackle? Not such a surprise." Pressed about who he worked for, the dwarf replied, "Who haven't I worked for? The devil is a very big angel, but a very little man. But I have no name in this world, so don't bother with me." When Elphaba threatened to kill him as she had killed Madame Morrible, he calmly told her she had not killed the old woman—she was already dead—and that he himself was immortal. He then revealed his true role: "I am the guardian of the book, and I was brought to this dreaded, forsaken land to watch over the book's history, to keep it from getting back to where it comes from. I am not good, I am not bad; but I am locked here, condemned to a deathless life to guard the book." He explained that he works through events, lives on the sidelines, dabbles in causes and effects, and interferes only to keep the book safe, using second sight to meddle in the affairs of men and beasts.

The Three-Act Puppet Show

The dwarf offered Elphaba a private audience with the Time Dragon itself. A small area halfway up the clockwork structure was illuminated, and a three-act play began. Act One, "The Birth of Holiness," showed the life of Saint Aelphaba: the good woman, the mystic and recluse, who disappeared to pray behind a waterfall. Elphaba watched the tiktok saint walk straight through a guttering spout of real water, but the saint never emerged, and the lights went out. When Elphaba protested, the dwarf ignored her and announced Act Two, "The Birth of Evil." A credible likeness of Colwen Grounds appeared on a cardboard backdrop. A figurine of Melena kissed her parents good-bye and went off with Frex, a handsome little puppet with a short black beard. They stopped in a small hut; Frex kissed her and continued on to preach while Melena, at home, yawned and waited. Along came a man with a small black bag from which he extracted a green glass bottle—the same "MIRACLE ELIXIR" bottle that had appeared throughout Elphaba's life. He gave it to Melena to drink, and when she had, she fell into his arms. The traveler and Melena made love. Then, when the act was done, the traveler pulled himself off Melena, snapped his fingers, and a balloon with a basket descended from the fly space. The traveler got in. It was the Wizard. Elphaba cried out, "Oh, nonsense. This is pure poppycock." The dwarf announced Act Three, "The Marriage of the Sacred and the Wicked," but no area was illuminated and no puppet moved. When Elphaba demanded the end of the play, the dwarf stuck his head out of a trap door and winked: "Who said the end was written yet?"

The Looking Glass and the Revelation

Another door opened, and a tray slid out bearing an oval looking glass, cracked along one side and scratched on its surfaces. It was the same glass Elphaba had had since childhood, the one she used to imagine she could see the Other Land in. The last she remembered of it was in her hideaway digs in the Emerald City. Inside the glass lived reflections of a young and beautiful Fiyero, and a young and impassioned Fae. The Witch took the mirror and hid it in her apron, and wandered away. The dwarf's revelation that she was a half-breed—"both of Oz and of the other world"—and that her father was the Wizard himself, confirmed the deepest suspicion she had always carried: that her green skin and strange origins were not a curse from the Unnamed God but a biological inheritance from a man who had crossed worlds. The dwarf told her plainly, "Your old Frex always was wrong; you were never a punishment for his crimes. You are a half-breed, you are a new breed, you are a grafted limb, you are a dangerous anomaly. Always you were drawn to the composite creatures, the broken and reassembled, for that is what you are."