Journey to the Emerald City

The journey to the Emerald City was a desperate, impulsive act born of grief and rage. Following the murder of Doctor Dillamond and the collapse of Ama Clutch into madness, Elphaba, driven by a conviction that the Wizard must be confronted, persuaded a reluctant Glinda to abandon Shiz and travel to the capital. The journey itself, lasting more than a week, was a harsh education in the realities of Oz beyond the sheltered university walls.

The Road and the City

The two young women traveled as third-class passengers, huddling together for warmth in lumpy beds above inn kitchens. The landscape outside the carriage window grew increasingly desolate: overgrazed fields dotted with shriveled cows, farm women standing on doorsteps with faces lined by grief and rage at the useless sky. The farms gave way to deserted mills and abandoned granges before the Emerald City itself rose abruptly on the horizon, a "city of insistence, of blanket declaration" that Glinda immediately hated. Inside the city, the boulevards were lined with alleys where the poor—Munchkinlanders, dwarves, Gillikinese bowed by hunger, a Glikkun youth with no feet begging from his stumpy knees—sheltered under roofs of tin and cardboard. A civil army strolled in foursomes, brandishing clubs. Elphaba, who had passed through once before, kept her eyes on the people, noting the absence of Animals.

The Audience

After five days of waiting, the two girls were granted a four-minute audience. They were led through a series of ever-smaller antechambers, like processing through the chambers of a nautilus, until they reached a cavernous circular hall where the Wizard appeared not as a man but as a skeleton of dancing lights, a luminescent marionette of bones that spoke from the dark eye of a storm within its rib cage. Elphaba, terrified at first by the rain that accompanied the apparition, nevertheless found her voice. She presented the Wizard with Doctor Dillamond's papers, arguing that his discoveries proved there was no inherent difference between humans and Animals, and that the Banns on Animal Mobility could not be upheld. The Wizard dismissed the work as "derivative, unauthenticated, specious garbage" and refused to listen to the word "immoral." When Elphaba pressed him, he quoted from the Oziad—a cryptic passage about Kumbricia rearranging the world—and then vanished, leaving the girls in darkness.

Aftermath and Separation

The audience was a failure. The Wizard had not been swayed, and Elphaba's mission had accomplished nothing. At the carriage, Glinda had saved a seat for Elphaba, but when Elphaba arrived, she announced she was not returning to Crage Hall. She had decided to go underground, to disappear into the city and continue her work against the regime on her own terms. She kissed Glinda goodbye, told her to "hold out," and vanished into the crowds. Glinda, left alone, returned to Shiz, her understanding of the world and her place in it irrevocably altered. The journey had not only failed to achieve its stated goal but had also shattered the last vestiges of Elphaba's faith in institutional power and set her on a path of permanent resistance.