The Time Dragon

The Time Dragon is a mechanical oracle and traveling puppet theater that appears in the novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, serving as a prophetic and morally corrosive force that exposes hidden truths and incites communal violence. Mounted on a wagon and crowned by a clockwork dragon, it functions as a mobile spectacle of judgment, using its puppet shows to reveal the secret sins of its audience, thereby destabilizing communities and challenging the authority of traditional unionist faith.

Physical Description and Construction

The Clock of the Time Dragon is mounted on a wagon and stands as high as a giraffe. It is a tottering, freestanding theatre, punched on all four sides with alcoves and proscenium arches. On the flat roof is a clockwork dragon, an invention of green painted leather, silvery claws, and ruby jeweled eyes. Its skin is made of hundreds of overlapping discs of copper, bronze, and iron. Beneath the flexible folds of its scales is an armature controlled by clockwork. The Time Dragon circles on its pedestal, flexes its narrow leathery wings (they make a sound like a bellows), and belches out sulfurous balls of flaming orange stink. Below, featured in the dozens of doorways, windows, and porches, are puppets, marionettes, and figurines: creatures of folk tale, caricatures of peasants and royalty alike, animals and fairies and saints. The figures move on sprockets, wheeling in and out of doorways, bending at the waist, dancing and dawdling and dallying with each other.

Prophetic and Judgmental Function

The Time Dragon does not merely entertain; it judges. Its handlers are a dwarf and some narrow-waisted minions. During a performance in the village of Three Dead Trees, the Dragon turned on its base and pointed its talons into the crowd, indicating without a doubt a humble well digger named Grine, who had been a faithful if inattentive husband. Then the dragon reared back and stretched two fingers in a come-hither gesture, isolating a widow named Letta and her snaggle-toothed maiden daughter. The crowd hushed and fell away from Grine, Letta, and the blushing maid, as if they had suddenly been inflicted with running sores. The puppet show that followed depicted the husband, the widow, and her daughter in a graphic sexual tableau, after which the real-life Grine was set upon by his agitated neighbors and investigated for the grotesque anomaly, Letta was shunned, and her daughter vanished entirely. The clock thus acts as a catalyst for communal persecution, using its revelations to shatter lives.

Challenge to Religious Authority

The Time Dragon directly challenges the power of unionism and of the Unnamed God. Frex, the unionist minister of Rush Margins, sees it as a propaganda tool for wickedness and a threat to his flock. He attempts to counter its influence by arguing that the clock is not meant to measure earthly time, but the time of the soul—redemption and condemnation time—and that for the soul, each instant is always a minute short of judgment. However, his congregation is more captivated by the spectacle than by his warnings. When Frex tries to disrupt a performance, he is bundled from his perch, kneed in the groin, and kicked, his bowels releasing. The crowd, howling with mirth at the Clock Dragon's entertainment, does not intervene. The clock's power to sway the populace proves greater than the minister's authority, leading to his public humiliation and a crisis of faith.

Connection to Elphaba's Birth

The Time Dragon is indirectly linked to the birth of Elphaba. On the day of her birth, Frex had gone to Rush Margins to confront the clock, leaving Melena alone. The mob, riled up by the dragon's performance, went looking for Frex to kill him, forcing the midwives to flee with the laboring Melena. They took refuge in the back of the Clock of the Time Dragon itself, where Elphaba was born. The infant, green-skinned and with shark-like teeth, was delivered in the crawl space among pendulums and huge toothed wheels. The clock thus becomes the unlikely and ominous setting for the protagonist's entry into the world, a birth marked by violence, flight, and the supernatural. The dwarf who operates the clock later reveals to Elphaba that he is the guardian of the Grimmerie, a book of magic, and that he was brought to Oz to watch over its history, further entangling the Time Dragon with the novel's central mysteries of power and destiny.