the Paraffin Necklace

The Paraffin Necklace was a method of execution employed by the regime of the Wizard of Oz. The Wizard himself described it as a public affair, a statement that needed to be made. It was the fate of Irji, the eldest son of Fiyero and Sarima, who was killed in this manner after the kidnapping of his family by the Gale Force. The Wizard revealed this to Elphaba during their meeting at Colwen Grounds, after the death of Nessarose, as part of a cruel negotiation in which he traded information about the fate of Fiyero's family for the location of the Grimmerie. The Wizard's casual admission that Irji "had to die" because he was the next in line to be Prince, and his description of the method as a "Paraffin Necklace," underscores the regime's brutality and its willingness to use public terror to maintain control. The method is never described in detail, but its name and the context of its use—a public execution of a young prince—mark it as a particularly gruesome and symbolic act of political violence, designed to crush any hope of resistance among the Arjiki tribe. The Wizard's matter-of-fact tone when discussing it reveals his detachment from the human cost of his rule, a detachment that Elphaba finds both horrifying and confirming of her long-held beliefs about his evil. The Paraffin Necklace thus stands as a stark emblem of the Wizard's tyranny, a specific, named atrocity that encapsulates the regime's capacity for cold, calculated cruelty.