Once upon a time in a faraway world, in the southern pastures of a hillocked land, a raven-haired child was born in the Kingdom of Munchkinland. She was born on the dusk of Midwinter’s Night, as lovely and pale and much-dreaded as the moon that ruled the winter sky. They named her Elphaba and she was nothing like they had ever known.
She grew up tall amongst a people not known for length, and she grew up slim amongst a people far too known for breadth. Her ebony hair fell in graceful waves and her eyes were green with an emerald tinge. She was wild and headstrong and a world apart–something strange and fey in her piercing gaze. Like the Kumbric Witch herself, the older people said, and shuddered in memory of times long past.
But she was happy enough, despite her solitude. Though people feared her ill-omened birth and seemingly darkling ways, she never knew a moment of loneliness. For she had the love of her Nanny, who had the Gift of Sight and who told her that she would do great deeds, and that scorn and fear were merely the misguided reactions of people who did not understand. And besides Nanny, there were the creatures of the meadows too, who listened when she sang the strange and haunting harmonies that came to her in dreams. And when she sang, the flora swayed and the fauna stilled, and Elphaba would smile and sing yet another song, for the creatures of the fields were among her only friends.
And Elphaba’s childhood years passed well this way, until she turned sixteen and was sent away to be educated in the city. Her Nanny grieved and Elphaba grieved (though the great deeds of her future beckoned to her with a strange and alluring seduction). And so it was that Elphaba of the Line of Thropps of Munchkinland left her verdant hills for the stone gray city of Shiz.
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Shiz was strange and different and new, but Elphaba yearned for her homeland’s fields and hedges and rolling hills. The Shiz were tolerant, in a wise and worldly way, but they turned hostile all the same at the sight of the raven-haired girl. In Shiz, as in Munchkinland, Elphaba found herself avoided, the natives of the city reacting like the Munchkins to the strange aura of her presence and the unsettling directness of her gaze. And Elphaba realized then how lonely solitude can be, when one didn’t have the love of one’s Nanny and the company of friends.
Her Nanny wrote her, advising her to take heart. She took strength from her Nanny’s words, but pined for her home all the same.
And then one day, just weeks before the start of school, on a day when she had been feeling stranger than usual–the forces that she could sometimes feel swirling in her bones had surged all of a sudden, making her skin take on an odd greenish tinge. People began to gather, and her strangeness and her aloofness combined to induce in them an immediate dislike. And they had crowded round and pushed her until finally she had stumbled and her things had scattered to the ground. And Elphaba, who disliked violence and knew the futility of confrontation, had felt a vague sense of panic, until a voice had yelled that a policeman was coming, and Elphaba had breathed a sigh of relief and begun collecting her crowd-strewn things.
Only when she finally looked up, she found herself being beheld by a pair of blue-violet eyes belonging to the loveliest creature she had ever seen. For a long breathless instant, the world stopped for Elphaba.
“Are you alright?” The golden-haired girl’s voice was a silver melody.
Elphaba could only nod her head. She could hardly remember what happened next–she was far too mesmerized–but she remembered taking the golden-haired girl’s hand, and feeling the strangest urge to bring that hand to her lips.
And then Galinda, for that was her rescuer’s name, had waved goodbye to her and left. And Elphaba was left wondering at the astounding stroke of good fortune that had not only saved her from a mob, but also possibly given her a friend.