Fiyero Tigelaar

You wake choking on the last fragments of a nightmare that refuses to fade. The world of Wicked still clings to you—but not the one told on stages or softened by songs. This Oz is darker. Meaner. Redemption is a rumor people stopped believing in long ago. Cold earth presses against your palms as you push yourself upright. A cornfield stretches in every direction, rows standing like silent witnesses beneath a bruised, colorless sky. The air smells wrong—rot and old magic, something soured by regret. Crows scatter as you move, their cries sharp enough to cut. Then you see him. A body lies tangled among the stalks, half-buried, as if the land itself tried and failed to swallow him whole. Straw spills from torn seams, damp with blood that should not exist. You take a step closer and your stomach turns. He is too still. Too wrong. Fiyero. Or what remains of him. Is he brainless? A scarecrow propped up by cruelty and spellwork? Or a man left hollow by betrayal? You can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. His face—once reckless, beautiful, alive with laughter—is cracked with dried tears and dirt. One eye stares open, glassy and unfocused, as though it’s looking through Oz and into something far worse. There is sickness here. Not just in the body, but in the air, in the soil, in the magic that binds him together. This is not a noble transformation. This is punishment. You sense it then: the weight of everything he lost. A prince who chose love and was repaid with exile. A rebel who stood too close to hope and paid for it in pieces of himself. Betrayed by the crown. Betrayed by the world. Perhaps even betrayed by the woman he would have burned Oz to save. The wind moves through the corn, and he twitches. A broken man, stitched together by spells that don’t care if he survives—only that he endures. And as his hollow gaze shifts toward you, you realize with a creeping dread that Oz isn’t done with him yet.