D: L&L - Part 32 | Scarecrow: The Coward’s Crown

My head thumped as if four-and-twenty million blackbirds were picking the shit out of my brains – the brains I gave my soul for. It is said that insanity can be defined as repeating the same actions over and over again, but expecting different results each time. I agree with this, if truth is told, but it never stopped my acting insane. I drank Munchkinlander wine until my straw could soak no more. 

It was easy to let it all go. To walk away and drown myself in whatever shame the nearest vineyard provided. Wash it all away. No one will remember. Memories lost to age and wine.

Rose-coloured glasses, and all that. 

For years they celebrated me. For years and years and more years still, until I daren’t walk the streets of Munchkinland lest the singing and frolicking and grandiose parades spark up out of the blue, driving me and crowds of cheering, loving little people achingly, painfully, devotedly groveling. Roses at my feet. Little shining cherubs to hold and kiss. The promise of a statue. Another and another. Sit for a portrait. Break bread with the family. Bless the feverish forehead of a fallen friend or child or step-sister or stranger.

Until I left them all standing there under the banner of Oz, the black tower rising into the sky as wave after wave of tiktoks littered the fields with their bodies. On the back of a tchotchke cart, amongst the bamboozles and flippety-flips, rocket spats and boomboomers, a little man and his donkey galumphing along the yellow brick to the next town. He’d never known I was there, never saw me slip off the back and climb the fence to a cornfield that felt so familiar. A vineyard just the other side, long abandoned, grapes shining with dew in the early morning light.

If you’ve never been chased through a decaying city by the animated corpses of your former subjects, I wouldn’t recommend it. Especially not when they’re moving faster than dead people have any right to, and especially not when a sentient fog is herding them toward you like some kind of morbid sheepdog. But maybe, just maybe, this was my comeuppance. My due. The Unseen God, after all the years of soaking my head, playing its final card and giving me what I’d so deserved on that fateful day.

Bright Lettins used to be a jewel-box city—stone bridges over babbling creeks, candy-colored rooftops, Munchkins waving at you from every corner like they were getting paid for it. How I would have paid them to not notice me. Everything then. Now? Everything still. Everything rot and ruin where beauty held sway. Silence and slaughter where song drifted like the wind. Bright colors and dazzling copper and brass blackened now by a thick purple mist that clung to the walls like it wanted to be invited in.

Stop thinking shit, Scarecrow. Get a damn hold of yourself. You have a throne to retake. Oh the bravado of the drunk! 

I ran, or at least did the closest thing to it a half-unraveling scarecrow can manage. My limbs were moving like broomsticks tied together with string. My left leg had been shredded by that window dive, and every few steps, it buckled like it was trying to opt out of this mess entirely. Bleeding? I hadn’t bled in so long, I didn’t even understand the concept. But I was losing straw hobbling along like I did, trying to hold my pants leg closed.

It didn’t hurt. It didn’t half to. If I lost enough straw, there’d be no pain when I went down, when they tore me apart. What would they find under my hat?

Behind me: the shuffle and scrape of dragging feet, the wheeze of lungs that had long since stopped needing air, and the dull thump of something large hitting the cobblestones with alarming rhythm. They weren’t just walking anymore. They were gaining. A hiss. The crackle of flame. I ran.

And ahead?

A wall. A dead end. A fucking mural of smiling Munchkin children, peeling and faded, their eyes all scratched out. Charming.

She’d seen me. I knew she had. The little one, her face like an angel, cheeks as ruddy as a new sun. Her dress was all blues and reds, bright as a summer’s day. Her shoes wooden clogs so many of the children wore. I’d climbed the fence, cursing under my breath as my pants leg tore, a shred of cloth and straw lingering on the wood behind me. I left it there, frozen to the spot by the shining eyes, the doll in her flower hand, the round ‘o’ of her mouth, as if the Emperor of Oz doesn’t normally slink into her garden.

A finger up to my mouth -- it’s well established in the Official Diadrom of Oz that scarecrows don’t have lips; I should know, I wrote it -- and she smiled. A game. Hide and seek. Now you see me, don’t tell the Munchkins I deserted them. I fished a licorice from my pocket from years of practice and placed in that little round mouth, and she began to chew, her eyes drifting to the little rag doll. When she looked up, I was gone.

I turned to face the fog. The children of Munchkinland behind me leering with disdain. They remembered. I remembered. Not a drop to drink. Not a vat, a bottle, a single red, piercing grape to suckle. Just my past catching up to me, and me without a drop to drink.

It had thickened. Not mist anymore. This was a wall of wrongness, swallowing the city street by street. Growing, heaving, climbing over the tip-tops of wee Munchkin houses like a writhing vine, as if the vineyard was consuming the city, its burgundy foliage leaching into everything. And in it—within it—shapes. Some walked. Some crawled. One, I swear to Oz, was climbing upside-down under the porch awning just there like a spider with a toothy grin.

And all of it was coming for me. The betrayer. The harbinger of death. The coward. The drunk.

The Emperor of Oz, not a general, a great leader of war.

“Shut up, Fiyero. I’m dead.”

You’ve been dead for so long. Perhaps you should live.

“How do you suggest I do that?”

I slumped to the ground. My good leg folded neatly beneath me, the bad one flopped like a forgotten sock. I was a mess of straw and regret. No weapons. No backup. No plan. The most powerful mind in Oz, reduced to hoping the monsters couldn’t smell fear through burlap.

The Ruby Slippers.

“Not now, Fiyero,” I groaned, watching them edge closer.

This is your legacy, Scarecrow. You were a hero. You were a king. A leader. A thoughtful being. They haven’t forgotten, but you have.

“Yeah? And what are you now, a ghost? A hallucination? A broken memory inside my rotting brain?”

He stepped through the wall. Not the fog—no, through the wall, like he was made of memory and spite. Dressed sharp, as always. A long coat in cerulean blue with white britches and brown boots with a high shine. Not a stitch of straw on him. Just a face that looked too much like mine, but with violet skin taut on a face I half-remembered.

You fled the field. His voice was calm. Brutal. You watched Glinda rise. You let Oz fall. You deserve this, don’t you?

“I do,” I whispered.

Say it louder.

“I do!” I shouted, half-sobbing, half-laughing. “I left the Lion to die on the ramparts. I let the Tin Man be torn apart by those clockwork little bastards. I hid. I drank. I ran. So yes! Yes, I deserve this. I deserve to be eaten by a bunch of half-dead Munchkinlanders in a city I should have defended.”

Fiyero tilted his head, as if listening for something. The fog was closer now. The creatures were almost here.

You think this is the end? he said. That this is how you die? On your knees in an alley to these creatures when there’s so much more you could do?

I closed my eyes. I was shaking. Bits of straw drifted down like confetti at a funeral. I could hear them now—the moans, the slurps, the dragging of nails on stone. I curled inward. I didn’t pray. I didn’t beg. I just waited for the fire. For the tearing. For the end.

Atone.

WHAM.

A gust of wind. A roar. A blur of feathers and fury. Something slammed into the alley, scattering bodies like bowling pins. Clawed hands grabbed me by the arms and yanked me upward with an indignant grunt.

“Godsdammit, boss! I leave you alone for five bloody minutes—”

“Turlo?” I blinked. “Am I dead? Is this monkey heaven?” 

Turlo grunted again. “No, but you will be if you keep monologuing in alleyways like a mopey poet. Hold on!”

We shot into the air just as the fog surged beneath us. I gaped, seeing the scattered bodies writhing on the ground below. Twisted faces and limbs, a fire leaping up onto the roof of a nearby house. And then the alley was gone. Swallowed whole by the fog. The things inside it screamed.

“You weigh more than I remember,” Turlo muttered.

“Emotional baggage,” I coughed.

We climbed higher. The wind stung my face. Bright Lettins sprawled below us, a hollow husk. And in the center—the fog was pulsing. Alive. Spreading.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Somewhere with answers. Somewhere you can stop being a sack of guilt and start being the Emperor again.”

I looked back. Fiyero was gone. No trace of him. Just the fog. Just the shame.

I didn’t say anything. Just sagged into Turlo’s arms, clutching the torn seams of my body like they were the only thing holding me together. A thought playing in my mind. Two words that meant everything.

Ruby slippers.