Chapter Text
Liir raced through the city streets, Elphaba’s coat tied around his neck and her broom clutched tightly in his hand. It was too dangerous to get on it now. Besides, he was leading some rescues who were landlocked.
The group of Foxes he had freed from Southstairs followed closely behind him. “Everyone keeping up?” he shouted over his shoulder. The Foxes answered in a jumble of confirmations. The group ducked into an alleyway, hoping to lose their pursuers in the mess of a city. One by one, they caught their breath. Mothers tended to young, and two young male Foxes stood guard on either side of the alleyway. Liir spoke up and addressed the group.
“Friends!” he started. “You remember me asking each of you the whereabouts of a girl named Nor. If any of you have information, now is the time to tell me. We’ll rest in this alley for the afternoon, then continue our escape under cover of night. Once we get out of the Emerald City, we go our separate ways.”
A unionist Fox in the group spoke next. “Family, friends, colleagues. Let us pray to the Unnamed G-d that our journey goes smoothly.”
Liir stayed silent. An atheist like his presumed mother, he prayed to no g-d, worshipped no idol. He all but scoffed. If a g-d did exist, he thought, would I be standing here right now? Orphaned, homeless, with no childhood, friends, or family to call my own. He took the drawing of Nor from the cloak pocket and turned it over to read the note for what must have been the millionth time. He took in the blocky child’s handwriting. Nor by Fiyero, it said. He remembered going to Kiamo Ko and finding this picture in Fiyero’s boot. A new memory came to him from that same day.
He leaned down and breathed against it, and quickly wrote his name with his finger in the condensation. It dissolved into shapes, his reflection no longer sharp-lined, but foggy. Colored blobs like tossing petals. Then they resolved. The lines he saw were not the carved cornices of the wardrobe or the line where the ceiling met the walls. Instead he saw a skylight, and walls of old cracking plaster, and a white cat observing from the top of a crate. A man moved out of the margin of the mirror, turning his tunic inside out in his haste to remove it. He was dark and beautiful; Liir knew enough about the beauty of men to tell this. He circled an arm about a woman and drew her toward the wall, where he leaned down to kiss her. Then the man turned to open a wide double-doored window, and a flood of light that was never seen in the tower at Kiamo Ko burned into the room in the mirror. (Liir the young soldier was outside, heading for Quadling Country, daydreaming in the sun.) Their forms were indistinct in the sun flooding around them into the room. The woman pulled back, away from the window frame, and raised her arms around the man. Her face was hidden. Her arms were green.
The looking glass. The only time he had ever seen his presumed father. He contemplated this memory, then pushed it back into the depths of his brain. I have better things to waste my thoughts on, he thought. Listening to the Foxes pray, he began to grow weary. And soon, he fell asleep with the sun warming his head.