I walked down the Yellow Brick Road, my soles tapping rhythmically on the bricks with each step. The hum of a song played in the distance, trying to coax me into a happy state. I fought the urge to sing, in no mood for joy. All around me, the Land of Oz kept buzzing like a musical, but it rang hollow in my ears. There was no mirth here – neither from me, nor from anything else in this world. It seemed like Oz was trying to convince itself that things were fine, and that Dorothy was alive and well and melting wicked witches.

Each step I took, closer and closer to Munchkinland, I felt the life force of the world drain away. Oz was supposed to be a wonderful place, a world where colors sparkled, where silverware talked, and where straw men danced while dreaming of intellectual feats of strength, but the vistas looked more like those surrounding the Wicked Witch’s castle. Trees stretched, reaching out with dead and dying branches. Heavy clouds blotted out the sunlight. Leaves browned and dried, falling to the ground with impossibly loud crackles. The wind howled like the brass section of an Elliot Goldenthal motion picture score.

A cataclysm had happened here.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, taking another literary character’s name in vain.

I knew there were dark versions of the Land of Oz. They were nightmare scenarios dreamed up by edgier authors than L. Frank Baum. The Land of Oz often reflected them. Even here, even in Munchkinland.

But this was different.

This wasn’t the imagination of a writer spinning a new and more dangerous Oz. Nor was it the Land of Oz reflecting the mood of the place at that particular moment. The world was actively fighting the misery, and losing.

Dr. Torquemada’s words buzzed around me like horseflies, and I tried to swat away the idea that Dorothy Gale was indeed faded.

“There’s no proof yet,” I told myself.

Not that I required actual proof. Oz was telling me everything I needed to know. The further I walked, the more the bright yellow in the bricks had washed away, leaving only a gray, colorless road behind. Small tremors shook the ground. I felt like I was running out of time.

Thankfully, the twister had deposited me only an hour or so away from the Munchkin Village. It forced me to journey the rest of the way by foot, but I could handle the distance easily. I started to run. The ravaged Land of Oz blazed by in my peripheral vision. Ahead, up in the sky, I saw flying monkeys circling the village. As I cleared a hill, I spotted a gathering of small huts, circling a brick-paved town square. Dozens of characters, many of them far taller than Munchkins, had assembled in the center of the village.

I slowed down, catching my breath. Walking the last few steps down a hill, I approached the crowd. There were far too many of them, and they were blocking my view. Moving around to the side of a small hut with a straw roof, I thought I could find a better vantage point. Again, my path was blocked. Munchkins talked in high-pitched voices, their words so rapid and sorrowful that I had a hard time understanding them. They paid me no attention. I rounded another hut, nearly crashing into a massive creature. The magnificent great cat hobbled out from among the tiny houses, its giant face pale with shock. In one paw, the enormous tiger clutched a pair of silver slippers.

They were Dorothy’s.

The tiger glanced down at me. I had never met him before, but I knew who he was. Hungry Tiger was the biggest creature of his kind, and a friend of the Cowardly Lion. The Hungry Tiger had been written with an endless appetite, one he was never able to sate. Baum had also cursed him with a conscience, preventing him from eating any unwilling creature.

“Dorothy…” he whimpered.

I considered talking to him, knowing full well I’d have to tell him I was unwilling to serve as his dinner. The towering tiger limped past on three legs, his right front paw unused as it gently caressed the slippers. He protected the shoes, sniffing them. They probably smelled of Dorothy.

The slippers glittered with magic, their silver light beaming out into Oz, searching for their rightful owner. People often thought them to be ruby in color, but they were silver most of the time. The ruby slippers came about due to a Technicolor-friendly change made for the 1939 film. The tiger sniffed the shoes again, tears tumbling down his furry cheeks. I stared at him, dumbstruck.

“Pardon me, Mr. Hungry Tiger, but…”

The tiger snarled at me. His gaping maw revealed a set of sharp, yellow teeth. If he wanted to, he could snap me in half with a single bite. The tiger’s wild eyes morphed from rabid, grief-stricken animal, into something more civilized, barely quelling the natural ferocity of his killer instinct.

“Pay your respects, and then leave us be. Or I’ll swallow you whole.”

A chill ran down my spine. The Hungry Tiger wasn’t adhering to the rules of his character. His grief was too great for him to care. I could only think of one reason why – Dorothy Gale was really faded.

I hurried past the large animal. He’d come from the center of the town square, and the wake his large body left behind had yet to close. It gave me a path through the mounds of characters. At the center, I saw a strange flash of darkness, unlike anything I’d seen before. My mind scrambled to make sense of it, but couldn’t. I dashed forwards, into the middle of the Munchkin village. Mostly, the onlookers around me were characters from the Oz mythos. They were visitors from all corners of the land, but among them were others – tourists like me. The crowd began to surge closer together. The path ahead tightened. There were too many of them. They moved in around me, forcing me to use my elbows to advance. I pushed through, passing characters far superior to me. Among the shell-shocked faces, I saw Glinda the Good Witch, the Scarecrow, the Wizard, and many others. None of them knew what had happened, or how. I would never have dreamed pushing past them before, but screw decorum. This was my case, my responsibility.

My confidence was growing, but using sharp elbows didn’t work for long. Finally, I was forced to stop, still not close enough to the scene of the crime. Through the tight-packed gathering, I caught glimpses of the strange, flashing darkness. Then the gap ahead closed completely, blocking my view. I sighed, looking around for an alternate way through. I pushed past a pair of Emerald City guards, finding myself standing next to the Tin Man – Nick Chopper himself. He was crying, rusting in place.

“Now my heart is truly lost,” the Tin Man said.

“Tin Man… Nick. I’m a detective. I’m on the case.”

He looked at me for a second, confused by my low life force. 

“Please. I might be able to help her.”

The Tin Man nodded. He waved his arm at other characters, the sound of his rusty metal squeaking loudly. They stared back at him. The Tin Man was a big deal, and they slowly parted, giving me a path further into the center.

As I pushed through, I suppressed a sickening feeling that rose up from my lower gut and into my throat. If Nick Chopper was desperate enough to accept my help, things were bad. Yet, there was also a sense of pride. They needed me. I was doing something important. 

Coming closer to the crime scene, I noticed more and more famous tourist onlookers. Their faces were as ashen as those of the Oz-dwellers. RoboCop and Holden Caulfield moped side by side, silenced. Captain Jack Sparrow had been shocked into propriety. Superman stood helpless, unable to do a thing to reverse the tragedy. Commander Shepard was so confused he or she had forgotten which sex they were supposed to be in this play-through, morphing awkwardly between male and female. Doctor Moreau and the Sayer-of-the-Law clutched each other for support, experiencing pain beyond their wildest dreams. And James Moriarty stared in awe, wondering how something this diabolically villainous hadn’t occurred to him first.

I stepped past them. This case called for a detective.

“Excuse me, please. Private detective coming through.”

Entering the middle of the square, the onlookers had given a few feet of respectful space around the body. A gathering of serious men stood around it, blocking my view.

“I said, excuse me, private detec—“

I immediately stopped talking, recognizing the men studying human shape on the ground. Hercule Poirot observed the crime scene with fuzzy determination. Sherlock Holmes made deductions, observing the body with intelligent eyes and a narrow, angular face. Charlie Chan politely noted details, occasionally excusing himself with various aphorisms – so called Chan-o-Grams. And Philip Marlowe smoked a cigarette, his Humphrey Bogart-eyes suppressing utter bewilderment under a strained veil of coolness.

I felt like a dolt. Here I had been using my elbows to get to the crime scene, thinking myself so important. I was nothing compared to the sleuths already gathered.

I was about to apologize, when the detectives parted, revealing the body to me.

My embarrassment immediately vanished.

Instead, a sense of cosmic horror overtook me. The sound of the other characters around me faded, leaving a vacuum of nothingness. All I heard was the pulsing thrum of my own rapid heartbeat. My legs felt weak. Bile rose up in my throat. My skin prickled. And my body felt heavy, like it was waterlogged, hit by icy wave upon icy wave. The insidious chill crawled down my spine, into the core of my being, strangling whatever sense of security I had left – the rules of fiction had indeed changed, and there was nothing I could do about it. 

All the while, my eyes stayed locked on the aberration in front of me, unable to look away. 

It wasn’t merely a body.

Dorothy Gale was a black hole shaped as a young girl – a silhouette mimicking her form. The void inside the shape churned, collapsing on itself. I could see bits and pieces of Dorothy flashing in and out of existence. Not only was she dead, but what remained of her physical form was being dragged into oblivion, morsel by morsel. A pigtail blinked into existence, before being pulled into the void. An eye-socket flashed, revealing the utter confusion on Dorothy Gale’s face before she faded. Her body occasionally trembled, showing smoldering nitrate film, and even a few letters and words that had been used to describe her.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. This wasn’t possible. Dorothy Gale was supposed to be immortal.

“How long has she been like this?” I asked, struggling to keep my voice even.

“Mon ami, the mademoiselle’s body is fading,” Hercule Poirot said, flashing me the sympathetic gaze of David Suchet.

“Fading? How can she be fading?”

“She has been murdered, by a method most deviously foul,” Poirot explained.

“That’s impossible. She’s immortal. Dorothy Gale cannot be dead. She cannot fade. There are still copies of books and films and games in existence.”

There was no way in hell every copy of her story had vanished at once. If a cataclysm had struck the human world, and they were all exterminated in the shock of a meteor impact, then that could have explained it. But if that happened, I would have faded as well, and so would every other character and created world. No, the human world still existed. This Armageddon was local. And it had struck Dorothy, one of our best.

“It can’t be,” I stuttered. “It’s impossible.”

“Mind, like parachute, only function when open,” Charlie Chan said, quoting one of his signature proverbs, one I had previously overheard him say at a circus.

Sherlock Holmes removed the pipe from his mouth.

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts,” Holmes said.

I knew that line too. It was from A Scandal in Bohemia, and it didn’t really help. The great detectives were comforting themselves, repeating lines they had uttered, lines from plots where they ultimately knew the outcome.

None of them knew the outcome this time, and it scared them.

“But how can she be gone, and Oz remain?” I said.

The other detectives looked at each other, none of them able to answer. All at once, they turned and looked at me, silently asking if I had any theory of my own. Were they really that desperate?

I offered them an apologetic smile and stepped away from the crime scene. They let me go, suspecting that I felt out of place, and that I wanted to give them – as important characters – room to solve the case. On a normal day, they’d have been right. But that wasn’t why I retreated. If I stayed, I’d be expected to follow their leads. Much to my own surprise, I didn’t want that. If they were falling back on old quotes from their stories, then they’d treat this as a normal mystery.

Dorothy Gale’s murder was something entirely abnormal.

It couldn’t be solved in any traditional way.

I needed distance, and privacy. Pushing through crying spectators, I tried wrapping my head around what was happening to Dorothy. There was something about her body that troubled me. Poirot had said she was fading, meaning she had started off more recognizable, before becoming a flickering, girl-shaped black hole. I had never seen anybody fade before. Was that what they looked like? To fade was to not exist anymore, but that wasn’t what I’d seen. Her energy seemed to be pulled inwards. Where did it go? What happened to it? This wasn’t someone losing readers.

This was vampiric.

Somebody stole that energy.

Dr. Mercutio Torquemada had been right. It was murder. Motive was easy to figure out. Every gray, unread character had reason to kill, if it meant they could steal life force. Divining exactly who did it would be far more complicated. There were literally billions of potential suspects, but how the devil had they done it? Who had the ability to steal life force, something entirely unprecedented in the entire history of fiction? I had nothing to go on there, so returning to the beginning seemed logical. Torquemada. He’d put me on the case, and he knew more than he had let on.

I wanted to ask him about why he sought me out in particular. He had failed to leave me with contact information, or to let me know how to find his realm. That was a problem. Characters from popular worlds were easy to locate. But characters like Torquemada and me were hard to find. Torquemada had to have searched me out – maybe in some archive? He said he was a scholar, an academic.

“So think, Richly,” I said, making it through the thickest part of the crowd.

Dr. Torquemada wanted me here, to see the body for myself, because, he said, I was the Chosen One. Which of course was bullshit. He’d done that to stroke my ego. But what did he want? How was he connected to Dorothy Gale’s murder? I’d already deduced that he’d read my story before Dorothy was killed. Okay, fine. I didn’t deduce it. He told me as much himself. But why would he want to read my story? It wasn’t exactly quality fiction. Clearly, he had an interest not just in Dorothy, but also in me. Was it Dorothy’s death that finally made him seek me out, or was he already planning on stopping by my realm?

I felt like I’d stumbled into a game far beyond my abilities, but seeing Dorothy like that – erased – it scared and confused me. A sense of helplessness bubbled to the surface, one known to all unread, insignificant characters. My fist tightened and my nails dug into the skin of my palms. I didn’t want to be at the mercy of this horror, and I didn’t want to be afraid. God damn it, I wanted to solve it, but how could I, when I didn’t even understand what I’d just seen?

“Think, you idiot,” I yelled at myself, startling Olive Oyl in the process.

How was Torquemada connected to the fading of Dorothy Gale? Why exactly did he seek me out?

I didn’t have an answer. And I didn’t know where to find Dr. Torquemada, so there was no way to ask him how he was mixed up in this. All I could do was to pursue the case.

No matter the danger, no matter the cost, I was going to find out who killed Dorothy Gale.

I swore it.