Ozilda the Wicked Lore: Official Story
“Not long now, my pretty. Not long now.”
– Ozilda, scrying upon Dorothy Gale
Ozilda grew up in Tilshire, the child of two wandering beggars who blamed her for all their misfortunes and heaped shame and abuse upon her. In response, Ozilda developed a powerful imagination and spent most of her time in a daydreaming reverie to escape the misery of life. Her fantasies, however, were bitter, vengeful and twisted reflections of her trauma.
On their travels, Ozilda’s parents met an aged crone. They shouted at the old lady, demanding alms, and grabbed her by the robes, while Ozilda hung back. The old granddam refused, and when the couple tried to rob her, she met them with her true power. The crone waved her emaciated arms, the skies darkened, and Ozilda’s parents transformed before her very eyes into a rat and a toad. Then the aged sorceress blew them away into the undergrowth with a great gust of wind, never to be seen again.
Ozilda was in awe. She did not mourn her parents for a moment, and immediately coveted the amazing transformative powers the stranger possessed. She followed the witch for miles, begging to be her apprentice. Eventually, the old woman agreed, a sinister smile crossing her face.
Ozilda worked tirelessly to learn magic from the witch. Her mentor treated her with saccharine, exaggerated, matronly kindness, like a beloved granddaughter. She carefully concealed the vast malevolence and ambition she harbored, indoctrinating Ozilda to be a perfectly obedient and emphatically loyal servant.
Everything changed when four troublesome adventurers entered the witch’s domain. Ozilda believed – her view sculpted by the witch – they were marauding thugs out to plunder her mistress’ secrets. The adventurers were captured, but later escaped, and confronted the witch. Before she could destroy them, one of them by chance spilled a bucket of water onto her, which happened to be her arcane weakness: she melted before Ozilda’s eyes. The adventurers escaped while Ozilda stood too shocked and horrified to move.
Ozilda was possessed by an all-consuming thirst for revenge. Casting her mind back to her morbid childhood fantasies, she wished she could condemn the adventurers to a torturous realm ruled by her imagination. None had dared attempt such planar genesis, but Ozilda was confident that, with her extensive training as the witch’s apprentice, she could succeed. She infiltrated arcane universities with charm and guile. She consorted with the Knights Revenant and Dark Elven practitioners of Siroth’s dream-magic, mastering the art of shaping Shadow and giving it tangible existence. She was one of few people in history to have entered the terrible doomed city of Ireth and then left it, alive, mind unbroken, bearing the answers she had sought.
After enormous effort, Ozilda succeeded. She created a land of ‘Oz,’ a dark and terrifying inversion of the known world and its laws. Then, she set to work ensnaring the four adventurers, who had since gone their separate ways. They faced a perilous reunion.