Joe Stuart, for the first time in her blissfully ignorant life, wanted to thank all the higher powers that she may or may not have believed in her previous world. And then she wanted to bow her head down to the villainess that had unceremoniously barged right back when Joe needed her the most.

She felt like she could wax poetry in honor of the villainess and frame it up in the pristine walls of her bedroom back in the Winsten manor.

“Lady Joanna!” Joe blabbered in sheer relief, clutching her head like a lifeline. “Lady Joanna, you’re back!”

There was an arrogant flip of hair somewhere in her mind. “Hmph! You ought to be ashamed of yourself! All that bragging about surviving this world, and I came back after two days only to find you running around like a headless chicken?”

The accusation hit the girl like a slam to the gut. Joe was momentarily confused, all hysteria forgotten, before the exact events of their last screaming match came rushing back to her mind.

She blanched.

It was undeniable that Lady Joanna didn’t have a single reason to come back to her. After all, this was the arrogant, short-sighted and selfish little villainess they were talking about, the one who held onto grudges and treated everyone like trash. Joe thought back to her vicious spat with the Lady back at the Winsten manor, and finally came to the depressing conclusion that there was little reason for celebration; Lady Joanna probably wanted to take Joe’s helplessness and rub it in her face.

Either that, or the Lady probably couldn’t bear to see the humiliating sight of her physical body groveling in the dirt.

“You do realize that I can hear all your thoughts, do you not?” Came a lazy drawl, snapping the girl out of her stupor. There was a hint of feigned disinterest in Lady Joanna’s voice, and Joe couldn’t tell if she was imagining it or not.

But there wasn’t much time to ponder anyway. The forest of Sandora was beginning to swirl back around into an unrecognizable mess of colors once again, and Joe wasn’t sure that she could last another ten minutes in the center of it all.

“Damn straight you cannot.” Lady Joanna sneered. It was mildly amusing how the noblewoman’s words were being peppered with more colourful language the longer she stayed stuck in Joe’s head. The latter was smart enough to keep the observation to herself.

“But girl, is there not something you should be saying to me first? Hmm?”

Joe winced. Ah, there it is, she thought.

“Ahem…you have my heartfelt gratitude for coming back, my Lady.” She told the villainess in her head. “But just so you know, I’m not apologizing for what I’d said before.”

There was a pregnant pause, and Joe imagined a slight narrowing of Lady Joanna’s eyes.

“I-I might have said a little too much back then…” Joe added hastily. The feelings of remorse were sincere, even though Joe never had a way with words quite like Nero did. “…And I thought about it a lot during the time you were gone. Please do believe me that I hadn’t meant to be hurtful with my words —”

Lady Joanna said nothing, but the girl could almost feel the simmering rage in her heart. It pulsed hotly like a throbbing wound, threatening to break through the surface at the slightest push.

“…Even if, in reality, some of them probably did end up sounding that way.” Joe finished weakly.

She didn’t know where she was going with this. But she did know that somewhere down the fucked up line, she had genuinely grown to care about the arrogant, spiteful villainess that was Lady Joanna. ‘Who knew that I had such a weird masochistic streak in me?’ Joe mused absent-mindedly. The video game was doing wonders to her resilience, although she didn’t have much of it to begin with.

There was a resigned sigh from Lady Joanna. “Let me get this one thing straight, Joe Stuart. I didn’t come back here because I wanted to hear your stilted apologies—” Joe ducked her head in embarrassment. “—Or because I wanted to ‘rub it in your face’, as you put it so ineloquently. I came back because you had promised to survive this world in my place, and because, as foolish as it sounds, I have some faith in your words.”

Joe’s eyes widened at the unexpected proclamation. Of all things she’d expected to hear from the villainess, a veiled compliment was not one of them. Today was really full of surprises. It sounded nice, Joe realized, to hear that some her affections were actually reciprocated.

“Don’t misunderstand —” The villainess scowled spitefully, “I stand by my own convictions just as you stand by yours, and I hardly care to apologize either —I certainly do not think that I was in the wrong— but if there is a chance that I can get to the bottom of this shitty cycle of death, I WILL grab hold of it. And as things stand, YOU are my chance, Joe Stuart! ”

“Aww, can’t you just admit that you were just worried about l’il old me?” Joe teased.

“S-Silence! Do not get chummy with me, commoner!”

There was a slight smirk in the girl’s lips. It was hilarious to hear the villainess nonchalantly borrow modern words while sounding uppity about it. “So you say, but you seem to place a lot of faith in this commoner, my lady.”

“…I do.” Came the whispered reply, so quiet that Joe almost didn’t hear it. “For the first time in centuries, I finally feel like someone is on my side. It is a strange feeling, but right now I feel like I trust you more than anyone in the world.”

Joe felt the weight of the words in her heart. Just how lonely Lady Joanna had been all these years, dying and dying endlessly, she didn’t know. She wouldn’t even pretend that she could understand. But Joe felt like she had actually won something through this exchange, even if it was a concept as trivial as the villainess’ faith.

They had truly come a long way.

And that was when Joe was yanked back to her current predicament. The ghastly voices, which had mellowed out into a dull buzz in the background for a small moment, were now roaring back against her ears at full force. The girl winced at the volume, gritting her teeth until she felt like they would break.

“Stop whining and stand up!” There was an uncharacteristic steel in Lady Joanna’s voice. “The time for groveling is long gone! You are the current Joanna Valeria Winsten! Do not drag that name through the ground, not under my watch!”

She’s strangely good at pep talk, Joe thought distractedly. But the words were not enough. The forest of Sandora was still bearing down on her like a giant, with gnarly branches and a swirling storm of yellow leaves. Joe felt like she was sitting right in the eye of a colossal tornado, ready to be blown away by the force of the wind.

The mind-numbing pressure was back around her. The jumbled human words raised their pitch once again. “wHaT iS wROng, MiLadY?!” They sang in mismatched melodies, mocking at her mercilessly through the whistling wind.

“I c-can’t!” Joe wheezed out the words with difficulty; the voices swirling in the air had reached a chaotic peak, bouncing about through the trees and echoing through the magical forest. They sounded like broken, jagged glass against her eardrums. “Those damned voices—the voices won’t stop! I can’t concentrate at all. It feels like my head is going to split in half!!”

Everything in her vision swam away like muddy water. Joe scrunched her eyes shut in pain. She was vaguely aware that the villainess was screaming bloody murder somewhere in her mind, but this time it wasn’t enough to yank her back to sanity.

“Get a hold of yourself!” Lady Joanna was yelling. “There are no voices! It is all your imagination, you blithering git! Concentrate on my words. TUNE OUT EVERYTHING ELSE! ”

“Easy for you to say!” Joe snapped back hotly. She could barely hear the villainess over the pandemonium now. The two-headed lion had mercifully disappeared into the forest, but her surroundings still rocked back and forth like a flimsy boat caught in the storm. “You’re not the one caught between snails and snakes and melting trees!”

Joe felt as if the world around her had turned into a frigging kaleidoscope.

“THERE ARE NO SNAILS OR SNAKES OR MELTING TREES HERE!” The villainess hollered in her mind. It was the most unladylike thing she’d had ever done. Joe would have collapsed into a heap of laughter if her own situation wasn’t so unhelpfully dire. What did the woman mean by no snails or snakes?! Did she not realize that the leaves were morphing into snakes and lizards on the trees? Couldn’t she see the slimy animals crawling all over the ground?

Then there was shift in Lady Joanna’s voice. “Wait, I got this! I got this!” She blabbered excitedly in Joe’s mind. “Listen to me Joe! Talk to me! Tell me more about yourself! About your old world! Remember your life before this world, Joe! Won’t you tell me about it?!”

Her old world?

A barrage of nostalgia came out of nowhere hit Joe like a freight train. The memories of her world, her home, all her old friends and everything she’d left behind on that fateful night suddenly came spilling out all over the thoughts that she’d kept hidden for so long. What was happening back in her hometown? How was her family? Surely, she’d lost her job by now; it paid so handsomely too. When was the last time she’s talked to anyone about her other life?

What about Gracie? Did Gracie ever wonder where Joe had disappeared off to?

Tears welled up in her eyes before Joe could stop them. She felt the sadness bone deep in her gut, like a yawning chasm, like an old wound that had been ripped open forcefully before it could heal. The little worries which she had carefully stowed away in that untouched part of her heart were now gushing forth through the crumbling cracks. It hurt in a place that no one could reach.

“Tell me!” Lady Joanna demanded, voice urgent and insisting.

Joe could no longer focus on the bizarre forest in front of her. Like a dam burst open by the force of a river, her mind was suddenly flooded with the memories of her old life. Perhaps some tiny of her was truly beginning to think that she could no longer escape this forest.

“Tell me anything!” The Lady begged. “Tell me about your childhood!”

The words brought back a brief flash of pain in Joe’s chest. They were a strange combination of fondness and longing, those memories. They sat in a forgotten corner of her stupid little heart, collecting dust through the years of adulthood.

“I was an only child of my parents.” Joe found herself telling the villainess, as if reliving her life through the hollow flashes of memory. “Mum was strict and serious most of the time, but Dad was always smiling. I always thought that you became boring like that when you turned into an adult. My old world had no such thing as magic, but that didn’t matter. It was home all the same.”

She could feel Lady Joanna nodding along in her head encouragingly. Joe could not stop the words that came spilling out of her mouth. “When I was a little brat, I was up to no good. We used to live near the coastline, and I loved the smell of storms. One day I had almost tumbled right off the cliff. Mum had cried all day and night, and I realized that I’d much rather see her scolding face than the tears that I had caused that day.”

She wondered where that feckless little Joe had disappeared off to. Perhaps she went away just as quickly as the howling wind of the sea. Perhaps she had ended up losing most of herself over time, and only the cynicism remained in its place. Joe didn’t know, because the endless storms had become something of a distant memory after her family finally moved out of the little coastal town.

“I grew up as any normal girl in a normal city would.” She told the villainess. “I think that sometime in my preteens, I had decided that when I grew up, I would become an artist. Of course none of that ever came to be. And when I had turned nineteen, I finally moved into my new home. Then I got a normal job, and settled in like a normal working woman, and lived the normal life like ten thousand other normal people.”

“Before I knew it, I had become the same boring adult that I had hated as a child.” Joe didn’t know what was funnier: the fact that she was reminded of her silly old ideals when she was stranded in a strange new world, or that she was sharing the silliness with the villainess of all people.

The forest was now deathly quiet. But the villainess didn’t laugh. “But you do miss your old life all the same, do you not?”

Joe nodded absent-mindedly. Somewhere down the line, the corporate life had become her sole standard of living. She ate, slept and worked like a clockwork, and never thought to question it. Sometimes, Joe would indulge herself and go to the movies. Gracie used to tease her mercilessly about it all the time. ‘What kind of idiot goes to movies all alone?’ She had asked between gasps of breath. ‘Oh my god, Joe! Do you intend to die a single old hag?! Get yourself a boyfriend, girl!’

And then what? Joe had wanted to ask. Marry him and have kids? Settle down in some safe little corner of the world, and live away the rest of my life in tranquility? Was that the kind of life she wanted? Was that the kind of life all adults envisioned when they realized that what they had become?

“It’s a relatively good standard of living in my previous world, y’know?” She told Lady Joanna instead. “You have a roof over your head, and food on the table. You can save up enough to indulge in some hobbies –not that I had had any – you could live comfortably and decently for all your life. It wasn’t ambitious or anything, but it was all I had.”

Who was she kidding? Joe knew that some years down the line, she would have gone crazy. She would have hated herself for the boring adult that she’d become. She would want to disappear off the face of the earth. But Joanna Stuart was, to her own detriment, too stubborn to admit her own feelings until they burst at the seams and exploded right back at her face. But by then, she would be too broken to pick up the pieces again.

“I had my home, my own career, my family, and all my old friends in that boring, magic-less world. Of course I would miss it, Lady Joanna.”

The voices had stopped sometime along her ramble, because Joe could no longer hear the chaotic echoes through the forest. The trees had finally stood still, and the snakes had somehow turned back into crooked yellow leaves. Sandora was once again morphing back into the ever tranquil, autumnal forest that enamored with its colours and swayed gently with the wind.

There was a brief lull in the forest for a merciful moment. And then, through the soft rustle of leaves, the girl heard a quick patter of footsteps. Joe was bracing herself for another bizarre, who-knows-how-many-headed monster of Sandora, when she finally heard the voice that she had been waiting for all along.

“Lady Joanna! Milady Joanna! Are you in there?”

It wasn’t just any voice. It a voice Joe would recognize even in the mindless cacophony of the forest. Her heart swelled in relief as the voice came closer. It wasn’t an illusion, she had to tell herself. And sure enough, a shadow emerged out of the trees, tall and solid and very much human. Nero’s worried visage came into view. He was running towards Joe like a man possessed.

“About damn time.” Lady Joanna’s muttered.

“Lady Joanna! There you are!” It was strange to hear the alarm in Nero’s voice, the undeniable hint of panic that had crept up in his eyes. Joe found herself enveloped in a quick hug in the man’s trembling arms. It reminded her of Lucia. It reminded her that there were still people in this strange, hostile world that she could trust with her all life.

Nero released Joe and lowered himself to look at her in the eye.

“Milady! Are you alright? Are you hurt somewhere?” Nero raked his urgent eyes over her slouching figure, trying to discern any hint of injuries. “What were you thinking milady?! I told you not to let me out of sight! Did not understand how dangerous this forest could be for unsuspecting mortals like you?!”

His words irked her somehow. Joe frowned when she realized that Nero had a habit of abandoning his third-person speech when he became especially serious or flustered. Which was happening a quite lot tonight. And what the hell did he meant by ‘mortals like you’? Of fucking course she was a mortal! She came this close to dying from the bandits’ attack tonight, he didn’t have to remind her again dammit!

Joe pressed a trembling hand to her forehead. She was angry and frustrated and anxious on the top of being exhausted, but the girl knew that Nero had probably been just as anxious when he’d realized that she was missing. The anger was going to do neither of them any good, especially in a strangely hostile place like the forest of Sandora.

Joe sighed and decided to fold first.

“I’m fine Nero.” She waved away his attempts to help her off the ground. “There are no… physical injuries to speak of. And I am sorry for making you worry. I truly am. It would seem that I had underestimated this place, after all.”

She gave him a wry smile. “A few more days of the reckless troubles and you’ll finally tire of being my ‘bodyguard’, I suppose.”

Nero ignored her jab and nailed her with a serious look. “What happened?”

Joe stood up on unsteady legs and grimaced. The blisters and cuts on her feet were stinging uncomfortably. “I was following you when a dense fog rolled in through the trees. It spread around unnaturally fast and before I knew it, I was all alone in the forest surrounded by nothing but a blinding white wall of fog. I tried calling for you several times, but you were nowhere to be found.”

She remembered the terrifying hallucinations. It felt as if the entire forest had come alive right before her eyes, pulsing, throbbing and blinking in and out of reality. “I thought that I heard someone call me…” she confessed with a shudder, “…But it wasn’t your voice. It was as if someone was mixing and matching all sorts of pitches and calling me out just for shits and giggles. I stayed put though.”

Nero raised an eyebrow at her choice of words, but didn’t say anything. It was obvious from his expression that she did the smarter thing by not following… whatever those voices belonged to.

“I also seemed to have seen the two-headed lion.” Joe said, almost as an afterthought. She peeked at Nero through her lashes. “You do not have to believe me if you don’t want to.”

There was a tired exhale from her bodyguard. “No, Nero believes you, milady.” He dragged a calloused hand over his face, eyes scrunched shut in –— was that a hint of guilt in his face?

“Nero believes that Nero owes you an apology as well, milady.” Nero’s voice was soft now. Ah, that manner of speech; he had slipped back into his familiar pretense again. “Regardless of what Nero had told you, it was Nero’s duty to ensure the Lady’s safety. Nero has failed to keep his word. It seems, that Nero who was supposed to know better, had also underestimated the dangers of this forest.”

Joe shrugged lightly. “All things considered, I think that you’ve kept word so far, Nero. Although, between the bandits’ attack and getting lost in a hostile forest, I seem to have quite a lot bad luck hovering over me.”

“I wouldn’t quite say that, young’un.” Came a deep, gravelly voice from somewhere behind Nero. “In fact, I would rather say that you are the most fortunate human that I have seen in a long, long time. And do believe me when I say that I have seen a lot in my life.”

It was then that Joe finally saw another silhouette in the distance. It was strange, because Joe hadn’t even registered the presence of another human until now. The figure strolled forward in slow, measured steps, as if carefully gauging her reactions, until it was standing a meter away from Nero.

Joe could make out a freckled face against the morning light, a messy braid and a fraying shawl fluttering in the wind. It was thin old woman, dressed entirely in black right down to her painted toe nails, and frowning at Joe with the most piercing grey eyes she had ever seen.

“Eh, hello to you too, I guess.” Joe could only give one confused little nod in acknowledgement. Her mind was still reeling from the sensory overload. She squinted at the woman and glanced back to Nero in askance. “But err….ma’am, are you who I think you are?”

“Interesting.” The woman grinned sharply. “I came all the way here to greet a so-called noblewoman, and I must say that I am not surprised in the least. Did no one teach you that you ought to introduce yourself before asking for another’s name?”

‘I am too tired to deal with this shit.’ Joe thought miserably. But if she had learnt anything from the last six hours of the night, it was that you always needed to adapt yourself to deal with whatever shit this world threw at you.

Joe effortlessly slipped into her noblewoman persona and did a proper curtsey. If this woman wanted a demure, high-class lady, then a high-class lady she would get. “My apologies, Madam. I suppose proper introductions are in order. I take it that you already know my companion too well.” Out of the corner of her eyes she saw Nero take in a sharp breath. “I also take it that you know who I am, isn’t that right?”

She straightened up and flashed a disarming smile at the woman in front of her. Now that the fog of confusion had lifted from her mind, Joe realized that there was no other human in the kingdom that could possibly come sauntering out of the eccentric forest, save for the forest’s very own eccentric resident.

“My name is Joanna Valeria Winsten. It is a pleasure to finally be able to meet you, Witch of the West.”