Elphaba Grimmerie Spells

She looked for a recipe for the overthrow of a regime. She found much on power, and damage, but little on strategy.

The Grimmerie described poisoning the lips of goblets, charming the steps of a staircase to buckle, agitating a monarch's favorite lapdog to make a fatal bite in an unwelcome direction. It suggested the nocturnal insertion, through any convenient orifice, of a fiendish invention, a thread like a piano wire, part tapeworm and part burning fuse, for a particularly painful demise. All of this seemed carnival sleight of hand to Elphaba. What was more interesting, in her reading, was a small drawing she saw next to a section marked Evil Particulars. The drawing-done, if you would believe gullible Sarima, in some world other than theirs-was a clever sketch of a broad-faced woman-fiend. Written in an angular, bronchiating script with elegant tapering serfs, all around the illustration, were the words YAKAL SNARLING. Elphaba looked again. She saw a creature part woman, part grassland jackal, its jaws open, its hand-paw lifted to rip the heart out of a spiderweb. And the creature reminded her of old Mother Yackle from the mauntery.

Conspiracy theories, as Sarima had said, seemed to bedevil her thinking.

She turned the page.

Nothing in the Grimmerie on how to depose a tyrant-nothing useful. Armies of holy angels were not answerable to her. Nothing there that described why men and women could turn out so horrible. Or so wonderful-if that ever happened anymore.

- Wicked, Book 4