Living Waters

While I’ve written about beings in the Oz universe made of fire and ice, I don’t believe I’ve yet covered plain old water. Well, I guess it’s not that plain if it’s alive. Whether Gwyneth Paltrow has met any of these people, I don’t know. Anyway, in The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, one of the Immortals at the council is the Queen of the Water Sprites, “whose beautiful form was as clear as crystal but continually dripped water on the bank of moss where she sat.” I gave her a more significant role in my short story “Alliance of the Elementals,” in which she was accompanied by her young daughter Hydrilla. I kind of thought of her as a single mother, but I haven’t really put much thought into how Water Sprites would reproduce anyway.

Rachel Cosgrove Payes’ The Wicked Witch of Oz mentions a water nymph who lives in a brook in the Quadling Country, and it’s stated that if such a being doesn’t stay wet, they’ll shrivel up and blow away. Singra, the Wicked Witch of the South, saves her life by cutting her hair out of a branch, and in return is granted immunity to water.

In Dick Martin’s Ozmapolitan, there’s Princess Melody, ruler of the Winkie River. She is described as small and delicate with translucent skin, and wears a tunic that appears to be made of drops of water. She says that she has three sisters who rule the other three major rivers of Oz, but doesn’t say their names. Perhaps one of them is Harmony, but that leaves the other two. Rhythm and Timbre, perhaps? Melody’s people are both male and female, and while they’re all small, the guards at least are said to be muscular. They also wear silvery helmets that look in the illustration to be in the Roman style.

The Princess lives in the Water Palace at the center of a crystalline city in a great underground dome.

Finally, there are the Cascadians in Ruth Plumly Thompson’s Pirates in Oz, inhabitants of a country on the side of Mount Up in the Nonestic Ocean. Well, at least they used to be. They’re said to be playful beings made entirely out of water (as opposed to just MOSTLY made out of water like humans are) who would spend all their time sliding down rocks and then spraying themselves back upwards from fountains.

Since the ogre Og kicks his way out of the mountain after being awakened, Cascadia might be no more, but I’m sure its people are still living somewhere.