Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25926288-20170515015929/@comment-31564770-20170523125754

DSP88 wrote: Pardon me if this has been discussed before but if the Black Fairy was able to still cast her curse even though Zelena drained all her magic out of the Fairy Crystals, then what were the crystals for? Would they have made the curse stronger or what? The show never really explained what they were being used for and as we saw, the Black Fairy didn't need them.

I think she did need the crystals to cast her curse, she did it with black dust, so yeah. My head canon of what went down here was she was gonna use Zelena's magic to darken the crystals but then when Zelena destroyed her magic her plan was temporarily foiled. That is, until Rumple came after her with the banishment wand. She convinced him to give it to her so she could open a portal to the dark realm and grab the massive supply of dark dust she had stored there from all the years of child slave labor in the mines. She probably didn't use it to cast the curse from the dark realm because it's cut off from other realms and she was trapped there so she couldn't do it. Then when Gideon freed her, she couldn't really take anything with her so she left it and went for the crystals in the mines.