He was travelling into a sort of land of lies that was a mania. There would be nothing about this story that would merely satisfy the wants of an inopportune – in terms of being a more attractive person – hanging off his throat bollock-gland – he was vane as well – gland. He could tell. The gland, he had, wouldn't be satisfied by this at all. The colours played through The Orach of Mending highlighted a pointedly hysterical lie-world he was moving toward – his glands cooperated - all while the hunchbacked body of Waat slowly stretched its knotted muscles on the horizon.

The first thing Art noticed, his horse pulling him past an invisible transition that marked his entering the town, were the posters everywhere; pasted on the sides of sheds; an inn whose entire thatch roof was thatched with a face into the roof itself.

There were more accurate renderings, but the amateur thatching revealed more of what was actually going on. Clearly meant to be flattering, it showed, the twisted Queen of Waat; a kind of pageant before her of crowned babies, shitting and mewling, and - exaggerated lines in all directions indicating these motions and sounds, all the time a strange leering grin on her hay-derived coupon. [Art Dialect Glossary: Face/Head]

Art kept on, but it was the same everywhere, the whole town - it wasn't a city, really, big enough, but it was still a town. The mud road through it passed stables; blacksmiths; a few more taverns; residential dwellings - a market square ahead, but all Art really noticed were the posters: everywhere, of the Queen of Waat.

Her name was Slua-Sryh. Her presence - her eyes in fact were not something that left you in the small confines of the capital town of this small but strategically important nation. Bordering several important nations, it was typically well led, and lay upon certain stores of certain, again, strategic deposits of – they were mined – supernatural elements. It was something like this he'd been told to justify this.

The structure of the place, all of it, the angles, led, consciously or unconsciously, to the palace that was on a hill, the hunch of Waat.

On the mysterious first impulses of supernatural organs and glands perceiving no alternative, he moved toward it. Having no desire to really try hard to seek any, or stop elsewhere - he had a story to get into as fast as humanly possible. He asked himself, still on his horse moving toward the palace - three onyx spines towering up the hunch – how this small country of Waat with the reputation of being so ably led, maintained, to the point that it was regarded a power broker between the three other larger more important nations that each intersected it – really how it maintained, any of - what was the source of its power/prestige - any of this? Her?

Travelling through the place itself and seeing no visible signs of wealth, of serious civilisation really; it was a town - how was it all possible? What was its reputation, power, actually, sustained upon. Because it was sustained upon something. That hysteria? Those lies? Something in the structure of this reality fundamentally did not make sense. Even materially.

Covered in posters. All telling a story about a queen that was beautiful and admittedly malign – this was the subtext of each poster; they explicitly made her out to be beautiful, but evil, which seemed to undercut the point of them in Art's naive understanding of politics?

But where had the colours gone?

He focused in now on an interpretation of the place he was, through the Orach of Mending; and all those colours reappeared. The place was just as drenched in mendacities - a predominant orange and purple warping all reality beneath. Even on the faces of the peasants going about their strangely repetitive, and not on the surface terribly purposeful affairs. Carrying things around. A small lad with a pig on a string, a string tied around its throat, passed Art; normal looking in the face until Art laid the interpretation available to him of what was really happening via his supernatural organ, that one, and, pretty plainly; both the face of the pig and the boy were melting orange. An orange shadow lay across each visage and they were melting. Art stopped him. The lad, not the pig.

“Lad.”