“Lad.”

The boy walked over by him, looked up expectantly. He was on a horse. A warrior as well equipped, as professionally outfitted as Art[ion] Mlckk'n Inchance-rify – this was not a common sight, he imagined, for such a young chap, limited experience of the world, he'd wager. Art would have liked to have been regarded as large, intimidating, impressive, and even daunting and perhaps admirable by the lad, and everyone really, and attractive women especially, but everyone – vanity - but he got nothing of the sort back except a dull kind of incurious expectancy.

“What?” He said eventually.

“You love your Queen, boy?”

“Who?”

“The queen of the place you live; Queen Slua, of Waat – you... like her?”

The lad laughed smugly, like he'd got one over on him just by his asking this, “You think it's real?” said the boy. “It's a game. It's a game she plays. I don't think it's real. It's a different king every year. She's the queen. Look,” moving in, more conspirational like, “If she's enjoying herself, if she gets pleasure from this, I'm all for it. No one expects her... to be good.”

The boy left, in the direction he was already going, pulling his pig along with him. Art noticed now it had a little bow around its neck. He'd assumed the pig was for agricultural reasons, now he thought, perhaps not. He prayed really that no one fucked it.

The more he looked around the more baffled he was. About this place in material terms. Glancing up again at the onyx towers, of the three towered palace on the hill overlooking the small and unimpressive hamlet of Waat. He wondered about this place being – they said this - an important power-broker between the moribund dynasties of the three intersecting realms of – Sanfrinz; Prink and Choonst.

He turned his head to face the towers and with it the town turned; the world did.

Something new and irrational poured in great massive heat waves from the castle. Something palpable, something there, something ineffable but definitely there, a palpable transmission backed by the physical force of reality itself; passing out, it was waves but, they were straight; they were perpendicular, and there were no gaps between them. This irrepressible, evidently actually there force, came in layers, and uninterruptedly, now from the Palace of the Queen of Waat.

He would have felt it. If he was a normal person he would have lived under its impulses, felt it - but would not have, strictly speaking in conscious terms, even if invisible, perceived it in a manner understood.

But even that. Art had other means available him; other apertures on this world, and other attributes that explained it to him in ways that did not require subtlety; interpretation. Not judgement. Even: it was just there. His senses were so much more sensitive than he was. His senses, and his bowels.

He saw the thing itself and he saw it, in all its bizarre, in all its macabre, and in all its exorbitant colours. Colours that burned not his eyes but his brain, and the organs whose tendrils were inside it; his separate brain organs, and in the rest of his body too.

He saw it, he saw it all, because his right ear was the Orach of Mending.

He saw it all, mainly through his ear: