He stared.

“- A quest, is it?”

The Throne Room:

It was a clearing more than a room. A pond centred the whole place, a fountain in the middle, a statue of a fish with human arms - six human arms - spouted water in a great arc out the organ-hole in the middle of its coupon. The water was white, somehow, it had been dyed that way, or by some other means - it wasn't foam, because the water from the fish mouth was more a consistent trickle – but, whatever, beyond that this was what it was.

There were other things he noticed so as to distract his mind with as much force as he could muster from the torrent of colours, in - lies[!]

that assailed him the instant he entered the place. Other features:

Sand everywhere; the place was a fake desert; great sand dunes, beautiful, perfect granules, of course, it was for aesthetic reasons, not the dirty sand of a real desert, nothing too real, all for aesthetic reasons. The walls: repeated jade masks, at least he thought they were masks, running along uninterrupted in repeating patterns of half a dozen, no a dozen, maybe 16 different faces, repeated over and over and over again. With black, black eyes, like an ocean of emptiness he wished to have no contact with at any time; beautiful women; but tricks in some sense. Their beauty was pure manipulation. Art did not understand his impressions, they were confused beneath the layers of colour that assailed him.

The Throne was ten feet off the floor, supported out the side of the wall of jade faces.

Giant necked incomprehensible topless giraffe women, four of them, stood on each corner, pretending to hold the Throne aloft, but it was really attached to the wall.

A hundred tame white weasels, sniffed around the place, occasionally rolling over in the sand.

Fifty professional guardsmen stood at more or less attention behind the pond. Comparatively able looking.

This was the place beside the lies and the Queen of Waat, throned and watching him.

What kind of beauty was it? It hit him like an abstract notion, that and the swarm of colours inextricably intertwined that -

But what were the colours doing?

And what was the quest; he already had one, he was in a quest, or was he, was this just a trick of will, an illusion of self-determination, just a trick of glands that imparted meaning to him; that said he was on the correct path/the right route, to something, and now this - and why couldn't he focus, and why was his consciousness; his self, a plane upon which, it was the very plane upon which, whatever this was, call it a quest again, was - being - waged.