Lord, but I was fanciful. I think, honestly, that part of the reason they believed the Scroll was real was that it was so shamelessly bad. No respectable forger would ever string words together in such a self-important slurry. Forgery is a quiet discipline that doesn’t put itself forward—indeed, it wants very much to fade into the scenery. This idiot, this supposed scribe I contrived as my narrator, was afflicted with no such sense of limitation. The prose is purple, adolescent, puffed up, and filled with mystical ellipsis. In other words—though I didn’t realise it at the time, I was just drunk with Hortensus’ pawprint on my tit—it is perfectly authentic for a young man trusted with what he saw as a great task of record-keeping. Or, let us be fair, a young woman also, for portentousness is beyond gender and I never did specify which our young chronicler might be; they all just assumed, as men do.