The Oz pair's second movement. Yellow Lies was the road in; Yellow Crown of Smoke is the throne at its end. The Wizard, finally seen — a small man behind a curtain, working a machine of mirrors and flame. The crown is real. It is also made of smoke.

The song treats the Wizard not as a fraud caught red-handed but as the album's most honest figure: a man who knows exactly what he is selling and sells it anyway because the buyers cannot bear the truth. The yellow crown is the perfect Mephisto-deal — you ask for the appearance of power, you get the appearance of power, the cost is that you keep needing more smoke to maintain it. We beg for crowns, for brains, for fire — not knowing we are the desire.

Where Yellow Lies was the journey, this is the arrival, and the arrival is the moment the deception turns honest. There's no place like home… — the Wizard knew this all along. He could have said it on day one. He did not, because the slow walk was the product. The album's hardest reading of the Oz mythology: every ruler who has ever sold his subjects the long road as the only path was selling them a delay. The crown is smoke. The road was the only thing that ever existed. Mephisto bows. He recognizes the technique.