. . .

His pupils are vastly dilated. He is not sane. He has been breathing the vapors of the hats, and grief, and his own frustration. He is in dream-wroth now, in coherence-hunger, like a scientist obsessed with a half-glimpsed equation, a snake that is trying to fold itself into being, a poet sifting through their words. He is caught up in an avarice for sense; and finds it.

That is the trick of it. He has seen a true thing. He has chased the patterns of it, and found the edge of something magical.

He is a lens, and he shall make a lens; he shall refine himself through his own perceptions; take the thing in him that sees the world, turn it back on itself, see itself through itself, and onwards until the ending of the world; he will dream of dreams, and he will take his dreams and he will wear them like a hat.

He has seen something like what the old Tom might have seen.

He hunts the lowlands and the highlands of the hats.

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