It didn’t matter. He saw it a few, then many times. The thing had properties. Lacking words or even the idea of words, he could behold those properties but not keep them in his mind when the thing was not there before him. It was as if the thought-ways that he had, over minutes or centuries or eons, identified as creases or grooves had taken on a form that he could behold. It was the first and only thing with a form; all else was static. When he beheld different parts of it, or moved his regard from one part to an adjoining part, he perceived turnings and features that were expressions of the creases and grooves that his mind had worn into itself, sometimes branching in one direction, sometimes another. That it had parts distributed in such-and-such a way—a stem here, serrated edges there, veins branching this way and that—hit him hard as, at once, a vast revelation, and at the same time so old and obvious that it was second nature.

The thing wasn’t always the same—the branchings changed from one reconstruction of it to the next—but it was always the same kind of thing. One day (or year, or century) he was beholding this thing for the hundredth (or thousandth or millionth) time and he knew somehow what it was. And some time after that, the roar and hiss began to call to him strangely. In the same way as he had learned to see something in the waves of flickering static, he began to connect moments in the noise and to string them together into patterns he could recognize. The way they were organized one-after-the-other was of a different nature from the way the static-motes coalesced one-beside-the-next into a thing that he could behold, but once he learned the knack of it he was able to repeat this trick of stringing them together. The strung signals could be recognized as a thing no less sensible than the thing he had been looking at.

It was a leaf.

These ways of gathering static-motes into patterns that he could hold in his regard, and stringing fragments of noise into sequences that he could recognize, spread first slowly and then with too-great speed for him to encompass. If he’d had access to a larger pool of memories he might have likened it to flame spreading across a pool of gasoline, or a crack propagating through a block of stone.