One year when the trees had all turned red, he noticed the first leaf of autumn drifting to the ground. It skated and turned on an invisible breeze that was at the same time stirring the branches of the trees. He descended from the park and moved down the street and approached the leaf to inspect it. It was an especially brilliant specimen, not yet purpling with age, its veins a radiant yellow.

A bad thing happened to him then: a glimpse of resurgent chaos, as if the fabric he had so laboriously woven and perfected had been torn open in one place, and he were gazing through the hole at a much older and less well-formed version of it, seeing not a beautiful leaf but a patch of chaos with only a few red motes. It was a degree of ill-formedness he had not had to endure for a very large number of days and years and it put him in mind of the time at the very beginning when he had suffered through the eons of chaos and grasped desperately at even a single mote of red. This was troubling to him. He recoiled from it and went back up the street to the park. From that commanding height he could gaze down upon that one single leaf, lying there alone on the green grass, and brood over what had just happened. He was reluctant to go near it again. In time, though, he began to take it amiss that he was so fearful of this one leaf. Had he not brought all of this into being out of chaos? Could he not do it again? Could it be that this was a harbinger, a warning that something was wrong in what he had made, and that he might need to go and better it? So he went back down to inspect the leaf again. It was just a leaf. No wrongness in it. And yet he sensed something in its vicinity that was of a much lower order of perfection, so crude and low that it lacked even a visible form, that was seeing it all wrong, trying to drag the leaf down to its level—the level he had once existed at.

It puzzled and troubled him for a long while until he came suddenly to understand that there was another like him. Or rather, like what he had once been.

He was not alone.

Others could exist—did exist—who independently could experience what he had experienced in times long past. One of them had found its way here.