Thomas spent many months as a guest of various native American and First Nations tribes. He was well versed in their pantheon of deities and spirits. It was the Innu peoples of Quebec that introduced him to such entities as the Wīhtikow or Wendigo, and it was under their jurisdiction that he had searched for evidence of such things, despite their hesitation. They did not fear catastrophe on a grand scale, but perhaps the loss of sanity. The Wendigo remained elusive, and possibly for his own good, but he did not leave the forests of North America empty-handed.

He travelled to Montreal, and then on by train to America, staying at the Bartholomew Hotel in Pine Grove, West Virginia. Whilst dining one evening, he was interrupted by a man shouting at the desk clerk for assistance. Merrylin overheard him speaking of some menace that plagued his farm and that no one would help him. Thinking this an unlikely coincidence, he went to the man to offer assistance. The man went by the name of Albert Tennesson, a farmer with a meagre acreage in the sleepy north-west Virginian town, whose family had been terrified by nightly visits of a giant, bird-like creature. He spoke of its ‘taunting’ and, when pressed, Thomas was told that the creature had spoken, and that it had warned the farmer of a coming peril.

‘There will be a storm, and lightning shall strike your barn. Your livestock and livelihood will go up in flames.’

Thomas agreed to accompany Albert back to his homestead, to witness the creature for himself. For three nights, Thomas had sat on the porch, covered in a thick blanket, awaiting the return of this creature. On the fourth night, his patience was rewarded, as giant wings unfolded from the dark tree line, and a seven-foot-tall entity landed in the fields before the house. It walked with a human gait - although its arms were far longer than a human - and its wings held outstretched. It had thick black fur about its body, and yet its face was pale and vaguely human. Perhaps the most startling aspect was its eyes, that shone with a red luminescence. Thomas writes:

‘It said my name - Thomas Theodore Merrylin. Its voice was insect-like, an organic whirring reverberated with each syllable.

“You have sought us. We are the dreamers in time’s unformed state, in the chrysalis of that which is yet to come. You have seen our brothers and sisters, but never seen us. Many have listened to our warnings, others have not, and their pain is a tapestry in the aether.”

It reached out an arthropodal forearm, and I took its hand, sharing, for a brief moment, the vast cacophony of its own thoughts. A species of wandering seers - natural prophets, ancient, collectivist, unable to change what was to come, yet helpless in warning others of their fate. Fear held back many from listening, but for the First Nations and Native peoples who had interpreted their tales through their own avatars and spirits, a wealth of knowledge.’

Thomas searched for years for further evidence of these creatures, and it was another serendipitous, if not tragic event, that saw his final encounter. A creature, shot down by another farmer, too scared to listen. Its body held in an ice house, Thomas took it away to be studied. In his notes, we find reference to a Homo lepidopterus, or Anthropteryx Erythrophthalmus Lepidopterus, which speaks of the red eyes. ‘What is most telling is the brain itself. There are two channels that run parallel to the optic nerve. These channels serve a very specific purpose, in relation to the creature’s foresight.’

In a paper in 1905, a year after faster-than-light ‘meta-particles’ were hypothesised by physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, Merrylin postulated that, perhaps, the creatures could capture such particles through some organic means. What he spoke of would come to be known as tachyons - coined by Gerald Feinberg in a 1967 paper titled "Possibility of faster-than-light particles”. Thomas stated:

‘If particles are proved to travel faster than light, then it stands to reason that this species has evolved some process to collect and use them to glean information. In this regard, we can perhaps consider this a simple survival mechanism that jumpstarted a very clear intelligence, and thus, altruism, to share their predictions with all and sundry’