The context here is an akashic macro compiler, that looks each pattern up in the akashic library and substitutes the contents of the library at that position if a match occurs. Akasha's Distillation will mishap if the second argument is not a pattern, which means if you have reified data in your hex the compiler will inescapably break.

I see two ways out of this:

• provide some way to distinguish patterns from non-patterns so the compiler can skip over them;
• cause Akasha's Distillation to return NULL without mishaping in the case that the pattern argument is not a pattern (which would make the compiler work fine).