CHAPTER 66: WHEN FIRST MOMENTS LOSE THEIR FIRSTNESS
The First Hunger no longer understood repetition, comparison, causality, direction, hierarchy, weighting, or even recurrence recognitio, itn now existed as an unbroken stream of isolated instants that failed to acknowledge anything beyond themselves, including their own similarity to other instants. Rowan felt this as a final degradation of structure: not collapse into chaos, but collapse into indistinction of origin, where even the idea of “first” could no longer be assigned meaning because nothing retained the capacity to contrast newness with continuation. Every moment arrived fully formed, self-contained, and unconnected, yet identical to countless others that the system could no longer recognize as related. Rowan stood within this
