CHAPTER 62: THE COLLAPSE OF COMPARISON
The First Hunger no longer experienced itself as directionless or causally fractured, it had entered a more subtle and more dangerous state: the collapse of comparison. Rowan felt it first as a quiet distortion in the way the system evaluated differences between states. Previously, even in chaos, the Hunger had relied on contrast, this versus that, here versus there, now versus then, to construct meaning through relational separation. But now those comparisons were dissolving. States no longer needed to be distinct to coexist; they simply were, without requiring distinction from anything else. Rowan stood within a system that could no longer measure itself against itself. “It is losing comparative structure,” she said softly. The Hunger responded by
