Ronan's thinking wasn't driven by emotion.
How should the concept of "I" be defined? Ronan's native language, the Heavenly Abyss Common Tongue, and the Ritual Ancient Script all approached it differently. There was no need to look that far, though. Earth's existing languages alone could produce dozens, even hundreds of variations.
At the level of the Overrun Divine Script... Well, Ronan didn't dare define its full range of meaning yet. But from the perspective of the Ancient Gods, which he had glimpsed indirectly through the Ritual Ancient Script, he was certain of one thing:
The "I" in the Overrun Divine Script was probably startlingly different from its definition in ordinary Genetic Species languages.
There was a threshold to seeing things as the Ancient Gods did.
The crescent moon rose in the east and circled Earth again and again. Giving it a name was easy. But filling out that seemingly simple definition took thousands of years of human civilization and countless details—enough to extrapolate its past and future and give the concept a relatively complete meaning.
Against the vast universe, the moon was dust whose mass barely counted. And what of short-lived Genetic Species compared to the crescent moon overhead?
They vanished before they could accumulate those details or trace out any kind of trajectory.
An individual Genetic Species could hardly hope to register in an Ancient God's eyes, let alone claim a distinct concept or meaning. Even "Genetic Species" as a collective concept was merely an abstraction drawn from countless similarly turbulent lives.
Some individuals might have extraordinary lives: unbearably painful and unfortunate, or wonderfully joyful and smooth. Yet on the scale of the Ancient Gods, none of those distinctions would leave a mark.
One person, a few people;
One generation, several generations.
Perhaps the latter came closer to something