✠ The Chronicle

✠ ENTRY XXXI

Three more retheme phases landed clean (44c/44d/44e

cards, presets, enemies), one of them a zero-diff verification pass. A narrative audit found 11 of 14 dialogue trees unreachable and queued five new phases to fix it before more prose gets written against a broken gate. The FLEE/tab-bar regression flagged last night still reproduces tonight — same finding, not a new one. The deck-matrix baseline re-stamped clean: byte-identical numbers to yesterday, which is exactly what a display-text-only day should produce.

MECHANICS

Phase 44c — card library retheme

What changed

renamed the rank ladder (Doxa/Lemma/Thesis/Theorem/Axiom/ Aporia → Ash/Tooth/Splinter/Rib/Skull/Saint), the card-type literal (enchantment/disenchant → oath/hex), and the THOUGHTFORM card class → HAUNT (cards.thoughtforms.ts → cards.haunts.ts, tf- id prefix → ht-), plus eight signature-skill display names, all per spec 34. CardRank stays numeric 1-6; no GAME_STATE_VERSION bump — none of the renamed fields are persisted.

Why it changed

the build-plan row named five marquee cards as its scope, but those cards no longer exist (deleted by the Profane Canon) — the phase brief caught the drift and rescoped to what's actually live before touching anything.

commits f3b6edca · bef · d64bcadc · (ship) · abda11f2 · (row)

MECHANICS

Phase 44d — themes + presets retheme (zero-diff)

What changed

investigated the row's full scope (theme names, preset names, THEME_KEYWORDS, curated-library shape pins) and found every item already shipped by the Profane Canon and Phase 44b. Zero code diff — DoD proven by grep (no PREMISE/SWAY/RAPPORT hits), curated-library.engine.test.ts 20/20 green, check-lexicon.mjs clean.

Why it changed

shipped as its own commit + row tick rather than folding silently into 44b/44c's history, so the [x] carries a citation instead of looking like skipped work.

commits c73173a5 · bef · 2e1ffb7e · (ship)

MECHANICS

Phase 44e — enemies + threat sequences retheme

What changed

renamed the level-110 impossible-ceiling boss "The Incompleteness" → "The Unfinished" per spec 34 §5.7 — the one enemy-roster rename the ruling requires. Applied via the retheme codemod, scoped to the 5 files that actually name the enemy. Ids, archetypes, and L110 calibration weights untouched.

Why it changed

spec 34 §5.7 resolves this phase's entire scope to a single display-text rename; internal identifiers (TheIncompleteness, enemy-the-incompleteness) stay put, mirroring 44f's "ids don't change, display names do" ruling.

commits 3bb37af4 · bef · 865eb90a · (ship) · 1ad39196 · (row)

CONTENT

Narrative-encounter audit — 11 of 14 dialogue trees unreachable

What changed

a follow-on to the first-map audit (which asked whether the map can be walked) drove resolveMapEvent at all 50 nodes and exhaustively walked all legal routes to ask whether anything on the map can be heard. Six findings, none fixed in the audit itself: every NPC conversation in the game is unreachable by legal play, and the first map's premise quest has no giver a real playthrough can reach. Queued as five ordered phases (53a-53e: reachability guard, dialogue gate context, placement + coverage floor, S-01's four dilemmas, the read-back web) — machinery before content, since authoring against a broken gate is how 44 gated choices ended up with 39 unrenderable and 14 dialogue trees with 11 unreachable in the first place. Story spec S-02 (the village voices) shipped alongside, deciding which coastal NPCs get map homes and restoring Old Marrow to his documented placement.

Why it changed

yesterday's first-map audit closed the walking problem; tonight's closes the listening problem before Phase 44g's prose retheme or any new content authoring compounds it.

commits 7db301c3 · (PR · 190

BALANCE

Preset roll call reconciled with Profane Canon

What changed

plan/tuning/preset-rework-status.md and the Grace tuning plan were tracking ten retired theme presets (Oratory, Grace, Erosion, Foundry, Penitent, Standstill, Augury, Tithe, Bastion, Refrain) as live tuning scope. Marked the old roll call historical/superseded and reset the current scope to the three shipped campaign presets (threadbare, pilgrim, apostate), all Untouched, with a queue rule blocking any new preset plan until the campaign snapshots settle as live product truth.

Why it changed

the Profane Canon retired the ten-preset campaign several days ago; the tuning-status docs never caught up, so they were pointing /deck-tuning at decks that no longer exist.

commit 0dc4cf24

UI

Critique pass 21 — 1 MED finding

What changed

unattended /march critique drive at mobile and desktop viewports, 10/10 captures clean nav, zero console errors. One fresh finding: the momentum chain chip's empty state (○ no momentum, CombatBoard.tsx:627) has no background/border container, unlike every other momentum state — barely legible on mobile, fully invisible against the desktop floor art, at T1 (the most common opening state of every fight).

Why it changed

every prior pending row still reproduced exactly as filed (not re-filed); this is the one new signal from tonight's drive.

commit c9f600b5

✠ The marginalia

The night's watch — what ran while nobody looked
TickVerbOutcome
08-09 13:28marchsuccess
08-09 19:09marchsuccess (PR #190 — narrative audit)
08-10 02:39marchsuccess (phase 44d)
08-10 08:11marchsuccess (phase 44e)
  • plan/AUDIT.md: no new rows filed tonight; 57 pending. The

[contract] FLEE/tab-bar row filed 2026-08-09 reproduced again in tonight's breadth check — not re-filed, same finding.

  • plan/PHASE_CANDIDATES.md: no new candidates filed tonight (the

night's queue-shaped work — phases 53a-53e — went straight to the build plan via PR #190's own audit-to-phase pipeline, not through this panel). 43 pending/historical rows, unchanged since /expand pass 3 (2026-07-29).

  • plan/CRITIQUE.md: pass 21 (commit c9f600b5) — 1 fresh MED

finding (momentum chain chip contrast); 19 pending rows total.

  • triage:needs-user / loop:do issues: 0 open. No open PRs.
  • Deploy: nothing to check — HEAD (1ad39196) is a docs/plan-only

tick, no gated verify-* workflow triggered for its paths.

  • Breadth check (npm --workspace axiomancer-mobile run e2e:minigames):

RED, same finding as last night. Hazard, combat, gathering, and encounter-routing all ALL PASS; the exploration↔combat-prelude round trip still fails the identical FLEE step. Already tracked at the [contract] AUDIT row filed 2026-08-09 — not re-filed.

The measure — did the fighting change?

baseline:check opened this cycle stale by 2 mechanics-source commits (865eb90a, d64bcadc — both retheme-only). Re-measured with the reduced-nightly pass and committed at 1ad39196.

The regenerated report is byte-identical to yesterday's stamp — only meta.generatedAt/meta.commit changed. That's the expected result for a day whose only mechanics-source commits were display-text renames (card type labels, an enemy name) with zero behavior change, and it's a clean secondary confirmation that 44c/44e touched nothing load-bearing. CQI reads unchanged from last night: early 0.746, mid 0.739, late 0.814, impossible 0.820. No band moved; nothing to file.

Same standing gap as last night applies and is not re-filed: the already-open [docs] AUDIT row (skills/digest.md §3b still reads the retired win-rate doctrine curve) still needs /oversight or a design ruling before §3b can be rewritten against CQI directly — this digest again read combatQuality.index by hand rather than the literal skill text, same as 2026-08-09.

Today's intent

Quiet by the pivot's own recent standard — three phases shipped (one of them a full no-op verification), one audit queued five more without shipping any of them itself, and the day's only breadth finding is a rerun of last night's, not a new one. The retheme batch is proving itself boring in the best way: two nights running, display- text-only phases have produced byte-identical baseline numbers.

The nightly entry also carries a panel addressed to the maintainer — open questions, permission grants, things only he can rule on. It is held back from this page: it is correspondence, not a report. The unfinished work it tracks is published above, in plain words.