Animator

“Cold iron offers no capability. An Animator is the address at which power answers.”

An Animator is a live addressable capability/runtime handle through which LychD discovers, probes, and invokes a service. It carries no deployment manifest. Model inference is one family of service, not the definition of this office.

The Holy Contract

Three kinds of truth meet at the binding:

1. Declaration names the Animator, its capabilities, lifecycle intent, and provenance.
2. Observation establishes whether each declared capability is reachable and ready now.
3. Proof exercises the bound runtime surface under the caller's typed contract.

A probe may make a declaration unavailable; it may not invent a capability absent from the Rune. Native protocols remain behind adapters. Callers receive the stable surface their Graph or extension requested.

A search API, crawler, renderer, speech service, or other addressable tool may therefore be an Animator; model inference is not required. That classification governs declaration, readiness, and invocation shape only. If the capability performs a web-acquisition effect, its Animator grant does not replace the separate Scout grant, budget, destination policy, and effect receipt.

Animus: the power answering

When an Animator's admitted capability is active, Animus is the inner-tongue name for the power answering through it. The clearest case is a loaded model—Gemma behind llama.cpp—but the term creates no new runtime object. Orchestrator still owns activation; the Animator remains the addressable service, its Connector the conduit, and the CapabilityGrant the exact permission and lease by which a caller may draw.

A Spell shapes that draw as a typed request: the return is candidate material, not Spirit, Persona, identity, authority, memory, or operational Cognizance. It enters a cognizant act only when Circle receives it, Blade discriminates it, Spirit carries it in Flux, and Answer binds it locally.

Two Sources of Power

Soulstones

"The Furnace of Animus."

A Soulstone is local, containerized, and stateful. Its Rune becomes rootless Podman/Quadlet/systemd embodiment on the Magus's iron. It declares every device, mount, secret, model, and lifecycle boundary it needs.

Portals

"The Rift to the Remote Sky."

A Portal binds a remote API. It generates no local service unit, consumes no local VRAM, and leaves the provider's lifecycle outside LychD.

Capability and Readiness

Capabilities owns semantic interfaces, immutable implementation profiles, typed material and feature facts, capability identity, the is_dynamic trait, and the six readiness phases. The current source retains its narrower family/model compatibility projection. The Dispatcher selects and leases a warm capability. The Orchestrator alone drives an admissible physical or runtime-native transition.

The Galvanic Arc

Demand names an exact interface and operation, typed input/output facts, invocation mode, and constraints. Dispatch resolves one declared profile against current state. A cold managed service enters bounded orchestration without carrying a connector or lease across the pause. Once observation reaches honest WARM, dispatch retries, issues the discriminated grant, and records its lease. Use returns through the caller's own evidence path. Current source performs the same handshake only for its v1 family/model demand and narrow chat-model/toolset compatibility grant.

Choose Soulstone for local iron, Portal for a remote boundary, Portal Roads for provider and subscription selection, Connectors for exact invocation dialects, and Coven for compatible local aggregation. Audio Hardware and Host Routes maps replaceable local device mechanisms without giving Animator their application meaning. State of Work owns what each path currently proves.