Shadow Realm

“A branch may produce candidates and evidence. It never appoints itself reality.”

A branch can feel like the whole present world: its context, files, tools, traces, and feedback all agree. The Sepulcher sees something narrower—a candidate possibility with pinned parentage and an unspent claim on reality. Shadow keeps that distinction inspectable.

Possibility with lineage

Shadow is the singular possibility-lineage Extension Domain. A Shadow Realm holds the speculative state and declared workspace topology of one active branch. Changed files remain candidate state; container and executor identity belong to separately owned boundaries.

The branch record pins its base, parentage, assumptions, required state, unknowns, evidence, artifact references, budget, status, and resource owner. Vikalpa is used here as a literary correspondence for a possibility fashioned apart from actuality while it awaits measurement. Its explicit uncertainty and honest handling come from project law, not from the source term. Phantasma is Shadow's isolated expansion mode; evaluation remains elsewhere.

Shadow is Designed. No simulation Rune or schema, runnable Pattern, branch Graph or store, budgeted search, workspace manager, Shadow–Tomb integration, evaluation, verified collapse or promotion, or Branch Reaper ships. ADR 31 owns the design; State of Work owns delivery.

Choose an office

Dancer opens alternatives through a declared Lens without ranking or choosing among them.

Hunter reviews one named candidate in a separate Invocation, exposing missing evidence and boundary failures without inventing its replacement.

Their attributable handoff preserves lineage, assumptions, challenges, evidence requests, and uncertainty. Spellweaver and Graph own ordering, fan-out, and joins.

Nothing crosses by acclaim

Shadow may package an inert Vision or Promotion Request with its lineage. The target's ordinary effect owner still revalidates current state and required evidence, prepares rollback, obtains Ward and HitL or eligible preauthorization, then applies and verifies the effect. The branch cannot merge, deploy, publish, purchase, restore, or promote itself.

A rank or “winner” inside the experiment remains only a search result. Failed and ineligible branches retain required findings, artifacts, provenance, and residue before cleanup. Branch Reaper names that cleanup discipline and its receipt; it does not require another child route. Deleting a directory cannot settle processes, leases, credentials, ports, or shared effects.

Jujutsu may suit a future tracked-change workspace, but it supplies no execution sandbox. Unsafe execution requires its own admitted boundary.