Dancer

“Open another door, but do not call it the exit.”

One source Intent forks beneath a declared Lens. Dancer is Shadow's expansion office: it makes several alternatives legible from the same starting point, preserving what each assumes and requires while favoring none of them.

Dancer is Designed. No simulation Rune or schema ships, and no Dancer path runs. State of Work records delivery, while ADR 31 owns the design.

One bounded fork

A Dancer Invocation receives the source Intent shared by its siblings, one operational Lens, and a pinned base and current Context. The owning Spellweaver Pattern supplies the containment and effect boundary, budget, branch limit, stop conditions, and expected output shape.

The Lens is one angle of examination or variation. It carries no Persona, identity, or permission. A Dancer does not receive sibling output before the declared join, nor does it receive Hunter's review context. Spellweaver owns fan-out, joins, budgets, cancellation, and termination; Shadow owns branch identity and candidate lineage.

Return attributed alternatives

One bounded Invocation returns:

• alternatives, each with a stable local identity;
• assumptions for each alternative;
• required_state each alternative presupposes;
• unknowns left unresolved; and
• provenance for every source or observation it uses.

Shadow attaches that return to the common Intent and pinned Context. Dancer supplies typed expansion material, not a private reasoning trace.

Every alternative remains a possibility awaiting measurement; Vikalpa is the page's literary correspondence for that state, not a source claim that the possibility is honest. Evidence and the responsible owner decide what follows. Phantasma names Shadow's isolated expansion mode; it grants no identity, execution sandbox, or proof of containment.

Dancer may open, combine, reframe, or vary candidate material. It produces no score, rank, pruning decision, certification, promotion, selection, live effect, or proof of novelty. An alternative may be useful, redundant, mistaken, or impossible without changing Dancer's duty to return it honestly.

Stop before selection

Exhausting the branch limit, time or token budget, or a declared stop condition returns an honest incomplete expansion. Existing alternatives remain attributed; unknowns and provenance remain visible. Dancer cannot silently substitute the first or cheapest candidate for the requested breadth.

A candidate may then enter Hunter through a separate Invocation, undergo deterministic checks, or become a Riddle trial subject. Those passages may reject every alternative. Dancer neither argues their verdict nor repairs a candidate inside the same expansion context.