Crucible

A bias is a Blade held at a declared angle. The Crucible reveals which cuts survive contact.

Crucible is Spellweaver's canonical two-round adversarial choreography for a consequential question with several defensible answers. It produces an attributed decision dossier, not truth by debate and not permission to mutate the world. Blade owns the discipline of discrimination; Workflow owns the score; the office receiving the result retains judgment and effect authority.

When to light it

Use Crucible when a bounded decision has at least two serious positions, self-review would hide a material conflict, and the cost of a premature answer justifies another model round. Architecture, security, product trade-offs, recovery choices, and admission decisions are natural candidates.

Do not use it to decorate a settled fact, manufacture false balance, outvote a deterministic test, or postpone a decision whose owner already lacks required evidence or authority. When alternatives need isolated candidate worlds or effectful experiments, Shadow owns those branches. When the question is whether a capability passes repeatable Cases and a Rubric, Riddle owns the trial.

The bounded casting

One admitted casting freezes:

The logical score is:

Frame question, evidence, biases, and limits
→ Clash I: independent advocate reports
→ Temper: attributed strongest-claim/concession join
→ Clash II: each advocate rebuts the actual opposing claims
→ Quench: Lead synthesizes NOW / PREPARE / REJECT and preserved dissent
→ Magus Gate or inert dossier

Clash I branches share evidence but not sibling output. At Temper, every advocate nominates its own strongest claims and concession; the join retains their citations, defeat conditions, unknowns, and original report references. Clash II may see only the bounded attributed projection required for rebuttal. It is not entitled to hidden chain-of-thought, an opponent's private Context, or an unbounded transcript.

Logical branches may execute concurrently only after Graph's parallel contract is delivered. A serial casting remains a valid implementation when it gives each first-round advocate a fresh Context and withholds earlier reports until the join. Capability, model, provider, and road may differ only when the admitted design intends that difference; the dossier records them because they can confound the apparent strength of a position.

Quench without crowning a winner

The Lead answers the decision, not the debate. Its dossier retains:

• the exact question, owner, base, acceptance criteria, evidence closure, and omissions;
• every advocate, Posture, implementation, road, budget, and terminal status;
• first-round claims and second-round rebuttals with source references;
• concessions, defeat conditions, conflicts, UNKNOWN findings, and missing evidence;
• a NOW / PREPARE / REJECT synthesis when that vocabulary fits the owning question;
• the strongest surviving dissent and conditions that would change the recommendation; and
• any proposed owner delta as inert text or an artifact reference.

Compression may shorten the projection or final dossier, but cannot drop a nominated strongest claim, concession, dissent, uncertainty, source, or declared omission. Full reports remain retained under their own provenance. Agreement can still be wrong; disagreement can expose the missing predicate that matters most.

The final Gate may accept the dossier for downstream consideration, request one bounded evidence extension, refuse it, or close without decision. It does not itself edit a Covenant, promote a candidate, deploy a service, spend, publish, or relabel evidence. Those effects require a new forward Invocation under the exact target owner and authority.

Refusal and recovery

Crucible refuses when the question has no owner, positions are duplicates or caricatures, the common evidence floor cannot fit, a bias lacks a defeat condition, the Lead is also an advocate, or the requested result would acquire authority by majority. Timeout, failed branches, incomplete rebuttal, and missing sources remain visible in the dossier; the Lead may return non-decision but cannot silently complete the missing side.

A retry binds a new Invocation and records whether evidence, Postures, models, limits, or the question changed. It never rewrites the earlier clash. When one narrow evidence request can settle a named unknown, the owner may run it separately and invoke Crucible again over the enlarged evidence packet.