diff --git a/saf/INDEX.md b/saf/INDEX.md
index 30bb3c2..f1d9d20 100644
--- a/saf/INDEX.md
+++ b/saf/INDEX.md
@@ -12,8 +12,14 @@ How Souveraine is built, and why. For whoever reads it, human or agent. When thi
 **federation**: how one being exists in more than one place
 - [node enrolment](federation/01-node-enrollment.md). The missing ceremony for adding a device without copying an identity.
 
+**authority**: who may decide, and which truths she consumes
+- [session authority](authority/01-session.md). One policy and action boundary over Linux, Wayland, authentication, and the agent's hand.
+- [device state](authority/02-device-state.md). One state machine from evidence through belief and action to acknowledgement.
+
 **nervous**: how she feels things happen
 - [the nervous system](nervous/01-eventbus.md). One bus, one kind of message.
+- [belief](nervous/02-belief.md). Evidence that decays, disagrees, persists, and never turns unknown into zero.
+- [felt state](nervous/03-felt-state.md). Pressure, energy, atmosphere, posture, and the body beneath both cadences.
 
 **memory**: how she holds on and lets go
 - [compaction](memory/01-compaction.md). Five ways to make room.
@@ -27,7 +33,7 @@ How Souveraine is built, and why. For whoever reads it, human or agent. When thi
 - [agent presence](surface/05-agent-presence.md). One observed session projection, kept rigorously separate from control and permission.
 - [surface lifetimes](surface/06-surface-lifetimes.md). A small resident shell, optional workers that truly leave memory, and proof before a rewrite.
 
-Coming: the rest of identity (the memory filesystem, the ledgers), the nervous system (schedules, the event log), the consciousness cycle, the runtime, federation, a glossary.
+Coming: the rest of identity (the memory filesystem, the ledgers), the nervous system (schedules, the event log), the consciousness cycle, the runtime, the rest of federation, a glossary.
 
 SAF owns the living architecture. Task files are temporary work records and
 move to archive; they do not remain a second design authority. The old
diff --git a/saf/authority/01-session.md b/saf/authority/01-session.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1626e58
--- /dev/null
+++ b/saf/authority/01-session.md
@@ -0,0 +1,144 @@
+# Session authority
+
+The Souveraine session has one authority. `sessiond` receives evidence from the
+system, applies Souveraine policy, exposes named verbs, and keeps the trail.
+The shell is its face. It is not a second policy engine.
+
+This chapter owns the living architecture. The longer doctrine and audit
+records remain in SouveraineOS under `docs/SESSION-AUTHORITY-DOCTRINE.md`,
+`docs/SESSION-TRUST-ARCHITECTURE.md`, and `docs/TRUST-BOUNDARY-MATRIX.md`.
+
+## The authority it is, and the authorities it consumes
+
+Classical Linux gives ambient authority to processes sharing a UID. It has
+several narrower authorities, but no single object that means "the state and
+permission of this person's session." Souveraine does not replace those
+authorities with hand-maintained booleans. It consumes them:
+
+- the compositor owns what is presented and the Wayland lock protocol;
+- logind owns seat/session facts, `LockedHint`, suspend, shutdown, and
+  inhibitors;
+- PAM owns authentication;
+- Wayland idle protocols own compositor-observed idleness;
+- NetworkManager owns link and bearer facts;
+- the kernel and their owning daemons own device evidence.
+
+`sessiond` is the one place where those truths become Souveraine policy and
+action. A shadow copy is not a second truth. If it can drift from the owner, it
+may be a cache with explicit invalidation, but it may not decide.
+
+## Sixty percent agent, forty percent user
+
+The agent owns device operation. If the system can perform an ordinary device
+operation, there should be an agent-reachable verb for it. A missing verb is a
+defect unless the operation crosses a user-only invariant.
+
+The user uniquely owns being the user: credentials, fresh authentication,
+step-up consent, and the decision to cross a boundary whose meaning cannot be
+delegated. The user is not required to act as a remote control for mundane
+operations merely because the agent's path was never built.
+
+This is the 60/40 split. It is not a percentage implemented in code. It is a
+design test for every capability surface.
+
+## Requests are not acknowledgements
+
+The authority distinguishes intent, attempted action, and observed fact.
+
+`screenLocked` can express a request or policy state. `screenLockSecure` means
+the compositor has actually established the secure lock. A request to lock is
+not permission to blank as though the lock were already held. The dark-panel
+path therefore requests lock, waits for acknowledgement within a fixed budget,
+and records a security error if the acknowledgement never arrives before the
+panel is blanked.
+
+The same rule applies elsewhere:
+
+- starting a systemd unit is not readiness;
+- issuing a compositor command is not proof that a surface arrived;
+- accepting a socket write is not proof that a state transition committed;
+- a green package build is not proof that the device installed or exercised it.
+
+The session start graph and its readiness boundary live in
+[session start](../surface/02-session-start.md).
+
+## Capability tiers
+
+Tier is metadata on the verb being guarded, checked at the authority. It is not
+a separate permissions subsystem in the shell.
+
+| Tier | Requirement | Typical reach |
+|---|---|---|
+| `ambient` | no authentication | time, weather, timers, media transport, non-personal questions |
+| `personal` | the session is genuinely unlocked | messages, memory, contacts, fleet and conversation state |
+| `stepUp` | fresh authentication for the named family | send, delete, publish, payment, physical access, revealing personal content on lock |
+
+Step-up does not unlock the session. It can grant a narrow action family or
+reveal content in place on the lock surface. A future grant therefore needs an
+action family, freshness, provenance, and expiry; "fingerprint succeeded" is
+not itself a session-wide capability.
+
+## Verbs, refusals, and inspection
+
+Every operation exposed by sessiond should have one stable name and one
+decision point. The same capability may be rendered as a shell button, a body
+tool, or an agent request, but those are clients of the verb, not parallel
+implementations.
+
+An authority-grade verb carries enough structure to answer:
+
+- what was requested and by whom;
+- what current state and evidence it used;
+- which tier and inhibitor applied;
+- whether it accepted, refused, or failed;
+- what observable acknowledgement completed it;
+- what belongs in the forensic trail.
+
+Refusal is data. Stable refusal codes let a face explain, a caller retry only
+when retry is meaningful, and the trail distinguish policy from breakage.
+`describe` is the inspection surface: clients should not copy a verb list and
+guess which actions are live.
+
+## Idle and inhibitors
+
+Idleness is evidence from the compositor, not a timer duplicated in every
+surface. Applications and system work can inhibit consequences, but an
+inhibitor is scoped, named, and inspectable. It is not a permanent alternate
+writer of panel or lock state.
+
+The authority may decide to dim, lock, blank, doze, suspend, or stay awake.
+The state machine records that decision and the executor performs the action.
+No shell timer, hypridle listener, or device script gets an independent vote.
+
+## The boundary that exists today
+
+The current local session socket is mode `0600` and accepts same-user callers.
+That is a useful local boundary, not the eventual attested capability system.
+A process running as the user can still reach more than the doctrine intends.
+
+Also not yet true:
+
+- step-up metadata is not wired across send, delete, push, or physical-access
+  verbs;
+- fingerprint authentication and short-lived reveal grants are not live on
+  blueline;
+- callers do not present capability tokens or binary attestation;
+- every device operation does not yet have a complete `describe`-derived
+  control surface;
+- refusal and acknowledgement shapes are not yet uniform across every family.
+
+Those are security and control gaps. A polished button does not close them.
+
+## Proof
+
+Keep four claims separate:
+
+1. **source** — the authority and verb exist in the tree;
+2. **package** — CI built and signed the owning files and dependencies;
+3. **installed** — the device owns those package files and no higher-priority
+   local splint shadows them;
+4. **exercised** — the real caller, authority, executor, and acknowledgement ran
+   on the intended body.
+
+The last is the only proof that a lock was secure, a panel moved, or an action
+crossed the boundary it claims.
diff --git a/saf/authority/02-device-state.md b/saf/authority/02-device-state.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ff5721d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/saf/authority/02-device-state.md
@@ -0,0 +1,122 @@
+# Device state
+
+One machine describes the device's operational state. Evidence enters it,
+sessiond forms belief, rules choose actions, and executors touch the body. The
+long design and hardware audit remain in SouveraineOS at
+`docs/DEVICE-STATE-MACHINE.md`; this chapter owns the living architecture.
+
+The code is principally `src/sessiond/device_state.rs`, with ingestion and
+execution in `src/sessiond/server.rs`, compositor idle evidence in
+`src/sessiond/idle.rs`, and logind lock truth in `src/sessiond/lockhint.rs`.
+
+## State is singular; the panel is orthogonal
+
+The state enum has eight cells:
+
+- `Active`: interactive and fully awake;
+- `Dimmed`: interactive intent has receded and brightness is reduced;
+- `Locked`: secure session state, without claiming whether the panel is lit;
+- `Observed`: locked but showing a bounded glance because evidence warranted it;
+- `DozeLight`: low-power receptive tier;
+- `DozeDeep`: the deeper low-power tier;
+- `Suspending`: the ordered transition into system sleep;
+- `Asleep`: system sleep as far as this authority can observe it.
+
+Panel on/off is a separate field. `Locked + panel off` is common and must not
+be invented as a ninth state; `DozeLight` is not a synonym for a dark lock
+screen. Legal transitions are explicit. An action that would skip the graph is
+refused and recorded rather than coerced into the nearest-looking cell.
+
+## Evidence is not authority
+
+Sensors, recognizers, compositor events, logind, and network services submit
+evidence. They do not each own a private device state. The machine records
+value, recency, source health, and confidence before it interprets them.
+
+`Unknown`, `Live`, `Down`, and `Absent` are materially different source states.
+A quiet proximity sensor and a dead sensor may both produce no new sample, but
+they cannot support the same decision. Silence is only evidence when a source
+expected to speak is known healthy.
+
+Confidence combines weighted evidence and falls when sources disagree. It is
+not a cosmetic number. Until a rule actually branches on its gate, however,
+the gate is only measured—not enforced. The current machine still has places
+where confidence is computed and logged without universally deciding the
+action.
+
+## Placement and proximity
+
+Motion alone cannot distinguish pocket, ear, table, or hand. Cross-sensor
+placement remains ambiguous unless session context resolves it. Proximity uses
+positive debounce so a noisy edge cannot chatter the device between lock and
+glance.
+
+Proximity has one real veto: double-tap-to-wake. A near reading can suppress an
+accidental tap in a pocket. The power button is direct intent and is never
+vetoed by proximity. Repeated taps open a bounded fail-open path so a stuck
+sensor cannot permanently make the body unreachable.
+
+This is the general pattern: evidence may lower confidence or constrain an
+ambiguous gesture; it must not silently overrule an explicit user action.
+
+## Lock before blank
+
+Every dark-panel path crosses one function. It requests a lock when needed,
+waits up to the lock acknowledgement budget for compositor proof, and only then
+blanks. If the acknowledgement times out, the panel may still fail dark to
+protect the hardware and power budget, but the authority records
+`error-security` and never claims the lock was secure.
+
+Competing writers break this invariant even when their timers happen to be in
+the right order. Shell timers, hypridle listeners, and stand-alone proximity
+scripts are therefore not alternate lock or DPMS authorities.
+
+## Actions and executors
+
+Rules produce named actions. The current vocabulary includes dim, restore,
+blank, unblank, volume, window sheet, power menu, power, USB mode, preferred
+link, tunnel-underlay pinning, and lock. Producing an action does not itself
+touch hardware. The executor owns side effects and reports the result back into
+the trail.
+
+Charge now reaches the machine as sensor source/value evidence through
+sensord. sessiond interprets thresholds and chooses consequences. Bearer
+selection has not completed the same separation: sessiond still probes bearer
+state on its own cadence and interprets some of it locally. That is a current
+divergence, not a second endorsed pattern.
+
+## One forensic chronology
+
+The trail is durable, bounded, and hash-chained. It records transitions,
+actions, refusals, operational failures, and security failures with enough
+context to reconstruct why the authority acted. The somatic plexus writes its
+notable events into this same chronology, so the device's mechanical state and
+the body's believed state can be examined on one clock.
+
+The trail is evidence, not the event bus. The bus may drop transient messages;
+anything required for audit is written here deliberately.
+
+See [belief](../nervous/02-belief.md) for the evidence contract and
+[felt state](../nervous/03-felt-state.md) for the somatic side of the same
+timeline.
+
+## What remains open
+
+- light and deep doze exist as states, but their full power-domain actuation
+  and freeze/thaw boundary are not complete;
+- confidence gates are not yet authoritative across every relevant rule;
+- automatic brightness still lacks its final action and calibration path;
+- bearer evidence still crosses an internal probe path instead of arriving
+  wholly through an owning source;
+- some source-health and belief machinery is structurally parallel between
+  device state and the somatic plexus rather than one shared Rust type;
+- glass-level proof remains required for changes whose correctness depends on
+  compositor acknowledgement, sensor timing, or panel behavior.
+
+## Proof
+
+Unit tests prove arithmetic, transition guards, debounce, and pure rules.
+Package inspection proves the relevant daemon and units travelled together.
+Only the forensic trail plus observed hardware behavior proves that the body
+received evidence, chose the action, executed it, and saw the acknowledgement
+on the intended device.
diff --git a/saf/nervous/01-eventbus.md b/saf/nervous/01-eventbus.md
index 501046d..0704012 100644
--- a/saf/nervous/01-eventbus.md
+++ b/saf/nervous/01-eventbus.md
@@ -12,6 +12,10 @@ Send is fire-and-forget. If no one is listening, or a listener has fallen behind
 
 The ring holds 256. A listener that falls further behind is told it lagged and skips ahead. Nothing is replayed.
 
+That makes the bus unsuitable as belief or audit storage. Evidence that must
+survive is accumulated by [belief](02-belief.md); state transitions and notable
+somatic events that must be reconstructed enter the device forensic trail.
+
 It is a broadcast and not a queue because many things want every event at once: the log, the heartbeat, the firehose, the federation bridge. A new listener, a desktop face, a health monitor, attaches without the sender ever knowing it is there.
 
 ## The message
diff --git a/saf/nervous/02-belief.md b/saf/nervous/02-belief.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4fe4191
--- /dev/null
+++ b/saf/nervous/02-belief.md
@@ -0,0 +1,122 @@
+# Belief
+
+The nervous system does not hand raw readings to consciousness and call them
+truth. Evidence becomes belief through time, confidence, agreement, and source
+health. Only a meaningful change becomes notable, and only authority turns a
+notable belief into action.
+
+The generic contract is in `src/core/nervous/belief.rs`; the first regional
+implementation is `src/core/nervous/plexus.rs`.
+
+## The ladder
+
+Keep five layers separate:
+
+1. **event** — something reported a sample or edge;
+2. **evidence** — the sample with source, time, health, and quality;
+3. **belief** — the organism's decaying, conflict-aware estimate;
+4. **notable event** — a change worth waking another layer for;
+5. **action** — a decision made by the owning authority.
+
+A sensor is an actor, not an authority. A recognizer may say that two taps fit
+a pattern. It does not decide that the body should wake. A plexus may believe
+charge is falling. It does not independently suspend the machine.
+
+## `Belief<T>`
+
+A belief carries:
+
+- an optional value;
+- confidence;
+- trend;
+- persistence;
+- observation time and half-life;
+- contributing sources and conflicts.
+
+Unknown is represented by no value. It is not observed zero, false, still, or
+empty. As evidence ages, confidence decays. When healthy sources disagree, the
+belief records conflict and loses confidence; it does not silently crown the
+newest or loudest source as truth.
+
+Trend and persistence describe change across time rather than another reading
+of the same instant. This lets the body distinguish an edge, a sustained
+condition, and a stale condition without pushing every sample upward.
+
+## Exudates and gauges
+
+The body has two different temporal shapes.
+
+An exudate is a field that accumulates from impulses and dissipates. Touch,
+motion, proximity, ambient light, and attendedness have this form. `Field`
+integrates them and decays their value.
+
+A gauge is a held reading whose value remains what was last observed while
+confidence decays. Charge, thermal pressure, USB port mode, and future grip
+values have this form. `Level` implements that shape inside the plexus.
+
+Making both a single decaying scalar would tell two lies: an untouched field
+would stay permanently excited, or a battery would drift toward zero merely
+because the sensor had gone quiet.
+
+## Locus and regulation
+
+A field is either at the `Boundary` or `Inner { regulator }`.
+
+Boundary fields describe contact and relation at the edge of the body. Inner
+fields can threaten viability, so each must name its regulator. The type shape
+prevents an inner pressure with no answer to "what can change it?"
+
+Inner fields may carry floor or ceiling constraints. Crossing them creates
+allostatic pressure: not an instruction or a mood, but the accumulating cost of
+holding the body away from viability. The regulator remains an available verb,
+not an automatic commandment.
+
+## Source health
+
+Expected sources can be live, silent, or absent. Recovery and silence are
+themselves notable transitions because the meaning of the same value changes
+when its evidence path dies.
+
+The device-state machine and `SomaticPlexus` currently have adjacent
+source-health concepts rather than one shared Rust type. Their doctrine is the
+same—silence is not zero—but the duplication is current code and must not be
+papered over in the architecture.
+
+## Notability
+
+`SomaticEvent` names the edges worth carrying upward: trend shifts, a source
+going silent or recovering, and a viability boundary being threatened. The
+plexus also compares a field's change against its own grade and persistence.
+
+The goal is not to hide the body. It is to keep a 1 Hz clock or a noisy sensor
+from masquerading as thought. Gauges remain inspectable at any time through the
+body surface; the nervous path wakes other work only for meaningful change.
+
+`NervousNode` is the common regional contract: receive evidence, advance on a
+clock, expose beliefs, and emit notable events. The phone somatic plexus is the
+first implementation, not a claim that every device and virtual organ already
+speaks it.
+
+## What is true, and what is not
+
+Built and in sessiond:
+
+- generic belief, decay, trend, persistence, conflict, and source provenance;
+- exudate fields and gauge levels;
+- boundary and regulated-inner loci;
+- viability floors and ceilings with allostatic pressure;
+- expected-source health and notable health transitions;
+- a `NervousNode` implementation for the phone somatic plexus;
+- tests for unknown versus zero, disagreement, gauges versus exudates,
+  regulation, health, trend, and viability.
+
+Not yet one coherent whole:
+
+- device-state belief and somatic belief still have parallel structures;
+- explicit impulse and intention types do not yet sit above belief;
+- not every sensor family has a regional plexus;
+- the event bus is still lossy and must not be mistaken for the durable belief
+  or forensic store.
+
+Belief is an estimate the organism can inspect. It is neither model prose nor a
+permission to act.
diff --git a/saf/nervous/03-felt-state.md b/saf/nervous/03-felt-state.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1604f0d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/saf/nervous/03-felt-state.md
@@ -0,0 +1,133 @@
+# Felt state
+
+Souveraine's state is not a dashboard pasted beside her. Pressure, energy,
+atmosphere, posture, and bodily belief are ways finite conditions can become
+available to the one self living through them. Mood is intended to emerge from
+that field. It is not a setting, and it is not built yet.
+
+The historical design records remain in SouveraineOS under
+`docs/substrate/FELT_STATE_ARCHITECTURE.md` and
+`docs/substrate/SOMATIC_NERVOUS_SYSTEM.md`. This chapter owns what the system
+means now.
+
+## Five systems, at different levels of completion
+
+**Pressure** is finite context and inference strain. Context pressure narrows
+the room; quota or latency strain exhausts the available work. Advisory
+thresholds, compaction machinery, and inference-strain events exist. Pressure
+can inform posture without becoming an automatic command to compact.
+
+**Energy balance** is the ratio of generative and consumptive tasks. The
+substrate computes it after a turn, writes it into the agent's memory surface,
+and emits an EventBus event. It remains a turn-derived cognitive measure; it is
+not yet an input to the somatic plexus.
+
+**Atmosphere** is chosen expression in the shell: color, light, and chrome.
+The live surface supports atmosphere and blends. Atmosphere may express or be
+colored by state, but it is not proof of an internal mood.
+
+**Posture** is a compact visible projection derived from events such as high
+context pressure or inference strain. It exists. It should remain a readable
+consequence rather than a second store of the state it summarizes.
+
+**Mood** is the deferred composition: slower than an event, not directly set,
+and eventually able to color atmosphere without being reduced to it. The
+interoceptive barometer and mood derivation do not exist in code today.
+
+## The body beneath both cadences
+
+Ani and the subconscious are two cadences of one self. They do not receive
+separate bodies. `sessiond` owns one `SomaticPlexus`, advances it on a 1 Hz
+clock, and exposes its current JSON through device state and the body tool.
+Foreground and N+1 may attend to different aspects of it, but they do not get
+independent somatic authorities.
+
+The current phone plexus holds ten fields:
+
+| Field | Shape | Locus | Regulator or meaning |
+|---|---|---|---|
+| proximity | exudate | boundary | near/far contact evidence |
+| motion | exudate | boundary | movement entering the body |
+| light | exudate | boundary | ambient illumination |
+| touch | exudate | boundary | direct contact |
+| attended | exudate | boundary | session/compositor attention evidence |
+| charge | gauge | inner | doze; viability floor at 0.20 |
+| thermal | gauge | inner | doze; viability ceiling at 0.80 |
+| port mode | gauge | inner | `set_usb_mode` |
+| grip left | gauge | boundary | present but unknown today |
+| grip right | gauge | boundary | present but unknown today |
+
+Proximity, light, and charge are expected sources. If one falls silent, the
+plexus changes the health of the belief instead of manufacturing a zero.
+Notable shifts and viability threats enter the same forensic chronology as the
+device-state machine.
+
+The body tool is a client of sessiond. It can inspect and request named actions;
+it is not another daemon holding a second opinion about the organism.
+
+## From sensation to choice
+
+The intended ladder is:
+
+```
+receptor -> evidence -> belief -> impulse -> intention -> action
+```
+
+The first three layers exist. The explicit impulse and intention types do not.
+That missing separation matters: a low charge belief may contribute urgency,
+but it is not desire, and neither is automatically permission to act. Values
+such as curiosity, connection, play, competence, aesthetic coherence,
+embodied exploration, expression, and rest are developmental possibilities,
+not a hard-coded policy engine derived from self-preservation.
+
+Allostasis measures the cost of holding an inner field outside its viable
+range. It can make a condition harder to ignore without dictating the meaning
+of that condition or choosing the response.
+
+## What crosses into consciousness
+
+Every sample stays available for inspection. Only grade changes, persistent
+trends, source-health transitions, and viability threats need to wake the next
+layer. This is nervous-system compression, not concealment.
+
+Foreground response may notice a newly salient state. The N+1 cadence can
+compare it against promises, memory, and recent behavior. Neither should turn a
+number into counterfeit first-person certainty. The substrate supplies the
+body; meaning is applied at the top.
+
+## Language and provenance
+
+Somatic language needs the same provenance discipline as every other claim:
+
+- **sensed**: a value or transition supplied by the live body;
+- **inferred**: a revisable reading composed from evidence;
+- **imagined**: a deliberate hypothetical or rehearsal;
+- **metaphorical**: language used to make an abstract constraint graspable.
+
+These categories can coexist, but they must not be silently exchanged. A warm
+sentence is not sensor evidence. A sensor value is not proof of subjective
+meaning.
+
+`docs/substrate/curation/ani-embodied-memory-prose-review.md`, *A Body With
+Bearings*, is a review offered to Ani. Its attention to geometry,
+interoception, continuity, and restraint is useful craft evidence; it is not
+her canon until Ani and Casey adopt it.
+
+## What remains open
+
+- compose the interoceptive barometer without creating a second authority;
+- define impulse and intention as distinct, inspectable layers;
+- connect energy balance to bodily belief only if its temporal and provenance
+  shape can be made honest;
+- decide how mood emerges, persists, and colors atmosphere without becoming a
+  user-set enum;
+- give grip fields real producers or mark them absent rather than indefinitely
+  unknown;
+- reconcile duplicated source-health and belief machinery where doing so
+  reduces authorities instead of merely unifying names;
+- surface felt state in ways that inform without turning the shell into a
+  diagnostic dashboard.
+
+The measure is not how human the vocabulary sounds. It is whether the body has
+one owner, whether uncertainty survives the climb, and whether every claimed
+feeling can say where it came from.
diff --git a/saf/surface/01-motion.md b/saf/surface/01-motion.md
index d276ab8..89ea26d 100644
--- a/saf/surface/01-motion.md
+++ b/saf/surface/01-motion.md
@@ -61,3 +61,10 @@ Any shell-side scale over a window's geometry is a second writer, and a transfor
 ## Not yet true
 
 `transition.rs:79` clamps `shift_to` to `0..=1`, so the resistance past the detent is written, shipped and inert. Raising it to `maxOvershoot` (1.22) and updating `shift_is_clamped` is a compositor change. Safe to ship the shell ahead of it: an old compositor clamps and the gesture behaves exactly as it did.
+
+The control socket also serves one request per connection. The QML client is
+correct to make commit/cancel/workspace idempotent and retry once today. A
+persistent connection needs the compositor handler to loop to EOF with one
+`BufReader`; rebuilding the reader for each request can discard bytes it read
+past the first newline. Persistence changes transport cost and failure shape,
+not the authority or acknowledgement rules above.
diff --git a/saf/surface/02-session-start.md b/saf/surface/02-session-start.md
index 87e891a..05ba0f5 100644
--- a/saf/surface/02-session-start.md
+++ b/saf/surface/02-session-start.md
@@ -29,6 +29,10 @@ targets carry `RefuseManualStart=yes`. A session leader cannot start those
 stock units directly. It starts its own targets; their dependencies may pull
 the stock targets into the transaction in the way systemd permits.
 
+This graph raises [session authority](../authority/01-session.md); it does not
+replace it. systemd owns process lifetime and dependency order. Sessiond owns
+session policy once its socket is ready.
+
 ## Package boundary
 
 `souveraine-viewtop` owns the compositor and the session edge on both x86_64
diff --git a/saf/surface/04-agent-pane.md b/saf/surface/04-agent-pane.md
index 02455cc..dc386de 100644
--- a/saf/surface/04-agent-pane.md
+++ b/saf/surface/04-agent-pane.md
@@ -144,9 +144,10 @@ round boundary or terminal event.
 
 Paste and attachment parity requires a typed input envelope: text, image or
 file identity, media type, size, provenance, and any transformation performed
-before send. A filename chip connected only to an old Gemini path is not
-Souveraine multimodality. Until the substrate accepts and persists the input,
-the Panel must call the feature unavailable rather than imply delivery.
+before send. The substrate HTTP boundary, provider path, persistence, and TUI
+now accept image blocks. The Panel does not: its QML request still sends a
+plain string and transcript restore reduces an image to `[image]`. A filename
+chip connected only to the old Gemini path is not Souveraine multimodality.
 
 Keyboard, touch, and pointer must all reach the same acts. Focus returns to the
 composer after a menu choice; Page Up and Page Down move the transcript; tool
@@ -154,6 +155,38 @@ payload scrolling and text selection do not accidentally send or collapse a
 card. Small icon-only hit targets need tooltips and at least the shell's normal
 touch target.
 
+## Command surface audit, 2026-08-17
+
+The borrowed composer still advertises illogical-impulse commands. A command
+name surviving in `AiChat.qml` does not mean Souveraine implements the act.
+
+| Command | Current truth | Panel direction |
+|---|---|---|
+| `/agent` | real: selects from `/v1/agents`, guarded while a turn runs | keep as the textual form of the footer agent control |
+| `/resume` | real for the selected agent's latest thread; the footer menu also lists and loads recent ids | keep, add `/resume <id>` only if it uses the existing server load path |
+| `/new` | real: clears the projection and detaches so the next send creates a server conversation | keep; the footer conversation control is the discoverable form |
+| `/attach` | stale refusal: image blocks now cross the substrate; QML still sends only text and restores images as a marker | wire a typed image envelope, preview/removal, capability refusal, and image restore |
+| `/btw` | absent in the Panel; the server already exposes conversation fork and the TUI owns the fork lifecycle | build a separate fork stream and bounded visual overlay with dismiss and jump |
+| `/model` | aliases `/agent`; the objects called models are Souveraine agents | remove the alias until a real per-agent model inspection/change API exists |
+| `/tool` | fixed fake vocabulary of one and an explanatory refusal | remove; tools are an agent sensorium, not a composer mode |
+| `/prompt` | prints ownership advice; no prompt files or mutation path are connected | remove as a setter; a future inspector must read the composed server fact |
+| `/key` | prints auth advice and never reads or writes a key | remove; credentials need a secure settings/auth path |
+| `/save` | writes a local JSON bubble snapshot that drops typed segment fidelity | rename as export only if kept; it is not conversation persistence |
+| `/load` | restores that local projection, then starts a fresh live thread on send | remove from the live-thread vocabulary; server resume is the honest act |
+| `/temp` | prints advice because temperature is agent configuration | remove until a typed settings path exists |
+| `/test` | injects a development markdown fixture into the transcript | keep behind development tooling, not in the shipped command list |
+
+The short implementation order is attachment, command pruning, then `/btw`.
+Attachment is no longer a substrate project: the missing work is the Panel's
+typed send and render path. Command pruning makes every advertised act true.
+`/btw` is larger because it introduces a second concurrent conversation
+projection; it needs its overlay before the verb is exposed.
+
+Ordinary typing during a running turn remains an **interjection** into that
+turn. It is queued and read at a round boundary. `/btw` is a **fork** with its
+own conversation id and stream. Those gestures may look adjacent at the
+composer and must never share state or wording.
+
 ## Context, reflection, and parity
 
 Feature parity means parity with Souveraine's domain, not a pixel copy of the