The Culture-Kin

Third	Skein-Kin	Tending	Fraying
The Shared Name	The Inner Circle + Transmission Drift	The shared name pulls the people under it closer, and the closer they get, the more the name means.	The shared name pulls its people together less, and it means less each time it passes on.
Proxy Detachment	Second-Order Design + The Shared Pot	Effort aims harder at where the number moves, so the number climbs faster and is called a win more surely.	Effort aims less at the number, so it climbs slower and is called a win less often.
Policy Resistance	Held Silence + The Settling	Each push to change things meets a harder push back, and the whole holds its place more firmly.	Each push meets a weaker push back, and the whole drifts further before it returns, or moves.
The Long Cycle	First-Arriver Lock-In + The Shared Pot	Each round of growth feeds the next more, and the swing up and the fall after it both grow bigger.	Each round of growth feeds the next less, and the swings rise and fall more gently.
The Received World	The Faithful Chain + The Reputation	Handed-down ways are followed more surely with each passing, and the reasons behind them matter less to anyone.	Handed-down ways are followed less surely, and people ask more often why they were ever done.
The Slow Hand	First-Arriver Lock-In + Second-Order Design	The people in the place hold each other to the easiest way more tightly, so the setup stays fixed more firmly.	The people hold each other to the easiest way more loosely, so other ways of acting spread and the setup shifts.
Independent Convergence	Second-Order Design + Second-Order Design, sharing nothing	More separate seekers, sharing nothing, land on the same answer, and each match makes the answer surer.	Fewer separate seekers land on the same answer, and each match carries less weight.

Proxy Detachment is worth reading against its parents, because the composition is unusually tight. A measure is a return path — the channel by which what a system produced gets back to whoever sets its rules. Fuse that with a resource nobody is positioned to protect and you get the specific case where the channel can come apart from what it carries: the number keeps arriving, on time, whether or not it is still about anything. That is not a coincidence between two figures. It is the Skein-Kin’s return path, one tier up, wearing a number — and like any running figure it can run stronger or weaker.

Independent Convergence is the one figure in this catalogue whose fusion is defined by an absence, and it widens the rule for how parts meet rather than breaking it. Two parts meet when something links them. From the Skein tier up, that link is everywhere else a shared component; here it is the same pressure, met separately, with no path between the two. Independent Convergence is two instances of the same Skein-Kin occurring with no shared component anywhere between them, and that missing connection is not a flaw in the derivation. It is the entire content of the figure. Two groups arriving at the same design with a path between them have copied; the same two with no path have found. The absence is what carries the evidence, which is why this is the only place in the catalogue where an absence does the joining.

Note on this tier: it is three inference-layers deep, built by composing figures rather than observed directly. Treat it as provisional, and anything built on it as more provisional still.