The Self-Kin · The Standing Thirds

The Keepsake

Drawn as a Cantor dust. Keep the ends, discard the middle, and repeat.

The Local Rule. Storing an episode by its peak and its close. This is a Self-Kin figure: one person, repeating one thing. Everything further out in the catalogue is built by fusing figures like this one together.

Tending. Each time is kept more by its high point and its ending, and the rest fades from memory faster..

Fraying. The high point and ending hold less sway, so more of the whole time stays in memory as it was lived..

Its Turning. Thin. What it builds: the remembered life reconnects to the lived one.

Catalogued in The Self-Kin, alongside every other figure at this scale.

In a Weaving

Tending

You're keeping each time more by its peak and its ending, and the rest is fading faster.

Fraying

The peak and the ending hold less sway, and more of the whole time stays with you.

Tending is not good news, and Fraying is not bad news — a card describes a pattern already present, never an outcome. How to read the two.

Or follow a thread instead

A Standing Third

The Shared Story

A memory two people build and keep together. It binds them to something real, or to an account of an event neither of them actually had.

Part Five — The Standing Thirds

Twelve patterns one person generates alone, each with its Local Rule and both of its poles. Nothing sits underneath them, and every larger figure is built by fusing these.

Part Seven — The Turnings

The Twelve Private Turnings — Self

One per month, kept alone or with whoever's nearest — twelve small occasions, each built to make one Self-Kin's failure mode visible before it hardens.

Part Six — Weavings

The full working deck: fifty-two drawable figures across five kinships, each carrying two readings — plus one figure that's never drawn at all.

Part Five — The Standing Thirds

Nineteen two-person patterns, each one two Self-Kin meeting. Know any two of the three and the third follows, which means changing your own leg changes what the two of you make.