Govern Arcanea canon, rights, inventory, and ARC-REL-001

[frankxai]

Outcome

Establishes the go-forward Arcanea control plane and assigns ARC-REL-001 without pretending a draft is a released book.

Adds

• content-specific All-Rights-Reserved notice with historical-license preservation
• repository and brand boundaries for Arcanea Universe, Studios/Press/Records, Arcanea Connector, and Starlight
• canon, naming, mystery, rights, content-inventory, public-estate, and release registries
• evidence-backed greenlight manifest for ARC-REL-001
• story architecture for the Arion–Mera–Emilia flagship
• deterministic governance audit command
• public claims policy and legacy-mirror warnings

Flagship decision

• Greenlights the Dragonborne creative lane for development.
• Uses The Godbeast Covenant: The Unchosen Bond as the working public stack.
• Classifies the existing 37,590-word The Last Clutch as a draft-complete founding novella seed, not the Arion-led Book One.
• Keeps Dragonborne provisional pending professional title/trademark clearance because the near-identical Dragonborn is an active major-publisher fantasy series.
• Records Kael-led material as legacy draft ancestry; Arion, Mera, and Emilia become the forward public center.

Deliberately not done

• No historical license is claimed to be revoked.
• No vendor, editor, cover artist, or external spend is commissioned.
• No public release, merge, or deployment is claimed.
• The Source/Shinkami/tenth-Guardian conflict is exposed and release-blocked rather than silently rewritten.

Verification

• node scripts/governance-audit.mjs
• all YAML registries parse successfully
• git diff --check
• independent verifier and franchise-owner merge approval still required

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[claude]

Review

This is a well-organized governance layer — clear precedence rules, an honest "deliberately not done" section, and sensible separation of locked / approved_delta / staging / conflict. A few things worth addressing before merge, roughly in priority order.

Correctness / bugs

• scripts/governance-audit.mjs uses import.meta.dirname, which is narrower than the repo's declared Node support. package.json sets "node": ">=20.9.0", but import.meta.dirname only landed in Node 20.11.0 / 21.2.0. On Node 20.9–20.10 this is undefined, and resolve(undefined, "..") throws immediately — the script (and pnpm audit:governance) would fail outright rather than degrade gracefully. Either bump the engines floor to >=20.11.0 or swap in fileURLToPath(new URL('.', import.meta.url)) for broader compatibility.

• The recorded canon fingerprint may go stale the moment this PR merges. governance/CONTENT_INVENTORY.yaml records a sha256/word count for .arcanea/lore/CANON_LOCKED.md against snapshot_commit: 6cfddd2d… (the pre-PR base), but this same PR edits CANON_LOCKED.md (adding the governance-note banner and rewording PURPOSE). Once merged, the committed fingerprint won't match the file it's supposed to describe. Worth either regenerating the fingerprint after the banner edit, or keeping the banner edit out of the same PR that snapshots the "current" hash.

• governance-audit.mjs's filesUnder() recurses without excluding build artifacts. It's called against apps/web (for public_claim_candidates) and could pick up .next/, .turbo/, or any nested node_modules if they exist there, which would slow the audit and add noise to authoritative_lore_legacy_terms/public_claim_candidates results. Consider skipping common build/dependency directories.

Canon-consistency (repo-specific gate)

Per this repo's own lore governance rules, the 852 Hz Gate's canonical name is Starweave, not "Shift" — Frank ruled on this 2026-08-14, and .claude/ci/lore-lint.mjs treats "Shift" as an ERROR on newly-added lines. governance/releases/ARC-REL-001.yaml introduces:

movement_2:
  working_scope: "Heart, Voice, Sight, Shift"

That's a new line naming the Gate "Shift". It likely slips past the mechanical linter (its Gate-context regex requires a literal "gate" token adjacent to the name, e.g. "Shift Gate" or "Gate: Shift" — a comma-separated working_scope list doesn't match that shape), but it's the same drift issue #98 exists to prevent. Worth fixing to "Starweave" here, and possibly auditing the rest of the new governance YAML for the same pattern since it's exactly the kind of place the linter's context-matching can miss.

Process concern

This PR directly edits .arcanea/lore/CANON_LOCKED.md (adding the governance-note banner and rewording the PURPOSE paragraph). The repo's root CLAUDE.md states that file is read-only to agents, with promotion/edits going only through /lock-decision by Frank. The actual locked facts aren't changed here — only framing text pointing at the new registry — but given how explicit that rule is, it's worth confirming this edit has (or will get) Frank's explicit sign-off rather than merging on the strength of the PR description alone. The sync/aios/lore/CANON_LOCKED.md "STALE SYNC MIRROR" banner addition, by contrast, is uncontroversial and a good change.

Public-exposure consideration

governance/PUBLIC_ESTATE_REGISTRY.yaml commits a full repo-by-repo legal/licensing risk audit across the frankxai account and Arcanea-Labs/Arcanea, including explicit risk: "critical" / "high" labels for repos with ambiguous or missing licenses. Per the PR's own governance/REPOSITORY_BOUNDARIES.md, this repository is a "transitional mixed public mirror." Publishing a document that itemizes exactly which repos have weak/unclear IP protection seems like it could be sensitive from a business/legal standpoint — worth a deliberate call on whether this belongs in a private governance repo instead of this public mirror.

Test coverage

• No test exercises scripts/governance-audit.mjs (word counting, hash computation, the --write path, or the exit-code-on-missing-file behavior). It's small and deterministic, so even a couple of smoke assertions (e.g., run it in a temp dir with a missing required file and assert non-zero exit) would catch regressions cheaply.
• The script also isn't wired into any GitHub Actions workflow yet, so audit:governance is currently a manual-only check — that may be intentional for now given the PR says verification was run by hand, but flagging it in case CI enforcement was assumed.

Nits

• governance/MYSTERY_LEDGER.yaml has status: blocked_on_ARC-CAN-004 — fine as YAML, but the hyphen-heavy unquoted string is a little easy to mistype; a quoted string would be marginally safer for a value referenced elsewhere as an ID.
• LICENSE-CONTENT.md and README.md changes read clearly and are internally consistent with the new governance/README.md precedence table — no notes there.

Overall this is solid, well-evidenced governance scaffolding with a clear "not yet publication-ready" posture. The main things I'd want resolved before merge are the Node-version bug in the audit script, the "Shift"/"Starweave" naming slip, and explicit confirmation that the CANON_LOCKED.md edit has the Creator's sign-off per this repo's own agent rules.