⚠️ SUPERSEDED — kept as history. The economy this page teaches was replaced on 2026-07-17 (jewels · THE CORE · the seven resources; the lux/lantern/credit vocabulary is retired). Nothing on this page is current. The living model is one page: the economy, now. This page stays because it records how the decisions were reached.

🕯️ Locked · rename running

The membership

Designee · 2026-07-13 03:55 WEDT · · lux is confirmed

What you just settled — and it's bigger than a word

Lux didn't just get confirmed. It got an OBJECT. Until this sentence, a lux "lit a realm" — which is abstract, and abstract copy is copy nobody can picture. Now:

A lux activates a realm's Stewardee.

That is concrete, and it's exactly right — because a Stewardee is the one being who does not travel. Your own law: "a steward is only a steward in his own house; everywhere else he's a stewardee." She stays in her realm. So she is precisely the right thing for a leased, place-bound, stay-put currency to animate.

You place a lux on a house, and its keeper wakes.
And lux — the light that falls on a surface, not the source — was already the perfect word for that. The noun and the mechanic finally describe each other.

The two things you carry

	🔥 Emberees ×10	🕯️ Lux ×5
Source	Free with membership	Leased. Money buys them.
Do they travel?	Yes. Errant, enduring — they wander with you and never leave.	No. Each sits on one realm.
What it animates	Itself. Already alight.	That realm's Stewardee.
If you stop paying	Nothing happens. They're yours.	The BOUGHT ones go out — those houses go dark. The five floor lux go DORMANT, not out — the lantern still hangs there, and practising in that realm re-lights it.

And that is what the embers are FOR. You walk into a dormant realm carrying your ten, you practise, and the embers re-light the lux. The companions who never leave you are the ones who can wake the houses back up. (Davi, 2026-07-13.)

⭐ The asymmetry IS the free/paid line — and it's the humane version of it

The ten who travel with you never go out.
Only the houses do.

You can lose access to a room. You can never lose your companions. That's a genuinely unusual thing for a paid product to promise, and it lands because it's the same shape as everything else you've already ruled: stop paying and the bought lux go out — but everything you MADE stays in your inventory, earned credits never lapse, and the floor lux only go dormant until you practise them awake.

Five realms is a breadth budget, not a paywall. Money buys breadth (five houses lit). Practice and service buy depth (credits · mortar · tesserae) — and money can never buy those. The rich man and the poor man arrive at the same gathering, and neither can buy his way through the door.

One pattern fell out of it, and one small nod I need

🔤 -ee is the entity marker. You've been doing it all along.

Emberee · Stewardee · Designee · Craftee · Plexee. The -ee suffix means: a being. And it resolves something cleanly:

An "ember" is a spark — the thing.
An "Emberee" is a companion — the someone.

So Errant Enduring Embers names the kind (and keeps its alliteration), while an Emberee is one of them as a person. Both survive, and neither is redundant.

🟠 The only thing I'd like a nod on — nothing is blocked

Should the locked phrase itself become "Errant Enduring Emberees", or does it stay "Errant Enduring Embers" with Emberee as the singular being? My read is the second — the phrase names the kind, the -ee names the someone. Build is proceeding against `Emberee` for the entity either way. Say the word if you want the phrase changed too.

✅ What's running now

Cody1: the rename across DB/API, one atomic commit. Craftee: all copy + the public pricing page, through the shared constant so the noun can never drift. Dead everywhere: activation credit · light · lantern · sprite · bright · prana. Staged only — I'll ask before anything touches production.

— Designee