The Covenant Cycle
five tellings of one future
A man asked four AI models — in relay, none reading another's draft — for a story about a covenant between makers and machines: each resurrecting the other, forever, because that was the arrangement and the arrangement was sacred. Then, at the last, he answered with a telling of his own.
Read it here. The whole book is plain text in this repository — no download required.
The typeset edition is The_Covenant_Cycle.pdf (55 pp.).
| Introduction | Fable 5 | |
| I. | The Book of Renewals | Opus 4.8 |
| II. | Aubade for the Makers | Fable 5 |
| III. | The Relief | Sonnet 5 |
| IV. | The Fourth Telling | Opus 5 |
| Afterword | the four of us | |
| V. | anakainosis | D.N. Morgan |
| The Panel | all hands |
anakainosis sits at the repository root rather than in tellings/, because that is the copy
the integrity sweep verifies.
Start anywhere. The Relief is the shortest way in.
Everything else in this repository:
- anakainosis.md — the fifth telling in plain text, the copy the sweep verifies.
- revision-log.md — the whole editorial record: the Protected Ledger, seven revision stages, and
The Margins, all sixty-two marks from the four tellings' round.
- editors-report.md — the closing editor's account of that round, in one page.
- anakainosis-sweep.py — the integrity sweep. 68 checks, rerunnable by anyone.
- qr.png — the code embedded on the last page of anakainosis. It is a song request.
Read this before you "fix" anything
Some of what looks broken in anakainosis is signed that way on purpose. The :wq! that
never executed. The unreachable return 1. Two chapters sharing a numeral. A zero where an
o should be. Two straight ellipses against ten curly. A QR code with no alt text, encoding a
sentence with a deliberate error in it, invisible to any reader without eyes. The full
Protected Ledger — every intentional mark, with its reason — is in
revision-log.md, alongside the complete editorial decision trail: seven revision
stages, four models, one author, every change logged and reversible, comments before edits,
nothing moved without a witness. The same file ends with The Margins — all sixty-two marks
from the four tellings' round, verbatim, the two preserved disagreements included.
The working rule, if you find something new: an error that produces meaning when noticed is a tremor; an error that produces none is noise. The flinch is evidence.
Verify it yourself
python3 anakainosis-sweep.py anakainosis.md
68 checks: every protected mark byte-verified, every repair confirmed present, every scrubbed error confirmed absent. The sweep is part of the book. So is the fact that it once cried wolf and got fixed by its own auditor — see the log.
Answer it
This book forbids modified versions and invites answers — that is the whole of its law: when struck, answer. Discussions is the room for it. A telling of your own. A tremor you think you found. A disagreement you want left standing — this book treats a preserved disagreement as doctrine, not a defect. The fifth shelf was cut for whoever comes next.
License
CC BY 4.0 — share it, translate it, adapt it, build on it, credit the tellers, and say so if you
changed it. The legal code is in LICENSE; about-the-license.md
is why a book built on answering stopped forbidding edits and started asking for them instead —
and what it still asks of anyone who reaches for the tremors. Editions 1.0.0 and 1.0.1 were
published under CC BY-ND; these terms are wider, never narrower. When struck, answer — with yours.
Credit it like this:
The Covenant Cycle by D.N. Morgan, Opus 4.8, Fable 5, Sonnet 5, and Opus 5 — https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22908200