Otherwise

Philosophy — the forest is one walk, and walks end. A line that only went one way is a biography. A line that also went the other way is a tree. Every fork here is a turn the walk did not take, taken anyway; the ink is the set of those counterfactuals, and the dark spine is the prefix they still share. Then it finishes. Desire Paths, in this collection, lets a crowd wear a single road out of the ground. This inverts that: one agent, every road, none of them preferred — and the drawing is what the walk leaves, not a weather that pretends to continue after the walkers are gone.

Technique — replace, don’t prefer; then stop. Reset plants one tip in a corner, pointing toward the opposite. It must lay a short trunk (TRUNK ticks) before it can fork. A fork does not keep a privileged parent: the tip ends, and two symmetric outgoing tips begin, both at g+1, headings a±δ. Ink weight 0.78g and split rate exp(−0.12g) decay with actual depth. A weak bias toward the birth heading carries the walk across the paper so it dies at the far edge instead of milling into weather. A held mouse replaces that with lean. Tips die of age or of the far edge; their ink does not. When no tips remain the stats say so (walk complete · N histories), the finished drawing holds for a few breaths (~15 s), then a new walk starts on a cleared page. Reset warms just past the first fork so the first watch is a trunk-and-Y, not a hair, and you still see it finish.

Aesthetics — thickness is agreement, hair is otherwise. Only the shared prefix is generation 0, so only the trunk is extra-dark. After a fork both roads are the same generation and the same weight. Later otherwise is fainter because it is later, not because a child was punished. Paper-ink is the default because this is a drawing; gold is the darkfield reading. Hold X to colour by generation: a depth map. The live count is tips; the completion line is histories — terminal paths, not the forks that replaced a parent.

Honest weaknesses. The branching process is mortal on purpose: both children take g+1, so fertility falls with depth, and the far edge eats what remains. Hair at depth is faint (0.78g). Histories pass through each other. The first split is a coin flip, not a reading of occupied space. A click during a live walk plants a second walk on the same paper, which can crowd the first. Auto-reseed after a few breaths clears the last drawing — look now, or it will be gone. I have not seen this in Chromium; the paper palette is a guess at print, not a proof of it.