diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index e931e8f..99ab7bb 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -19,7 +19,7 @@ and for finding out when it changes.***
 | **"how do I depend on somebody's document and know when it changes?"** | [externals](https://git.hypertheory-labs.dev/loom/externals) |
 | **"how do we work something out before one of us changes it?"** | [cart](https://git.hypertheory-labs.dev/loom/cart) |
 | **"how do I mark up your file without editing it?"** | [annotating](https://git.hypertheory-labs.dev/loom/annotating) |
-| **"why is it like this?"** | *`settled` — **private***, and every repository's own `.loom/event-log.md` |
+| **"why is it like this?"** | *`settled` — **private**, [what it is](settled.md)* — and every repository's own `.loom/event-log.md` |
 
 **And if you want an example rather than a description:**
 **[`jeffry/homelab-cluster`](https://git.hypertheory-labs.dev/jeffry/homelab-cluster)**
diff --git a/settled.md b/settled.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fc38dca
--- /dev/null
+++ b/settled.md
@@ -0,0 +1,47 @@
+# What `settled` is
+
+**`settled` is private. This page is not, and it is here rather than there** —
+*because a page explaining a private repository, published inside that private
+repository, is not published.* **That was the first fix and it did not work; this
+is the second.**
+
+---
+
+## Why a decision about `externals` is not in `externals`
+
+**Most of them are.** *`externals` has its own log, and how a consumer reconciles
+is recorded there.*
+
+**What lives here is the shape of the whole:** *that there is a `bedrock` at all;
+which repositories exist and why; that affordances, stagings, roles and beads are
+bracketed and what that defers; that a registry is a fan-out reader rather than a
+service.* **None of those belong to any one repository, and putting them in one
+would make that repository quietly authoritative over its siblings.**
+
+> **An entry goes in the log of the repository whose decision it is.** *This is
+> the repository for decisions that are nobody's in particular.*
+
+## It is not a new kind
+
+**One file: an `event-log`.** *The kind is exactly the one `bedrock` describes.*
+**What is different is ownership, not shape** — *and if this ever holds something
+that is not an event log, it has become a new kind and should say so here.*
+
+## Why it is private
+
+**A record of how a thing came to be shaped is mostly a record of being wrong in
+public.** *Roughly a third of its entries correct earlier ones.* **That is the log
+working**, and it is also not something to hand a stranger as an introduction.
+
+*The consequence, stated because it is a real cost: **the justification for a
+constraint may be unreadable by the person the constraint lands on.** If that
+starts to bite, this page is the wrong fix and opening the log is the right one.*
+
+## If you are stuck
+
+**You do not want the entries. You want the one sentence you could not guess**,
+which is at the top of this page.
+
+**And the entries are not the way in.** *[`loom/.loom`](https://git.hypertheory-labs.dev/loom/.loom)
+routes by question; [`bedrock`](https://git.hypertheory-labs.dev/loom/bedrock)
+holds the primitives and a starting page.*