colophon has composed the question about what its pages did not settle
since it was written, and merged a reply back into the record it read.
Both were reachable only from a terminal, so a pipeline wanting the same
fallback would have had to write its own prompt — a second one, drifting
from the first, asking for a shape merge does not accept.
merge fills only the unsettled fields, so a model cannot overwrite what a
book printed about itself. That is the property that makes asking one
safe, and it belongs to colophon rather than to any caller.