The lock the clavis's key fits in: a credential verified against an artefact's own bytes, and a door that names which public keys may open it. A GATE, NEVER A CIPHER — nothing is encrypted and nothing is decrypted, and the declared host surface carries only verify and digest so that it cannot be. Every no is a told no, named in a small fixed set — digest mismatch (the bytes are not the bytes it was claimed over, checked before the signature because it is the more useful sentence) · signature invalid (a foreign key, a re-labelled author, a moved moment and a forgery all answer here, deliberately, because naming which would tell a forger how close they got) · malformed (asked before anything reaches a host, so a host is never fed rubbish) · and, on a fitted door only, key not admitted. A host that throws is a shut door, because a lock that fails open is not a lock. A lok holds keys and nothing else: no identities, no roles, no expiry, no clock, and no revocation register — which it says out loud at every locking rather than implying. Lok, Sanskrit loka: world, realm of existence, space — from the root lok, to see, view, perceive (KP1, 2026-09-02).
Sanskrit loka (world, realm of existence, space), from the root lok (to see, to view, to perceive); a word for perceiving lent to a lock that only ever verifies and never encrypts.
The lock the clavis's key fits in — a gate, never a cipher, that verifies a credential against an artefact's own bytes. Named for the Sanskrit sense of perceiving: a lok sees whether a key is admitted, and holds nothing else.