[Stephen Belanger (Qard)]

A provisional root waiting for child work currently keeps the route's delivery boundary open, retaining acknowledgements for otherwise completed turn batches. Stage root candidates before publishing route deliveries so empty sessions remain hidden while completed turns can drain independently.

The small Roots stage retains candidates and releases their saved operations immediately before their first direct child. SQLite commits the candidate snapshot, ready SpanOps, and consumed event position atomically. Restart restores the original values and creation provenance; append/commit retries retain already prepared output. Route consumers, InputPort, and completion receipts remain unchanged. Direct sink/import deferral remains compatible.

Regression coverage reproduces the previous pending flush for an empty session, then verifies successful flush, continued empty-session suppression, and original provenance when work arrives after restart. Additional tests cover unrelated turns alongside an unused root, root update ordering, atomic candidate/release failures, and publication retry without duplicate staging. Existing lifecycle fixtures now include actual work; correlation still resolves before reporting an empty child. Recreated observers replay staged root birth records, preserving session fallback after idle retirement without replaying defensive retirement updates as native closure. A regression reproduces the missing fallback and verifies repeated observer recreation.

Validation before rebase: locked all-feature Rust suite passes all 548 tests, with five normally ignored live-agent tests. Strict all-target/all-feature Clippy, formatting, and diff checks pass. All four provenance tests also pass after replacing the old expected-timeout deadline with the normal successful-flush deadline. Remote CI passes on Linux, macOS, and Windows at c595e48 (run 38951791151).

Based on main at c41676d, including merged #193.

Rebased at a9055bb: all three commits retain identical patches (git range-diff); diff checks pass. Tests are left to fresh CI as requested.

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Review	Status	Commit	Review trigger
📝 Code Review	✅ Completed 2026-10-16T18:54:34.092352Z	425c55e	PR opened

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