Authority is a graph

Follow a payment power from the legal order that grounds it to the office that exercises it. Change the facts at the execution gate and watch the path survive, fail, or require a determination.

The model has four normative primitives (power, limit, occupancy, duty) and two companions (act, control). Limits propagate down the whole ancestry. Revocation cuts the path. Derivation and precedence can point in opposite directions, and history runs on two clocks: when authority was in force, and when the system learned of it.

Limit. A concept, not a shipped architecture. The fixtures are illustrative, and the gate isolates one scope or composition check while assuming valid occupancy. The point it makes is general: a machine can implement authority this way, tracing the path, reading the limits, and reporting allow, deny, or indeterminate. It cannot adjudicate it. Where the path requires a determination, the model stops and a person decides.