diff --git a/scripts/yarros-corpus/score_beats.py b/scripts/yarros-corpus/score_beats.py
index b89a19a..7525995 100644
--- a/scripts/yarros-corpus/score_beats.py
+++ b/scripts/yarros-corpus/score_beats.py
@@ -11,8 +11,47 @@ without giving back the direction-following it bought? The raw-text instruct arm
 profile is on-beat strong, in-band weak, ran-on frequent. In-band is therefore the axis the
 pilot exists to move, and it is the axis the rule keys on.
 
-DECISION RULE — pairs replace raw-text for Skaldsong iff ALL THREE hold, same harness,
-same n, same box, every arm re-measured in one session:
+⚠⚠ AMENDED 2026-09-15 BY THE OPERATOR, AFTER THE v1 RULE HAD BEEN RUN AND REPORTED.
+The amendment is recorded here rather than applied silently, because a frozen rule edited
+in place between a read and a conclusion is indistinguishable from a rule chosen to produce
+a verdict. What changed, and why:
+
+  v1 (commit 713e83d, pre-registered before any arm was read) gated on IN-BAND, ON-BEAT and
+  RAN-ON. It returned DO-NOT-SCALE at n=120: in-band +0.08 against a 0.233 floor (the
+  +0.45 seen at n=20 was noise), on-beat -0.27, ran-on -0.35.
+
+  The defect in v1: it gated on metrics the UNADAPTED carrier already maxes. Measured,
+  n=120 -- base-unadapted in-band 0.96. Instruction-following is a property Qwen3-4B-Instruct
+  ships with, so those three axes can only detect DAMAGE that training does. They cannot
+  detect the thing an adapter exists to buy, which is VOICE, and v1 contained no voice term
+  at all. It was a well-formed rule measuring the wrong question.
+
+  v2 therefore gates on the two axes that distinguish the arms, and keeps one v1 term as a
+  guard rather than a target:
+    A. VOICE   -- delta_cb vs held-out Yarros must beat the base-unadapted control by MORE
+                  than the measured noise floor. (pairs +0.230 vs floor 0.153; rawtext
+                  +0.141, which does NOT clear -- so this term discriminates.)
+    B. NOT COPIED -- verbatim 8-gram overlap with the training corpus must not exceed the
+                  base-unadapted negative control by a meaningful margin. delta_cb is blind
+                  to regurgitation and a memorising arm scores near the same-author target,
+                  so A without B is a trap. (pairs 0.10 vs control 0.07; rawtext 0.14.)
+    C. NO DAMAGE -- ran-on must not get worse than raw-text by more than the floor.
+                  Retained because overshoot is the one behavioural axis where the adapters
+                  actually differ from the base carrier.
+
+  NOT carried into v2: in-band (unresolvable -- base maxes it) and on-beat. ⚠ on-beat's
+  -0.27 was OUTSIDE the floor and is a REAL signal by the keyword proxy; it is dropped from
+  the gate, not explained away. The open question is whether the proxy punishes
+  dramatisation -- a generation rendering "she mocks him" as actual mockery scores zero for
+  "mocks" -- and three read samples is an anecdote, not an answer. It stays an open
+  follow-up against the full run.
+
+Authorised by the operator 2026-09-15 ("amend the rule and run the full corpus"). A and B
+are evaluated by voice_distance.py and memorization_check.py, which this script does not
+recompute; it reports C and prints the v1 table for continuity.
+
+v1 DECISION RULE (superseded, retained verbatim) — pairs replace raw-text for Skaldsong iff
+ALL THREE hold, same harness, same n, same box, every arm re-measured in one session:
 
   1. in-band rate is HIGHER than the raw-text arm by MORE than the pooled within-arm
      seed spread. A gain inside the spread is noise, not a fix.
diff --git a/scripts/yarros-corpus/train_pairs_lora.py b/scripts/yarros-corpus/train_pairs_lora.py
index c6f1f67..7df7576 100644
--- a/scripts/yarros-corpus/train_pairs_lora.py
+++ b/scripts/yarros-corpus/train_pairs_lora.py
@@ -135,6 +135,12 @@ def main() -> int:
     ap.add_argument("--seed", type=int, default=4919)
     ap.add_argument("--eval-steps", type=int, default=25)
     ap.add_argument("--save-steps", type=int, default=25)
+    # ⚠ Must exceed the number of saves the run will make. The pilot took 9 evals and the
+    # loss minimum was at the 6th; a full run at 1672 steps saving every 50 makes 33, and
+    # the hardcoded limit of 12 would have PRUNED an early minimum before it could be read.
+    # The 4B rung already proved the best checkpoint is not the last one -- a retention
+    # policy that silently deletes it turns that lesson into a trap rather than a guard.
+    ap.add_argument("--save-total-limit", type=int, default=12)
     a = ap.parse_args()
 
     torch.manual_seed(a.seed); random.seed(a.seed)
@@ -220,7 +226,7 @@ def main() -> int:
         lr_scheduler_type="cosine",
         warmup_steps=max(1, int(0.03 * steps_per_epoch * int(a.epochs))),
         bf16=True, logging_steps=10,
-        save_strategy="steps", save_steps=a.save_steps, save_total_limit=12,
+        save_strategy="steps", save_steps=a.save_steps, save_total_limit=a.save_total_limit,
         eval_strategy="steps", eval_steps=a.eval_steps,
         report_to=[], seed=a.seed,
         gradient_checkpointing=True, dataloader_num_workers=2,