EA-PRIOR-00 v1.0: §0.0 The Ontological Prior — The Law of the Fall and the Construction of the Reader is a constitutional principle (ontological prior; root position) in the Crimson Hexagonal Archive, by Lee Sharks (2026-07-03). The vernacular riddle — if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? — is rejected as incomplete, and its familiar answer accepted on corrected provenance. Sound is not an inherent property of a collapsing body; it is a transform executed by a receptive apparatus on a disturbance borne through a medium. The riddle collapses three things that must be held apart: Let F be the fall, M a transmitting medium, R a receptive apparatus, S the registered sound: F →(M)→ signal →(R)→ S. The fall is not yet the sound. Sound is the fall as borne, transmitted, and received. Sharpened to its true form: if a tree falls in the forest in the absence of a vibrational medium to carry the wave, it makes no sound — and now the why has clean provenance. Without air, bark, or soil to bear the compression wave, the collision has no extension; it cannot translate; the channel was never established. The medium is not an incidental container around the event. It is one of the conditions under which the event can acquire extension beyond itself. — Article composed 2026-08-05 from the work's own prose so that every record carries an encyclopedic entry; a fuller editorial treatment belongs to the description/wiki review stream.