Head connects chunkenc and WAL: label-to-ref resolution with striped concurrent maps, active Gorilla chunk per series sealing at 120 samples, and an Appender that buffers samples, writes WAL on commit, then applies to head. OOO rejection checks both committed and batch state. WAL replay on Open rebuilds the full in-memory state. Exported ChunkAppender/ChunkIterator interfaces from chunkenc.