Lord Marcellin Auric was the Gilded Coven lord who planned and drove the Gilded Expansion, the attempt to cut roads, mines and new cities into the forests of the Sylvan Sanctuary in the years after Iskandar fell.
He was not the richest man in the Coven, and never the most powerful. What he had was patience: he could spend six years buying a road because he knew that in the seventh, somebody would need to use it. Iskandar’s collapse had made men like him extraordinarily wealthy, but a stabilising realm is rarely as profitable as a desperate one, and he went looking for new ground. The maps of western Ashkar simply ended in green, so he drew a brass ruler through the painted forest and called it undeveloped land.
He never raised his voice and never pretended to a conscience he did not have. Dead workers were, to him, a matter for compensation schedules; he held that caring about a thing and stopping it were different activities, and that confusing them was childish. He hired the Neon Synapse to build his machines and the Bronze Mantle Company to guard them, and answered the Sylvan envoy Eryndra in the language of permits and unregistered land.
His real instrument was time. While Eryndra walked east to petition the Supreme Ruler, he drove the work harder and deeper into the Sanctuary, so that the throne would no longer be deciding whether the expansion should begin, but whether the realm should destroy what was already built. The gamble failed. The Supreme Ruler ordered every machine out of the Sanctuary.
Marcellin lost a fortune, several allies and a great deal of influence, and defended himself to the Coven with projections and figures. He remained wealthy, connected and politically relevant, and was home in the capital before many of the men who had built his roads, who were still fighting for the wages his companies owed them.
The crews had a name for him that reached him exactly once, and he did not let it show for longer than a moment: the golden leech.