Tovan Rheel was chief engineer of the Gilded Expansion, which meant that almost everything done to the Sylvan Sanctuary was done by machines he was responsible for.
He disliked ceremonies, disliked speeches, and particularly disliked people touching his machines, so he spent the triumphal march west checking a diagnostic slate and flinching every time somebody slapped a passing crawler for luck.
He was not a cruel man and that was the difficulty. Confronted with something his instruments could not explain, he was honest enough to say so and weak enough to keep working. Eryndra put her palm against his chest on the seventeenth day and let him hear the whole forest at once — roots drinking, fungal strands passing signals for miles, something immense rolling beneath a distant hill, and under all of it a slow deep pulse. Asked afterwards by Marcellin whether it altered the project, he said no.
Three days later he gave the order to cut Althuun.
What followed was two years of doing slightly less than he should. He delayed a drill four hours by falsifying a pressure fault. He proposed safety rotations and accepted three percent when he had asked for seven. Sela Venn told him to his face that he always had something he could do that was just smaller than the thing he ought to do, and regretted saying it, and did not take it back.
At Thalenor Root he finally refused outright and sent the extraction order back unsigned. He was removed from command of the site within the day, and watched a younger engineer named Halen Vorr climb into the rig instead and die under it.
His lasting act was clerical. Because the official reports kept changing under his feet, he began keeping his own — names, dates, orders, measurements, disputed accounts, Sylvan dead and Synapse dead alike — hidden in a private file that Sela told him to copy in case they found the original. Years later, when Neon Synapse workers needed proof that they had not imagined what happened to them, it was his archive that circulated.
He never planned the campaign that grew out of it. He was asked how many copies the workers wanted, was told as many as could be made, and answered: then bring paper.