Tovan Rheel was the Neon Synapse’s chief engineer on the Gilded Expansion, which meant that almost everything done to the Sylvan Sanctuary was done by machines he was responsible for. He is remembered less for what he built than for what he wrote down.
He disliked ceremonies, disliked speeches and particularly disliked people touching his machines, and he marched west with his eyes on a diagnostic slate. His closest colleague was the engineer Sela Venn, who teased him, argued with him, and was the only person willing to tell him plainly what he was doing.
He was not a cruel man, and that was the difficulty. Early in the expansion the Sylvan envoy Eryndra let him hear the forest as the Sylvan heard it — roots drinking, fungal threads passing signals for miles, something immense moving under the hills, a slow deep pulse beneath everything — and he was honest enough to admit his instruments could not explain it, and weak enough to keep working. For two years he did slightly less than he should: a falsified delay here, a safety rotation half-won there. Sela told him he always found something to do that was just smaller than the thing he ought to do.
At Thalenor Root he finally refused outright and sent the extraction order back unsigned. Lord Marcellin Auric removed him from the site within the day and put a younger engineer in his place, who died under the rig in the fighting that followed.
His lasting act was clerical. Because the official reports kept changing under his feet, he kept his own — orders, warnings, casualties, changed accounts, names. After the withdrawal, when the Gilded Coven tried to avoid paying the crews, he stood with Sela and the workers against Marcellin over the disputed claims, and copies of his archive passed from workshop to workshop. They fed the long grievance the Synapse came to call the Abandonment, and the hacker cells that grew out of it.
He never planned the campaign that grew out of his archive. He only agreed, when the workers came asking, to make as many copies as they could carry, and sent someone for paper.