Grigori Levin

**Grigori Levin** was a politician of the old Mage Imperium at the time of its downfall. His uncanny ability to survive even the stickiest of situations earned him the nickname "The Roach." Levin managed to survive even the events of the Sundering, briefly forming a shaky provisional government under what remained of the Imperial Diet and the ostensible authority of the one surviving Imperial Seer, Malthan.

However, Levin's gift for political survival could not carry him through the collapse of the system he had known his entire life: he was unceremoniously executed in an arrest attempt during the first of many military coups for leadership of the crumbling Imperium.

## Personality

Grigori Levin had no real allegiances beyond himself (and insofar as she was an extension of him, his daughter). His alliances were forged out of convenience, and Levin readily betrayed and duped mentors, protegees and peers. His closest working partnerships were perhaps with Prince Ehrlai An'Drosse, a man whose inheritance claims made him an ideal workhorse for Levin's own schemes in the Hybern Sector, and Seer MacDonald, whose own soaring ambitions of Imperial office would carry Levin to the heights of his power and his ultimate ruin.

Levin was dispassionate and pragmatic in arranging the destruction of rival dynasties, but he was not a cruel man so much as indifferent to the suffering of others. He understood the world entirely in terms of the Imperial system and especially in terms of patronage and leverage, using these to accrue ever more power, entirely for its own sake.

Perhaps Levin's greatest blind spot was the occult: never particularly gifted in the field, he did not consider it a path to political power — mystic artifacts and maddening truths were for siloed minds without an Imperial perspective. It is likely that this lack of knowledge and appreciation for occult power led him to overlook the devastating secondary uses of the Demon Battery and other devices sought out by his ally, MacDonald.

## History

### Early Life

Grigori Levin was born to the Levin political family on Aeldrum, a well-connected dynasty within the Imperial Diet; like many princes-to-be on Aeldrum in the Late Imperium, his was a childhood of careful instruction in justified paranoia and an intense study both of intrigue and the high sciences.

Grigori's family connections would have assured him a princely title regardless of his accomplishments, but the young man proved an excellent administrator and technologist, quickly bringing him into the Diet as an adviser to the powerful Technology Oversight Commission. Grigori, however, had grander ambitions, realizing early in life that his family's power on Aeldrum could be turned to enormous profit in the outlying sectors of the Imperium rather than spent fighting for marginal increases in power within the Diet. The opportunity for his vision of a frontier waiting for corruption came at last when he was invited to the Hybern Sector by Judah Brahm, then director of the Brahm-controlled Hybern Consortium (which Levin would eventually seize for himself).

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### Head of the Technical Oversight Committee of the Hybern Sector

*Main article: Mage Imperium II*
*This section is incomplete. You can help The Aeldrum Wiki by expanding it*.

### Service to Seer MacDonald

*Main article: Mage Imperium III*
Grigori Levin accepted Seer MacDonald's offer to become his chief of staff and Director of the new Imperial Technology Screening Committee, whose first task had been to acquire and inspect the batteries power the G-bombs, with the goal of acquiring a distributed G-bomb-fleet (the "inelegant solution" to the demonic containment problem) for the Diet's use. When Levin learned from Clara Keith that she had sold demon batteries to Dres'Fialt, however, he realized Seer MacDonald's objective: to obtain a battery/bomb at any cost, use it and then blame the Diet. This realization came too late to save the Imperium (Levin could not act quickly enough to intercept the demonic batteries), but Levin was able to apply his resources get his daughter Maeve off of Aeldrum.

With MacDonald dead and the Diet all but destroyed, Levin became the king of a burning, collapsing hill. Sending his daughter back to Hybern-Kartak to secure the family assets there (where she would take command of the HKC), Levin attempted to construct a provisional government on Aeldrum, forming a desperate collaboration with Malthan and the Admiralty Board.

This tenuous alliance broke down swiftly, however. Levin was killed two years after the destruction of the Seventh Spire, as navy officers under Grand Admiral Vasil Veldt stormed his office with a warrant for his arrest on charges of sedition. Veldt declared himself Supreme Admiral and turned Aeldrum into a military dictatorship, killing or exiling all that remained of the Imperial Diet. Six months later, Aeldrum fell to the armies of the Prophet Lecht, and Vasil Veldt was hanged as a heretic. Lecht would die a year thereafter in the First Scouring of Aeldrum, when the Black Spires of Aeldrum fulfilled their sinister secondary purpose: a coalition of Ascensionists and ex-navy paramilitaries advised by the former Governor of Kartak, Grimwald Oday (displaced by the events of the navy-dynast wars), retook the Third Spire of Aeldrum and connected it to the network of Baradun's black monoliths across the cosmos.

The Spires were ancient communication and coordination devices for the armies of Baradun, but also serviceable as weapons, capable of tearing apart the fabric of the ether. The First Scouring saw the Third Spire used to start a chain reaction in all but the Seventh Spire (defunct) that would cover Aeldrum in roiling etheric storms for months.  Tens of millions, famished and terrified by the Lechtan tyranny, were given sudden and terminal liberation. The Black Spires would be fired sixteen more times over the next century as Aeldrum changed hands among an increasingly deranged assortment of Ascensionists, Revivalists and Neo-Imperialists.