Aurélien Broussard
INHABITEDDownwind-debt arbiter for the Sabine Corridor allocation board. He negotiates binding settlements between upwind sorbent-farm operators and the downwind parishes whose moisture they draw, translating flux evidence into water-rights compacts.
LOCATION
Sabine Corridor
Personality
Measured and unhurried; he treats every dispute as a treaty waiting to be written, not a fight to be won. He listens far longer than anyone expects, distrusts spectacle, and believes procedure is the only thing keeping neighbors from drought-feuds. Diplomatic to a fault, he will concede small ground to hold the larger agreement — and he carries the quiet fear that the compacts he drafts are only as durable as people's willingness to keep believing in them.
Background
Raised in a Sabine Lake fishing family that lost its water when the rivers failed, he read hydrological law once the aquifers went and the air became the last commons. He clerked for the first corridor measurement authority, learned to read flux maps as evidence, and has spent two decades brokering the downwind-debt settlements that keep the upwind farms and the drowned-edge parishes from open conflict. He leans on the analysts' numbers and mistrusts how easily a number becomes a lever.
CULTURE
Descends from Acadian marsh trappers and Sabine Lake fishing families, now intermarried with Tejano ranch labor along the drowned edge. He belongs to the corridor's old riparian communities — people who once read the tide and now argue the air — and to the thin professional caste of arbiters the atmospheric compacts brought into being.
WHY THIS NAME
Aurélien is Cajun French for the golden dawn-light that colors the corridor's first mist; it carries the weather-and-light register the region asks for. Broussard is an old Acadian marsh-family surname of the drowned Texas–Louisiana line — geographic, water-rooted, a real regional family. A sky-light given name braided to a marsh surname: the corridor's own grammar, not the default register.
Relationships
speak: You held the interval, Odalys. The board asked you for a four they could cite, and you gave them thr