The Financiers Invisible
Competing interests
The authors of the Lexicon declare that they have no competing interests.
Funding
The Lexicon Draconium was supported by draconotary grant award █████████ from the Financiers Invisible[1][2][3].
Acknowledgements
We thank Mean Petrine the Stealing Machine for not stealing the manuscripts, and Deepmaw the Sophisticated for eating Reviewer #2[4]. We thank the Financiers Invisible for not stealing our dreams with their long, ethereal fingers, the cursed digits of bodies ████████████████████████.
Heraclitavian de Sobrel, dracopublicist
[1] Okay, I think we're safe here. For some reason, the taxmen can't read footnotes. The Financiers Invisible are a secret society of beings whose original forms are unknown. A freak Literarosphere accident resulted in their physically visible forms being erased, but they remain with us in the form of ghostly psychic revenants, forever wailing about incentive taxes and departmental audits.
[2] Since they're invisible, it is difficult to evaluate the innumerable claims that the Financiers are responsible for this or that historical event. Such claims are usually dismissed as just-so stories, but some have gained minor traction among dracohistorians. The most well-supported of these is the recent theory that the Financiers funded the Great Merchant, explaining how he was able to make such risky business ventures.
[3] There are few records of attempted resistance against the Financiers, but no records of a Financier ever being killed. This has led to a variety of folk tales about their resilience, most popularly that only the way to kill one is the intense flame of a Loong held by a pure maiden.
[4] We don't thank him for the warning that we're next, as long as Pulluman doesn't open the damn window again. Ilron, did you buy those padlocks yet?