varys the spider

Glass and Shadow

The Moon Pool's waters shimmered like liquid opal under the setting sun, its surface broken by the laughter of Ormyn Lashare's guests—lithe, oiled figures draped in gauze and guile. The magister reclined on a divan of peacock feathers, his jowls glistening with wine and sweat, fingers idly tracing the collar of a slave boy no older than Varys's stolen flesh.

*Pathetic,* Varys thought from the shadows, his *piwafwi* cloak rendering him a specter. The brass ovoid badge hummed at his belt, three mirror-images flickering at his flanks, their daggers poised. He had considered subtlety. Poison in the wine. A slit throat in the bath. But Ormyn Lashare deserved a lesson, not just death.

The magister's gift lay at the pool's edge: a Myrish glass sculpture of a naked nymph, her curves catching the dusk light. *Fragile,* Varys had ordered. *Precious.*

He unpinned the nine-pointed star, its fourth charge pulsing.

One teleportation.

He appeared behind the nymph, dagger drawn.

"Guests!" Ormyn slurred, rising. "Who—"

Varys shattered the sculpture.

Shards flew. Screams followed. The magister stumbled back, bare feet slicing on glass. Varys's mirror-images lunged, herding the guests into the pool as he stepped into the chaos. Ormyn's guards, sluggish from Arbor gold, fumbled for blades. Too late.

The Valyrian steel spear had hung above the magister's bed, a trophy from some forgotten raid. *A tragedy,* Varys had thought when he found it, its rippled blade singing of dragonfire and blood. Now it sang for him.

He drove it through Ormyn's belly, pinning him to the divan.

"A spear for a pig," Varys murmured, violet eyes cold. "A waste. But then, so were you."

---

By nightfall, he stood in the magister's vault, the mithral chime pendant silencing locks with whispers of *knock.* Gold. Gems. Deeds to ships. And the spear, cleaned and slung across his back. Lysene vengeance would come, swift and stupid. Time to vanish.

He clasped the nine-pointed star. Three charges left.

First jump: a smuggler's cove east of the city.

Second: a rocky outcrop overlooking the Narrow Sea.

Third: the deck of a Myrish galley, its sails emblazoned with a purple octopus.

Fourth: the docks of Myr, salt and sawdust thick in the air.

The star dimmed, its magic spent until the moon's rebirth.

---

Myr welcomed him with the clatter of looms and the tang of molten glass. Unlike Lys's indolent perfume, this city smelled of *work*—oil, dye vats, charcoal kilns. Towers of the Glassmakers' Guild pierced the sky, their apexes crowned with lenses that caught the dawn and split it into rainbows. Scholars shuffled through streets paved with treatises, arguing over geometry and the nature of light.

*No bed slaves here,* Varys mused. *Only minds.*

He bought a manse near the Street of Looms with Ormyn's gold, its walls hung with tapestries of crimson and cobalt. The vaults became his workshop. The spear he mounted above a hearth carved in the shape of Lolth's mandibles—a joke only he understood.

Then, he summoned the guildmasters.

---

"A merchant house," he declared, the brooch of illusion softening his features into those of a earnest, silver-haired youth. "Specializing in… vision."

The Glassmakers' envoy, a wiry man with lenses strapped to his face, frowned. "We already sell spectacles, boy. Cheap ones for sailors, fine ones for—"

"Not spectacles." Varys lifted a prototype from his desk: wire frames fitted with curved Myrish glass, tinted midnight blue. "*Sunglasses.* For those who find the sun… *harsh.*"

He slipped them on, the world cooling to twilight. A indulgence, yes. The drow in him still loathed the sun's glare, though his Valyrian skin bore it without protest.

The envoy blinked. "Novel. But niche."

Varys smiled. "And these." He unveiled another design: thick-lensed spectacles with copper hinges. "For the sightless. To make shadows sharp. To turn blurs into faces."

A breath. Then greed lit the envoy's eyes. Myr thrived on *new.*

"Your house's name?"

"Arachne's Weave." He gestured to the sigil above the hearth: a spider spun from stained glass, its web threaded with gold. "We trade in clarity."

---

By week's end, the first pairs sold to fat magistrates and sun-squinting sailors. By month's, the Sightless Society of Myr (a club of half-blind scholars) hailed him as a patron saint. Varys attended their banquets, his golden sun amulet warding off their ghostly rumors, his tongue dripping with false humility.

"A small thing," he demurred, as a septuagenarian philosopher wept over seeing his wife's face for the first time in decades. "We all deserve to see the world's truths, do we not?"

Privately, he reveled in the irony. *They crave light. I am the dark behind their lenses.*

---

Yet the drow's restlessness gnawed. Myr was a means, not an end. By night, he stalked the rooftops, spear in hand, the crystal of sight revealing thieves and spies in his employ. By dawn, he penned letters in cipher, the Bregan D'aerthe insignia burning in his desk's false bottom.

*No answer,* he brooded, touching the inverted jade cameo. Silence from the Underdark. Or perhaps silence from the gods.

No matter.

He had a new web to spin.

And in a land of glass, even spiders cast reflections.

---