Sythren Vaal was the Shadow Weaver who arranged the fall of Iskandar. He came uninvited to Master Corven, the Gilded Coven’s emissary in that kingdom, on the day King Varyon refused the Coven’s contracts unopened, and for the four years of the civil war that followed he was the hand behind nearly everything the realm afterwards called a rebellion.
His guild used no titles outside its own circles, kept no capital that appeared on a map and marched under no banner. It was tolerated because every powerful house believed it could use the Weavers, and feared because none knew who else already had. Sythren himself was tall and narrow in charcoal robes crossed with silver thread in a pattern like roads on a map. His skin was grey and faintly translucent, with dark shapes drifting beneath it; his eyes were black with silver at their centres and no whites at all; and his shadow did not always agree with the lamps. He was soft-spoken, courteous and never in a hurry.
The Coven had already been paying for discontent in Iskandar and had found it would not hold together. Sythren’s gift was to give the kingdom’s many grievances a single explanation and then close the roads back to reconciliation — or enough of them that people believed the last had closed. He rarely needed to lie. He worked through clerks, couriers and registries, choosing which true facts arrived and in what order, and by losing the right reports he turned Captain Darien Rusk, a provincial officer who had refused to fire on starving villagers, into the hero of a rebellion he had not yet chosen.
When the Supreme Ruler sent the Justicar’s Legion to judge Iskandar, Sythren decided what it would see. He steered it with intelligence true enough to act on and false enough to cause bloodshed, sent fleeing separatists who could name Coven suppliers into its patrols, and let Rusk slip custody so that the Legion’s chief witness would be remembered as a convicted man who ran. Corven came to understand that he had never been Sythren’s master, only the visible hand that paid, signed and could be blamed.
What the Weavers wanted was access rather than gold, and access is what they got: their agents recognised as investigators across guild borders, a quiet seat in the Supreme Ruler’s confidential secretariat, sight of the sealed reports of the realm. Sythren kept every record of the conspiracy, and told Corven he would never be in danger from them, which was precisely what they were for.
Early in the war he told Corven that they were not building something that could be controlled. He was the only one on that balcony who meant it as a description rather than a boast.