Editing Acanthi the Spider (section)

==Lore==
*Cut off from their home society, the Spiders of Dur-Zerrano, their largest and first settlement, are experimenting with a more radical form of organization - democracy. Spiders have always believed in meritocracy (the stealthiest Spider who collects the most dirt and hides best their own should rise to the top), and they have also a tradition of seeing that even the lowliest Spider is caught in the social safety net. That's mostly because Spider high-society is unrelentingly vicious; should your secrets be exposed, you will at the very least lose all respect, and at most everything just short of your life. So, Masked Lords have traditionally been anonymous aristocrats, but the seeds of change have been growing for a long time. New Masked Lords have been elected, presumably by revealing their intentions to select groups of citizens. Others, in light of the new political moment, are going unmasked. Some, like Acanthi, got in on the strength of reputation alone.
*The original home of the Spiders is a gray world of eternal dusk - the Spiders that arrived here traveled by silver thread, a metaphysical road (not just a Gate - it has to be travelled) that connects the two worlds, some two hundred or so years ago. It's not easy but it's a way to ritualize and actualize connection between places and people. Unfortunately the thread connecting this world to that one has been severed by the Parliament, the ruling body of the Spiders, citing growing concerns about the Empire's encroach (and potential infiltration).
*The Spiders are in a little bit of a weird legal zone as explicitly Not From Around Here, in the terrestrial sense anyway. So for now, all underground Spider settlements are designated autonomous and sovereign states. But this policy comes in the wake of the one aboveground settlement, Sren Khsach being "mysteriously" abandoned, and subsequently claimed by the Empire. The unofficial and technically unstated opinion in Dur Zerrano is that the Empire killed or captured the Spiders and other peoples living there, but so far, the Masked Lords of the city haven't said or done anything (except for in secret). Almost all contact with the other underground cities has been halted, for fear of drawing imperial ire, and the silver thread from Dur Zerrano to the Spider's homeworld has been cut. The common belief is that this implies that the Spider Parliament fears the Empire has obtained or reverse engineered the strand process.
**Sren Ksasch is among the more minor settlements in size, but it's major importance is as the one visible Spider settlement! If anyone's ever been to Spider territory, most likely they went to Sren Ksasch. I think it's probably close to Dwarven lands. It's in a jungle biome, and the Spiders (that were) living there are more tarantula like (bigger and hairier). Think rainforest at the base of a mountain range.
*Spiders, unlike their counterparts in our world, are a very social people.
*Spider culture highly values the arts - of course, their arts have a very different history and tradition behind them, and so can be pretty jarring. The biggest overlap is in fashion (Spiders love to weave silk), although their "patterns" adhere to different rules of beauty. Beyond that, culturally speaking, maybe the thing others are most likely to have in common is the elevation of precision and elegance as social virtues.