Harker Villenci is no mere merchant, he is a sovereign in silks, a monarch of mercantile dominion whose fingers grip not only the coffers of Mithrin, but the pulse of trade routes stretching across continents. Crowned not with iron or gold but with contracts, tariffs, and silent leverage, Harker wields influence like a seasoned duelist wields a blade, measured, elegant, and merciless. Profit is his guiding star, shining brighter than loyalty, virtue, or legacy. To him, morality is negotiable, but margins are sacred.
Wherever commerce thrives, so too does Harker’s presence. From exotic silk caravans skirting the spine of the Ulmeth Range, to black-sailed galleons unloading jungle spice at Voolnishart’s wharves, he finds a way to insinuate himself into every enterprise. He rarely forces ownership, but always insists on a piece. A cut of the coin, a toll for the passage, a signature clause that binds without blood. Most who resist find their supplies curiously delayed, or their vendors mysteriously swayed. Even the proudest merchant lords often discover, too late, that the ink on their ledgers was poured from Harker’s well.
Only the most ancient and ironclad institutions resist his reach, and even then, he tends to own the ships that carry their goods. Nothing moves without him noticing. Nothing expands without him calculating. He is both the engine and the brake of Mithrin’s economy, a paradox of velvet diplomacy and razor-edged maneuvering.
Yet no empire grows unchallenged. Asmith Ashanti, the self-styled Smuggler King, is the rotting thorn in Harker’s otherwise gilded rose. Cunning, unpredictable, and unburdened by legality, Asmith thrives in the shadows Harker refuses to sully himself with. Their rivalry is as old as it is volatile, a cold war of influence fought with trade guilds, port authorities, and contracts phrased like weapons. Where Asmith circumvents tariffs, Harker enforces them. Where Asmith bribes, Harker lobbies. It is a battle of paperwork and power, of dueling subpoenas and whispered sabotage.
Though Harker maintains a reputation for staying just within the lines of law, indeed, shaping those lines when necessary, he is not above twisting legislation to inconvenience Asmith’s every move. Their battles are waged not on bloody fields, but across city councils, merchant tribunals, and the velvet-draped chambers of Mithrin’s trade courts.
To those on the outside, it may seem Harker plays the gentleman, and Asmith the rogue. But those who understand the game know: both wear masks. One smiles from a throne of ledgers. The other grins from the shadows of the dock. And neither has any intention of bowing.
The newly opened Underdark market in Mithrin is a festering wound in the side of Harker Villenci’s otherwise immaculate commercial empire. Carved from the shadows beneath the city and sanctioned by precarious treaties with the drow Houses, the market emerged like a mushroom after rain, sudden, bold, and defiant. It brims with exotic goods, whispered poisons, deep-metal artifacts, and crafts of uncanny beauty and terrible utility, all utterly outside Harker’s usual channels of oversight and taxation.
To Harker, it is more than an irritation, it is an affront. A black vein of commerce that pulses without his approval. No tariffs pass through his ledgers. No gate fees fatten his coffers. Worse still, the Underdark traders obey no surface codes and deal only through veiled intermediaries, smirking at his emissaries and returning his envoys empty-handed, or worse, insulted.
He has tried diplomacy, pressure, and carefully-worded gestures of patronage. He has sent gifts of rare wines, letters gilded in mithril ink, and even commissioned a mural of drow-surface friendship, none of which received more than polite silence or cryptic refusals. Every attempt to gain a foothold is met with cunning evasiveness or, more insultingly, laughter.
What gnaws at Harker most is the chaos the market breeds. Prices shift wildly. Buyers flock to it out of novelty or greed, bypassing the reputable halls of his own auction houses. Rarities once filtered through his network are now traded in back-alley vaults or beneath fungal-glow lanterns with no record, no markup, and no control. It is not just an economic threat, it is a cultural one. A new kind of mercantile anarchy slithering beneath his polished floors.
Yet, there is one bitter draught of comfort he savors: Asmith suffers just as much.
The Smuggler King, for all his underhanded mastery, has found himself likewise rebuffed by the Underdark’s alien protocols and opaque hierarchies. His usual bribes fall flat in the face of drow disdain. His charm wilts under their withering gazes. Whatever connections he might have forged in the past mean little here; the new market plays by no rules either man understands. And so, for once, Harker and Asmith are united, in vexation, in failure, in impotent fury.
Though they would never admit it, both now walk the same tightrope, trying to unravel the mystery of who truly pulls the strings in the cavernous depths. And both, in their own ways, plot feverishly, drafting deals, flipping spies, and consulting dubious advisors, each hoping to be the first to tame this wild vein of wealth.
And if neither succeeds?
Then perhaps it must be destroyed. Quietly. Surgically. Or spectacularly.
Shinazazi. The name alone causes Harker Villenci’s wine to lose its flavor and his thoughts to grow sharp and uneasy.
Where most obstacles in his path are financial puzzles, legal obstructions, or petty rivals dressed in silks and ambition, Shinazazi is something altogether different. She is not part of the game. She is the knife that sits beneath the game table, the smile that means something else, the quiet in a crowded room that heralds blood.
A high matron of the Underdark, draped not only in wealth but in ancient reputation and unwholesome alliances, Shinazazi represents everything Harker cannot buy, sway, or intimidate. There is no leverage to be found, no weakness to exploit. She moves through the city of Mithrin like a blade wrapped in velvet, gracious, refined, even diplomatic, but every whispered report that reaches Harker’s desk carries the scent of quiet executions, shifting allegiances, and messages written in missing persons.
She does not threaten him. That would almost be a relief. No, she simply acknowledges his existence, in that unsettling, polite, almost amused way one might acknowledge a child playing at war. And in return, Harker, master manipulator, economic despot, lord of coin and contract, feels like a man dancing too near a precipice.
Her underlings walk his streets now. Her shadow moves through the Underdark market. And though she has made no overt play for his holdings, her presence alone is corrosive to his certainty. The drow do not act without purpose, and Shinazazi least of all. Every smile she gives him, measured, unreadable, feels like the drawing of lots he was never meant to win.
He’s heard the rumors, of course. That she sees through things, not just lies, but intentions. And though Harker prides himself on never flinching in the face of power, Shinazazi unsettles him in a way even Asmith never could. She is not an opponent in the same game; she is the harbinger of a different set of rules entirely.
And worst of all?
She is responsible for the Underdark market.
Not command. Not conquest. Her brokered pact with he city has eluded his spys, he knows not the extent of her influence, but measured by actions it is immense. As if the entire city of Voolnishart were a curiosity in a glass case, and she the collector deciding whether to purchase it… or crush it.
So, Harker smiles when they meet. He bows with perfect etiquette. He offers respectful tributes and speaks in carefully measured tones. But inside, he is calculating, always calculating, wondering when the blade beneath the velvet will finally move, and who it will fall upon first.
Within the towering, opalescent halls of Velence Manse, nestled atop the cliffs of Mithrin’s high district, Trade Lord Harker Villenci resided in what he considered the most secure sanctum in the nation. His estate was a fortress masquerading as a palace, layered with arcane wards, antimagic filigree etched into every archway, and private guard mages paid thrice their weight in diamonds. Nothing uninvited entered this place. Nothing unknown lasted long.
Or so he believed.
The room was pristine, marble floors so white they shone like water, banners of deep violet stitched with platinum thread hanging like soft thunderclouds. Crystal sconces hummed with slow magical resonance. This was a throne room in all but name, and Harker, draped in a robe heavy with diamonds, leaned upon his rod of rule, not just a symbol of power, but a weaponized work of wealth.
And yet, in the quiet, along a barely visible seam in the marble, a spider crawled.
So small it escaped the gaze of every ward, every spectral guardian, every sweep of the diviners’ eyes. It moved without purpose, or so it seemed, until it reached the center of the chamber and halted. There was no flash of magic. No thunderclap or rune-fire.
There was only Shinazazi.
One breath she was not there, and then, she was.
Clad in whisper-thin silk armor, shimmering darkly as if soaked in midnight, her body shimmered with arcane gems set in deliberate patterns across her torso, neck, and brow. They resembled the unblinking eyes of spiders, cold and innumerable, and somehow, aware. Her hips bore two wickedly curved blades of strange, silver-choked metal, their sheaths stitched with black chitin. Her presence was not loud, nor aggressive, yet the air thickened with it, like a drop of ink spreading through still water.
Every ward Harker had spent a lifetime erecting had failed. She had walked through them like they were candle smoke.
His fingers tightened slightly on his rod. His breath came cool and measured, years of training held him together, but inside, a scream of alarm curdled into a frozen knot of fear. He stood, spine erect, attempting a smile that was too precise, too rehearsed.
“Matron Shinazazi, you honor me with your, ”
She held up a single hand. Not harsh. Not rude. Simply final.
“Make no move on the Undermarket.”
Her voice was smooth as oil on obsidian, carrying no edge and yet leaving no space for misunderstanding. It was not a threat. It was not a negotiation. It was law, spoken by one who had never had to repeat herself.
“You may do as you will outside my province. But within the Undermarket, you hold no sway. You may buy, trade, and sell, as others do. No special leeway. Nothing… illegal.”
She did not look at him as she spoke. She already knew he would listen.
And then, to drive the dagger deeper, not into his flesh, but into that grand thing he guarded more than life: his ego, she turned her back on him.
With deliberate slowness, she surveyed the room. The vaulted ceilings, the golden inlays, the priceless tapestries, all of it curated to express power, refinement, invincibility. She saw it all.
“You hold more wealth than anyone in the nation,” she said, almost softly, as if the words were incidental. Then, like poison sweetened with honey:
“Yet still you hunger for more. What a hollow, empty thing you are.”
And with that final barb, she was gone. No flash, no shimmer, no displaced air. Simply vanished, as if she had never been there. Except the spider remained, crawling harmlessly across the polished floor, unnoticed, like an echo with legs.
Harker did not move at first.
His hand was still on the rod, but the knuckles had gone white. His breath had slowed too much, as if forcing calm had overtaken the instinct to breathe. His mind screamed, not in panic, but in offense. In violation.
He had been dismissed.
Not confronted. Not debated. Not even threatened. Dismissed, like a petty merchant, told to behave and stay within his province. It was not the threat to his life that shook him, Harker had danced with assassins and poisoners and crooked magistrates for decades. It was the casual erosion of his supremacy, the effortless way she had spoken to him as if his power were ornamental, a bauble among many.
And she was right. That was the worst part. He was hungry. Always.
He sank slowly into his throne, rod resting across his lap. He stared ahead, but not at the spider, which crawled just a few feet away. His gaze was distant, turned inward, where the foundations of his identity had begun to tremble. The wealth. The control. The influence.
None of it had mattered. Not to her.
He would recover, he always did. He would send out his agents, reassure his allies, remind his rivals that the Trade Lord still ruled Mithrin’s surface.
But in the depths of his soul, in the vault where he kept his true fears under lock and chain, a new one now stirred.
And it wore silk armor with eyes that never blinked.
Shermans fantasy world 