Slender, soft-spoken, spider folk, the Weavers are the children of the spider queens of the western forests. Despite having lived alongside men for over four centuries, they are little understood by humans, and have little wish to understand them. The City of Silk is still very much held to be their place, despite the sizable human population. Visitors to the city note a strange stillness to the place, even the human population speak seldom. It is as if the city its self dare not raise its voice, for fear of waking something terrible.
Those who have attended the meetings of the Suffragan[1] Council have reported a similar eerie calm. There are no bombastic speeches, no raging debates. They gather, they murmur amongst themselves, often in the subtle Weaver tongue, and they reach decisions. Their votes are almost always unanimous. When an outsider must address the Suffragan Council, the council listens, in silence, until the petitioner has finished. Then they wait, in silence, for the petitioner to leave.
Despite the requirement for all Suffragans to be priests of the Old Powers, there is little in the way of organised religion in the City. The gods, say the Weavers - when they say anything at all - are not in temples. The closest they have to any kind of holy building is the Scriptorum[2], where the wisdom of countless generations of Suffragans is recorded in lovingly bound volumes of achingly delicate vellum. A few new pages are added shortly after the death of each Suffragan.
The lack of organised religion in the city also leads to a lack of suitable crematoria. The Temple of Ashes has expressed considerable concern that the dead are being buried, preventing corporeal forms being granted to the dead, and increasing the threat of their rising under the yoke of some necromancer. The Weavers insist that this will not prove a problem, and have strongly resisted attempts by the Temple to open missions in the city. They claim that fires offend the wood.
Outside of the City of Silk, most Weavers live quiet, solitary lives, plying whatever trade best suits them. Remarkably few of them sell Steel Skilk directly, despite its lucrative nature. Indeed, they seldom have much use or desire for money - this has caused some to wonder what the Weavers gain from the Steel Silk trade, of course the Suffragan Council and the Family Almedia are always swift to quash any of the more outlandish speculations on this matter.
1: A loose translation from the Weaver tongue, a subtle blend of sighs and clicks and body language. It comes from a root which can be translated as "speaker" "liar" or "murderer", depending on context.
2: Again, loosely translated from the Weaver tongue. The word literally means something like "resting place" or "place of skins"