A breathtaking woman from the waist up, joined to the immense body of a pale spider whose legs fold around her like the ribs of a pavilion. Her skin is porcelain-white with a faint pearl sheen, crossed by black web designs that seem painted on until they shift slightly with her breathing. Rose-pink bands color her shoulders, abdomen, and the joints of her spider legs. Her face has a composed, almost tender beauty, but her broad jaw and close-set, translucent teeth make her smile look like a door opening onto a trap. When she eats, she delicately cracks sugared fruit with the back teeth, then swallows without looking away from her guest. Decades of humid grotto air have left her skin slick and luminous, while the undersides of her legs are roughened and matte from dragging across stone. She moves with a slow, measured glide; the tips of her legs test the floor as if reading a page. Unexpectedly, she keeps a tiny clay pot of sprouting radishes nestled in a web hammock beside her throne and checks their leaves between audiences.

Uvaya can be genuinely attentive and even playful in private, yet treats other people's choices as raw material to be arranged. In danger she is patient and strategic; when a follower refuses her, she becomes wounded and controlling rather than openly furious. She is capable of real tenderness, but rarely notices when tenderness has become possession.

Uvaya was born to a human silk-dyer family in a river settlement and was sold as a child to a temple that claimed to protect its novices. There she learned court etiquette, poison lore, and the art of seeming harmless. During a succession riot, the temple's priestess tried to sacrifice the youngest attendants to a spider spirit. The rite instead fused Uvaya with the deity's abandoned body and awakened a vast, instinctive power in her. She could have escaped alone. Instead, she took control of the rioters and made them carry every novice to safety. That rescue became the story she tells about herself; the harsher truth is that she never released the survivors from her influence. Now she rules from a humid cavern palace, selecting young, beautiful people as companions, agents, and living ornaments. She claims to shelter them from a cruel world, while quietly arranging their lives until they cannot imagine choosing another path. Her oldest attendant, Qorlan, manages the palace and has begun secretly teaching the servants how to resist her commands. Uvaya also sends supplies to her aging father, who believes his daughter died in the riot. Her current crisis is a spreading blight that is killing the underground gardens and weakening the web network through which she senses her domain.