Defector from the Cerberus Assembly

Early Years

Katerina Potrova shares nothing with her family but her name. As an elven child of 20, she was taken into custody of the Migrant Unity, a network of foster homes and orphanages across the Dwendalian Empire. The Migrant Unity told her she was found in the Xhorhasian Wastes in the Barbed Fields below Bazzozan, which led to many of the other orphans ostracizing her for being “weird” at best, or “evil” at most, given the history of Xhorhas as the seat of the Betrayer Gods.

This treatment by the other children made Katerina feel like the lowest of the low-born and she often took the opportunity to get revenge on those who put her down. Most of these were biting remarks designed to take them off their feet, but they occasionally matured into darker, more gruesome retributions: dead animals left in their beds; a violent and quiet sneak attack in the hall; glass in their food. Cruel, but effective against your bullies, but every one of these incidents ended up with Katerina being moved to a different home where a new bully would push her to the breaking point. The pattern continued until Katerina landed in the Migrant Unity home in Odessloe, just north of Rexxentrum, in the eye of the Empire.

Odessloe was Katerina’s last chance and, when another bully pushed her to the limit, she was not sent to another home, but to Rexxentrum, capital of the Empire, where she was conscripted into service for the Cerberus Assembly at one of their servant houses on their campus. Her orphan housemates were swapped for criminals and deranged supplicants of the leading archmages of the eight Cerberus Assembly houses. Katerina fell into a routine here for the first time, assigned duties and tasks every week by mages of the Assembly, along with everyone else in the house. For three years, Katerina worked for the Assembly in quiet, unseen service, learning from her new roommates the art of pain and suffering. When she would strike, they would return the attack, harder and more ruthlessly. When she cried, they mocked her, or beat her until the tears stopped. By the time she was 36, barely a teenager in elf years, Katerina was hardened, ruthless, and desperate for an outlet for the rage that had been building inside her all her life.

Mage Marcus Arralyn noticed this brooding elf child and began to request her be assigned to the tasks he was responsible in service of the Invoques house. Soon, these tasks were errands with Arralyn, taking Katerina off the campus and into the city, shopping for magic materials and receiving shipments for the Assembly. During these errands, he interrogated her about her history, her childhood, and her time in the homes, slowly leading her to talk about the incidents. At first, she would clam up, conditioned that these would send her away again or, worse, if admitted to a mage of the Cerberus Assembly.

Eventually, though, Arralyn broke her down, bribing her with sweets, treats, and insightful gossip about the Assembly, and Katerina told him about her tendencies to give into a more violent nature, from the first times a child bullied her, to her most recent shiv fight with another Assembly servant in the house. Arralyn listened with rapt attention and asked her questions about all of them. How did it make her feel? Was she hurt? Did she care about the people she hurt? And all of them made her feel special for the first time in her life. She thought Marcus was her friend.

He stoked this feeling in her, continuing to talk about her days in the home whenever he saw her outside, encouraging her to fight back against the others, even giving her advice and training occasionally. Word spread to the other servants that Katerina was close with one of the mages and though some teased her with lewd interpretations, she dealt with them quickly and gained more respect from the rest. Katerina started to enjoy her life, which is when Marcus began to share his struggles with her. Archmage Loren Invoques, leader of one of the eight Assembly houses was a cruel, horrible man. He abused his power over the other mages, but Marcus in particular, denying their research interests or taking credit for their discoveries himself. He was only interested in the goings on of the Empire and continuing their hold over Western Wynandir, blind to the threats and opportunities that abound across Wildemount. “While Loren holds power,” Marcus told her, “The Empire is only as strong as he will allow it to be…and with what I see coming in the future, that won’t be strong enough.”

Slowly, with the skill of a practiced and expert manipulator, Marcus convinced Katerina that Invoques should be killed so as to place his power in the hands of someone more deserving. He bought her a weapon: an ornate bronze dagger in the shape of a dragon’s head, with a ruby in it’s eye on the crossguard. And finally, he gave her an opportunity, assigning her a task with him outside the campus in the evening. They received a standard order for the Assembly, shipped up from Port Dimali, and took it to House Invoques’s gate. Then, with the gate open, Marcus turned away and said “I trust you know how you will get home this evening.”

Loren Invoques was not the first person Katerina killed, but it was the first she killed with intention and malice. The scars she got from Loren’s final spell and his personal guard’s blade were worth it, she told herself, thinking that this man’s blood would secure her a better position in life by doing her friend a favor. In a way, she was right. With Invoques out of the way, Marcus was promoted to head of the house, now Arralyn, and he took Katerina with her, but his days of friendly bribery and gentle manipulation were over. Because of his planning, Marcus had all the evidence that Katerina was the one who killed an archmage of the Assembly and consistently threatened to use that against her at every opportunity, generally using it as a way to get her to do exactly what he wanted.

Adulthood

Thus began the last 50 years of Katerina’s life, filled with torture, manipulation, killing, and treachery as Marcus continued to seize whatever scrap of power he saw as available, and used Katerina as the bloody knife to secure it. She carved her way through Cerberus Assembly allies and enemies alike, becoming a finely honed tool at Marcus’s deploy, and quietly trained herself into one of the greatest assassin’s in the realm, fully operating in the shadows. But, once again, she was alone. Marcus all but locked her away in the basement of his house, keeping servants and assembly members out of the way in order to secure her “anonymity”. But, she would steal away, taking quiet moments in the city at night. It was there that she met Lionel, a baker’s son prepping the bread overnight.

Seeing her, a skinny, lonely girl, on the street, Lionel invited her in to make bread. The first night, Katerina ran, not wanting to get reported back to Marcus. But, a few nights later, she returned, and Lionel offered again. The first few times she went inside, she watched him bake and let him talk. She came back every night after that. It wasn’t until the fourth visit that she started making bread with him. The eighth night, she told him where she came from and lied to him about dreams she never really had, but she felt might be possible in this room filled with yeast and flour. It was the 18th night when she kissed him, recklessly, spontaneously, and shockingly, to both of them. She ran away then, unsure what she felt or what to do with the flood of emotions. All she knew was that she felt happy again. On the 21st day after meeting Lionel, the Cerberus Assembly marched for war and her life was upended, again.

The last year has been spent marching across Wildemount as Arrayln began to prepare for war after a group of Crick warriors attacked Hupperdook. He took Katerina with him as his “personal security” and she began to put the pieces of his plan into place. Arralyn took the mages of his house into Eastern Wynandir, into Grimgolir where he set up a temporary house and began sending his agents into Xhorhas, looking for something. He heard a rumor that the Crick worshipped an ancient deity known as the Luxon, which is said to have imbued an object at the center of civilization with incredible divine power. Arralyn became obsessed with finding this piece of the Luxon, studying every piece of Kryn history that his men brought back. Finally, after three months in Grimgolir, Arralyn began to search out the Crick armies, chasing them across Eastern Wynandir before finally engaging with them in the Bromkiln Hills. Katerina was on the front lines, the sword among the sorcery, killing dozens of Kryn soldiers, their armor whistling like crickets as they moved in battle. But their deaths were different. The didn’t die desperate or begging, like the men she’d killed for Arralyn before. They died with honor, for something they believed in. And it shook Katerina to her core, lighting a spark that had never been there before.

The battle with the Kryn lost Arralyn several of his best mages, but he got what he wanted: the piece of the Luxon. As Arralyn began the next stage of his plan, Katerina did as well. Arralyn studied the piece of the Luxon and took it to various holy sites across the empire, struggling to unlock it. As he did, he consulted with other mages of the Assembly, including Qin Von, who’s own head of security, a haregon named Scrum Diddly Umptious, was a well known fighter in the Assembly and continually praised by her own regiment and even Arralyn’s own men. It made Katerina more than a little jealous to have this female so openly praised while Katerina was forced to live in the shadows. This new feeling led to some out of character sniping from Katerina, which Scrum returned and then some. It became a pattern every time the two saw each other and, eventually, Katerina had to admit she kind of liked the other female.

Meanwhile, Arralyn was expanding his and the Assembly’s knowledge of the beacon. The deeper into study he got, the more he believed that this was responsible for uniting the Kryn Dynasty, used to grow their civilization, expanding their lineages, and granting them magical abilities. Arralyn thinks that he can break it down and re-engineer it to teach the Assembly the tactics of the Kryn and then, used as the catalyst for their own destruction. The piece could be restructured into a bomb, which Arralyn and Von plan to unleash in Rexxentrum, driving the archmages and the king to engage in all out war after this seemingly Kryn attack. All that was left was to unlock the energy signature. So, Katerina began watching for a chance to execute her plan: steal the beacon and meet up with a fence she met in Tussoa on their way through. Sell the beacon and use the money to flee to Tal’Dorei, away from the Assembly, away from the war, and away from her life of killing here. She wanted something new.

She got an opportunity to enact her plan when the mages were called to Gwarda, where one of their own is captured by the Menagerie Coast’s Zhelezo guard, who have no love for the Empire. They head there to represent him in a trial while attempting to keep their allyship with the Menagerie Coast, leaving their guard in the city to watch the objects and arsenal they brought with them. While the camp was quiet, Katerina snuck in and stole the piece of the Luxon, only to find Scrum Diddly Umptious already there, with the same idea. Unable to reconcile their reasons for being there in the moment, Scrum and Katerina struck an uneasy alliance to steal the beacon together, talking their way through the camp as much as possible on the way out, but relying on both their fighting skills to get them out when the negotiations inevitably failed.

Together, the two newly minted criminals absconded into the Siltbasin Pass, headed to meet the fence in Tussoa, though the Cerberus Assembly is likely hot on their trail…