"Six hours later, she tossed Demetrius's severed head at her father's feet." Riot's biography of Katarina is the story of one assignment, and that sentence is how it ends: the target she had refused as beneath her, delivered, after a night in which her father tried to have her killed for the refusal. Nothing else on the Runeterra roster explains Noxus quite so efficiently.
Who they are
She was born into one of the most respected noble families of Noxus and raised above others from the start. Her younger sister Cassiopeia took after their politically brilliant mother; Katarina was her father's daughter, and the wily General Du Couteau pushed her to learn the blade, to cut away the empire's enemies with precision rather than reckless brutality. He was a harsh teacher with many pupils and notoriously hard to impress. Her childhood, if the biography will call it that, had no room for kindness or rest: she honed her endurance, dexterity and tolerance for pain, stole poisons from the city's least reputable apothecaries and dosed herself in tiny increments to build resistance, and scaled the tallest towers at night unseen.
Her first mark came from her father, camped with his warbands on the eve of one of the military's endless westward invasions: a line officer in the opposing army, a low-born wretch named Demetrius. Katarina was livid. She had not trained her whole life to waste her talents on a man barely able to swing a sword, so she slipped into the enemy camp instead and cut the commander's throat as he slept: a flawless execution, swift victory, glory to Noxus, a proud father. At dawn Demetrius, his face daubed with ashes, led a berserk charge into her father's encampment. Dozens of Noxian soldiers died with the general's retinue, and the general himself barely escaped. He would not look at her. The greatest assassins, he reminded her, seek no recognition and expect no place at their master's right hand.
She went into the wilderness alone to finish the original job, asking herself how she could have been so foolish, and did not see her attacker until he had nearly taken her eye out. For her failure, the general had sent another of his protégés after her, a nameless whelp from one of the lesser assassins' guilds. With blood running down her face, her training took over. Six hours later she threw Demetrius's head at her father's feet and told him she had considered taking his instead, and had decided, hating to admit it, that he had been right to order her death: she had failed as an assassin, as a daughter and as a Noxian, and failure must have its consequences. She ran her fingers along the raw gash over her left eye. She had lost her father's favour for good, and he would raise others in her place to spite her; she vowed to redeem herself at any cost and become the sinister weapon she had always meant to be.
Where they belong
Riot's faction pages put Katarina in Noxus, and the biography is Noxian in every line; its one excursion is a westward invasion the text does not locate. No race is listed for her on Riot's pages.
Riot lists six related champions:
- Cassiopeia: her younger sister, who took after their mother where Katarina took after their father. The biography gives her that line and no scene.
- Talon: not named in Katarina's biography. The text's attacker is a nameless whelp from a lesser guild, and it keeps him nameless.
- Sion: not named. The link Riot draws is Noxus, not a scene in the text.
- Garen: not named either.
- Swain: not named.
- Darius: not named; the biography offers nothing that would connect them.
In the Riot MMO, as a guess
This is speculation. Katarina is a quest-giving character of the kind a Noxian storyline needs most: someone who hands out contracts and has a reason to hand out hard ones. The biography's mechanics are already MMO mechanics, a mark, a camp to enter, a father who grades the result, and a woman who has lost her standing and wants it back will send a player after targets she cannot be seen to take herself. She is alive, mortal and on Noxus's side, a boss only for a player fighting Noxus. The Du Couteau household, with its many pupils competing for the general's favour, is the guild a designer would build around her. Whether a champion can run a player's assignments is part of the question in will champions be playable.
What we do not know
Whether the era the game chooses, the open question in when is the Riot MMO set?, finds Katarina alive, and whether it finds her before or after the night that scarred her. The biography dates nothing and ends with the vow.
What became of the nameless whelp, and of the general. The text leaves both where the fight left them, and Riot has not said.