Chapter Text
Book 1
Catherine Foundling lives in the Kingdom Of Callow, a Good kingdom that has been occupied by the Dread Empire of Praes for the last two decades. She is an orphan in Liesse with ambitions of reforming her kingdom from the inside. In a fit of luck, she is granted magical powers - called “Name” - by the Black Knight, one of the conquerors of her kingdom, who takes her on as an apprentice. While studying to become better at utilising her powers, she meets three sets of adversaries that would prefer to see her dead. First, three other “claimants” to the same Name, and thus the same magic powers. Second, the Heiress - a person with a different Name, who wants to be the apprentice to the Black Knight herself. And finally, a Lone Swordsman, who seeks to free Catherine’s kingdom with a classic rebellion. Catherine kills the first group (and thus gets the full powers of her Name), almost kills the Swordsman but lets him live in order to use his rebellion for career advancement, and Heiress gets away.
After this, Black Knight sends Catherine to an officer academy as he has business to attend to in the capital and doesn’t have the time to train her personally. In the officer school, Catherine handily achieves victory in her first battle by exploiting her unique advantage in strength due to Name magic. Due to unrelated reasons, she is invited to attend the imperial court, where Heiress tricks her into betting her future ownership of an army on a wargame between five armies. During the war games, Catherine overcomes her opponents with trickery and sequential betrayal of different armies. Finally, she agrees on a draw with the commander of the last army (Juniper, a brilliant strategist) by promising her status of a commander of her future legion.
Book 2
Lone Swordsman’s rebellion begins, and Catherine (in command of her new legion, alongside Juniper) is sent to stop it. Along the way, several things happen. First, two Named join her party. First is Hakram, (Named the Adjutant), an orc officer that helped her a lot during the war games. Second is Masego (the Apprentice), son of Warlock - an old friend and colleague of Black Knight. Then, she meets Lone Swordsman once again, who is attempting to assassinate Warlock with his party of Heroes, consisting of Wandering Bard, Bumbling Conjurer, The Hunter and Thief. Catherine, alongside her friends, manages to stop it. In the fight, Bumbling Conjurer is killed by Warlock, The Hunter gets captured, while the rest manage to escape.
Continuing on their way, Catherine’s legion is faced with an army of rebels lead by Shining Prince who opts to challenge Catherine to a duel, one on one, instead of letting the armies fight it out. She shoots him in the throat with a crossbow instead. In the battle that follows Catherine manages to rout the rebel army, and continues to the city of Marchford. Unfortunately, Heiress releases a demon of corruption nearby. Demons are incredibly dangerous creatures which have wide area effects. Demon of corruption, in particular, “corrupts” environment, people, and in general everything it touches, mutating everything in various ways. Animals and people turn into mutants under control of the demon, land turns corrupted, and so on. Effect is contagious - every corrupted thing spreads corruption even further. Heroes are capable of harming and killing demons, while everyone else has a lot of trouble with that.
Catherine and her friends manage to survive the demon, with the help of Archer - a hero who arrives to take custody of Hunter, and Hunter himself, who is forced to join the fight by Archer. Unfortunately, Hunter dies in the process. At the last moment, Heiress shows up, and calls the demon back into a magical flagpole she has. Catherine and Heiress officially join forces to chase the rebels down to the last city they have under control, while unofficially attempting to kill one another.
As it turns out, rebels are attempting to summon an Angel in the city of Liesse. Angels are almost as bad as demons, except themed around repentance, contrition and such, instead of corruption, madness and death. When this particular Angel comes into reality, everyone around Liesse would become mind controlled into starting a new Crusade against the evil nations. Naturally, Heiress finds this to be a perfect time to betray Catherine openly, and summons a bunch of devils(not demons) to kill everyone in the city. In the fighting that follows Catherine kills the Lone Swordsman, prevents the summoning of the angel, while Heiress manages to maneuver her way into avoiding death. As a result, Catherine is given province of Marchford as her domain, and is put on the ruling council of Callow - a new government of Callow - as one of the key members. Heiress maneuvers her way into ruling Liesse.
Book 3
Book 3 begins with Catherine doing her best to rule Callow, which isn’t very good. Despite managing to secure a majority vote on the ruling council, she can’t seem to manage to establish any stable policy within Callow. However, not all is well, as Winter fey invade Marchford, and Catherine goes back to her territory to investigate.
Catherine, Masego and Hakram perform a sortie into the part of the city which contains the snowstorm surrounding the new portal into Arcadia, and, sure enough, end up stuck there. As it turns out, Arcadia follows the tenets of story logic closer than the normal world, which Catherine and the party(now with Archer who encounters them at just the right time) use to sneak into Skade - the “capital” of Winter fey. In the capital, they try to find a way to ensure Winter would stop attacking Marchford permanently. Unfortunately for them, King of Winter has his own plans in motion. Catherine is invited to a party, where she is introduced as “Princess Sulia of the Summer Fey” - someone is clearly trying to trap her somehow. One thing leads to another, and Catherine uses a story of patricide to claim she is a daughter of Duke of Violent Squalls in order to kill him and take his power. After the fight, King of WInter - biggest and baddest fey in all of Winter - shows up, and has a chat with Catherine. He takes her heart, replacing it with a piece of ice, and says he will give it back if she wins a war against Summer fey in six months. He also names her The Duchess of Moonless Nights, granting her the powers of the fey.
Returning back to the real world, our heroes find out they were gone for three months, as time flows differently in Arcadia, and Callow is on fire. Akua has started a rebellion against Praes, Summer has invaded in the south, and Daoine may or may not be rebelling. Catherine immediately sets out to fix various problems around the country, which is helped by her Winter powers. In particular, she can make a Gate between normal world and Arcadia, travel through Arcadia, make a second Gate at the exit, and thus arrive at her destination in a quarter of the time it would have taken her if she traveled by roads. First, Catherine swings by the capital and quickly convinces Thief(who stole the entire treasury) to join her side, and then continues on to the duchy of Daoine. There, she convinces Duchess Kendall to join her in her fight against Diabolist(Akua, previously Heiress) and the Summer fey, since Diabolist stole something important from Daoine.
Together they set out through Arcadia towards the center of the fey invasion, and face off against the armies of Summer lead by Princess Sullia herself. Catherine is forced to call in a favor with a major Winter fey - Prince of Nightfall - in order to get his warband of fey to act as supporting forces, but by promising him seven crowns of seven mortal rulers she secures that alliance fairly easily. In the middle of the fight, Catherine’s party confronts Princess Sullia, Thief steals her sun (a literal sun, Sullia can summon a small one), and the party puts Sullia herself in a containment ward.
Finally arriving at Dormer, where the center of the invading Summer forces was located, Catherine storms the city, slaughtering summer fey until she arrives at the castle, that stands in the center. Once there, she summons the Queen of Summer, and forces her to take the hand of King of Winter in marriage by backing her into a corner: Catherine holds the sun, her allies are about to breach the walls of the capital of Summer, and she beat Summer armies in the normal world. Queen of Summer can not refuse, and so Summer and Winter end, united into one force. So ends the war of Summer on Callow.
But Winter does not end. Catherine still remained the Duchess of Winter, and since Winter King is no more, she has inherited the whole thing. Masego barely keeps her alive throughout the transition, making a scaffolding around her soul to keep it from imploding from the stress. Yet even having survived that ordeal brings Catherine no rest - Akua is finally on the move.
As soon as Catherine wakes up after the battle, Akua contacts her via a magical mirror. Mutual threats are exchanged, as Akua unveils that she has turned one of the cities - Liesse - into a flying fortress, and can turn every person within that city into undead soldiers if need be, and tells Catheirne she can prevent that by swearing loyalty to Akua. Catheirne punches the mirror in response, breaking it. Only thing that remains it to gather her forces and chase down wherever Akua will end up landing. Along the way there, she reunites with Black and his legions. Nature of the item Akua stole from the Deoraithe is likewise revealed: it is an enormous gestalt of the souls of all deoraithe soldiers that died in the last millenia, and it was previously used to provide power to the Watch – a special forces division of Deoraithe army, with powers akin to minor Named.
After they have located Liesse, a battle ensues. Legionary forces under combined control of Catherine and Black Knight were less numerous than the defenders, but better trained in siege tactics, and with support from eight combat-capable Named in total - Squire(Catherine), Hierophant(Masego), Adjutant(Hakram), Thief(Vivienne), Archer(Indriani), Black Knight(Amadeus), Warlock(Wekesa) and Asassin. On the other hand, defenders of Liesse had warded defences, and were lead by a single Named – Diabolist.
Seeing that she is utterly screwed in a straight fight, Diabolist resorts to the time honored villanous tradition fo running away, and hides the whole city in a pocket dimension, entrance to which now lies in the middle of a fort constructed outside the city. At the same time, she opens an enormous permanent portal to Hell right in the middle of legionary forces. Her side also releases three separate demons, which proceed to sow more chaos. While Warlock is trying to close the Hellgate, Hierophant is trying to contain the demons, and Adjutant is assaulting the more mundane defences that remain on the field, Catherine and Black head towards the portal leading to Liesse in order to personally put down the Diabolist once and for all.
The city itself is filled with thousands of undead, but such minor threats do not interrupt two seasoned Named. Black separates from Catherine, and heads off to do something of his own devising. Catherine, meanwhile, makes her way to the palace where Akua no doubt lies in hiding. Fighting her way through numerous foes and traps, she finally confronts the villain, and manages to almost beat her. However, she makes a mistake: by leading Akua into Arcadia she gained increased powers (due to still being part-fey), but at the cost of opening herself up to narrative shenanigans, which are stronger in Arcadia. Akua thus manages to get a hold on the scaffolding Hierophant constructed around Catherine's soul, thus giving her perfect control over everything Catherine's body does.
Thus bound, Catherine and Akua make their way back to the real world, where Akua orders Catherine to stab what looks like naked and bound Black Knight. She does so, revealing that this was Assassin all along: his body dissolves into ash, and the real Black Knight calls Akua on a magical intercom, showing her that he has captured her father, and is holding him hostage. In return for "letting her father go" Black Knight asks three questions, which Akua answers truthfully. Her father is set free...only to be filled by arrows as soon as he exits the door of the room. Black kept his promise, to the letter.
This distraction, coupled with Thief suddenly appearing and stealing Akua's binding, gives Catherine enough of a control to rip the scaffolding off her soul. Winter floods her veins, and she becomes fey in truth. Now impossible to control by magic, she slaughters Akua, and meets up with the Black Knight, who made his way to the control array of the device that allows Akua to control Liesse, and in particular open Hellgates . An image of the Dread Empress Malicia joins them as well, and she and Catherine attempt to persuade Black to use the fortress as a weapon of mutually assured destruction: averting any future wars with other countries since if any particular country were to declare war on them, a Hellgate could be opened in the capital of that country. Black knight is, however, unconvinced - he believes that such a weapon would be a perfect casus beli for all other countries to declare a Crusade against Praes, and bring in the most experienced heroes with them - and uses his aspect Destroy to break the weapon, releasing the gestalt of souls that kept it powered. As the weapon breaks, Catherine sees The Wandering Bard standing near, smiling at a plot that went exactly according to plan.
Dramatis Personae
I thought about writing this, I really did. But kind people at TVTropes have already done the work for me, and really, I could not possibly compare. :p If you don't know (or forget) who one of the characters is, head down there and they would explain it all.