Katliara's love

[My story for D&D. May you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.]

When we last left our hero, Katliara Aella-sly had been taken from the ardent dawn’s keep to travel through the planes. Norton immediately brought her to his extremely dark and exceedingly evil castle. They were in his grand hall when he just turned and vanished on her. “Take a look around, hot cakes, and make yourself comfortable. You’re going to be here for a while. Like, I said baby, you need a lot of room. Here you have it.” His voice echoed around her. With a groan at having to look at that flashy palace again, the rogue found the place empty. Since she didn’t need any of them, none of the servants were there to show her around. Her first thought was getting acquainted with her glamorous cell and possibly find a route of escape. She simply wandered around, prepared to fend for herself.

The palace was a lot more complicated than she thought it would be but at the same time she wasn’t surprised. Getting lost and very confused with all the unnecessary rooms and demi-planes that stemmed off in every direction, Katliara didn’t quite understand what it was all about. The isle of madness was definitely a fitting name for Norton’s lair. He was trying too hard to inspire fear with his crazed evilness, but the elf thought that it merely made things too cluttered. Where were the comfortable rooms and chambers that gave one the sense of actually living in this place? It seemed more, in her opinion, like an Alter to Joshua Norton and his lunacy.

Along her searching she found a dark and sinister garden which she particularly took a liking to; despite the gnarled, poisonous and dangerous plants. This place she chose as a haven from Joshua’s charms, summons and exasperatingly endless halls. Often he would have to summon her from those green walls in order to have her bask in his marvelous presence. Katliara would not have been impressed had he not kept her continuously enchanted. But, as the days went by, he had to enchant and summon her less because she would willingly appear, or he would appear before her to interrupt whatever it was she was doing at the moment because he felt the need to see her.

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“Would you quit trying to enchant me.” Katliara said in a rather bored and indifferent tone as she looked at the proffered folded rose that Joshua was holding. “You know that I have not the will…” … or the inclination, she silently added “… to resist you.” Her eyes were guarded but beneath their silvery depths held an exhausted confusion. For the time she was being held prisoner she knew she had to return to her company, but she had spent the time writing and researching without any pesky undead attacking. Why did the House of Farwend have to have so many enemies? Couldn’t they ever be liked?

Joshua, ever the lover of being the center of attention, forced her from her thoughts. “Now, now, sugar puff, do you think I would waste so many spells on one such as the likes of you? You place too much importance on yourself, sugar cookie, if you believe that.” His look was condescending and his tone patronizing. Katliara would have preferred that he had slapped her than having said such a thing. She reminded herself that he was just telling her how he felt about her, she wasn’t important to him. Then why did she wish she could change his mind and gain a little acceptance? Maybe even attain some approval. Then again, no one seemed to like those of the House of Farwend.

Katliara turned away from him and sighed; but she whirled back around and rapped the back of Joshua’s hand with an arrow when he made an attempt to touch her. “My touch is not so repulsive, buttercup. My discordia will not rub off onto your velvety soft purple being.” He would chortle at his own wittiness. The elf would turn to him with a glare. “Don’t be stupid and leave me be! Why are you even here? Don’t you have planes to visit and other lives to disrupt aside from disrupting mine?” The anguish was there, in her voice. He was no longer enchanting her but she was still reacting to him… wanting… needing… Those thoughts brought the hard edge back to her posture and her glare.

“Sugar lips…” Joshua would begin, see her murderous look and the flash of her dagger, and smile his cocky grin. “That name does seem to get your leaves in a ruffle.” He taunted coolly, puffing himself up with amusement. Katliara would look away in disgust. Joshua would lean in close to her pointy ear, giving it a playful nip before repeating the hated endearment. “Sugar lips, if you try to run away again a beholder will be your fate or maybe a destructing plane without a gyroscope.” My, he thought to himself, she was awfully pretty when she was riled. He watched as she shred up the paper rose and threw the pieces at him. No, she was damn gorgeous when riled. “Your House of Farwended Weaklings will eventually come for you. So, write… feast… and then later give me a… private dance, sugar lace. ”

There was underlying jollity in his voice and in his eyes when he suggested that she should give him a private dance. Katliara turned to him, one thin eyebrow raised on her smooth forehead. How could he know that she danced? Was he merely teasing her since dancing was what slave girls were supposed to do? But then the memory of the night before when she had visited a demi-plane where she had danced, flashed through her mind. The night had been lovely there, so full of stars. There had been music in the air. She had no idea where the music had come from but she had felt it in her heart; that need to dance and give release to some of her feeling and emotions. She had danced the way she had then because she had thought that she had been alone.

Had Joshua been there watching her? Was that his way of complimenting her by asking her for an encore performance? She could see that he expected her to take it as a taunt. Then he could torment her further and he would not have to admit that he had found her bewitching in the moonlight. Her every movement had been graceful and fluid as she had weaved her way in and out of shadow. Katliara had been herself then. She had been unguarded from attack and he probably should have taken advantage of that. But something had made him hold back and only watch her, appreciate her, and allow her to captivate him. It had been very easy to believe that she had been dancing just for him. Why else would she have been so sensual and provocative? His eyes darkened with memory and ardor before lighting up with amusement.

Departing from her quarters, he blew her a kiss before he twinkled off on his toes. As soon as the door closed, Katliara let out a frustrated scream and threw around a Joshua Norton statue to let out her pent up passion and aggression. Already in the time of her stay, 5 statues had been battered and destroyed beyond recognition. To be humiliated and degraded so by someone and know that they were not enchanting you. Yet, still finding them charming, handsome, powerful and enrapturing... Katliara almost doubled over, sickened by her own thoughts. Getting away was no longer about her getting away from him, but it was suddenly about her getting away from her feelings for him.

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Katliara knew that she had to make another attempt at escape. She had acquainted herself with the overly showy and evil halls and planned to make a run for it…

The bare muffled sounds of her light, quick footsteps echoed around her, filling her ears until it was almost a deafening roar. At the very least it silenced her own thoughts, thoughts from her soul that were trying to convince her mind that Norton wasn’t as bad as she had once thought. That he was, instead, charming, charismatic and attentive. The more those thoughts poured from her heart the harder she ran, causing her blood to rush and her heartbeat to pound in her ears. Her hair trailed behind her in a glorious sheet of dark green, swirling around her now and again when she stopped to decide which way she should go next. Because she was so distracted and distraught, she found herself plunging into a haze. Katliara knew she had been caught. She could run no further because she had reached her limit. There was no where left for her to go. She was trapped. It was of no use. Joshua had her, a prisoner of his demented psychosis and a prisoner of her own tormenting feelings for him.

After this attempt at escape, Joshua took a hold of all her original belongings. Placing them within her own bag of holdings, she watched as he set it within a locked box in the great hall. Katliara could do nothing more than look at the box, not daring to extricate her things since she had none of her tools. Everything that she was was hidden in that damnable box. She took that as a dramatic representation of her current situation. Joshua had her trapped, to be looked at but not touched, to be known but not used; and only available when Norton deemed it.

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“No escape attempt today, honey cakes? It is the second Tuesday after your last attempt. Run out of useless ideas, sugar lips?” Joshua asked as he entered the hall where Katliara sat and was writing. She had looked indifferent to him until he had used the hated endearment of ‘sugar lips’. As expected, she was instantly glaring and just a moment away from hurling an inkwell at him. That had been his reason for using the name, to get her irate and looking at him. However, she said nothing and motioned to the chair next to her with an almost resigned expression.

“I quiver with excitement when you aren’t being angry and violent, muffin buns. That you know so many curse words in so many languages does taint your sweet and delicate nature, angel cakes.” Joshua would coo in his licentious manner as he pulled the seat to be as close to her as possible. Katliara turned to him with a smile, fluttered her lashes and asked the things she would always ask everyday upon first seeing him. “So then why don’t you just give me the Tome of Discord and let me leave if you don’t want the truths told to your face?” Immediately their daily argument would erupt, Katliara arguing and demanding the book and her own release from his palace, and Joshua not getting upset at all. He would take great delight in getting her thoroughly annoyed and angry at him by refusing her release and calling her ever sugary food name he could come up with.


His power over her always gave him a thrill and his creativity in his choice of names entertained him to no end. Joshua would manage to quiet Katliara by saying “If you want a kiss, my cream dollop, all you have to do is ask.” Katliara turned away from him, a flash of torment on her face before whispering. “You know me, I wouldn’t ask.” “And yet you ask daily for a book you do not understand and can never use and your return to that group of misfits?!” Joshua said in exasperation as he stood up and began to make his way around the table. He was folding a piece of paper as he went. “Here then! Kiss the toad/frog you say you would rather kiss than kiss me, sugar plum.” He set a paper frog which hopped across the table to be in front of the night elf as he walked out the door.

She looked warily down at the frog, unsure of whether or not to lay a hand on it. Who knew what sort of spell he had charged it with? Sighing, Katliara made to reach for it but it unfolded before she even touched it. The note read “You take my breath away. I could love you. You’re dazzling.” Katliara sighed again and just looked down at the paper. She knew it held nothing but the promise set by the words themselves. She took the little paper and folded it into her pocket. “I know…” Katliara whispered, too bad she already felt that way about him. She could lie to everyone with ease but she couldn’t and wouldn’t lie to herself. Katliara was in love with a crazy fool who folded paper, worshipped a still-born god of extreme evilness, wished the world to be balanced by more death and called her by the disgusting name of ‘sugar lips’. The world was most certainly doomed.

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Time moved regularly in Joshua’s palace but Katliara knew that it was still moving faster than it did on her own home plane. Since she was an elf, time’s passing didn’t matter. Therefore she didn’t feel the need to try to keep track of the days. Still, she knew that things had progressed and when she eventually returned to her company, she would not be in the same time or state of mind as she had been upon departure. He would have to let her go. Though at first her time with him had seemed like true imprisonment; it was a sentiment that felt no longer true. The emotions and feelings had been raging between them until it was almost palpable and neither could ignore them. Joshua couldn’t keep her. They both knew it.

One morning, Katliara walked into her quarters to leave some papers she had written, only to find Joshua standing by the window. A little folded paper piano was playing from the nightstand. He was looking out, with his back to her, while all the things he had locked away from her were now lying on her bed. For a moment she just looked at everything: her leather armor, her cloak, her rings, her amulet, her goggles, her longbow, her quiver, her moonglaive, her dagger and her bag of holding with all her tools. It was all there. Then she looked down at what she had on, at the simple but pretty jewelry and the rich silk dress. He had given them to her.

Katliara was truly unrecognizable from what she had been when she had first arrived. Even her mass of unruly hair was collected in a neat and sleek twist. Leaves and flowers still adorned her head but wisps framed her face and collected at the nape of her neck. This made her ears look decidedly pointed and long but softened her face. The black of the dress highlighted her lavender skin, a silver belt hung low on her slim hips which brought out the rest of the silver details on the dress and in turn brought out the exotic color of her eyes.

His voice brought her to look at him, there was wonder and questioning in her gaze. He had stood with his back to her even when she had all her things within reach. “I have very greatly decided my frosted cupcake that your friends are no where NEAR ready to return to my isle. So, since they are nothing and worthless without you, and I have no use for you here… having you eat all my food and using all my paper… I’ll be sending you back to them.” Joshua spoke as if he took great delight in being rid of her. Katliara, knowing and now understanding his moods, did not defend her party or try to debate his letting her go. He was torn up about her leaving which tugged at both their hearts. Yet he was going to laugh and party as if it were the biggest joy of their lives to no longer have to stand one another. Of this she was sure about and therefore kept her silence.

She watched as he drew closer on his way to cross the room to leave, spinning from foot to foot; his white robes whirled around him as he went. He stopped beside her, leaned up and drew her down for a kiss. For the moment that their lips met, she was frozen in place. Not from any spell but because of her own warring emotions. “Pack up, moonbeam. A portal will wait in the hall for you in half an hour.” With those words and a flash, Joshua was gone. Katliara pressed the back of her hand to her lips as if to keep the feel of his lips on her own, fully understanding his choice to release her.

Straightening her shoulders, she moved forward to change. She couldn’t return to the company looking the way she did. Silvread would have a heyday if she saw her this way. Vladimir would ask questions. Then again, they would ask questions either way because of the fact that she had been returned from capture without reason or her coming to harm. Once she was ready with all her things packed, including the things he had given her during her stay even though they held no magical abilities, Katliara made her way to the hall and the waiting portal.

Her steps were slow and her mind was heavy. She had to return, of that there was no doubt, but what would she tell those of her House? There was a bouquet of paper flowers waiting for her with no sign of Joshua near the portal. One paper flower opened and, as if it were a petal falling off a wilting bud, fell onto the table. On the center of the page, it simply said “Ouch.” Katliara nodded and took up the bouquet, knowing that they would be of no harm to her and that her feelings were being reciprocated. Stepping into the portal, Katliara murmured, her eyes looking particularly liquid “Farewell… until we find each other once again.” With a breath and a blink, she would be gone from his plane but would she be gone from his heart and from his mind?