Cathak Matarin
Type: Dragonblooded
Aspect: Fire
Titles: Senator (Deliberative Greater Chamber); Dragonlord (19th Imperial Legion), retired; Badge of the Goose (Ever-Flowing Office of Foreign Acquisitions), retired;
Residence: [none], (Her husband controls the Villa of Taste and Tranquility in the Imperial City, and a summer home in Port Caval on the Daoshin Peninsula).
Cathak Cacek Matarin is an elder Senator of the House Cathak Deliberative Caucus, and wife of fellow Senator Peleps Caval, with whom marriage has proven fruitful, leaving numerous children and grandchildren now serving in the Imperial Legions and Thousand Scales. Matarin shows signs of age, skin starting to wrinkle and streaks of grey through her hair, but while her gait has slowed she retains the firm posture of a soldier, a military bearing evident in both court dress and travelling clothes.
Matarin was raised to the Senate by the Scarlet Empress following a long and accomplished career in the Imperial Legions. While the House of Cathak is not famed for its politicians, Matarin surprised many with her talented oratory, still remembered for its brilliance by many sitting in the Deliberative. Her political duels and maneuvers against her to-be-husband Senator Caval are themselves remembered for both their ferocity and the talent both displayed, and some Senators speak that in the end the two had argued until they were left with only a single point of agreement: that the other was the only one they could marry. Those senators will also often chuckle as they tell the tale, and conclude that, though Caval would never admit it, within their close match it was Matarin who was the better.
But all of that is in the past. In more recent years, Matarin has slowed, spending less time on the Deliberative floor, more seriously stating the belief that the Deliberative itself is a poor institution for producing legislation. When the Scarlet Empress vanished, the Senator warned that without Her firm hand to guide the Realm the Deliberative would be worse than useless, it might well doom the Realm itself.
No Senators joined Matarin’s call for all to resign their posts en-masse, and left alone she herself kept her title, stating that it was better to keep one seat empty than let one more pompous legislator feed at the trough. Even the Cathaks, for all their claimed distaste of politics, could not stomach this insult, and Matarin was sent on a tour of Cathak satrapies in the Threshold, far from the Imperial City and the Senators who considered her to have abandoned all they once respected about her. Inevitably the course set for her by her House leads Matarin through troubled regions, many believing the Cathaks hope she might be overcome and free them a seat for a more amenable politician… though when pressed her husband has exclaimed that if HE could not manage to have her killed, what hope have the Cathaks or anyone else for that matter.
Source: Based on information found in AB:F
