Theoboda Kataph

## Theoboda Valentina Theodosia Kataph

**Theoboda Valentina Theodosia Kataph** was the Empress of Bishant and the leader of the Shantine Empire (reigning as **Empress Theoboda IV**) during the mid-400s A.U. She is commonly known as "The Prophet" and in scripture as "Theoboda-Leandra."

The Shantine Empire of the 6th century was made in Theoboda's image, and was culturally defined by the proud assertion that it had been in a Golden Age since the ascension of Empress Theoboda to the Patriarchate of Bishant in the latter half of the 5th century. The entire national mythology centered on the Kataph Dynasty of Theoboda and her successors, and their sacred relationship with the Kirvan angel Leandra.

## History and Legacy

The hagiography of Theoboda IV maintains that the Empress was a living prophecy of the redemption of the quiescent and ineffectual Kirvan Church. A vast Kirvan theological corpus grew up around the nature of prophecy since Theoboda's time, but the generally accepted version within the Shantine Kirvan Church was that Theoboda's status as a prophet was preordained as the best of all futures but required the Empress to take certain actions that would "close the loop" between herself and the angel of prophecy, Leandra, to make the potential future a certainty. In this interpretation, Theoboda proved her worth by ensuring the emancipation of the tens of millions enslaved by the various Fialta states and reawakening Shantine martial purpose against the Fialta Imperium in the Second Coalition War.

Leandra was a hitherto obscure Kirvan angel, only dimly hinted at in the most generous interpretations of ancient texts, who manifested in the mind of Theoboda after the death of Patriarch Jan of Bishant. Promising Theoboda that she could become a living prophet of Kirva, Leandra exhorted Theoboda to seize leadership of the Kirvan Church. Leandra was revealed to the cosmos during the *Immolation of the Korinthians,* when hundreds of Shantine clergy, including Patriarch Wenceslas of Korinth, and Knights of Adarnum, were burned at the stake on charges of treason against the Empress: Leandra stepped from the cleansing fires that engulfed the Empress's enemies to proclaim Theoboda as a Prophet and the new Patriarch of Bishant.

These and other mass executions occurred under the watchful gaze of Arren Kane (later Saint Kane), the Grandmaster of the Knights of Adarnum and the Empress's brutal right-hand man in centralizing all state and religious authority for the purposes of realizing a violent Shantine revision of the cosmic order. What followed this divine manifestation was a crisis within the international Kirvan Church, as Theoboda wrested any pretense of independence from the Shantine clergy. Able to declare that her every edict was vetted by an angel of Kirva, and with no apparent contradiction from other accepted Kirvan angels, Theoboda attracted fanatical support from not only the Shantine public but from millions of Kirvans abroad, especially emancipated slaves convinced that the Empress was responsible for their freedom.

The Empress and her advisors (including Kane and the protégé of the late Jan, Patriarch Latakon of Highveldt) were successful in negotiating a "soft-schism" with the Aeldman Kirvan Church, in which the Shantine and Aeldman churches recognized each other but the Aeldman government retained a close watch on Shantine religious activity in-country. At the particular instigation of Kane, the Shantine realized a massive relocation of Kirvans and Fialta Pentacle-Worshippers between the Shantine and Fialta empires to prevent future religious and ethnic strife – such a sweeping measure to uproot tens of millions of lives was emblematic of Shantine policy and of an emerging new relationship between the Shantine and Fialta, based on pragmatic accommodation without pretense of friendship.

It is said that the fire burning twice as bright burns half as long, and such was the case with the body and soul of Empress Theoboda: by the 460s, the revered empress was showing signs of fatigue and declining health, prematurely aging from the stresses of leadership and divine revelation. Rumors of her mental instability were severely suppressed as foreign deception, though apocryphal accounts from political exiles suggest that the line between divine inspiration and madness was blurred even for her closest advisors, who circled with opportunism and fear around the flame of her power. Theoboda's divine reputation made it easy to limit her public appearances for reasons of mystique, claiming (more and more often, rightly) that she was in sacred and secret communion with Leandra.

The splendor of Theoboda's late reign was unequaled, but also isolating. In the wake of attempts on her life and that of her heir Irboda, the empress was never without a guard-host of lesser angels. Their inability to manifest continuously outside of certain sacred sites kept her a virtual prisoner on Bishant. Where they could not walk, neither could she, perhaps less for her own protection and more to protect the cosmos from the nightmare of retribution for her death. Theoboda took up permanent residence in the Basilica of the Patriarchs, quite literally unifying church and state in one vast city-sized complex that grew up around her seat of power. She would not return to the Imperial Palace of her childhood and early reign in life or death, taking her final rest in a magnificent sarcophagus that formed the new pulpit of the Patriarch of Bishant.

As the Prophet Empress became ever more entwined with her divine mirror in Leandra, until the distinction of Theoboda from Leandra became a redundant matter of formality, she inherited the famous problem of Angelic Perspective. Even in her most lucid and energetic moments, time and causation were blurred, memories of her life as it was drowning in the infinite potential of what might be or have been. Later theologians would claim that Leandra was the self-fulfilling manifestation of Theoboda in death, and that the Empress's later life consisted of a magnificent paradox in which her future divine self shaped and guided her mortal self to be ready to become divine. In this view, her death was ordained by divine will at the moment of unity between the malleable, growing Theoboda and the eternal Leandra.

In further elaborations of this theology, it later became commonly taught that the first manifestation of Leandra occurred because she had at last been made powerful enough by Theoboda's actions as a mortal to reach back into her own life – hence, the greater Theoboda became, the more Leandra could lend her a divine power. In consequence of this unique relationship, the successors of Theoboda to the throne were thought to enter a similar self-fulfillment of prophecy, communing with a divine avatar not only of Kirva but of their own sacred lineage. The destiny of every new monarch was thence to join their forebear as an aspect of Leandra – shrines were raised across the Empire to composite angels, Theoboda-Leandra and Irboda-Leandra (with some fringe groups claiming to already worship the future Leandra-of-Leandra, who would be the posthumous manifestation of the then-present Empress Leandra I).

## Notes

1. ↑ In the traditional hagiography, the passing soul of Jan is held to have made the intercession with Kirva that allowed Leandra to manifest (an act which LeandraA is believed to have confirmed to Theoboda in the successful case to canonize him as Saint Jan). Rumors that Jan, Theoboda's longtime spiritual advisor, was also secretly her father (making Theoboda and her heirs illegitimate), are severely punished as heresy within the Shantine Empire. Rumors that Theoboda had the inconvenient firebrand Jan assassinated are also vigorously prosecuted but bear a rather more uncomfortable harmony with the theological principle that Theoboda was singularly responsible for fulfilling the conditions that would make her a prophet.