I: The Tour of 3E 199–200
It is said she never felt home in the Imperial City, in the endless council halls where cold-hearted consuls and praetors would fawn upon her while calling her a grey-skinned usurper under their breaths, so it's only natural Katariah traveled a lot. Perhaps she felt her life was at risk had she stayed in the City or perhaps that it was her duty to personally fix the broken Empire that her late husband, the Mad Emperor Pelagius, had left for her to rule. The final year of her reign, at the turn of the century, Katariah Septim, the Grey Empress, was constantly on the move with her trusted company and she never slept or ate twice in the same halfway house or lord's hall.

Touring the provinces she put out small fires which could've otherwise consumed the whole Empire. A testament to Katariah's abilities as a mediator is how hard-pressed one is to find records of her deeds in the annals of history. Some of them are known, though. There are letters discovered in Elsweyr written by the Empress herself that tell us how she arranged, in secret, a marriage between the son of the Sugar-Marquis of Torval and the widowed Moon-Duchess of the rivalling city of Orcrest thus mending a rift that threatened to tear the whole province apart. A set of tapestries on display in Emeric's Hall in High Rock depict how she invited the bickering would-be heirs of the late King of Alcaire to a banquet on a meadow. There she had them all armed with dueling swords and ordered them to either settle their dispute then and there or pledge allegiance to a heir of her own choosing.

Katariah's most daring act has survived as a folktale in the Gold Coast. It tells how the late summer's stormwinds brought a mighty reaver fleet before the city of Anvil. The Abacean pirates had outmanoeuvred the slower Imperial Navy and it seemed nothing could save the city from being plundered. Luckily, the Empress was there. She sailed to meet the enemy alone on her barge. Holding a dagger on her own throat lest she be taken for ransom Katariah offered the reaver captains gold and rubies for signing a contract with the Empire to work as privateers and merchantmen. When one captain refused the offer the Empress pointed at the city they had come to sack and declared that the first man to bring her the disagreeable captain's head would be made its Count. As the story goes, the captain's first mate Dawgo Umbranox turned on him immediately and that's how the ennobled Umbranox family really came to rule Anvil. [Editor's note: Count Fasil III of Anvil, the supposed great-grandson of Dawgo Umbranox, has vehemently denied these 'vicious rumors of his pirate ancestry'.]

II: The Incident in Black Marsh
Rising tensions between Argonian farming villages and the Kothringi tribesmen of Hoh'hoijaa brought Katariah and her company to the mountainous tripoint region between Cyrodiil and the provinces of Morrowind and Black Marsh.

This much of her final hours we know from a publican's testimony: the Empress and her company spent the night in the Oxless Man Inn where they had a breakfast and then, before the fifth toll of the morning bell on the 30th of Hearthfire, the carriage was loaded. Knowing that the native tribesmen would be distrustful of symbols foreign to them Katariah had all Imperial banners struck down and the carriages covered with a plain burlap cloth. After that they made their way through a narrow mountain pass, across the border, into Black Marsh.

Unfortunately, sometime on that afternoon, they crossed paths with the Rat's Face Gang, who had been hired by N–, baron of A–, to rid the area of the troublesome natives. The Gang were notorious killers and scalphunters, veterans of wars that had long since ended, who now made their living both as sellswords and highwaymen, and selling the skins of their victims to Nibenese snake-cults. Men prone to war and ill-suited for peace. [Editor's note: The baron of A–'s name has been omitted as per the wishes of his descendants.]

We will never know for certain what happened at the skirmish because the Gang left no survivors. Apparently, the Imperial carriages' road was blocked by felling a tree in front of it and setting the surrounding shrubbery on fire after which the company was attacked from the flank. The small Imperial guard was soon overpowered by the scalphunters and everyone from the wheeler's apprentice to the Empress herself were slain. A coroner's report from the Proconsul's archives in Narsis describes that Katariah's body had no visible wounds save for an ebony-tipped arrow in her heart which, according to the report, would've caused an instant and a 'graceful death, fit for an Empress'. The visceral accounts of the Legion patrolmen who first came upon the site, however, seem to contradict this. Against their descriptions of horribly bludgeoned, dismembered and even partly eaten bodies, one can't help but wonder if the Imperial coroner was being extremely tactful in his report.

The scalphunters' folly was that after the bloody deed was done, and it had dawned on them whom they had killed, they buried the Empress and her company in shallow graves which they then kept watching nervously and so they were quickly discovered and promptly hanged.

At the time no other motive for the attack was considered than the Rat's Face Gang's taste for mindless violence. On one of the gang members, however, was a purse of strange and worthless copper coins. Years later sage Montalius connected the coin purse to one Ludovart Septimulus, a man belonging to a disenfranchised and largely forgotten Septim branch, who had approached various Elder Council members with bribes of similar mint prior to the Empress' death. The coins he had issued in advance, rather optimistically, with himself as the Emperor on the head. Not much came of sage Montalius' findings as by the time they were made Septimulus had already been stabbed to death in an alley behind a Daggerfall gambling house.

III: The Funeral of an Empress
Traditionally, the rulers of the Septim Dynasty have been buried in the Green Emperor Way of the Imperial City or in mausoleums erected on ancient battlefields across Tamriel. However, Katariah's kinsmen of the Dark Elven House Raathim declared that she should be buried in Old Ebonheart, the House's ancestral home. She was, they argued, a Lady of House Raathim first and an Empress of Tamriel only second. The Elder Council did not protest to these wishes. What they did protest to, and failingly so, was the sum of 20,000 septims being taken from the Imperial treasury to craft the Empress' death-mask; pure Nibenese pearl-silver carved into her likeness with a diamond-shaped ruby attached to its forehead.

According to the Ebon Tower’s chamberlain’s journal, on the day of the Empress' funeral it snowed in Old Ebonheart, something that hasn't been recorded before or since in its history. While Katariah's son and heir, Cassynder Septim, scurried to Cyrodiil to secure his rule, a ceremonial mourn-guard of Raathim elves carried her into the family's ancestral tomb deep underneath the city. The tomb was sealed after them, its entrance hidden and all but forgotten. It is said that anyone who'd seek to enter the final resting place of the Empress and the Raathim elves of old is doomed to fail; a grim stone guardian, sculpted by ancient lithomancers, stands watching over the tomb's entrance. It bars anyone expect those of the Raathim blood from entering. [Editor's note: it is more likely that the supposedly lost Raathim tomb is merely an empty cenotaph; official Imperial records state that Katariah is buried in the Imperial City next to Cassynder Septim].