> [!lore-page] > > [!infobox] <div align="center">Areinnye t'Fvareth</div><div align="left" style="font-size: 0.85em; color: var(--text-muted);">Areinnye i-Ra'tleihfi t'Fvareth</div> > > <img src="https://obsidian-media.gentoo-amberjack.ts.net/ficcion/fanfiction/of-goths-and-gods/lore/characters/faceclaims/areinnye-fvareth.jpg"> > > <div align="center" style="font-size: 0.85em; color: var(--text-muted);">Areinnye t'Fvareth observing new Valkyrie recruits at at a Escuadrón Valquiria training facility on outskirts of Madrid (2408)</div> > > <br> > > > > | Biographical Data | | > > |---|---| > > | **Full Name** | *Areinnye i-Ra'tleihfi t'Fvareth* | > > | **Born** | 18 September 2374<br>Ra'tleihfi, Romulus, Romulan Star Empire | > > | **House-clan** | s'Fvareth | > > | **Nationality** | **Romulan Republic**<br>**United Federation of Planets**<br>United Earth (U.F.P.)<br>Kingdom of Spain (United Earth) | > > | **Species** | Romulan | > > | **Gender** | Female | > > | **Siblings** | Arrhæ t'Fvareth (twin)<br>Vaehha t'Fvareth | > > | **Affiliation** | [[Agencia Townsend]]<br>Escuadrón Valquiria | > > | **Occupation** | Angel ([[Agencia Townsend]])<br>Valkyrie (Escuadrón Valquiria) | > > > > | Lore Notes | | > > |---|---| > > | **Faceclaim** | Christina Chong (2024) | > > | **Height** | 5'4" (163cm) | > > | **Neurocognitive Profile** | Neurotypical by Federation clinical standards; colleagues note a deliberately unhurried processing style even under acute operational stress, and a talent for stillness that more than one Starfleet-trained associate has admitted, off the record, to finding faintly unsettling to stand beside | > > | **Native Language** | Rihannsu | > > | **Fluent Languages** | Rihannsu<br>Spanish (daily use)<br>English (Federation Standard)<br>Dutch | > > | **Functional Languages** | Klingon<br>Vulcan | > > **Areinnye i'Ra'tleihfi t'Fvareth** (born 18 September 2374; Ra'tleihfi, Romulus, Romulan Star Empire) is a Romulan intelligence operative and one of the most senior serving members of **Escuadrón Valquiria**, the protective unit maintained by **[[Octavia Shanahan]]** and **[[Xóchitl Castañeda]]** for the security of their household and family. She holds concurrent standing as an Angel of **[[Agencia Townsend]]**, the private intelligence service to which Escuadrón Valquiria has, since October 2399, formally belonged as an elite subdivision, and her own induction predates the recruitment of a considerable number of Valkyries now serving alongside her. In an unofficial capacity, she is the head of Escuadrón Valquiria when neither Shanahan nor Castañeda are present. > > t'Fvareth's connection to the Shanahan-Castañeda household considerably predates her own service within it. House Fvareth - her family, of Ra'tleihfi, on a Romulus that no longer exists - was evacuated from the Romulan Star Empire on Octavia Shanahan's personal initiative in March 2386 - less than a month after the births of Shanahan's daughter Amy and t'Fvareth's sister Vaehha; and just under 17 months before the Hobus disaster, where the star went supernova and destroyed the planets Romulus and Remus. t'Fvareth has spent every year since in some form of orbit around the family that saved her life, and has never found the arithmetic of the debt complicated to carry. > > > [!quote] Areinnye t'Fvareth, attributed remark, on being asked directly why she stayed > > > > *Rhanne payr urrier. Rhanne thei'urrikhe.* ("I am able to go. I have no wish to.") > > *I have had twenty-three years to decide otherwise. I have not required a twenty-fourth to reconsider.* > > # Contents > > - Early life > - Evacuation of House Fvareth > - Interval years > - Agencia Townsend and Escuadrón Valquiria > - Notable operations > - War against the Tal Shiar > - Personal life > - Skills, training, and personal doctrine > - Public image > - Notable relationships > - Honours and recognition > > # Early life > > t'Fvareth was born in Ra'tleihfi, on Romulus, on 18 September 2374, during the Dominion War - nineteen minutes, by all counts, ahead of her twin sister Arrhæ. She has cited this margin as sufficient grounds for a lifetime spent insisting that she is the elder of the two whenever her twin brings it up. House Fvareth traces to the southern provinces of Romulus - smooth-browed rather than ridged, and matrilineal in the ordinary Rihan fashion: descent, and with it clan membership, runs through the maternal line, and a family's continuity is reckoned through its daughters rather than its sons. Which of the Fvareth women presently holds, or is understood to hold, the formal standing of *hru'hfirh* - head of the house - is a question the family has never once answered for outside consumption, and t'Fvareth has never given any indication she considers the omission worth correcting. > > Her given name translates, in Rihannsu, to something close to "*hell*." Her twin's translates to "*worthy*." Neither woman has ever offered a public explanation for the pairing, and their mother, on the rare occasion she is drawn on the subject at all, has restricted herself to observing that she named her daughters for what she hoped each of them would need to survive, not for what she hoped either of them would become. t'Fvareth has said, exactly once and without any apparent bitterness, that she considers the name to have aged rather well. > > Formal Romulan naming convention places the given name first, followed by a locative denoting birthplace, followed by the house-clan — *Areinnye i-Ra'tleihfi t'Fvareth*, in full: **Areinnye, of the city of Ra'tleihfi, of House Fvareth**. The *t'* is the feminine clan prefix; a Fvareth son, had the family produced one, would have carried *tr'* instead, at least until marriage moved him into his wife's house. Common usage among Romulans reduces the formal name to given name plus clan - Areinnye Fvareth - and etiquette holds that acquaintances address a Romulan by clan name alone unless given explicit permission to do otherwise; given names are reserved for family, or for those close enough to have been granted the same standing. The Shanahan-Castañeda household uses her given name without exception and without having ever formally asked permission to do so, a liberty Areinnye has never once corrected them on, which within Romulan custom is itself a kind of answer. > > Areinnye arrived in Madrid at eleven years old and grew up there in loose, then increasingly close, orbit around a family two years her junior at the eldest end: [[Luna Shanahan Castañeda]] was nine when House Fvareth's exile settled into something more permanent, and the two households' children shared enough of a city, and eventually enough of a security detail, that t'Fvareth is understood to have watched all eight Shanahan-Castañeda daughters grow up from somewhere reasonably close to the beginning - the youngest two, Daisy and Clover, literally so, as they were not yet born when the Fvareth family reached Earth. > > # The evacuation of House Fvareth > > On 9 February 2386, Octavia Shanahan - then nearly a year into continuing the Romulan evacuation effort independently and at her own expense, following the Federation's withdrawal after the Attack on Mars the previous year - went into labour with her sixth daughter, Amy, in a hospital bed in Ra'tleihfi immediately adjacent to the one in which Areinnye and Arrhæ's mother was, at the same hour, delivering the family's youngest daughter, Vaehha. Areinnye and Arrhæ, not yet twelve, were both in the building. Areinnye has described the encounter only once at any length, and did so in terms considerably plainer than the moment's significance might otherwise have invited. > > > [!quote] Areinnye t'Fvareth, attributed remark, on first meeting Octavia Shanahan > > > > *I remember a human woman in the adjacent bed, speaking Rihannsu to my mother between contractions I did not, at the time, understand were her own. She never once mentioned it. My mother did not learn whose labour it actually was until considerably later, by which point it had stopped seeming like the sort of thing that needed pointing out. She asked my father a question that had nothing to do with childbirth and everything to do with whether our house-clan still had property worth shipping. She did not sound like someone offering charity. She sounded like someone finishing a sentence she had already decided the end of. I had never heard an offworlder speak our language without an accent before. I am not certain I have heard it since, from anyone who was not already family.* > > > > *I had already heard of her before that afternoon, in the way everyone on Ra'tleihfi with anything left to lose had heard of her by then: the human woman running an evacuation Starfleet had abandoned, at her own expense, because nobody had made her stop and nobody was going to. What I had not heard, and would not learn until years afterward, was that the evacuation had not paused for the Attack on Mars, had not paused for her own pregnancy, and did not pause that afternoon either - that she delivered her sixth daughter and negotiated my family's entire future in the same room, within the same hour, and never once, in my hearing, gave any indication she considered one of those tasks the interruption of the other. Vaehha and Amy were born in the same hospital, in adjacent beds, to two mothers neither of whom seemed to feel the coincidence deserved any more comment than the work itself did.* > > The offer was made that day; the evacuation followed on 1 March 2386, seventeen months ahead of the Hobus supernova that would destroy Romulus entirely on 31 July 2387. House Fvareth's holdings - property, effects, the modest accumulated record of a family with no particular reason to expect it would ever need shipping anywhere - were moved alongside its members, at Octavia Shanahan's arrangement and expense. The distinction mattered enormously at the time, and has mattered rather more in retrospect: House Fvareth arrived on Earth as transplanted citizens with something to their name, not as refugees with nothing, at a point in the wider evacuation crisis when very few Romulan families leaving the Empire could say the same. > > Areinnye has never described the seventeen intervening months, nor the manner of her family's departure from a homeworld that would shortly cease to exist, as anything she considers herself owed sympathy for. She has, on the other hand, never once let a year pass without marking the ninth of February in some private way the family does not discuss publicly - a date that has, since, come to carry a second and entirely unspoken weight of its own - and Escuadrón Valquiria's own household calendar has, without anyone ever formally deciding it should, quietly come to treat it the same way. > > House Fvareth was not a special case, and Areinnye has never allowed herself to think of it as one. Octavia Shanahan's continuation of the Romulan evacuation effort after Starfleet's official withdrawal in 2385 - funded personally, extended to whichever families she could reach and however many ships she could keep moving, and never once presented afterwards as a debt owed back - is common knowledge across the Romulan and Reman diaspora in a way remarkably little else about [[Industrias Shanahan]] has ever been permitted to become. Areinnye has met Romulans on Republic worlds who know Octavia Shanahan's name and almost nothing else about her, and every one of them has known it for precisely the same reason House Fvareth does. > > # The interval years > > The fourteen years between House Fvareth's arrival in Madrid and t'Fvareth's formal entry into Agencia Townsend are, by her own account, the least eventful part of her life, and by everyone else's account of who was actually present for them, considerably busier than she generally lets on. She was schooled in Madrid alongside the Shanahan-Castañeda family's eldest daughters, picked up Spanish and Federation Standard the way a child absorbs a new home's languages rather than through any formal instruction, and retained Rihannsu as the one she still, by her own admission, thinks fastest in and reaches for first when something actually matters. > > That schooling came with a standing arrangement t'Fvareth never had to ask for and never once heard formally announced. By the time she and her sisters reached the classroom, it was common enough currency among Madrid's schoolchildren that Octavia Shanahan had continued funding Romulan evacuation efforts personally after Fleet Admiral Kirsten Clancy's 2385 withdrawal, and had trespassed Clancy from every Industrias Shanahan facility on Earth and off it for twenty-five years running to 2410 - the story did most of the work on its own. What it left unfinished, [[Luna Shanahan Castañeda|Luna]] and Imogen Shanahan Castañeda supplied without being asked twice: both girls made plain, early and consistently, that anyone caught bullying a Romulan or Reman child for being Romulan or Reman would answer to them personally, a standing threat that extended, without distinction, to every Romulan and Reman child at the school and not merely to the Fvareth sisters. t'Fvareth has never described the arrangement as protection she required so much as protection she simply had, the way she had a native language and a house-clan, and has said she did not fully register how deliberate it had been until she was old enough to notice diaspora children at other schools going without anything like it. > > > [!quote] Areinnye t'Fvareth, attributed remark, on schooling in Madrid > > > > *Luna and Imogen made the offer before any Romulan child at that school needed it, and made certain every Reman child heard it too. Nobody was foolish enough to test whether either of them meant it. I have never needed to thank either of them for that directly. I am fairly sure they would find the gesture beside the point.* > > The wider diaspora that grew up around Madrid's Romulan and Reman refugee population produces something else over the same two decades, considerably less deliberate than the schoolyard arrangement and rather more organic: a stable mixed in-group patois the community itself, without much self-consciousness, *Rihañol* - Rihannsu syntax reaching for Castilian vocabulary and back again, depending on which generation is in the room and how tired everyone already is. It emerged first as plain practical shorthand among first-generation adults working out daily life in a second language they had not chosen and a first one their children were rapidly outgrowing at school; it has persisted since, across a generation raised fully bilingual in "clean" Spanish and "clean" Rihannsu alike, as something closer to an identity marker than a necessity - everyone who speaks it could manage perfectly well without it, and nobody in the community has shown much interest in doing so. Areinnye speaks it fluently and, by her own admission, somewhat reluctantly, and has described it as "*the register my mother pretends not to understand and uses constantly regardless*" - an assessment her mother has never once been recorded contesting. > > Combat training arrived early than her Agencia Townsend record alone would suggest. The personal safety instruction Shanahan and Castañeda insisted on for their own daughters were extended, informally and without particular ceremony, to the Fvareth sisters as well - a decision neither mother has ever needed to justify beyond noting that a household with this many declared enemies does not train some of its children and not others simply because of whose name happens to be on the deed. By the time Areinnye approached Agencia Townsend directly rather than waiting to be found by it, she already had the better part of a decade's grounding in Suus Mahna derivatives behind her, absorbed the same unremarkable way she had absorbed Spanish. > > Arrhæ chose differently, and considerably more visibly. In June 2397, at twenty-three, she left Madrid for Virinat - a modest agricultural colony on the Beta Quadrant's edge, settled by Romulan refugees with no particular interest in rebuilding anything resembling the Empire they had lost - and built a life there largely apart from the household that had raised both sisters: a brewery, a partner, a home she meant to keep. Areinnye did not follow her, and has never once described the decision to stay as a difficult one. The twins' paths diverged for three years and converged again, by a coincidence neither has ever fully accepted as one, within the same twelve months: Areinnye approached Octavia directly in late 2399 and entered Agencia Townsend's training pipeline on 1 January 2400; Arrhæ, entirely unaware her sister had done so, was independently identified by an Angel observing Virinat's own brewery scene seven months later, and arrived in Madrid for training that August with no idea Areinnye had already been through the door for the better part of a year. > > > [!quote] Arrhæ t'Fvareth, attributed remark, on learning her sister had joined first > > > > She let me find out from the Bosley. I have not yet decided whether that was restraint or theatre. Knowing Areinnye, it was probably both, delivered with a completely straight face. > > # Agencia Townsend and Escuadrón Valquiria > > Areinnye t'Fvareth entered Agencia Townsend's recruitment and training pipeline in 2400, at twenty-five, and was inducted as an Angel on 18 September of that year - her twenty-sixth birthday, and a scheduling coincidence nobody in the family has ever quite convinced her was accidental. Her Angel tattoo, the organisation's rose-gold geometric wings, sits on her left shoulder blade. Her specialisations from the outset ran toward surveillance, intelligence work, and threat assessment - disciplines that, colleagues have noted since, suit a woman who spent her adolescence learning to read a room for the specific kind of danger that does not announce itself before it arrives. > > Induction into Escuadrón Valquiria followed on 11 February 2403, three years into her Angel service and after what colleagues describe as an entirely unremarkable vetting process by the elevated standards Valkyrie induction is understood to require. Her Valkyrie tattoo - a circular shield overlaid on the existing wings, framing rather than replacing them - sits on the same shoulder. The symbolism has never needed spelling out to anyone within the organisation: the wings are how she protects; the shield is what she has chosen to protect. Every Valkyrie induction on record has required Octavia Shanahan's own direct approval. t'Fvareth's is understood to have taken rather less time to secure than most. > > Within Escuadrón Valquiria, Areinnye holds no formal rank - the organisation maintains none - but functions, by consistent and unforced consensus, as one of the Valkyries newer recruits are quietly steered toward when a senior perspective is needed and Xóchitl Castañeda herself is unavailable. She reports, in the loosest sense either word implies inside a household this informally structured, to Octavia Shanahan in her capacity as the organisation's ultimate directing authority, and to Xóchitl Castañeda as Escuadrón Valquiria's Operational Commander - a dual reporting line Areinnye has never found remotely confusing, on the stated grounds that both women have only ever asked the same thing of her in different registers. When both are unavailable at once - rarer than either woman would prefer, but not so rare as never - command of the squadron devolves to Areinnye in practice, if never in writing, an arrangement nobody within Escuadrón Valquiria has ever needed to formalise because nobody has ever seriously questioned it. She would have earned the position outright several times over by now, had anyone thought to put it on paper and ask her; nobody has, and she has never once raised the matter herself. > > # Notable operations > > t'Fvareth's operational record within Agencia Townsend and Escuadrón Valquiria remains, consistent with both organisations' own institutional habits, very largely unpublished even internally. Two incidents have nonetheless entered something approaching household legend. > > The first occurred on 10 March 2406, when Octavia Shanahan had a dartboard printed bearing the likeness of Colonel tr'Hakeev, then a rising Tal Shiar officer with an already well-documented interest in the Fvareth family's continued survival being neither guaranteed nor especially convenient. Areinnye put an arrow through the centre of the portrait's forehead from across the room, on the first attempt, without any apparent effort. The moment is remembered within Escuadrón Valquiria less for the marksmanship, which colleagues describe as entirely in character, than for what it turned out to anticipate: Arrhæ spent much of 2409 hunting the man in earnest, a campaign that began within days of the destruction of the Virinat colony that January and did not conclude until considerably later in the year, when she finally killed him. The dartboard shot has, since, acquired a weight within the household that nobody quite intended it to carry, least of all Areinnye. > > The second occurred on 2 January 2409, the day the Virinat colony was destroyed. Areinnye was off duty and, by her own account, entirely unaware anything had happened until Hermóðr informed her directly: Arrhæ had used the spatial trajector installed years earlier at Villa Shanahan-Castañeda, with Octavia's authorisation, to evacuate Ekkhæ t'Hwæhrai - Arrhæ's partner - to Madrid in the colony's final minute. Areinnye was at the reception point before the trajector had finished cycling, and remained with Ekkhæ, in a capacity nobody had assigned her and nobody thought to question, through the worst of the aftermath that followed. It was not, by any formal reading of her duties that week, her job. She has never once treated it as anything other than obviously hers to do. > > # The war against the Tal Shiar > > Areinnye t'Fvareth maintains, entirely on her own initiative and considerably beyond anything her formal Agencia Townsend brief requires of her, a private working file on Grupo Hipólita's long and largely undeclared campaign against the Tal Shiar - a war she has followed closely enough, across the better part of a decade, to have stopped being surprised by how quickly the organisation keeps consuming its own leadership. > > General t'Nedar - the true identity of the Starfleet Security officer known for years as Commodore Oh, and the woman behind the April 2399 assassination attempt against Octavia Shanahan - died in 2405, in the engagement during which Octavia fired the *Hipólita Promesa*'s spinal weapon in anger for the first time. Colonel tr'Terak, t'Nedar's successor, died in battle in 2407, in a separate engagement against Grupo Hipólita forces; the succession crisis his death left behind ran for the better part of a year, and Areinnye's own notes track its resolution with rather more attention than the Tal Shiar's own internal communications ever intended anyone outside the organisation to have. Colonel tr'Hakeev - the officer whose ambition eventually carried that crisis, and the third head the Tal Shiar has burned through since the turn of the decade - spent the whole of 2409 visibly losing whatever remained of his grip on a position he had fought the better part of a year to secure, a desperation that drove him, in the months before Arrhæ finally killed him, to conduct himself in ways Areinnye's own file describes, without any apparent interest in softening the assessment, as monstrous by any standard the word is normally reserved for. > > Areinnye has never framed her interest in this succession as vindication, precisely, though colleagues who have seen the file note that it reads rather like someone keeping score. It is, more accurately, simple attentiveness paid to an organisation that spent the better part of a century deciding which Romulan and Reman families got to survive and which did not, and that has spent the years since Hobus discovering, one dead or discredited director at a time, that it can no longer make that decision stick. > > That attentiveness stopped being purely observational once the Tal Shiar's desperation produced an alliance rather than merely a succession crisis. Following the destruction of the Virinat colony in January 2409 and the confirmation of Colonel tr'Hakeev's alliance with the Elachi, Octavia Shanahan made Grupo Hipólita and Agencia Townsend intelligence resources directly available to Arrhæ's own campaign against both - a commitment that has run, in practice, through Areinnye rather than around her. Material assembled inside Areinnye's own working file has reached her sister's hands well ahead of anything a formal Agencia Townsend channel would have released on its own timetable, and neither woman has ever pretended the arrangement was anything other than exactly what it looks like. Areinnye has never described her own part in it as extraordinary, on the stated grounds that supplying a sister with everything she needs to survive a war is simply what a sister does, official channels or otherwise. > > > [!quote] Octavia Shanahan, attributed remark, on supporting Arrhæ's campaign against the Tal Shiar and the Elachi > > > > *I did not ask whether the intelligence should go through the usual channel. I asked Areinnye how quickly she could get it to her sister, and then I made certain the answer was always going to be immediately.* > > # Personal life > > Areinnye maintains a private residence in Madrid, within the estate's wider security perimeter but functionally separate from it in the manner most senior Valkyries eventually arrange for themselves. She has never married, and the household - Romulan in this respect as thoroughly as it is Spanish in most others - has never once treated the fact as requiring comment, since a Fvareth woman answers to no one on the point but herself. > > > [!quote] Areinnye t'Fvareth, attributed remarks, variously sourced > > > > *Rha?* ("Is that so?") — her preferred first response to a threat assessment she privately considers premature. > > > > *Kiuu mnek'nra.* ("Everyone is well.") — the report she has given Octavia Shanahan more times, over more years, than either woman has ever troubled herself to count. > > > > *Ahr'kholhnen rhanne.* ("I am a defender.") — offered, on the single occasion anyone pressed her to explain why she stayed, as the whole of the answer she considered necessary. > > Her political sympathies, since the Romulan Republic's formal recognition on 16 January 2409, sit unambiguously with the Republic - a position she shares with the whole of House Fvareth, and one that predates the recognition itself by decades, tracing rather more directly to Ambassador Spock's reunification work than to any recent development. She has never sought Republic citizenship or military commission of her own, unlike Arrhæ; her service, by her own quiet insistence, belongs to the household that gave House Fvareth somewhere to still be a house at all, and she has never regarded the two loyalties as being in any tension worth resolving. > > # Skills, training, and personal doctrine > > t'Fvareth's combat foundation runs through Suus Mahna derivatives adapted into Escuadrón Valquiria's own close-quarters doctrine, supplemented by Agencia Townsend's standard tradecraft curriculum in surveillance, counter-surveillance, and human intelligence work. Colleagues describe her combat philosophy as Romulan strategic patience married to Valkyrie decisiveness in roughly equal measure: she observes considerably longer than most operators find comfortable to watch her do, and moves, when she finally does, with a economy that leaves very little afterward requiring a second attempt. > > Four commitments are understood to underlie nearly every operational decision she makes: > > - Protect the family that chose to save mine, without requiring to be asked twice. > - Compartmentalise the feeling until the operation ends. Grieve, or celebrate, or rage afterward, and only in a room built for it. > - The Tal Shiar do not receive a second warning, on the grounds that they were never owed a first. > - Authority within Escuadrón Valquiria is not rank. It is trust, and it is re-earned continuously rather than banked. > > And, with equal consistency, the lines colleagues report her never once crossing: > > - Betraying the trust the Fvareth name has been extended within that household. > - Allowing sentiment to compromise an operation's actual outcome, however understandable the sentiment. > - Spending resources - motion, time, ammunition, or otherwise - on a gesture that serves nothing beyond itself. > > Day to day, t'Fvareth's presentation is deliberately unremarkable. Escuadrón Valquiria's routine posture is civilian dress, no visible insignia, and a manner calculated to read as nothing more alarming than a well-dressed stranger - the entire point being that nobody clocks a Valkyrie as security at all until the Valkyrie in question has decided they are permitted to notice. t'Fvareth has been mistaken, over the years, for a family friend, a driver, an unusually attentive shop assistant, and on one memorable occasion an off-duty diplomat, and has never once corrected any of these impressions faster than the situation strictly required. > > Full battle armour could not be more different, and that is rather the point. It is a considerably rarer matter besides, and a different technology entirely from the Aegis Armour Shanahan and Castañeda wear personally. Escuadrón Valquiria's own pattern is a derivative of it rather than the thing itself, developed for squadron deployment rather than for a single wearer, and its visual language departs from its parent technology deliberately enough that the two are not easily mistaken for one another. Where the Aegis Armour's own design inspiration has been kept quietly obscure, the Valquiria pattern makes no comparable effort: powered plate, baroque ornamental detailing, and - the single most immediately recognisable tell, drawn without much subtlety from the Adepta Sororitas of Warhammer 40,000 - a fleur-de-lis embossed across breastplate and pauldrons on every suit in the pattern, legible at a glance to anyone with the relevant cultural literacy and understood in simpler terms by anyone without it. Areinnye wears it only when a Valkyrie deployment has already moved past the point subtlety was ever going to help, an occurrence rare enough that most of her career could be recounted without mentioning the armour at all. > > Shanahan and Castañeda each maintain their own personal configurations of the same pattern, reserved for the occasions either woman leads Valkyries into battle directly rather than delegating the engagement to someone like t'Fvareth. It is a distinction t'Fvareth has had occasion to witness rather more often from Octavia than from Xóchitl, whose own command time is more frequently spent in Starfleet colours than in Valquiria plate. > > # Public image > > t'Fvareth maintains, even by Escuadrón Valquiria's own already considerable institutional preference for anonymity, an unusually low public profile. No confirmed photograph of her exists in any file outside the family's own private archive; the image reproduced above is drawn from that collection, with the family's permission, and was taken at a birthday party rather than for any operational or promotional purpose. This is, in substantial part, simple professional habit - a face nobody outside the household can reliably place is a face that keeps doing useful work - but it is also, by her own account, a habit with older and more Romulan roots than her Agencia Townsend service. > > Rihan tradecraft has long made use of the *nahi*, a working name assumed for travel or business one does not wish to have traced back to a birth clan, most commonly to avoid drawing the Tal Shiar's attention. Areinnye maintains an operational identity of exactly this kind for field use, consistent with standard Angel practice; its particulars, consistent with standard Angel practice, remain classified even within the household's own more casual channels. She has observed, when the subject has come up at all, that her people invented the discipline of not being findable several centuries before Agencia Townsend gave it a rose-gold tattoo and called it tradecraft, and that she sees no particular reason to improve on the original. > > # Notable relationships > > t'Fvareth's parents remain private individuals by their own preference, resident in Madrid since the 2386 evacuation and never once drawn into any account of their daughters' considerably more public lives; the family has never disclosed which of the Fvareth women, if any, presently holds formal standing as head of the house, and has never been asked twice. > > Her relationship with the wider Romulan Republic leadership is cordial rather than close - Proconsul D'Tan is aware of her by reputation and by her sister's own service record rather than through any direct dealing of his own, and Areinnye has expressed no particular interest in changing that arrangement. > > Her relationship with the Tal Shiar requires no elaboration beyond what has already been stated of the wider Fvareth family's position: absolute, and considerably older than anything the organisation itself did to earn it personally from her, though it has done a great deal since to deepen it. > > # Honours and recognition > > t'Fvareth holds no honours from any government, is not formally eligible for any Federation or Republic decoration given the classified nature of most of her service, and has never given any indication of regarding the absence as an oversight. Within Escuadrón Valquiria itself, the closest equivalent to formal recognition she has ever received is the plain, unremarked fact that newer Valkyries are quietly directed toward her when guidance is needed and neither Shanahan nor Castañeda is available to give it - an honour that appears on no record anywhere, and which she is understood to value rather more than one that would. --- > [!note] Character Dynamics > > # With Octavia > > Areinnye's devotion to Octavia Shanahan is built on gratitude that transformed, somewhere across the intervening decades, into something closer to purpose: Octavia saved the whole of House Fvareth from an extinction event without asking for anything in return, and Areinnye has spent every year since deciding, freely and repeatedly, to make certain that debt was never one Octavia had cause to regret extending. The relationship is not servitude, and both women have been plain that they would each find the description faintly insulting. Areinnye addresses Octavia with a respectful familiarity that sits somewhere between the formal and the personal registers Rihan itself would prescribe for the situation — closer than a stranger would be permitted, considerably short of family in the strict genealogical sense, and entirely sufficient for both of them. > > > [!quote] Octavia Shanahan, attributed remark > > > > I did not evacuate that family expecting a return on the investment. I am telling you this so that you understand precisely how little it changes anything that she has spent twenty years giving me one anyway. > > # With Xóchitl > > Areinnye's regard for Xóchitl Castañeda runs through the chain of command rather than around it: she respects Xóchitl's tactical judgement without reservation, and has never required persuading of Xóchitl's authority within Escuadrón Valquiria the way she might, in theory, have required persuading of an outsider's. When Xóchitl assumed command of the *USS Hephaestus* in January 2409, Areinnye's congratulations were characteristically brief, characteristically private, and accompanied by a quiet, entirely serious reaffirmation that the household's protection did not become anyone else's responsibility merely because its Operational Commander now also answered to Starfleet. > > # With Arrhæ > > The twin bond between Areinnye and Arrhæ has survived a shared childhood, a shared evacuation, and a considerable and growing physical distance between an Alpha Quadrant posting and a Beta Quadrant one, without ever once appearing to strain under any of it. The two maintain a standing intelligence partnership entirely outside any formal Agencia Townsend requirement that they do so - Areinnye tracking Alpha Quadrant developments, Arrhæ the Beta Quadrant, each cross-referencing the other's findings as a matter of habit rather than obligation. Areinnye offered tactical counsel throughout Arrhæ's long pursuit of Colonel tr'Hakeev, and has, since the destruction of Virinat, made a quiet and ongoing practice of talking her sister down from the particular flavour of guilt that comes from having saved one person and not been able to save several thousand more. > > > [!quote] Areinnye t'Fvareth, attributed remark to Arrhæ, cited by Hermóðr > > > > You had one minute and you used it correctly. That is not luck. That is competence, and I am not interested in relitigating it with you every time you have a quiet evening free to feel guilty in. Go and be useful instead. It suits you better. > > # With Vaehha > > Areinnye's protectiveness of her younger sister - twelve years her junior, and the living proof, by the family's own quiet reckoning, that House Fvareth did not merely survive Hobus but went on to build something worth having survived for - is unhurried rather than hovering. She has taken considerable, entirely private pride in Vaehha's emergence as a musician of some note, up to and including the 2408 concert tour that produced the single photograph the family has ever permitted off the estate of her, and has never once suggested to Vaehha that a career built on being looked at might have been an easier choice for someone else in this family to have made than it evidently was for her. > > # With the Shanahan-Castañeda daughters > > Areinnye is understood, without any single one of the eight ever having formally decided to grant her the standing, to occupy something close to the position of an elder cousin within the household - present for the whole of most of their childhoods, protective in the same unshowy register she extends everyone she has decided is hers to look after, and entirely without the professional distance her own job title might otherwise imply. Her connection to Amy Shanahan Castañeda carries a particular weight neither woman has ever needed to articulate aloud: born on the same day, in the same hospital, in adjacent beds, to two families whose futures Octavia Shanahan had just finished quietly rearranging within the same afternoon. > > # With fellow Valkyries > > Within Escuadrón Valquiria, Areinnye functions as an entirely informal mentor to newer recruits, sought out rather than assigned, and scrupulous about never once treating the seniority this has earned her as anything resembling rank. She leads, by consistent account, through demonstration rather than instruction, and has never been observed positioning herself as anyone's superior - Valkyries, in her own stated view, are equals in purpose regardless of how unevenly experience happens to be distributed among them. --- --- ##### Directory Constraints #fanfiction/of-goths-and-gods/lore/character #fanfiction/of-goths-and-gods/lore/character/areinnye-fvareth --- --- Attributions: 1. Christina Chong, portraying La'An Noonien-Singh from "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds". Image sourced from IMDB page on "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds". Used under fair use for fanfiction purposes. --- ← [[Master Character Registry|Back to Registry]]