> [!lore-page] > > [!infobox] <div align="center">Arrhæ t'Fvareth</div><div align="left" style="font-size: 0.85em; color: var(--text-muted);">Arrhæ i-Ra'tleihfi t'Fvareth</div> > > <img src="https://obsidian-media.gentoo-amberjack.ts.net/ficcion/fanfiction/of-goths-and-gods/lore/characters/faceclaims/arrhae-fvareth.jpg"> > > <div align="center" style="font-size: 0.85em; color: var(--text-muted);">Arrhæ t'Fvareth aboard USS Hephaestus in off-duty mess hall meeting with Xóchitl Castañeda concerning the Elachi-Tal Shiar alliance. USS Hephaestus had rendezvoused with RWW Æl'Khreinn in the Carraya system (2409)</div> > > <br> > > > > | Biographical Data | | > > |---|---| > > | **Full Name** | *Arrhæ 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** | [[Areinnye t'Fvareth]] (twin)<br>Vaehha t'Fvareth | > > | **Affiliation** | [[Agencia Townsend]]<br>Romulan Republican Navy | > > | **Occupation** | Angel (Agencia Townsend)<br>Riov / Commander (Romulan Republican Navy) | > > > > | Lore Notes | | > > |---|---| > > | **Faceclaim** | Christina Chong (2025) | > > | **Height** | 5'4" (163cm) | > > | **Neurocognitive Profile** | Neurotypical by Federation clinical standards; colleagues describe a controlled stoicism that gives way without warning and to a remarkably consistent comic rhythm, to a dry deadpan wit most reliably triggered by anything currently trying to kill her. | > > | **Native Language** | Rihannsu | > > | **Fluent Languages** | Rihannsu<br>Federation Standard (English)<br>Spanish<br>Klingon<br>Vulcan | > > **Arrhæ i-Ra'thelhfi t'Fvareth** (born 18 September 2374; Ra'tleihfi, Romulus, Romulan Star Empire) is a Romulan Republican Navy officer, currently holding the rank of **Riov** (Commander) and commanding the Mogai-class heavy warbird **RWW Æl'Khreinn**, and, considerably less publicly, an Angel of **[[Agencia Townsend]]**, the private intelligence agency to which she has belonged since August 2401. She is the younger twin sister of **[[Areinnye t'Fvareth]]**, born nineteen minutes after her. Where Areinnye's service has run, for the whole of her adult life, through a single household in Madrid - Arrhæ's has run through considerably more distance and considerably more open flame. > > Her given name translates, in Rihannsu, to something close to "*worthy*." Her twin's translates to "*hell*." Arrhæ has observed, on the single occasion she has addressed the pairing at any length, that she has spent the better part of thirty-five years trying to work out which of them their mother actually meant more literally, and has concluded, without much apparent distress about the answer, that it was probably both, applied to whichever daughter needed which quality most on any given day. > > Like her sister, she carries the debt of House Fvareth's 1 March 2386 evacuation from a Romulus that no longer exists - arranged, at Octavia Shanahan's own initiative and expense, less than a month after Arrhæ's own birth city delivered two infant girls to two mothers in adjacent hospital beds. Unlike her sister, Arrhæ did not stay in Madrid's orbit to repay it. She left, built something of her own on the Beta Quadrant's edge, watched the Tal Shiar burn it to the ground twenty-three years later, and has spent every year since making that organisation regret the decision one director at a time. > > > [!quote] Arrhæ t'Fvareth, attributed remark, on being asked why she left Madrid at twenty-two rather than staying > > > > *Areinnye stayed to protect the family that saved ours. I left to prove the saving had actually taken. Gratitude that never leaves the house it was given in isn't gratitude - it's rent. I wanted to build something with what Octavia Shanahan gave us, somewhere she'd never once asked to see the receipts for. I built it. The Tal Shiar burned it down. I am currently in the process of making that a considerably more expensive mistake than whoever ordered it appears to have anticipated.* > > # Contents > > - Early life > - The evacuation of House Fvareth > - Virinat > - Agencia Townsend > - The Romulan Republic Navy > - Notable operations > - The war against the Tal Shiar > - The Elachi > - Personal life > - Skills, training, and personal doctrine > - Public image > - Notable relationships > - Honours and recognition > > # Early life > > Arrhæ was born in Ra'tleihfi, on Romulus, on 18 September 2374 - nineteen minutes, by every surviving account, after her twin sister Areinnye, a margin Areinnye has spent a lifetime treating as settled fact and Arrhæ has spent an equal lifetime treating as a rounding error not worth the dignity of a formal dispute. House Fvareth traces to the southern provinces of Romulus - smooth-browed rather than ridged, and matrilineal in the ordinary Romulan fashion, descent and clan membership both running through the maternal line. Formal Romulan naming convention places the given name first, a locative denoting birthplace second, and the house-clan last: **Arrhæ i-Ra'tleihfi t'Fvareth** in full - Arrhæ, of the city of Ra'tleihfi, of House Fvareth - with the feminine clan prefix *t'* doing the same grammatical work for her that it does for her sister. Common usage among Romulans reduces this to given name plus clan, and etiquette reserves the given name itself for family or those granted equivalent standing; the Shanahan-Castañeda household has used Arrhæ's given name without exception since she was twelve years old, a liberty she has never once corrected them on any more than her sister has. > > Arrhæ arrived in Madrid at eleven, in the same March 2386 convoy as the rest of House Fvareth, and grew up there in the same loose, then increasingly close, orbit around the Shanahan-Castañeda household that shaped her sister - schooled alongside Luna and Imogen, absorbing Spanish and Federation Standard the way a resettled child absorbs a new home's languages rather than through any formal instruction, and retaining Rihannsu, by her own account, as the language she still thinks fastest in under genuine pressure. She has described her own childhood in Madrid in terms rather drier than her sister generally allows herself. > > > [!quote] Arrhæ t'Fvareth, attributed remark, on growing up in Madrid > > > > *Areinnye will tell you it was an unremarkable childhood, and she is not lying so much as she is being extremely selective about what she considers remarkable. I remember two girls two years our senior making it clear, before either of us had ever needed the protection, that anyone who touched a Romulan or Reman child at that school would answer to them personally. I remember not fully understanding, at eleven, that this was not how most refugee children got to grow up. I understand it very well now. I have never stopped being grateful for it. I have simply chosen to express the gratitude at considerably greater range than my sister does.* > > > > *What that city actually gave me, beyond the schoolyard guarantee, was proof that a Romulan could be ordinary somewhere. Not tolerated somewhere - ordinary. I queued for buses. I failed a mathematics exam Imogen has never once let me forget failing worse than she did. I learned to argue in Spanish before I properly learned to argue in Rihannsu, which still strikes some of the older Virinat colonists as faintly indecent when I let it slip. Madrid did not raise me to be grateful. It raised me to expect competence and kindness to be unremarkable qualities in the people around me, and then spent eleven years quietly failing to correct that expectation, because as far as I could tell nobody there ever wanted to.* > > > > *I have measured every other place I have lived since against that particular failure to disappoint me. Most of them have not measured up. That is not the city's fault. It is a considerably higher bar than most people realise they are setting when they simply decide to be decent to a child who arrived with nothing but a name and a burnt-out sun behind her.* > > Combat instruction arrived early for both sisters, extended by Octavia Shanahan and Xóchitl Castañeda to House Fvareth's daughters on the same terms as their own, on the stated grounds that a household with this many declared enemies does not train some of its children and not others because of whose name happens to be on the deed. By her mid-teens, Arrhæ had absorbed the better part of a decade's grounding in Suus Mahna derivatives the same unremarkable way she had absorbed Spanish - a foundation that would, considerably later and considerably further from Madrid, prove rather more load-bearing than either mother had specifically designed it to be for her. > > Where the twins' paths ran identically for twenty-two years, they diverged sharply and by Arrhæ's own deliberate choice in June 2397. Shortly before her twenty-third birthday, Arrhæ 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. She has cited the colony's founding temperament as the specific draw rather than any general restlessness with Madrid itself: a community that had already decided, collectively, to stop being defined by what Romulus used to be, made up of people who would judge her on what she could actually contribute rather than on a house-clan name or a Shanahan-Castañeda connection she had never once traded on and had no intention of starting to. Madrid itself she never fully left behind. She kept her fluency deliberately sharp long after there was any practical need to, and within her first year on Virinat had begun offering informal Spanish lessons to any Romulan or Reman colonist who wanted them - unpaid, unadvertised beyond word of mouth, and, by her own account, one of the more quietly satisfying things she has ever done with an idle evening. She has never once described the decision to leave Madrid as a difficult one, though she has been considerably more forthcoming than her sister about what prompted it. > > > [!quote] Arrhæ t'Fvareth, attributed remark, on leaving Madrid > > > > *Areinnye chose to spend her debt to Octavia Shanahan by staying close enough to keep repaying it daily. I respect the choice. I did not want it for myself. I wanted to take what she had given House Fvareth - a second chance nobody in that hospital room had actually asked for - and go and do something with it somewhere she would never once have to watch me do it. Virinat was not running away from Madrid. It was proving the investment had paid off somewhere she couldn't personally audit the returns.* > > # 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 Arrhæ and Areinnye's mother was, at the same hour, delivering the family's youngest daughter, Vaehha. Arrhæ and Areinnye, not yet twelve, were both in the building. Arrhæ has described the day rather more plainly than her twin, and rather more focused on the practical mechanics of what changed in the room than on the atmosphere of it. > > > [!quote] Arrhæ t'Fvareth, attributed remark, on first meeting Octavia Shanahan > > > > *My sister remembers the poetry of it. I remember the arithmetic. A woman in active labour asked my father, between contractions, whether House Fvareth's holdings were worth shipping - not whether we wanted to leave, which nobody had thought to ask yet, but whether there would be anything left of us worth moving if we said yes. She had clearly already decided the answer was going to be yes regardless of ours. I was eleven years old and I understood, watching her, that I had just witnessed someone solve two problems in the same breath without treating either as the interruption of the other. I have tried to run my own life on that principle ever since, with what I would consider reasonable, though imperfect, success.* > > > > *We had heard of her before that hospital room, the way most of Ra'tleihfi had by early 2386: the human woman funding an evacuation Starfleet itself had abandoned, running convoys out of her own pocket because nobody with a fleet had been willing to. The coverage had been growing kinder to her for months by then, in step with how much closer Hobus was getting and how much less patience anyone still on Romulus had left for institutions that had already proven they would leave. By the time my mother went into labour in the next bed, Octavia Shanahan was not a stranger doing something remarkable. She was simply the one remarkable thing that had not yet let anyone down.* > > > > *The occasion was considered noteworthy enough, locally, that the registrar in Ra'tleihfi processed Amy's birth certificate in Rihannsu rather than Federation Standard - by hand, and rather faster than the office's usual pace, which even at eleven I understood to be a compliment nobody had explicitly asked for. It records her, in full, as Amy Amelia María Shanahan Castañeda. Vaehha's was the very next certificate that same registrar processed that day. I have always found something quietly correct about the two of them being logged one after the other, in the same office, by the same tired clerk, on the same afternoon the rest of us were deciding what survival was going to look like.* > > > > *I learned considerably later what had actually been happening on the Federation side of that same fortnight - that Admiral Picard had put his own resignation on the table rather than accept the Council's abandonment of the evacuation fleet, offered Starfleet a plan to make good the lost ships from mothballed hulls at Beta Antares and 40 Eridani A, and watched Command accept the resignation instead of the plan. He is understood to have taken that as a personal failure and retreated to La Barre with the shame of it for some time afterward. Octavia Shanahan's own response, once she learned of it, was less sympathy than correction: she intended to prove to him, in the only language she has ever fully trusted, that he had not actually failed anyone if she had anything to say about it. That is one of the reasons she flew those convoy runs personally rather than simply funding them from Madrid. The other, by her own account, required no one else's guilt to justify it at all - it was the right thing to do, and she was entirely content to let history make up its own mind about the rest of it.* > > 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 were moved alongside its members, at Octavia Shanahan's own arrangement and expense - a distinction that 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. Arrhæ has never described the intervening seventeen months, nor the manner of her family's final departure from a homeworld about to cease existing, as anything she considers herself owed particular sympathy for, though she has marked the ninth of February privately, without fail, in every year since - a habit Escuadrón Valquiria's own household calendar has, without anyone formally deciding it should, quietly come to observe alongside her. > > # Virinat > > Arrhæ arrived on Virinat in June 2397, shortly before turning twenty-three, and spent nearly twelve years there before the colony's destruction - longer, by a considerable margin, than she has since spent anywhere else. Virinat was, by design and by the temperament of the people who settled it, precisely unlike Madrid: an agricultural colony of Romulan refugees who had no particular wish to rebuild the Empire that had failed them, and considerably less interest in the security apparatus of a household, however well-intentioned, that came with the name Shanahan attached to it. Arrhæ has described the appeal in terms she has never troubled to soften. > > > [!quote] Arrhæ t'Fvareth, attributed remark, on choosing Virinat > > > > *I did not want to build a life inside anyone's protection, however earned or however kindly meant. I wanted to build one that could stand on its own, on a colony full of people who had decided the same thing about themselves. Virinat did not ask what House Fvareth used to be. It asked what I could brew.* > > On 23 August 2397, Arrhæ founded **Hwæhrai's Refuge Brewery** in the colony's Rianekfal district, specialising in khellid ale and traditional Romulan beverages - named for the clan of **Ekkhæ t'Hwæhrai**, whom Arrhæ had met not long after arriving and whose relationship with her, formalised from 12 June 2398 onward, became the organising fact of the life she built on Virinat. The brewery was, by every account, a modest success rather than a spectacular one - beloved locally, unremarkable galactically, and precisely the kind of unglamorous, self-sustaining enterprise Arrhæ has said she wanted more than she ever wanted anything the Shanahan-Castañeda name could have handed her outright. > > The connection to Madrid did not sever entirely, whatever distance Arrhæ put between herself and it. Octavia Shanahan became a standing customer, ordering khellid ale shipped to Earth on a regular basis in the years before Virinat's destruction - a quiet, entirely unpublicised patronage Arrhæ has described as meaning rather more to her than the woman placing the order likely ever fully appreciated. > > > [!quote] Arrhæ t'Fvareth, attributed remark, on Octavia Shanahan's standing order > > > > *She never once asked for a discount, never once mentioned who she was to the shipping agent, and never once let the order lapse in twelve years. I built that brewery specifically so nobody would need to think of it as a Shanahan-Castañeda charity case. She found a way to support it without ever once making it one. I have decided not to examine that generosity too closely, on the grounds that some kindnesses are better received than interrogated.* > > Arrhæ's recruitment into Agencia Townsend began, without her knowledge, on 14 August 2400, when an Angel already operating in Virinat's brewery scene observed her identify a former Tal Shiar operative among the colony's regular patrons by behavioural markers alone - an unprompted demonstration of exactly the operational awareness the organisation looks for, and one that had nothing to do with any brief the Angel had actually been given that day. A recruitment card followed on 17 August; Arrhæ activated it the same day, arrived in Madrid for training on 23 August, entered the pipeline on the 26th, and graduated an Angel exactly one year later, on 26 August 2401 - with no idea, until she was told directly by a Bosley some months into her own training, that her twin sister had already been through the same door the better part of a year ahead of her. > > > [!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 > > Arrhæ's Angel tattoo sits on her right shoulder blade - the mirror of her sister's left, a symmetry neither twin has ever needed to explain to the other, or to anyone who has seen both. Her specialisations from graduation onward ran toward countersurveillance, strategic sabotage, and Romulan diaspora network integration, disciplines colleagues have credited to a woman who spent her adolescence learning to read a room for danger and her twenties learning to build one worth defending in the first place. > > Her post-graduation assignment ran through the Beta Quadrant's own Romulan diaspora networks, with a standing brief to track and disrupt Tal Shiar remnants - reporting to **Bosley Shathrissia sh'Kravar** as primary handler, with strategic oversight running, as for every Angel, to Charlie herself. Notable achievements from this period include the infiltration of a Tal Shiar cell operating out of Khitomer Station in 2402, and an eighteen-month surveillance operation tracking the movements of a rising Tal Shiar officer named tr'Hakeev, conducted between 2407 and 2409 and cut short, in the end, not by discovery but by the very attack it had failed to prevent. > > The spatial trajector installed at Arrhæ's own Virinat home on 18 February 2403 - authorised personally by Octavia Shanahan, and intended, at the time, as a contingency Arrhæ hoped never to need - would prove, six years later, to be the single most consequential piece of technology either woman ever discussed installing. It was through that trajector that Arrhæ forced Ekkhæ to Madrid in Virinat's final minute; Areinnye and Octavia knew something had gone badly wrong before either of them had a shred of confirmation to go on, simply from the fact that the receiving trajector at the villa had activated at all outside a scheduled test. Ekkhæ arrived, by every account, coherent enough to tell them everything she had seen within minutes of stepping through - a degree of composure and observational recall under the circumstances that did not go unnoticed by anyone in the room. She was offered a recruitment card of her own within the fortnight, once she and Arrhæ had each confirmed, across an increasingly strained subspace connection, that the other was still alive; she accepted a couple of weeks after that, once both of them had actually had time to sit with the fact that they'd survived at all. > > What Octavia, Areinnye, and Ekkhæ learned in that same conversation - all three of them at once, before Arrhæ herself had any opportunity to shape how it was told - was that Arrhæ had not simply escaped Virinat by shuttle. She had taken a warbird into the fighting too, and opened fire on the **IRW Khnial** on her way out of the system, by what she has since described, without much modesty about the alternative explanation, with a fair bit of luck rather than any deliberate targeting solution. The Khnial itself sustained comparatively minor damage. Colonel tr'Hakeev did not: he lost his left eye in the same exchange, a detail Areinnye did not learn until considerably later and has never once pretended not to enjoy knowing. > > # The Romulan Republic Navy > > Arrhæ enlisted in the Romulan Republic Navy on 5 January 2409, three days after Virinat's destruction, and holds the rank of **Riov** - Commander - in command of the Mogai-class heavy warbird **RRW Æl'Khreinn**. Octavia Shanahan is understood to have personally facilitated the dual-service arrangement that followed: Arrhæ serves openly as a Republic officer, with no attempt made by either party to disguise the fact, while quietly retaining her Angel status and continuing to provide Agencia Townsend with strategic intelligence and covert operational support parallel to her Republic duties. The arrangement benefits both organisations in ways neither has had any particular reason to publicise - the Republic gains access to Agencia Townsend's intelligence network without the diplomatic complications of a formal alliance; Agencia Townsend gains a degree of integration into Romulan Republic military structure no amount of conventional tradecraft could otherwise have purchased. > > In the immediate aftermath of Virinat, the *Æl'Khreinn* rendezvoused with the *HNS Hipólita Promesa* in the Acamar system, where the warbird underwent a comprehensive retrofit inside one of the *Promesa*'s own docking bays - Industrias Shanahan materials science and systems engineering applied wholesale to a standard Republic-issue Mogai hull. No asymmetric weapons were added; Arrhæ has been explicit, more than once, that she has never wanted the *Æl'Khreinn* mistaken for something it structurally is not. What the *Promesa*'s engineering teams delivered instead was depth - shielding, structural integrity, power generation, and damage control refined considerably beyond anything a Mogai hull was ever designed to carry, without altering the silhouette, the weapons loadout, or the sensor signature a Tal Shiar analyst would expect to see looking back at them. > > The retrofit package had, by Hermóðr's own account, been sitting in reserve for some time before Virinat ever fell: Arrhæ's years of STRATINT reporting on Mogai-class systems and doctrine had given Industrias Shanahan's engineering division a working profile of the platform long before she ever held a commission to fly one, and Octavia had quietly authorised a compatible retrofit kit be kept fabricated and ready against the day her Angel might need it fitted to an actual hull. That the *Khnial* came away from Virinat with "comparatively minor damage" rather than none at all is, on this reading, no longer simply a matter of luck - the warbird Arrhæ flew out of that engagement was, by every account, still stock. Virinat's own defence had not been nothing. It had simply not been enough. > > > [!quote] Octavia Shanahan, attributed remark, on the retrofit's restraint > > > > *I was not interested in turning her ship into something she'd need to explain if it were ever caught decloaked in the wrong shipyard. I wanted her crew to come home. There is a difference between making something lethal and making it disproportionate, and I have never had much patience for the second when the first was already sufficient.* > > Arrhæ has since adopted a standing tactical discipline with the retrofitted vessel that colleagues within Agencia Townsend have taken to calling, with some private amusement, *sandbagging*: running the *Æl'Khreinn*'s reactor output deliberately throttled to match the baseline signature of an unmodified Mogai warbird for as long as an engagement's opening moves permit, so that an opposing commander's confidence - and, more usefully, their tactical assumptions - are calibrated against a ship that no longer exists. The true output is revealed only once battle is properly joined, by which point the correction has generally stopped being a fair fight in any sense the enemy commander would recognise as sporting. Arrhæ has never expressed the faintest discomfort about the deception. > > > [!quote] Arrhæ t'Fvareth, attributed remark, on the tactic > > > > *A Tal Shiar captain who believes he is fighting a stock Mogai fights like a man who believes he can afford to be patient. I let him believe that for exactly as long as it is useful to me. Then I stop being patient on his behalf. Areinnye tells me there is a term for this in Federation sport - something about weight classes, and a lighter competitor left standing over a considerably larger one who assumed the fight was already decided. I would not know. I know only that the Tal Shiar keep assuming they are fighting the ship they read about in the last report, and I keep declining to correct the report.* > > Her working relationship with Republic leadership has been, on the whole, considerably warmer than her relationship with the institution she left behind. Proconsul D'Tan is understood to respect her effectiveness without particular reservation about her unorthodox methods. Commander tr'Temer served as her principal liaison with Republic Command until his death on 13 January 2409; Commander t'Nadel, who succeeded him from the 14th, is fully aware of her Agencia Townsend affiliation and has never treated the arrangement as anything requiring further comment. > > Arrhæ's command style aboard the *Æl'Khreinn* is understood by her crew in fairly plain terms: a woman with a personal vendetta against the Tal Shiar that everyone aboard already knows about, who will push a crew hard but has never once been observed to waste a life doing it. Post-engagement rituals aboard ship - a small, carefully rationed pour of khellid ale following any successful action, a toast kept deliberately brief - have become something close to institutional, and crew morale is, by every account, exceptionally high; more than one crew member has been quoted, informally, to the effect that they would follow her into a singularity if she gave the order and expect to see the whole crew again on the other side of it. > > # Notable operations > > Two incidents, beyond the events of January 2409, have entered something approaching legend within the family and, in one case, within Escuadrón Valquiria more widely. > > The first is not, strictly, Arrhæ's own operation at all, though it concerns her directly. On 10 March 2406, Octavia Shanahan had a dartboard printed bearing the likeness of a rising Tal Shiar officer tr'Hakeev - a man already showing a well-documented interest in House Fvareth's continued survival being neither guaranteed nor especially convenient to him. Areinnye took up a bow rather than her usual crossbow and put an arrow through the centre of the portrait's forehead from across the room, on the first attempt, with a degree of accuracy that would have made Robin Hood check his own form. The shot acquired a weight nobody in the family fully intended it to carry once Arrhæ, three years later and in deadly earnest, hunted the same man down and killed him on Brea III. Arrhæ has never described the coincidence as prophecy, on the stated grounds that she does not believe in prophecy, but she has conceded, once, that she has never been able to look at that particular dartboard without a certain grim satisfaction she has not troubled herself to disguise. > > The second is the destruction of Virinat itself, on 2 January 2409 - the single event that ended one chapter of Arrhæ's life and opened the one she currently occupies. > > # The war against the Tal Shiar > > Arrhæ's opposition to the Tal Shiar predates Virinat's destruction by decades, tracing to the same evacuation that saved House Fvareth in the first place; what Virinat did was convert an inherited, ideological hostility into something considerably more personal, and considerably less patient. She maintains, entirely on her own initiative and well beyond anything her formal Agencia Townsend brief requires, a detailed working file on the organisation's own long habit of consuming its leadership - General t'Nedar, killed in action in 2405 during an engagement Octavia Shanahan commanded personally; Colonel tr'Terak, killed in battle in 2407, with the same woman present to see it happen, his death opening a directorship succession struggle within the Tal Shiar's own remaining leadership that Colonel tr'Hakeev would not conclusively win for the better part of a year afterward. > > That campaign has produced, among its less formal artefacts, something Areinnye has been heard to describe, without much exaggeration, as the single most collaborative project the family has ever undertaken outside of actual combat operations: a running, jointly maintained, cross-referenced index of insults reserved exclusively for Colonel tr'Hakeev, added to over the years by Arrhæ, by Areinnye, and, on considerably more occasions than dignity would strictly recommend for a woman of her position, by Octavia Shanahan herself. Entries are traded between the three with something close to genuine competitive pride, and a standing favourite - contributed, as it happens, by neither sister nor Octavia - has proven remarkably durable. > > > [!quote] Ilweth i-Nelvath t'Rehu, Bosley, Agencia Townsend (Québec Station), attributed remark to Octavia Shanahan, cited in Arrhæ's own working file > > > > *I served alongside the man during the War - multiple posting rotations, more of them than I would have chosen given the option. He was never entirely present in the way a Tal Shiar officer is meant to be. He had an obsession with the Iconians nobody could ever persuade him to stop discussing, and a well-documented habit of inflating his own account of virtually anything he had personally touched. I did not understand, at the time, how a man that convinced of his own importance survived long enough to be promoted past the rank I first knew him at. I understand it even less now that the promotion in question was to the head of the entire organisation. I have stopped trying to make it make sense. I have settled, instead, for calling him what he actually is, and for making certain Agencia Townsend has everything it needs to see him lose.* > > > > *The man is, and I do not say this lightly, a fascist Caillou. I read about Caillou during my first fortnight on Earth, in September 2385, trying to make sense of a planet I had defected to rather than one I had ever intended to visit - a bald, perpetually whining four-year-old from some archived children's programme, convinced the entire world existed to be inconvenienced by his feelings. I have never found a more precise description of tr'Hakeev, and I have had rather longer than most to look for one.* > > > > *As for whatever charm the man is supposed to possess - I have served with him, I have watched him hold a room, and I can tell you with complete confidence that it amounts to the exact charm of finishing your business on the toilet and discovering, only then, that it does not flush. Immediate. Undignified. And entirely somebody else's problem to deal with the moment you can manage to leave the room.* > > Bosley t'Rehu - a Tal Shiar defector who used the chaos of the 2385-2387 evacuation to walk away from a service she had grown to despise well before tr'Hakeev ever rose to lead it - has continued, from her present posting at Agencia Townsend's Québec facility, to provide Arrhæ's campaign with intelligence support considerably beyond anything her own brief technically requires: a small, quiet act of reciprocity Arrhæ has never once taken for granted, and has said as much to her directly on more than one occasion. > > Arrhæ's own assessment of the Tal Shiar's decline under three successive, increasingly discredited directors is recorded with rather less theatre than the insult file might suggest, and rather more clarity. > > > [!quote] Arrhæ t'Fvareth, attributed remark, on the Tal Shiar's succession crisis > > > > *General t'Nedar died in action in 2405 in battle against the Hipólita Promesa, which Octavia Shanahan commanded personally. Colonel tr'Terak died in battle two years later, with the same woman present to see it happen. Neither man handed the Tal Shiar a clean line of succession on the way out - tr'Terak's death left the directorship to whichever of his own subordinates could out-manoeuvre the rest, and it took tr'Hakeev the better part of a year of eating his own organisation alive to come out the other side of that argument still standing. I take no particular satisfaction in an enemy's incompetence. I take considerable satisfaction in having been the one waiting when tr'Hakeev finally ran out of people left to blame for it.* > > # The Elachi > > Where Arrhæ's hatred of the Tal Shiar is personal, her assessment of the Elachi - the subspace-dwelling, parasitic species with whom tr'Hakeev struck an alliance in the months preceding Virinat's destruction - sits in a category she has never once permitted herself to describe in comparable terms. The Elachi reproduce by infecting captured humanoids with spores that consume the host from within, coalescing eventually into new Elachi; whether consciousness persists through the process remains unconfirmed and, in Arrhæ's own stated view, is not a question she has any wish to see answered definitively. > > > [!quote] Arrhæ t'Fvareth, attributed remark, on the Elachi > > > > *The Borg assimilate you. Grotesque, but you are, in some diminished sense, still alive afterwards. The Elachi turn you into fungal matter and call the result reproduction. There is no coexistence available with a species whose biology requires you as a substrate. I can understand the Tal Shiar's motives even while I despise them - power, control, a particular flavour of fear dressed up as ideology. The Elachi have none of that. They have hunger. I do not negotiate with hunger. I eliminate it.* > > On 2 January 2409, a Tal Shiar fleet under tr'Hakeev's direct command, with an Elachi vessel confirmed present alongside the flagship *IRW Khnial*, destroyed the Virinat colony. Arrhæ was at Hwæhrai's Refuge Brewery when the fleet appeared in orbit. She assessed the situation within minutes - escape window narrow, evacuation of the colony as a whole no longer realistic - and made the single decision she has since described as the only one that mattered: she activated the spatial trajector installed in her home's sub-basement six years earlier, forced Ekkhæ through it to Madrid over her partner's own protests, remained behind briefly to assist other colonists, and escaped the system by commandeered shuttle in the final minute before orbital bombardment began. Estimated casualties on Virinat exceeded five thousand four hundred; approximately six hundred colonists escaped or were evacuated by other means. Arrhæ watched the colony's destruction from orbit. The brewery burned with it. > > What Arrhæ learned afterwards, through Agencia Townsend intelligence channels, sharpened the loss into something considerably worse than grief: the Tal Shiar's Elachi coordination had been in place for months before Virinat, and the assault itself had been a test run for a wider campaign of "pacification" against rebellious Romulan colonies - one in which, had the Virinat operation succeeded fully, the Elachi were slated to conduct what the intelligence reports termed cleanup. Every colonist Arrhæ failed to evacuate would, in that scenario, not simply have died. She has never fully put the knowledge down, and has never claimed to have tried. > > > [!quote] Arrhæ t'Fvareth, attributed remark, on learning of the Elachi contingency > > > > *I had one minute. I used it to save Ekkhæ rather than myself, and I have spent every day since being told, by people who love me, that this was the correct decision. I know it was. I also know that if the trajector had failed - if I had been thirty seconds slower activating it - I would not simply have lost her. I would have watched her become something else's substrate, and I would have had to live with having watched it. That is not a hypothetical I am able to file away neatly. I have chosen, instead, to convert it into fuel.* > > Her twin's response to the confession, relayed secondhand, was characteristically unsentimental and characteristically correct. > > > [!quote] Areinnye t'Fvareth, attributed remark to Arrhæ, cited by Hermóðr Shanahan Castañeda > > > > *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.* > > Octavia Shanahan's own response, delivered on Arrhæ's next intelligence briefing in Madrid, addressed the trajector's original installation directly. > > > [!quote] Octavia Shanahan, attributed remark to Arrhæ > > > > *I heard you evacuated Ekkhæ with one minute to spare. That is not criticism. That is confirmation I gave the trajector to the right person. You used it exactly as intended - decisive action under extreme pressure. That is why I authorised the installation in the first place. I knew you would use it correctly if it ever came to that. Now - you want resources for the campaign that follows from this. You have them. No questions. No delays.* > > Arrhæ's own reaction to the discovery of the Tal Shiar-Elachi alliance, once confirmed, has entered something close to family legend for its deadpan delivery alone. > > > [!quote] Arrhæ t'Fvareth, attributed remark, on learning of the Tal Shiar-Elachi alliance > > > > *The Tal Shiar has allied itself with a parasitic fungus that eats people alive. I would say they have hit rock bottom, but apparently there is a sub-basement. Forget what I said about the Tal Shiar being merely evil. They are not evil. They are stupid. One does not ally with a species that eats its allies.* > > Since Virinat, Arrhæ's standing rules of engagement against Elachi vessels depart considerably from Republic doctrine on disabling and accepting surrender: she gives none, on the stated grounds that a species which cannot be meaningfully said to take prisoners does not merit the courtesy of being offered any in return. Republic command has, by her own account, never seriously pushed back on the deviation. Most of her superiors, when pressed, have agreed with her. > > # Personal life > > Arrhæ's relationship with **Ekkhæ t'Hwæhrai** dates to 12 June 2398, and remains, by every account including her own, the fixed point around which everything else she has built or lost since has been organised. Where Arrhæ carries the accumulated weight of loss and vigilance, Ekkhæ carries something closer to unhurried hope - a contrast Arrhæ has described, in her own idiom, as the entire reason either of the two qualities remains bearable in the other's company. > > > [!quote] Arrhæ t'Fvareth, attributed remark, on Ekkhæ > > > > *Your optimism is exhausting.* \[Translation: an admission of affection Arrhæ has never once bothered to phrase more directly, on the stated grounds that Ekkhæ has long since learned to translate it correctly without her help.\] > > Ekkhæ's own survivor's guilt following Virinat's destruction was considerable, and Arrhæ's response to it - providing support while simultaneously hunting those responsible - has been described by both women as compartmentalisation practised in the only direction either has ever found workable: vengeance and care, kept rigorously separate, pursued with equal seriousness. By April 2409, Ekkhæ had begun rebuilding a life on Earth with support from the wider Shanahan-Castañeda household and Escuadrón Valquiria; Arrhæ visits between deployments, and the relationship, by every account, remains as settled as distance permits. > > Hwæhrai's Refuge Brewery no longer exists as a physical facility, though its recipes survive on an encrypted PADD, and Arrhæ has, on more than one occasion, brewed small improvised batches aboard the *Æl'Khreinn* using whatever equipment could be adapted for the purpose, sharing the results with her crew during shore leave. Both she and Ekkhæ have discussed rebuilding the brewery in full, together, on New Romulus or another Republic colony world, once the Tal Shiar threat is sufficiently reduced to make the undertaking worth the risk again. Marriage has been discussed and deliberately delayed on the same grounds; children have been discussed considerably more tentatively, and neither woman has treated the timing as settled. > > Arrhæ's own spirituality runs to a pragmatic scepticism regarding traditional Romulan elemental and ancestral practice - respectful of the forms without particular adherence to them, on grounds she has stated plainly enough that nobody within the family has ever felt the need to press her further on the point. > > > [!quote] Arrhæ t'Fvareth, attributed remark, on faith > > > > *The Elements do not stop disruptor fire. Ancestors do not save colonies from orbital bombardment. I honour tradition by surviving, and by making certain others survive alongside me. I have not yet found a version of piety that does more than that.* > > # Skills, training, and personal doctrine > > Arrhæ's operational skill set runs to starship command, ground combat and asymmetric warfare, STRATINT, and strategic sabotage, underpinned by the standard Agencia Townsend Angel curriculum and considerably sharpened, since 2409, by the demands of open Republic military command. Colleagues describe her combat doctrine as adaptive aggression - strike decisively, withdraw before the position calcifies, and never once be caught unprepared for the position collapsing entirely, a lesson she has said, without much ambiguity, that Virinat taught her rather more thoroughly than any simulation ever managed to. > > Four commitments are understood to underlie nearly every operational decision she makes: > > - The Tal Shiar took everything. They will answer for everything. > - Protect what remains of home, even when home is presently ash. > - Trust is earned through demonstrated action, never through declaration. > - Ekkhæ's safety outranks every other operational consideration without exception. > > And, with equal consistency, the lines colleagues report her never once crossing: > > - Abandoning Ekkhæ for any reason - having already done so once, by brute necessity, she has resolved never to repeat it. > - Compromising Romulan Republic security for personal advantage. > - Cooperating with the Tal Shiar under any circumstance, however tactically convenient. > - Permitting grief to compromise operational effectiveness in the moment it is most needed. > > Her deadpan wit, colleagues are careful to note, functions as a coping mechanism rather than as cruelty - sharper around the Tal Shiar and the Elachi, considerably gentler around Ekkhæ, and never once, by any account on record, aimed at a victim or a survivor of anything. > > # Public image > > Arrhæ's public profile splits cleanly along the line of her dual service. As a Romulan Republic Navy officer, she is a known and respected quantity - her command of the *Æl'Khreinn*, her anti-Tal Shiar operational record, and her personal history with Virinat are all a matter of Republic record, openly discussed and, within the Republic's own officer corps, quietly admired. Her continuing status as an Agencia Townsend Angel is, by contrast, known to nobody outside a small circle of senior Bosleys, Charlie herself, and the family that raised her - a compartmentalisation she maintains with the same rigour her sister applies to her own field identity, and one she has never found any particular difficulty living inside. > > # Notable relationships > > Her bond with **Areinnye** 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, cross-referencing findings as a matter of habit rather than obligation. Her relationship with **Octavia Shanahan** is built, as her sister's is, on gratitude transformed into purpose rather than obligation discharged and forgotten; Arrhæ views Octavia as someone who acts rather than merely speaks about justice, and has said as much directly, more than once, without any apparent embarrassment at the sentiment. Her relationship with **Vaehha**, twelve years her junior, runs protective rather than instructive - she was audibly uneasy when Vaehha joined Agencia Townsend in 2408, and has since settled into an informal mentorship role during her younger sister's own Beta Quadrant deployments, protective without crowding. > > Her relationship with **Rear Admiral T'nae** of Starfleet Command mirrors her sister's and her family's own: openly hostile since T'nae's conduct toward a visiting Romulan Republic delegation on 13 January 2409, and never repaired. Arrhæ's own summary of the position has been quoted more than once within the family, generally with approval. > > > [!quote] Arrhæ t'Fvareth, attributed remark, on Rear Admiral T'nae > > > > *I will work with Starfleet. I will not work with bigots in uniform.* > > # Honours and recognition > > Arrhæ holds a Romulan Republic Navy commendation for the Virinat evacuation and her subsequent operational record against Tal Shiar-Elachi coordination, awarded openly and without the classification constraints that govern most of her Agencia Townsend service. She holds no honours from any Federation body, is not formally eligible for one given the classified nature of half of what she actually does, and has never given any indication of regarding the omission as anything worth correcting. --- > [!note] Character Dynamics > > # With Octavia > > Arrhæ's devotion to Octavia Shanahan runs on the same foundation as her twin's - gratitude that never expected repayment, repaid anyway, for decades, entirely by choice - though it expresses itself considerably more at arm's length than Areinnye's does. Arrhæ addresses Octavia with the same respectful familiarity her sister extends, built on the shared understanding that Octavia will never ask her to compromise a value she actually holds, and views her, without much sentimentality about the phrasing, as the reason House Fvareth had somewhere to still be a house at all. > > > [!quote] Octavia Shanahan, attributed remark, on Arrhæ > > > > *Areinnye stayed to protect what I built. Arrhæ left to prove it was worth building in the first place. I have never once needed to choose which contribution mattered more. I am fortunate enough not to have to.* > > # With Areinnye > > The twin bond survives distance considerably better than most relationships tested by an Alpha Quadrant posting on one side and a Beta Quadrant one on the other. Areinnye provides Alpha Quadrant intelligence; Arrhæ provides Beta Quadrant updates; both cross-reference the other's findings as a matter of habit rather than any formal requirement that they do so. Areinnye offered tactical counsel throughout Arrhæ's pursuit of tr'Hakeev, and has made a quiet, ongoing practice, since Virinat, of talking her sister down from the particular flavour of guilt that comes from having saved one person and not several thousand more. > > # With Ekkhæ > > Ekkhæ is, by Arrhæ's own repeated description, the reason survival continues to matter beyond simple vengeance. Their relationship is conducted almost entirely in layers of deadpan and sincerity intertwined - Arrhæ's affection reliably arriving disguised as complaint, and Ekkhæ having long since learned to translate the disguise without needing it explained. Post-Virinat, the relationship has weathered survivor's guilt on Ekkhæ's side and prolonged operational absence on Arrhæ's, and has, by every account, come out the other side of both considerably stronger rather than merely intact. > > # With Vaehha > > Arrhæ's protectiveness of her youngest sister runs warmer and considerably less guarded than most of her other relationships, tempered by a twelve-year age gap that has never once curdled into condescension. She was audibly uneasy when Vaehha elected to join Agencia Townsend in 2408, and said as much directly rather than attempting to talk her out of it. > > > [!quote] Arrhæ t'Fvareth, attributed remark to Vaehha, on her joining Agencia Townsend > > > > *Are you certain? This life - it is not an easy one.* > > Vaehha's reply is understood to have settled the matter for good. > > > [!quote] Vaehha t'Fvareth, attributed reply > > > > *You and Areinnye both chose it. If it is good enough for both my sisters, it is good enough for me. Besides - Octavia believes in me. That is recommendation enough.* > > # With the crew of the RRW Æl'Khreinn > > Arrhæ's command relationship with her crew runs on demonstrated competence rather than favouritism, direct communication without much patience for softened bad news, and a fierce, unspoken willingness to take responsibility for failures rather than distribute blame downward. Crew culture aboard ship has adapted her own deadpan register as a standing coping mechanism for the considerably grimmer nature of anti-Elachi engagements in particular; morale, by every account, remains exceptionally high despite it. --- --- ##### Directory Constraints #fanfiction/of-goths-and-gods/lore/character #fanfiction/of-goths-and-gods/lore/character/arrhae-fvareth --- --- Attributions: 1. Christina Chong, portaying La'An Noonien-Singh from "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds". Image sourced from ScreenRant. Used under fair use for fanfiction purposes. --- ← [[Master Character Registry|Back to Registry]]