The Nature of Shadows
Posted on Sat Sep 6th, 2025 @ 2:39pm by Lieutenant JG Jean-Baptiste Dorsainvil
Edited on on Sat Sep 6th, 2025 @ 6:25pm
795 words; about a 4 minute read
Mission:
Peril at the Unification Accords
Location: Conference Center, Argentia City, Barisa Prime
Timeline: MD006, 1850 Hours
Rethel stood alone beneath an arcade, her eyes on the security pylons the flickered in a faint cobalt blue across the well-tended lawns. She could hear them humming faintly, like a chorus of throats being cleared in the darkness. Somewhere beyond the perimeter, the Eastern Sea worked its way over the jagged rocks, but here the silence felt engineered--like everything else in these heady days.
She adjusted the sash at her shoulder. The insignia of vice-proconsul gleamed, but never seemed to settle easily against her frame. Romulan titles, Vulcan courtesies, Federation protocols: all of it a scaffolding she moved through without once putting the entirety of her weight down. Even now, days before the accords, the others seemingly measured their words against her silence, as though just her simply listening could bend them.
Inside the grand hall, she had walked among chandeliers and a trifecta of security uniforms, her boots soundless on the red carpet. Starfleet officers had nodded, cadets stiffened and lowered their voices, Vulcans extended restrained nods in their peculiar way. They wondered what Rethel wanted here--liaison, spy, something else? She had given them only fragments in return.
"Neutralization is not the question," she had said earlier. It was all they remembered. That, and the way her eyes hadn't blinked when they spoke of assassins.
Now she let the dark air cool the back of her neck. She had no use for stillness--not even in times like these. There were always currents flowing beneath the surface: motions invisible to sensors, voices muttering in dialects much older than Barisa's architecture. Rethel had spent her whole life with her ears open for them.
A child passed, selling useless charms of pressed metal and string. Rethel knelt, studied one in her palm. For a moment her expression softened, some sort of repressed grief surfacing and receding before it could be noticed. She set the charm back without a word, her hand brushing the hilt of her blade as she stood.
From the exterior mezzanine above, she could see the sweep of guards across the rooftops, the careful lines of sight, the grids meant to catch any ripple before it broke the pond's surface. In some small way, she admired the design, but knew designs only held until someone with enough power decided otherwise.
And if that moment came--if steel cut through protocol and candles sputtered in the corridors--many eyes would turn to her first.
That was the nature of shadows. They were always present and always suspect. Rethel had learned to live with that. Even welcomed it.
She turned, her cloak rustling across the stone, and vanished into the deeper dark of Argentia City.
Two figures lingered just beyond the columns, faces hidden beneath hoods, the city's last light reflecting off the edges of their light coats. One male, taller, his hands tucked into the front pockets of his coat. The other, female, smaller, shifting weight from one boot to the other. They did not speak. No, words would betray them. Their eyes followed Rethel with patience of reptilian predators. Every tilt of her head, every careful step was recorded, file, and would eventually be interpreted.
The male exhaled through his nose. "She is aware," he said quietly.
The female's lips pressed into a tight line. "Of course she is. That's what makes her dangerous. She knows our eyes follow, and yet she moves as though blind."
Rethel's cloak swung just past them, reflecting the amber of the streetlamps. For a moment, the light touched her high cheeks. They moved with her, careful, keeping to the alleys, the shadows folding around them. Every footfall was deliberate. Rehearsed.
"She's alone," the male murmured. "Not carelessly alone."
The female cocked her head. "Alone, yes--but the way she moves, she commands what is around her. Even absence is presence with her."
Rethel paused at the corner of a manicured garden path, lifting her face up to the breeze. She did not know she was being watched--if she did, she would not show it. The watchers noted the tiny clench of her jaw, the barely noticeable shift of weight from one boot to the other.
The male stepped closer. "Do we follow her to the plaza?"
"Not yet," the female responded, eyes fixed. "Let her finish her rounds. Let her leave a nice trail."
Above them, Barisa Prime's sky turned to a bubblegum colour, and the shadows became harder against the stone of the inner city. Rethel moved like something the city hadn't yet learned to fear. And in the hidden streets behind her, someone already did.
Lieutenant J.G. Jean-Baptiste Dorsainvil
Assistant Chief Security Officer
USS Astrea
(as Romulan Vice-Proconsul Rethel)
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