Content note: contains *ahem* adult themes, dark themes, discussion of death, and Australian Grade swearing
Prologue
The end of the Vulcan species was caused by a flower, and it was T'Pol, daughter of T'Les that found it.
Unlucky, future galactic historians declared her.
A tragic figure! T'Pol experts would then enthuse, nodding their heads emphatically, for T'Pol, and her equally unlucky human lover tended to attract experts of a particular, romantic temperament.
In fact, as the documents clearly showed, T'Pol made two fateful decisions that day.
Had she selected any other of the proposed landing sites she would have passed uneventfully from history, for the flower grew in just one small region, an ancient riverbed full of plate sized stones and mossy crevasses, and the planetoid was of little interest, and might never have been visited by a Vulcan again.
And most agreed that it was this decision was the fateful one, because it hardly seemed fair to blame the woman for anything that followed the moment when the fragrance first hit her nostrils.
Consequently, much ink was spilled for why she picked that site, rather than another or another.
Often, T'Pol experts – who, as mentioned, tended to be of a romantic sort – would trot out their favourite theory about T'Pol's father and insist that the fatal site somehow called to her , somehow took advantage of her duel nature.
There was no evidence, of course, that T'Pol's father had been Romulan - and T'Les scholars tended to be an especially romantic subset of T'Pol scholars! – but the theory was both popular and delightful.
After all, T'Pol had been such a marvelous boon for the Romulan Empire.