Matriarch Aethyta

Matriarch Aethyta was an asari who tended bar in the Eternity lounge on the world of Illium. A blunt, free-spirited matriarch with views well outside the asari mainstream, she had lived an unconventional life and was, in time, revealed to be the absent father of the information broker Liara T'Soni. During the war against the Reapers she resurfaced on the Citadel, where she watched over her daughter from a distance.

An unconventional matriarch#

Aethyta worked as the bartender of the Eternity lounge on Illium, an unusual station for an asari matriarch. Her parentage was itself remarkable: her father was a krogan who had fought in the Rachni Wars and the Krogan Rebellions, and her mother was an asari commando who had also fought in the Rebellions. Her father liked to show off his war scars and tell of stomping a Rachni Queen to death on a poisonous world. When her parents learned they had once been mortal enemies during the Rebellions, they resolved to fight, and neither survived the duel. Aethyta was about a hundred years old at the time, working as an exotic dancer, and over the long centuries that followed she took many mates, among them a turian, an elcor, and a hanar, and fathered a pureblood daughter whom she lost track of after her relationship with the mother ended.

Aethyta held very different views from other matriarchs and approached life with a free-spirited, laissez-faire attitude. She favored the asari becoming more militant and active on the galactic stage and believed young asari should improve society during their maiden years rather than turn to mercenary work. Her proposal that the asari attempt to build new mass relays was met with open ridicule, and realizing no one would listen, she left Thessia for the less conventional life she found on Illium.

When Commander Shepard first encountered her at the Eternity lounge, she was fending off the persistent Conrad Verner, who had come at the urging of a supposed undercover officer to demand the bar's deed, claiming it was a front for red sand dealers. Aethyta dismissed the accusation, noting that her bar sold no red sand and that the substance was in any case legal on Illium with a permit.

Liara's father#

During the war against the Reapers, Aethyta could be found at Apollo's Cafe on the Citadel. There she confirmed what her presence implied: she was in fact the father of Liara T'Soni, and was watching over her on behalf of asari matriarchs made suspicious by Liara's work as a powerful information broker, her relationship with Matriarch Benezia, and her ties to Shepard. Aethyta could be brusque and even threatening about the matriarchs' watchfulness, yet she revealed a protective regard for her daughter that warmed toward Shepard when the Commander showed loyalty to Liara.

Encouraged by Shepard, Aethyta and Liara could be brought to speak with one another. Their conversations ranged across the matriarchs' surveillance of Liara, the asari military doctrine and its failures against the Reapers, Liara's krogan heritage, and Aethyta's long relationship with Benezia, whom it became clear she had loved and married, and whom she preferred to remember as she had been before Benezia fell under Saren Arterius. Reconciled, Aethyta dispatched a group of asari mercenaries to volunteer their services against the Reaper invasion, and lent her backing to efforts to strengthen asari forces with recovered texts and technology.