Chapter 297: Chapter 297: The Revolutionary Faction
Eve held his gaze.
"I know," she said.
He laughed.
Stood up.
They walked to the portal together and she opened it for him and he stepped through. The portal closed and she stood in the courtyard alone for a moment.
Military faction. Merchant faction. Traditional faction.
Three of the five major factions moving toward the reform.
Now there are two left. She turned back and walked back inside the house.
Maya was in the kitchen when Eve came back inside.
She was eating lunch and reading something on her phone. she looked up when Eve walked in.
"Well?" she said.
"He said yes," Eve said.
Maya put her phone down.
"The Merchant faction is in the working group," Eve said. "With conditions. All reasonable."
"Eve," Maya said.
"What."
"That’s three factions Eve," Maya said. "Military. Traditional. Merchant. That’s three out of five."
"Yes," Eve said.
"That’s a majority," Maya said.
"Yes," Eve said.
"Of the supernatural Conclave," Maya said. "Supporting a reform that your parents spent their lives trying to build."
Eve looked at her.
Maya’s expression was doing something complicated.
"Don’t," Eve said.
"I’m not doing anything," Maya said.
"Your eyes are doing the thing," Eve said.
"I’m not crying," Maya said.
"I know," Eve said.
"I’m just saying," Maya said. "Three factions. That’s enormous. Do you understand how enormous that is?"
"Yes," Eve said. "I understand."
"Your parents..."
"Maya," Eve said.
"Okay," Maya said. "Okay. I’m done."
She picked up her phone again.
Eve sat down across from her, she reached out her hand and stole a piece of bread off her plate.
Maya didn’t say anything about it, she just looked at her, shook her head and smiled.
***
That evening Damon found her on the back step.
She had been there for twenty minutes.
He sat down beside her without asking why she was there.
"Aldous said yes," she said after a while.
"I know," he said. "Damian told me."
"Now we have three factions," she said.
"Yes," he said.
She looked at the dark grounds.
"My parents would have been...." She stopped.
"I know," he said.
"I keep thinking about them," she said. "Every time something moves forward. Every meeting. Every yes." She paused. "I keep thinking they should be here for this."
Damon was quiet for a moment.
Then he said, "They are though."
She looked at him.
"The pendant," he said. "The photograph. Vessa. Raphael. Everything they built and left behind for you to find." He looked at her steadily. "They’re here. Just....differently."
Her hand went to the pendant at her chest.
L.A.
Both of them.
"Yeah," she said quietly. "You’re right."
"I know," he said.
She jokingly bumped his shoulder and he bumped back.
They sat in the dark for a little while longer, Then he said.... " Now that we have three factions, Who’s next."
"The Revolutionary faction," she said. "They’re the hardest one. They’re the faction Malachai had the tightest grip on. Some of them are still....resistant."
"Resistant meaning actively opposed," he said.
"Yes," she said.
"What’s the play," he said.
She looked at the grounds.
"I don’t know yet," she said honestly. "I’m still thinking about it."
***
She spent three days thinking about the Revolutionary faction before she did anything.
Not procrastinating. Actually thinking. Reading everything Vessa had left about them. Every decision they had made under Malachai’s influence. Every leader who had come and gone. Every position they had taken publicly versus what they had actually wanted privately.
The Revolutionary faction had started as exactly what the name suggested, a group of supernaturals who wanted fundamental change to how the Conclave operated. Radical transparency. Dismantling old power structures. Equal representation regardless of bloodline or faction size.
Everything Eve’s parents had been trying to build.
They should have been natural allies.
Malachai had understood that.
So he had spent twenty years getting inside the faction and hollowing it out from the center. Replacing the genuine reformers with people who talked about reform loudly and did nothing about it. Creating a faction that used the language of change to protect the status quo.
It was the most sophisticated thing he had done.
It was also the thing that made Eve angrier than almost anything else she had learned.
He had taken the people who should have been fighting for her parents and turned them into a wall.
The current faction leader was a man named Corin Ashvale.
Fifty years old. Supernatural. Half witch half werewolf which was rare enough to be notable. He had led the Revolutionary faction for eight years and in those eight years had filed forty seven formal Conclave motions for reform and had seen every single one of them quietly buried in committee.
Raphael had sent her his full profile.
She read it twice.
Then she picked up her pen and wrote him a letter.
Not a formal diplomatic communication. Not the kind of thing that went through official channels with seals and formal language.
A letter.
Handwritten.
Corin,
My name is Eve. You know who I am.
I’ve spent the past week reading about your faction. What it was when it started. What it became under twenty years of Malachai’s influence. What you’ve been trying to do for eight years against a system designed specifically to stop you.
I think you’re tired.
I think you’ve been filing motions and watching them die in committee for so long that you’ve started to wonder if the reform is actually possible or if the whole thing is just a story people tell themselves to keep going.
I’m not going to tell you I have all the answers. I don’t.
But I have Military faction backing. I have Merchant faction participation. I have Traditional faction support. And I have forty one years of documented evidence about exactly how the system was corrupted and exactly what it looked like before that corruption took hold.
I’m building the thing your faction was created to fight for.
I’m asking you to come and see what we’re building before you decide whether to help.
Not a formal meeting. Not a diplomatic session. Just come to the estate. Bring whoever you want. Look at what we have.
Then decide.
— Eve
She sealed it and sent it through the messenger portal that evening.
