Year 651 — The Formal Assembly
Theodora, Moroi Court Elder, Seventy-One Years Old
The Assembly that had been meeting informally for decades was formalizing itself into something more structured, and what was emerging was a surprising development: the consolidation of moroi power into specific court lineages that had demonstrated the capacity to maintain long-term political influence.
Not all moroi courts were equal. This had always been true on an informal level, but now it was being formalized. The courts that had produced spirit users were ascending in status. The courts that had accumulated wealth and territory were consolidating their power. The courts that had integrated successfully with the Covenant's network were gaining influence in the Assembly's decisions.
Theodora's own court had been early in the integration with the Covenant, and they had benefited from that early positioning. But she was beginning to understand that the benefit had a cost: the loss of the autonomy that smaller, less-integrated courts still maintained.
"We are building a hierarchy," she said to the Assembly, in one of the formal sessions. "We are creating a structure where some courts have more say in decisions than others. This is not what was intended when we began the Assembly."
"The structure was always implicit," another elder responded. "We are simply making it explicit. Making it explicit creates clarity about how the Assembly functions and prevents the waste of time pretending that all courts have equal voice."
The proposal to formalize the hierarchy passed. By the year 654, the Assembly had established a clear pecking order: the largest courts, those with the most spirit users, those that had integrated most completely with the Covenant, had the most votes in Assembly decisions.
What this meant in practice was that smaller courts were increasingly marginalized from decisions that affected them. A court that wanted to pursue a specific policy would find itself constrained by the Assembly's formal hierarchy, constrained by the weight of larger courts' voices in the decision-making process.
Theodora accepted the change because she understood that it was better to have a clear structure than to maintain the pretense of equality while operating through implicit hierarchies. But she also understood that she was witnessing the moment when the moroi world transformed from a community of loosely-affiliated courts to something more like a political structure with clear power distributions.
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