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King Kindred@Retired Do my posts whenever you have the time, please.
Alright, so. Overall, I appreciated that you used this post to focus on exposition and introducing us to several of the characters. The only thing I would say about your exposition is that I would have liked some regarding Keast's mission, the committee, and subsequent rumors. Your post seemed to fall apart here because you suddenly lacked any exposition after providing it for other concepts and people introduced earlier. I also would have liked to see a little more introspection on Diana's part after being given this news, get some insight into how she's taking this news other than she had hoped it wasn't true.
I think you need to work on separating your dialogue a bit. While not always the case, when you have actual dialogue followed by a hefty amount of exposition or introspection immediately followed by more dialogue from the same person, it often works best to place the secondary dialogue in a new line. If that makes sense. It flows infinitely better and doesn't detract from the writing when this is done. You don't always have to do this, but for the occasions where there are heavier pieces splitting the dialogue of one individual, it reads easier.
Primarily, I think my biggest take away from your writing, however, is the repetition of wording. And, to a lesser extent, how sometimes your sentence structure can read awkwardly. Generally, when choosing diction, you don't want to have the same exact word show up two or more times in very rapid succession unless otherwise unavoidable/necessary. It really pulls someone out of the moment. Likewise, when your syntax doesn't flow as well, it can cause a reader to break out of the narrative, which you obviously don't want. Both of these are easily solved, though. And this is something I can't stress enough for everyone here: read your posts. More than once, and not just as you're writing it.
As soon as you're finished, read the entire thing, and do it out loud. When you edit and proofread solely within your head, your mind can skip over and self-repair mistakes, causing them to go unnoticed. But when you audibly go through your writing, these issues stand out very blatantly. And when you edit it, go through again until you no longer make any edits. This will legitimately solve the vast majority of issues people have when writing. Anything you go through while reading out loud and you stumble on, or you catch yourself wondering if that sounds okay, or it seems to break up the sentence structure in an unintended way, take a moment to reword things. This can dramatically enhance the flow of your writing.
Please, you and everyone else reading this, do this every single time. Some of you know you should, and don't - looking at you @Lord Wraith. Even if you're not looking to directly improve your writing, and you're just wanting to translate the concepts in your head into actual words, still do this. How your writing flows and how natural it comes across are extremely important for how your audience enjoys your stories.