Adrenaline sees her through the dragon attack. Even without it, circumstances like these are when she truly shines. She has always been blade-sharp under pressure, her focus without equal and her mind unimpaired by stress.
With the immediate danger now handled, thanks to Evita and her companions seeing the beast away, Teia is keen to meet Viago at their rendezvous point. So, she delegates orders to one of her grandmasters and vanishes into the carnage.
The wreckage below is a blur as she moves from rooftop to rooftop. She can hear the cries of her people in distress, see the long plumes of dark smoke rising to touch the pitch-black of the night sky, and smell the stench of what blight remains.
But all she can think about is Viago.
( She is selfish in that way—and she always would be. )
Once she knows that he is alive and safe, the rest of the world will have her: body, mind, and spirit. Until then, he is her only priority.
It takes her longer than she would like to reach the place where they intended to regroup (a flower merchant they both favored, one that they would frequent when they were together to purchase arrangements for one another). Nostalgia, bittersweet and unsolicited, crashes over her with a brutal force only to disperse into dread as she crests the final building only to see that, not only is the flower stand splintered by shards of ice, Viago is not there.
Though she tries not to catastrophize, it is difficult; Viago is meticulous about his checkpoints by nature. He has never been absent from one in all the years that they have known one another.
“Shit,” she growls in frustration and jumps from the roof. There are corpses (Trevisans, Antaam, and darkspawn) everywhere she looks, some felled by the dragon, others by blades. Her eyes sweep over them. No Viago. She minds her perimeter, eyeing the rooftops from which she had just descended from, and then sets off again, pushing farther past the Antaam’s frontline.
It is pathetic how easy it is to maneuver the ground the Antaam claimed to have seized control of. Perhaps even more reassuring, however, is the sheer volume of bodies she finds along the way. With palpable relief, she recognizes the bladework immediately. Viago has been here.
Teia tucks into a side street off the main path and whistles—the sound being one note that slurs into a longer, higher note, and that ends with an even higher, staccato note. This call is known by all Crow houses: What is your location? or Where are you?
She waits for an answer, but when she hears none after a reasonable period of time, she moves on, repeating the same whistle every few minutes. All the while, she relies on her steadily depleting arsenal of adrenaline to keep her mind intact and at ease.
@adderblack
