OK WAIT I HAVE QUESTIONS. I wanna know the lore behind your Cantori Diamond !!!!! Spill the tea I'm INTRIGUED!!
First of all THANK YOU for your wonderful comments and your enthusiasm, I'm so !!! 🫶🫶🫶
Second of all - this will hopefully be the topic of another fic I've got on the backburner, about Teia's rise to Talon-hood. it'll be a while yet before that materialises lololol, I have only a very sketchy outline and on pride, freedom and Treviso took a LOT out of me, but I'm playing around with so many ideas of what might or could have happened to her, that she got to the point where we meet her in 8LT, and later in Veilguard.
In short though, we know she was taken in by the Crows at roughly 8 years of age. We know she considers Caterina her mother, BUT she is very distinctly of a different house. Now, there are all lot of ways as to how that might have played out, and I'm only doing guess-work here and finding what feels fun to me, but I would imagine that when she was first, ahem, recruited, somehow both Caterina and the then-Cantori Talon were involved (I'm delighted at the idea that she might have tried to pickpocket Caterina, because that would be a fun little way to outrage the First Talon, AND set a precedent for the way they bond over beautiful things in 8LT. But that's just me) What were these two Talons doing in Antiva City 30 years ago? idk, you decide. I imagine between the two of them, Cantori took her in as being the weaker house, but Caterina couldn't help but also be charmed by the brazen little street urchin.
This is where HC territory truly begins. Here is what we know: given the sheer size of Villa Dellamorte and the way Lucanis personally identifies with Treviso, it's a safe bet that Treviso is the Dellamorte city, the same way Salle and Rialto belong to de Riva and Cantori. We know Crows have specific territories, but also that they forge alliances - so it could be possible that the Cantori Diamond was a concession in that sense, and a show of allyship between the two Houses. I imagine it might have been an establishment Teia was spent a lot of time in as a child, since her relationship with Caterina didn't wane over the years, so for that you need proximity. Perhaps House Cantori moved between Rialto and Treviso a few times a year! Perhaps Fledgelings were trained in one place and Crows worked in another! I don't know, but Teia needed to be in Treviso.
Now then, the scene is set, and from here we get certain glimpses over Teia's life, in lines such as the infamous "cruel men seemed drawn to her" or "we cannot let the cruelty of others define us" - between that and what we know from Zevran of how Crows were treated back then, the picture is quite not pretty. I don't think House Cantori would have been particularly kind, or particularly stable - and yet, it is a point of pride for Teia to be a part of it. You don't get a whole back piece you keep on display about something you're not proud of. As such, I imagine Teia's meteoric rise to power happened against a backdrop of cruelty and intrigue, with the Diamond as the seedy setting. No one in their right mind is going to consider a twenty-something year old, no matter how charismatic, the right choice for head of House, not unless every other option is so much worse.
SO to end this rant that I'm not 100% sure answers your question, I went with the idea that the Diamond is a piece of the Cantori legacy she inherited - a place where at least one of her precursors were brutally killed, where she might not have been safe, but at least she could be close to Caterina, and where her idea of family first coalesced. Somewhere that married the horror and wonder of being an Antivan Crow, and a place that she ultimately turned, later in life with her partner-in-crime, into the seat of a resitance movement. I think it's an experiment, for her, for what the Crows could be, and I am obsessed with that.