Moments

Moment of Rebirth

Easing down the stairs, I peered across the scattered remains of a half eaten meal abandoned in a hurry; plates stacked on one end were shoved aside to fit in a crate of empty bottles. My lips twisted from the mess, but I wasn't surprised. Our little home bulged with guests, the mage and templar forced to room their squabble together or spend their nights out in my treehouse in the back woods. No one ever took me up on the offer. It was probably the lack of a roof.

Plans were scribbled across whatever parchment the duo could find; old letters, missives covered in raven droppings, and huh...I turned over my gilded invitation from another lifetime to the Winter Palace now coated in a formula for a healing draught theory. Why did we hold onto this?

Piling up as much of the mess as I could towards the wash basin, I glanced over at the cabinet hissing beside the door. A wedding gift from Madame de Fer, it loomed over anyone who crossed our threshold - the carvings upon the door twisting themselves into a face biting through flesh by tricky candle light. It also whispered at night. I don't know if Vivienne sent us the cursed thing to be cruel or because she assumed only we could handle it. With her, the answer could be both.

Over time I grew used to the evil emanations and intelligible whispers - the kitchen almost felt empty without them. Rather than un-curse it, Cullen and I used it to hold our cleaning supplies and frighten away any unwanted guests. It succeeded at both. What drew my attention were the blankets piled below the cabinet, twisted and bare. Hm...

Yanking my cloak off the peg by the door, I rolled it around my shoulders, pinning it tight with the old eye brooch. Few people recognized it as the symbol of the Inquisition these days. My crossbow dangled off the peg beside it, but I hadn't touched it in months, and even then it was just to keep myself sharp. Honnleath had a way of not dulling the senses, but easing me to an unexpected serenity - like throwing on a blanket and curling up by the fire, preferably while someone rubbed my feet and whispered in my ear.

Rather than exit out the front door, partially ajar from a mage staff lobbed in the way while the two bickered on the front stoop, I twisted around the hearth to head out the back. Summer winds tumbled the smell of honeysuckle and fresh cut hay across the remaining grass. In the distance I heard a noise that was not an axe meeting against wood - as I'd suspected. Stepping off the stairs, my bare feet slipped through the grass, barely noticing the occasional rock and jut of tree root. After a few years of playing Inquisitor, I finally got my dalish sole back.

Before pursuing the sound, I stopped to inspect my garden. Rows of beans curled up the trellis I bowed out of wood recovered from my trips through the woods. They came in nicely, more than a handful ready to be twisted off the stems. The greater problem were the squash, their prickly vines crawling out of the small patch of dirt and into the next plot over. It was supposed to hold winter wheat in the coming change, but the invading zucchini were having none of that. I'd never planted a seed before, not one that didn't have a dozen other gardeners at Skyhold watching over it like a hawk. Even then, all it produced was another tuft of elfroot to dump into a healing elixir. But, when we moved in, Mia gifted me a small box filled with some of her best seeds. More curious than anything, I planted one in a patch of dirt beside the steps and waited.

It nearly drew Cullen mad waking every morning alone only to find me squatting out in the dirt tending to the little thing, weeding it, feeding it, and - on occasion - talking to it. When it sprouted a leaf I glowed proud, almost as proud as when I'd closed the breach. It was another two weeks before I returned from the market to find my husband hoeing up a patch of weeds, sweat pouring off his naked and still pale white back, gifting me my first true garden.

That first year of harvest anyone who visited had to try every single vegetable I raised from a tiny seed. Cassandra was polite about it, her requisite guards less so as they moaned through a third round of barley soup. The rare time the Chargers passed by, Krem kindly passed out the piles of fresh fall harvest to the others. It was Bull who grunted, sniffing the vegetable, "What's this?"