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Arbor Blessing, most gardeners would laugh, was both a blessing and a curse. The sight of it, sprouting wild and unexpected in some little garden or the corner of a farm, was always the prelude to a rich harvest. But to cultivate it oneself was like trying to make a river flow backwards. Possible, certainly, but it took so much effort for such a fickle, transient thing that most would hardly bother.
For those who did, it was not in the pursuit of fruit or flower. It was a point of pride and skill alone. Nobody knew for certain what caused it to take root, even now. They speculated, they wondered, they pored over painstaking notes of the soil, the sun, the air of any location Where it had been known to thrive. Even with all that, the initial propagation was always more luck than anything. And once placed where it had not chosen its own bed, keeping it alive was hard and heavy work.
But to Lyria, the work was only hard and heavy because it was a burden worth bearing.
In the garden, the sun baked the back of her neck, and her nails were so full of dirt that it would take her many passes to scrub them all the way clean. It hardly mattered. The dirt on her hands was... good. It was harder to imagine such dirt-stained hands containing magic under the skin. Here in the garden she was tender and caregiver first, and danger second.
The dirt was so never quite so thick that she could pretend to ignore the anchor. The Maker knew that she had tried, driving her hands deeper and deeper into the earth in the effort. Yet it still cast a sickly green light on her plants as she tended to them, so unlike the verdant vibrancy of their leaves. But her plants endured it, and so would she.
Despite a promising start, one of those Maker-blessed sudden propagations, the vine had been brown and listless for the past two weeks. Lyria had watched its leaves brown, crumble, and shed like tears without being able to understand why. Not quite dead, no. But unhappy. She had continued to water it, wanting to give it a little more time before she consigned it to being a failed attempt. And one morning, somehow, with the early dawn sunlight gleaming off of the highest points of Skyhold, she had paused.
Tiny, tiny hints of green, peeking out from the brown. New life struggling to be born.
"There we are," she said quietly, bending almost double over the tender leaves, as though she could shield the new growth with her body. (As though she could shield everything she cared about with the solidity of her own flesh.) Her chest loosened, a relief from the worry she hadn't even realised she had been holding in all this time. "You needed time."
And why not? Hadn't they all needed time, transplanted as they were into their sudden new stations, into this new reality after the Breach? Who would have blamed any of them for weeping, for crumbling, for simply curling up and refusing to move, when the tending in this new soil felt impossible, and there was nobody to tend to them but themselves?
Time. Time and patience. The sight of those little chips of green, emeralds flashing brilliantly, had done more good for her that day than she realised. All was not dead. All could never be lost, if there was time and patience.
Both things felt like valuable currency in the middle of a war, hard to come by and infinitely precious in the finding. Lyria knew that her people needed both, as vital as food and water, as needed as shelter.
(Did she neglect herself, in her efforts to chart Skyhold's high corridors nearly every day, to see that her people were cared for? Perhaps. The gardener often forgets to drink, when the sun is high and her plants cry out for tending. Who else will do it? Who else?)
When Cullen had made the decision to stop taking lyrium, she had applauded it, determined more than ever that she would make the work easy for him. Her Commander, her friend, her dearest love. They had both known it would take patience, and it would be a difficult road to walk. But some nights, when he sweated and mumbled, old demons blending with new withdrawals, it occurred to her that they had had no true idea of how difficult. It had rooted itself into his flesh, his mind, his soul, and such a thing would be no easy feat to remove. And though she would give anything to help him, the hardest realisation was that she could not graft anything of herself to heal the scars that the uprooting would leave behind. She could only give time, she could only give patience. Ensuring that he ate, making the little things easy when he hadn't slept, and biting down a sigh when he said he was not hungry, or he had no need for rest. On long, late nights, when her heart ached, when she wanted to reach out and repair his flesh with her own hands, how little both those things seemed to help. Unable to do anything but water, but tend, but wait, and watch the vine either all the same.
And indeed the lyrium had left Cullen to be such unfit soil. But though it had burned the ground behind it, it had not salted it. He was not so far gone that life could not thrive. She had seen that barest green and let it hold her through the war, watching the Arbor Blossom thrive, each leaf unfurling like a promise of the future. Lyria believed that to be true for Cullen as well She believed it so strongly that it became a pillar of his own belief, holding up the corners of a barest smile when he was too tired to do it himself.
And to Lyria, though the work was hard and heavy, it was worth bearing still.