I'd but smell the growing things

[eolasemah]

WHO: Siuona and [your face here]
WHAT: Let's check out this here garden!
WHEN: After more or less everyone has arrived at Skyhold.
WHERE: Skyhold garden
NOTES: Open to all!



It was a quiet, chilly morning when Siuona felt strong enough to leave her tent among the healers. With a warm woven halla shawl around her shoulders and slippers on her pale feet, she bundled her belongings in a corner of the tent and secreted herself away to the courtyard where she knew the communal garden to be.

Over the course of her convalescence, Sina had become increasingly homesick for the wooded Free Marches, and had felt her spirits weakening to a point where she knew, from the healer's perspective, that it would affect her recovery if she didn't find a way to occupy herself.
'You're so dramatic', she scoffed under her breath in muttered Elvhen, tugging the shawl around herself as she made her way through the dark, drafty hall and through the archway into the cloister. 'Have some self-sufficiency.'

Her breath caught in her throat at the sight of all the vegetation; having spent the last several weeks tromping around in snow-covered mountains and then wallowing inside a tent inside impassible stone walls, the sight of greenery was enough to bring a sudden rush of tears to her eyes.

Shivering from the chill and her lingering weakness, Sina approached the rows of pots and sat by what she knew to be elfroot, tenderly running her fingers over the leaves, mopping absently at her still-streaming eyes with the sleeve of her tunic. It wasn't until she had refocused her gaze on the elfroot, and really looked at it, that she abruptly noticed something strange.

Why was so much of it missing, and so ineloquently clipped?

Comments

[nadasharillen]

The muffled crunch of vegetation heralded Nahariel's approach, although she stopped halfway across the 'garden'--if it could be called such--to watch Siuona sniff quietly and run her fingers across the battered elfroot plants. Like the rest of Skyhold, this area, too, was in overgrown disarray. Large, solid, earthenware pots remained from the original garden, and a small well covered over with half-rotten planks, but of what was planted all that time ago, only the elfroot remained. The rest was mountain grasses, and a few untended trees.

If anyone could nurse it back to glory, Nari thought, it would be Sina. She'd been the only one in the clan who could get the seeds Keeper Thalia had brought from the plains to grow. She'd won a knife off Isen the day the flowers bloomed. The hunter chuckled at the memory, then turned it into a quiet clearing of her throat to get the younger woman's attention.

"I brought you some tea, da'halla. They were brewing it at the healer's tents. Elfroot, I think--it'll help to warm you up out here. And with whatever's left of the cough."

[cameasarat]

Part of the answer was the people tending to it. Peter wasn't a builder, or much of a fighter, or one of the dozen other things that were really helpful in pulling an old fortress back together. What he was was willing to do whatever little task anyone gave to him. Bring this here, take that there, get elfroot from that. These were things he knew. Sadly, as a tower-raised mage, most of his plant experience was with the drying out and grinding process, not the harvesting. So when told to clip he just...clipped. No strategy to it.

But now, passing by the site of his previous chore, he can't help but notice the elf apparently judging his handiwork.

"...Er, something wrong? Ma'am?"