There are no words to explain the relief washing through Leliana.
There are no words that adequately explain what it means to have seen a daughter dead and then to have been able to give her the gift of life again—to have planted seeds of it in her heart and watched as she took root and flourished. For so long she has worried over her daughter, concerned that she would not be able to find her way back to this world. That her magic wasn’t enough. That even though she had been able to craft her a new body of bark and leaf and flower that her soul would never settle into it again.
So to see her eyes open and to know that she lives again.
There are no words.
But she knows that the first breath is only the first step and there is so much more that they need to navigate together. One day, she will need to help her daughter learn what it means to have died. She will need to pull back the veil that she has dropped on the day to soften the blow. She will need to help her daughter learn to stand and be both young and old, both ancient of the earth and born anew.
What she does not expect is this fear that grabs at her daughter so fiercely.
She sees it before she is able to explain it and her mind begins to whirl, trying to place it. “Nikolaus?” she echoes, the name completely lost on her tongue. “Who is—“ but she cuts herself off because she can feel the waves of her daughters memory crashing through her. Perhaps she is just sensitive to it now or perhaps in the molding of Linnea, she wove them tighter than before. All she knows is that she can feel her daughter’s love for this boy and the further that she begins to root through the threads that now spin out further and further, the more complicated it gets. Because this is not just any boy.
This is a boy who nearly sacrificed himself to save her daughter.
This is a boy her daughter had died to save in return.
This is a boy who is the son of Castile.
And this is a boy who is lost.
Her heart nearly stops in her chest as she focuses again on her daughter. Using whatever gifts she can, she begins to weave a picture of him—just an illusion, faded on the edges—in front of her daughter.
“Is this him?”
Then, without waiting, she feels her magic return to her with an answer and she quickly spins open a portal in front of them in a flurry of leaves. Through it comes the biting wind of the northern land and with it, a boy of black and blue with a badly healed leg and a jarring limp as he stumbles through.
it's only you and me there until the darkness calls
let's face the dawn together; we'll brave whatever comes