Not a Sayan
Scrawl Banditta
SkyeOfStars
Neziul- It seems that my picture link, for whatever reason, ends up with the HTML linebreak tag (<br>) concatenated to the end of the address (after the file extension) when you actually click it. So if a link to a picture - or just any link - leads to not found, you can always just see whether there is anything like that at the end of the address and try whether a version with it removed leads to anywhere.
And hmm... I think you'd like my garden - it is largely half-natural. The back end of it is essentially kept as a woodland-meadow ... which is to say, I mow it down once each year in the late autumn when plants aren't exactly green anymore (And end up with a boxful of little oak trees. I can't kill little oak trees... Luckily, I still have places for them to end up in.), and occasionally either remove something - lest I end up with a solid empire of bishop's weed - or import something I happened to find interesting, but otherwise do very little with it. ...Ironically, it seems that some traditional "garden plants" usually found in flowerbeds are more than happy with such conditions. And if I don't mow the part of my garden that is lawn for a short while - I generally don't bother to do it all too often - then it ends up looking like some sort of flower-field, since it is at least as much various clovers, black medick, prunella and such as it is grass... The most taken care of thing in my garden is probably the pond ... it still looks half-natural with rather varied and disorderly selection of plants, but truth to be told, if it were left on its own for a mere month or so, then several meters from its edge on all sides would become impenetrable two-meter-tall wall of whichever handful of species that won the war. That ... is certainly some fertile ground around the pond. I like to at least be able to access the said pond, and there to be be at least some variation around it (a matter of keeping the most aggressive plants within some sort of confines).
- I don't mind the very immaculately ordered and groomed artificial gardens per se... They are certainly preferable to no garden at all. I just find them somewhat boring, whereas I am always discovering new things in my own garden, never mind the much richer wildlife (though some of it can be attributed to me living me in the middle of nowhere even more than the chosen state of my garden).
...Never mind pidgeons or crakes. Little owls are most likely to not let you sleep with a window open during later half of summer. - I mostly have long-eared owls over here. (TEE-YOU! ... ... TEE-YOU! ... ... TEE-YOU!)
Dark Jark said The companions have had it rough, sure, and have accumulated more than their fair share of physical and mental scars, but they've always managed to beat the odds.I am not sure whether I would personally call everything they've been through beating the odds more than Jillian and Gerald have done so? In the end, notably more companions or to-be companions have died than there currently are in the group, and even more have left (one of them in an extremely poor mental state) or gone MIA... In the sense of their adversaries either being felled or backing down (in one case being anything but defeated or severely weakened and going forth to cause almost as great, and potentially in time even greater than - destruction as the Crusaders did upon Anaxim) they probably could be considered to have been victorious, but that would be a very Pyrrhic, bitter kind of victorious. (As you yourself said, the only way the last great fight could have gone any worse would have been if they all got killed.)
There is, by the way, a very good reason for anyone to hurry away from the Anaxim Forest's immediate vicinity without spending time to heal anyone or do something else significant: smoke. Smoke everywhere. And at least some of the huge (how huge?) burning trees are falling onto the field (How big was/is Gariel Down's anyway? You can fit hundred thousand people into a fairly small field...). And since natural grass is dried straws by this season and it may have not rained in the past twelve hours (?), Gariel Downs itself is probably as flammable as it can get with all the corpses strewn over it... In any case, you probably wouldn't want to stick around, even if Salas isn't necessarily unconscious. Being largely immobilized more than does the trick. (As I have mentioned it before, I personally tend to be somewhat bothered by the "was unconscious/comatose for x amount of time while not in (modern) hospital" plot device, since more often than not it isn't actually feasible).
