Look out the window on the Aelfryd Hall estate

You walk over to the enormous, full-length window and sliding door leading to your personal balcony. Drawing the sheer curtains, you look out at the extensive grounds of your estate, bathed in the golden light of dawn. It has taken several years of planning, hard work, personal sacrifice, and no small amount of money to get to this point, but as you look down on the neatly manicured lawns and beautiful gardens, you feel a great sense of pride.

When you first arrived at Aelfryd Hall and signed the deeds and paperwork to formally inherit the property from your departed Uncle Gaius, it would have been fair to call the place a dump. The lawns withered, dry and dead. The gardens were weed-choked disasters. Any trees were twisted, spindly things devoid of leaves, blossoms or fruit. The ponds were little more than dried-up puddles. The manor itself had crumbling walls, broken windows, and a dilapidated roof. What little furniture remained was rotted. Clearly property maintenance had been low on your uncle's list of priorities. Even so, you could see something through the gloom: potential.

The estate did contain a sizeable collection of art, antiques, and other items of some value. Liquidating these assets gave you some capital to start with, and in the following few years you were able to slowly repair the manor, re-landscape the grounds, and hire the best gardeners, carpenters, maids, landscapers, and other staff to slowly but surely transform the property into what it was now: glorious.

The nearby gardens are lush and colorful. Your options for local flowers and shrubs were limited, but you imported a variety of eye-catching plants from across the realms. You even have a few nice topiaries around the property, and the odd statue or sculpture. At this point, your gardens are a perfectly pleasant place to pass the time, whether going for a short walk or sitting on a bench with a nice lunch or a good book.

You look across the lawns and fields and see the distant orchards that provide a small amount of delicious fruit, and the large greenhouse that supplies your estate with vegetables. Aelfryd Hall isn't quite self-sufficient, but it's getting there.

Further out, you see three small cottages on the shores of a small, man-made lake, the private residences of some of the more key members of Aelfryd Hall's staff. While the cottages aren't terribly large, especially compared to the manor itself, relatively few people would complain about a rent-free cottage with access to the lake and the rest of the estate grounds.

Beyond the grounds you see the shimmering fence delineating Aelfryd Hall's acreage from the larger, emptier expanse of the Tarius Region of the Bridge Between Worlds.