There's a monastery in the book that's a pretty important location. It's very well explored in the narrative, so nailing down exactly how it works is important. What the monastery exactly is was pretty vaguely defined, so I was given more or less free rein over it. Its history as a fortress was inspired a lot by the history of the Notre Dame de Paris cathedral and the Abbey of Kells, and I looked into the Monastery of St. Gall for a view on Benedictine monastic life. The main cathedral, Gothic and Renaissance-inspired design, a lot of Da Vinci's sketches of hypothetical architecture.
We're dealing with an entirely fictional location here, so we can't get too attached to any one source of inspiration. The place needs to feel real, though. A lot of this stuff won't even show up in the story, especially all the history, but we need to get the feeling of it, the hundreds of years' worth of collapse and renovation, the countless generations passing through.
This is just concept art, and the actual thing is going to get much better-defined in the future, but it's still a pretty good direction to start heading:
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