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Have some concept art for aSoE. Orion lives at that castle (mind you, it's not his, he just got a job there and never left) and a huge part of the story takes place there. Not entirely happy with the looks of the castle, though, but it has some nice elements.

Nox and Orion for scale. Why on earth they went for a run on the beach with that weather is beyond my understanding.

About the castle:
The city of Duinvoorde sits at a 'voorde', which is old Dutch for a place easiest to get through some difficult terrain. It often refers to water (Amersfoort = shallow place in the river Eem you can wade through; Oxford = shallow place in a river you can wade your oxen through). Duin means dune, so this town is located at a 'gap' in the dunes that gives easy access to the beach. That's its human name. For a long time, it coexisted with its older Kirrish name with the same meaning (this is the language my sentrins speak, my original species), as this is sentrin country, but humans couldn't pronounce it, and with time, that name grew extinct.

The dunes here are huge, 60 m piles of sand, so having a place that breaches through all of that is quite useful. Useful places are fought over, so that's what happened here too at some point. I'm still thinking about the details, as sentrin society differs from ours (like, they never had nobility. So who were the people in power and what caused them to fight each other?).
Defensive structures were build at the dune breach, and roughly a thousand years ago, the first tower of the castle was constructed. These were first made out of wood, but over the centuries, wood got replaced by brick, and the castle gained more towers, more walls, etc. Again, these structures will look differently from our typical medieval castles, as my world has air forces. You'll have to fight off gryphons, dragons, winged horses and other things flying. Those creatures (including the dragons) aren't able to tear down towers, but they can drop hot tar and maybe a heavy rock on top of the local soldiers, so I think such a castle has a lot of roofs that protects its men from such things, and has towers with archers and scorpions to take those creatures down. Oh, and once the technology is there, they would have spun nasty, thin wires between the towers, so anything that flies in it will cut off its own wings...

Around 400 years ago, the area becomes a lot calmer (I'm not sure why yet. Something with large-scale politics...) and the castle is no longer needed to defend the dune breach. The city sees great wealth and prosperity, and decided to get its own university. The castle became its home, because it was pretty much the only building large enough for such a thing and didn't have a function anyway. So a lot of the defensive structures were taken down or changed into buildings. Towers became houses for students. Another fun fact that causes quite a difference is that most sentrins used to grow wings and could fly, once they got the hang of magic. And they loved to fly. So staircases are a bit of a secondary thing... They had one-floor apartments in those towers, which had huge balconies that served as landing and takeoff strips. There were staircases, but they were there for the rare moments you couldn't fly, and were placed at the outside of buildings. So yeah, balconies everywhere, and all in a gothic building style because I happen to love that

A century ago, a huge plague struck the land, and at least a third of the sentrin population died - especially the higher educated ones (I'm thinking about letting the cause be tied to paper/libraries). So the university died, pretty much. for a decades, it stayed uninhabited, until it was bought by a wealthy human noble family from the east who wanted their old patriarch to live out the rest of his years in healthy sea air instead of big city stink. That worked very well, as the guy is still alive. So they changed the castle again, but only a part of it; they have no need for an entire university building, after all. So big parts of the place are still crumbling away.

Orion ended up here because some of the university wings have magic slumbering in them. Its library was protected by magic to protect its books, for example. Orion's job was hired to get rid of said magic. He told everyone that the magic cannot be taken away and that it was better to let him live here and simply keep the magic in check. In reality, the magic is pretty harmless and he just wants to live there to study every book that library has. Orion has his own problems with magic to solve, and the library contains 'forbidden' theories that might help him.

So that's Duinvoorde Castle in a nutshell. Did I think about this in waaay too much detail? Maybe...

I haven't drawn this place that much, I'm afraid. I only have a few vague pics of the library:

This work is part of a story I'm working on, called 'a State of Equilibrium. Find more about it here:

The prologue:

Prologue - a State of Equilibrium

All shared artwork and literature:

queenofeagles.deviantart.com/g…

Not-so-shared, WIP literature:

The Reading Corner

Story guide:

Guide to 'a State of Equilibrium'

The super-duper official *snorts* site:

queenofeagles.wixsite.com/asoe…

Site - Instagram - Twitter - Pinterest

Description

Have some concept art for aSoE. Orion lives at that castle (mind you, it's not his, he just got a job there and never left) and a huge part of the story takes place there. Not entirely happy with the looks of the castle, though, but it has some nice elements.

Nox and Orion for scale. Why on earth they went for a run on the beach with that weather is beyond my understanding.

About the castle:
The city of Duinvoorde sits at a 'voorde', which is old Dutch for a place easiest to get through some difficult terrain. It often refers to water (Amersfoort = shallow place in the river Eem you can wade through; Oxford = shallow place in a river you can wade your oxen through). Duin means dune, so this town is located at a 'gap' in the dunes that gives easy access to the beach. That's its human name. For a long time, it coexisted with its older Kirrish name with the same meaning (this is the language my sentrins speak, my original species), as this is sentrin country, but humans couldn't pronounce it, and with time, that name grew extinct.

The dunes here are huge, 60 m piles of sand, so having a place that breaches through all of that is quite useful. Useful places are fought over, so that's what happened here too at some point. I'm still thinking about the details, as sentrin society differs from ours (like, they never had nobility. So who were the people in power and what caused them to fight each other?).
Defensive structures were build at the dune breach, and roughly a thousand years ago, the first tower of the castle was constructed. These were first made out of wood, but over the centuries, wood got replaced by brick, and the castle gained more towers, more walls, etc. Again, these structures will look differently from our typical medieval castles, as my world has air forces. You'll have to fight off gryphons, dragons, winged horses and other things flying. Those creatures (including the dragons) aren't able to tear down towers, but they can drop hot tar and maybe a heavy rock on top of the local soldiers, so I think such a castle has a lot of roofs that protects its men from such things, and has towers with archers and scorpions to take those creatures down. Oh, and once the technology is there, they would have spun nasty, thin wires between the towers, so anything that flies in it will cut off its own wings...

Around 400 years ago, the area becomes a lot calmer (I'm not sure why yet. Something with large-scale politics...) and the castle is no longer needed to defend the dune breach. The city sees great wealth and prosperity, and decided to get its own university. The castle became its home, because it was pretty much the only building large enough for such a thing and didn't have a function anyway. So a lot of the defensive structures were taken down or changed into buildings. Towers became houses for students. Another fun fact that causes quite a difference is that most sentrins used to grow wings and could fly, once they got the hang of magic. And they loved to fly. So staircases are a bit of a secondary thing... They had one-floor apartments in those towers, which had huge balconies that served as landing and takeoff strips. There were staircases, but they were there for the rare moments you couldn't fly, and were placed at the outside of buildings. So yeah, balconies everywhere, and all in a gothic building style because I happen to love that

A century ago, a huge plague struck the land, and at least a third of the sentrin population died - especially the higher educated ones (I'm thinking about letting the cause be tied to paper/libraries). So the university died, pretty much. for a decades, it stayed uninhabited, until it was bought by a wealthy human noble family from the east who wanted their old patriarch to live out the rest of his years in healthy sea air instead of big city stink. That worked very well, as the guy is still alive. So they changed the castle again, but only a part of it; they have no need for an entire university building, after all. So big parts of the place are still crumbling away.

Orion ended up here because some of the university wings have magic slumbering in them. Its library was protected by magic to protect its books, for example. Orion's job was hired to get rid of said magic. He told everyone that the magic cannot be taken away and that it was better to let him live here and simply keep the magic in check. In reality, the magic is pretty harmless and he just wants to live there to study every book that library has. Orion has his own problems with magic to solve, and the library contains 'forbidden' theories that might help him.

So that's Duinvoorde Castle in a nutshell. Did I think about this in waaay too much detail? Maybe...

I haven't drawn this place that much, I'm afraid. I only have a few vague pics of the library:

This work is part of a story I'm working on, called 'a State of Equilibrium. Find more about it here:

The prologue:

Prologue - a State of Equilibrium

All shared artwork and literature:

queenofeagles.deviantart.com/g…

Not-so-shared, WIP literature:

The Reading Corner

Story guide:

Guide to 'a State of Equilibrium'

The super-duper official *snorts* site:

queenofeagles.wixsite.com/asoe…

Site - Instagram - Twitter - Pinterest