When I was twelve, I visited Mount St Michel in Normandy with my family. I vividly remember the mist that clung to the ground as we watched the tide slowly creep in to seal the entire city off.  It is, to this day, one of the most magical places I have ever been. Thus began my fascination with the Unconquered Fortress.

Mont St Michel is 1300 years old and to this day it has never been conquered.

 

“[Mt Sant Michel] …is a natural outcropping of rock sitting in the middle of a wide plain of mud and quicksand. It’s known technically as a tidal island.That highlights one natural reason for the island’s unconquerability: its location in the English Channel where tides reach their highest levels. Every day the tides swell up to fifty feet and rush in like a herd of stallions. Nautical technology today has little trouble managing tidal shifts of that magnitude, but the more primitive vessels and military tactics of ages past found them unmanageable.”

https://sacredwindows.com/the-unconquered-fortress-of-a-mighty-archangel/

 

I knew I wanted Sherwood Forest itself to be a source of magic, as this is a high fantasy world.  When I began brainstorming the world for The Outlaw Witch of Sherwood, that trip to Mount St Michel kept coming to mind. After hours of research (and one particular morning spent researching what would happen to an ecosystem after mass deforestation—spoiler, it’s very depressing) I crafted the geography and history of what is now the world of Dravmir to give us our opening line: “There were no trees, of course.”

 

Centuries before our story begins, most of Sherwood Forest was destroyed, and all the trees in Loxley scorched: burned by holy finnikfire at the behest of the Mother. This violent shift in the ecosystem made for the outcropping of rocks on which Loxley is built to become a tidal island: inaccessible by foot during high tide, and surrounded by marsh and quicksand at low tide. This then deliciously sets up the political, economic, and religious trappings for our story.

 

I sent Andrés my version of what I had sketched for the map, and he took that and made it cooler than my wildest dreams!