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This is why I stopped trying to get through the scenes I need to write for the key scene to make sense. Instead I write the scene I want to write and backpedal from there, and for some reason this works really well for how my brain is structured.
After much research on the Plan of St. Gall and Benedictine monastic life, I have completed the first floor of the monastery as it would've looked during its height of operations, roughly 200 years, give or take, before Lida et al. find it on their travels. I will be making another floor plan showing it in ruins.
Something to note is that this is where they encounter the terror-feeder, because the Northern Reaches really was the gods' DeviantArt page. Though I modeled this on Christian monastic life, the experiences of these monks are fundamentally different and far less ascetic so I made some fundamental changes.
Let me take you through some of the design choices I made!
Directional focus is the Overlook of the Gods, so southwest. The cathedral points in that direction as do both chapels.
Original Benedictine monasteries had very limited access points to the inner sanctum. I modified this with a few extras, but I still maintained some separation between the acolytes and monks.
Which leads me to the big main storage room. This was actually a surprising distance from the kitchens in the Plan of St. Gall.
The original kitchen had no outside access, iirc, but was separated from the main building by a hallway. I maintained this here, as it was a pragmatic and not religious decision; kitchen fires wiped out a hell of a lot of monasteries and abbeys before they moved the building off. Now they still maintained zero outside kitchen access, condemning anyone trapped in the kitchen to death, but I digress.
Monasteries were fully self-sufficient. This bad boy would’ve had crops and livestock and breweries. I did not want to design all that out because it would be gone by the time Lisa et al. arrive, but I did keep chambers for the brothers-in-service.
This place would have had an old men’s rest home to account for. Remember, part of the reason this monastery is so popular and well-maintained is because there’s too many men born in the Northern Reaches. (Don’t ask me why, I’m working on it.) So they would’ve had services for old impoverished men who couldn’t marry and had no families. I’m giving them three men assigned to the role and then an additional six that are cycled through the ranks to fulfill the mitzvah (for lack of a better word) of caring for others.
I eliminated the Benedictine conversation rooms, as Lida monks are free to talk, but kept the warming room out of practicality. It would be prohibitively costly to maintain fires everywhere. In monasteries that had dormitories, monks typically slept over the warming room, which will happen here. But unlike the ascetic Benedictines, I’ve given the brothers-in-service and others sleeping in beds far from the warming room little furnaces.
The conservatory is also not a traditional Benedictine room. My boyfriend asked the question of whether the era (roughly modeled on the Middle Ages) would’ve had such tech, which is absolutely valid, but the gods gave them a lot of knowledge. Also, greenhouses in general date back to 30 AD, when the Romans did it before it was cool.
Now we get to the big question: what the hell is up with the arcana rooms? Well, I may have jumped the shark. In constructing this on Inkarnate, I saw they had summoning circles, and I wondered, what if they had been practicing forbidden magic? Not magic outlawed by the Magisterium, but the one form of magic outlawed by the gods? What if they had accidentally summoned the terror-feeder from cryo underneath the Overlook of the Gods and this was their downfall?
I don’t have all the answers yet and I have a whole second floor to build before I can demolish it, but it’s interesting to think about and damn this was fun to make.
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The monastery in the Northern Reaches is really large. It makes for a lot of interesting places for stuff to happen but at the same time it has to be realistic. There has to be a reason a massive monastery exists in the middle of nowhere on the tundra.
Well, the Northern Reaches has a shortage of women. I had established that separately. My thinking is that the monastery would be a reasonable place for them to send their sons, particularly their younger sons who would not inherit. All those unnecessary spares when they had one who didn’t get mauled to death by a bear in childhood have to go somewhere.
But that leads me to the issue of why. Why does the Northern Reaches have such a shortage of women???
I… don’t know. I’m running a fever and have bitten off more than I can chew. 🤒
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Spod watched her work from the covered chair, wondering at how he’d ever been able to leave her. She moved quickly back and forth across her canvas. Occasionally he’d catch her with her tongue between her lips, deep in thought just as she did when she was drawing, before she darted on to a new part of the canvas.
By the time the sun was getting low, he well understood what she meant when she said she got excited when she painted. He understood how paint had gotten splattered upon the windowpanes. Maeva herself had paint down her arm. It had landed on the tops of her little bare feet as she moved across the dropcloth. She’d even gotten it on the side of her face, he discovered with a chuckle, as she’d gone to move the hair out her eyes.
What had stayed on the canvas was beautiful. She’d painted a scene from their journey through the Northern Reaches and, though incomplete, was already breathtaking.
Maeva was magnificent. The gods had blessed him beyond measure by allowing him to be hers.
In the years that followed, Spod would take much solace in watching Maeva work, whatever her great task may be, whatever form her whims and desires suited. Throughout everything that would come next, through all the heartbreak and triumph, they would always have time like this because, in spite of it all, they would always have each other.
Eventually, as she began to lose the light, her own vibrant energy seemed to lag. Spod cleared his throat, but she was too engrossed in the details to hear him.
Finally, he hesitantly opened his mouth and said her name as best he could. His deep, rich voice, so unfamiliar to her in words, made her pause immediately and come to him. He drew her onto his lap and kissed her.
“I quite love when you use your voice,” she murmured almost shyly.
Spod smiled. His lack of tongue had never bothered her. Why would the strangeness of his voice?
“What do you think?” she asked, looking up at the canvas.
He touched the dried paint on her arm and signed the word for it. He’d never had to use it with her before. He himself barely remembered it.
“Paint?” Maeva confirmed, signing it back to him.
He nodded, pleased. She was always very quick to pick up his words. Then, looking almost impish, he signed, I do not know if there is more paint on you or on the canvas. He drew a square in the air for “canvas”.
Maeva giggled. Then she did something she had never done before. Surprising even herself, she grabbed at Spod’s sides and began to tickle him. His vibrant laugh echoed through the room and out into the corridor.
Across the hall, Sella, in her workroom, heard it. At first she was confused at who it was and then she realized it had to be Spod. She smiled to herself. They deserved such happiness.
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There's an eight-day span of Northern Reaches travel that takes place in an abandoned monastery. The short of it is, there's a blizzard. This is when they encounter the terror-feeder.
Because my brain cannot work without all the data, I went looking for ancient monastery floor plans so I can make my own. Enter the Plan of St. Gall, which did not depict St. Gall but was found at St. Gall.
I guess this bad boy dates from like the 13th century and is the only example we have an architectural drawing at this scale from this time period. It may have survived because somebody was like OOOO PAPER and it got a new life as a saint biography. But don't quote me on any of that. I'm more interested in what it says than how it came to be.
What I do know is this thing is absurdly difficult to parse. Latin is not a language I know well, and I'm really just flying blind.
Some things I've found that just cannot be right:
A room labeled "aliud" which just means... "something else"??
"Domur bubulcorum" -- so cow bedroom? Which makes sense as this was a fully-functional monastery, but then right beside it is "conclave aprecularum", which is the "priests' chamber", or the "concalve appecularum" (depending on if I can read the handwriting), which is the "room of glasses"??? (S/o to @im-a-luxury--few-can-afford for pointing out it's probably milk jars.)
A space at the top of the sanctuary that describes being gently squeezed through the crypt -- "per crypta strycta mite bynt".
Above the crypt on the opposite side, we've got "Hic paul(y), magni breemur/bremur/bramur/brumur", which is "Here's Paul," and then either "loud noise", "future big breaking", or "we are very proud".
It seems like they're doing that thing where the S sound is sometimes written as f, and also maybe the German ß is involved but the handwriting may just be that bad.
All of this is to say, someone else had better have translated this, because good gracious I cannot. I've tried. It's not happening.
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