This is a separate post so announcements didn't get buried by pictures. Like most tangent posts, it's not part of the story, just me chatting about where parts of the story came from. If that's interesting to you, read on!
As usual, Palendurio is a fusion of places I've been and places I've just seen, mixing inspiration with the real world with the fantastical. The first 5 pictures are mine, the rest are pulled from Wikipedia where a lot of very fine people have added a lot of amazing pictures.
I describe Palendurio as a city built on top of Karst topography. In places like Florida, that kind of geology is why you get sinkholes. But it's also responsible for cool limestone caves and the extremely cool rock pillars see in the last picture showing some of the beautiful karst in China (credit wiki commons). So I imagined Palendurio as having lots of vertical pillars. For early settlers who had to deal with chimeras, drakes, and scimitar lions trying to eat them, the pillars would have been natural defenses allowing some degree of safety at nights, while allowing easy access to a river and farmland nestled among those pillars.
Another place of safety, especially useful for if wyverns are around, would be the underground caves. This part is inspired by places like Petra (pictures 6 and 7, again, thanks again wiki commons) where monumental architecture is built right into stone cliffs. Over the centuries, settlers would have modified these caves for their use. Eventually, Baracueli settlers would have turned the growing mess of an underground city where they hid from myrvites into a proper temple, eventually becoming the Grand Sanctum.
Meanwhile, as the city grew, there would be enough people that folks would want to stop hiding in caves and on pillars. They would have built walls to keep out myrvites, then castles to defend against hostile armies. Eventually, with the invention of spellwards and the unification of Baracuel, these defenses would become obsolete, but still be major features of the city. Here, are inspiration goes to Rome (and finally, my own pictures). Picture 1 shows a church in Rome, complete with sturdy stone architecture and beautiful stonework. I imagine a lot of the architecture like that. Picture 2 (panorama) shows how the mix of newer construction might look next to old ruins in the city (here, the Roman Forum). Picture 3 shows what it's like to have a kickass castle just hanging around your city; the fictional Charlem Palace and Ducastil are described as nestled on top of hills, but they'd be no less prominent or intimidating than Castel Sant'Angelo. Picture 4 shows the inside of that castle, but the disorienting, closed passages there are what I imagine the inside of the Grand Sanctum looks like.
Finally, we have picture 5, the other panoramic, which shows the Tiber River running through the city. For Palendurio, I imagined walls like the ones that now line the river, but pocketed with dozens of underground canal entrances where major movement of goods could take place without disrupting pedestrian traffic above. The technical feasibility of a city like Palendurio is possible through magic where arcanists can knit cracked stone back together (therefore preventing sinkholes and tunnel collapses) and also smooth out cave networks (allowing for underground canals).
So there's Palendurio. If you're ever thinking to yourself "wow, Uranium Phoenix has so much worldbuilding in these books," just know that I've been restraining myself!