Al Khair lives! My AI Worldbuilding Art Journey — Two Years Later

About two years ago, I first tried to create worldbuilding art for my 16th century paranormal romance trilogy, When Darkness Falls, using AI image generators. The results were... let's just say "charmingly terrible" and leave it at that! 😄

But AI art has come such an incredibly long way in just two years, and I thought it was time to try again to capture Al Khair — the ancient desert city at the heart of the trilogy — a massive walled city rising in tiers from the desert sands, crowned by a white marble palace at its summit. Think Mont Saint-Michel, but in the middle of a vast desert, surrounded by stark black mountains, under spectacular storm skies.

And oh my gosh... they did it. They actually did it! These images are almost exactly how I've always imagined Al Khair in my head — that sense of a city that grew organically over centuries, each tier of sandstone buildings climbing upward toward that gleaming palace, isolated and magnificent in the middle of the desert, with the black mountains that are home to the vampires, in the distance.

I may have squealed. Just a little. 😄

When Darkness Falls is my 16th century paranormal romance trilogy, and Al Khair is the heart of it all. If you haven't read the series yet, I hope these images give you a feel for the atmosphere — sweeping, dramatic, mysterious, and just a little dangerous. Exactly the way I imagined it. 😊