When I was a child, this city has been nothing but a simple village in the mountains with houses built out of stone and wood and the only thing that concerned the people here had been the demons of the forest and the crop on the fields.

Now I was an adult and looked upon a glorious collection of detailed constructions and buildings. Parts of the forest had been made ours and paths to the temples had been laid out with cobble. All because my mother had been a visionary. She had always been that, even before her marriage with father. Or so I have been told.

Time has passed, so that my mother, who had grown up in these very mountains as the child of the first pilgrims from Koruna, had grown old. Father had died and another leader had been chosen. My father had been a priest, as well as the leader before him, but the one who would lead us now was not. Apparently, everyone thought that the temples were just a secondary worry now and that leading us would require someone who was not occupied with countless rituals that had to be taken care of. I disapproved of that notion. Father had always managed to do both just fine, but that was just my opinion.

I was to be married to this new leader, who was called a king by the by now old pilgrims. And I was his queen. The titles seemed tempting, but they did not seem to suit this country. I have always heard them when mother had told me stories of Koruna, that in turn had been told to her by her mother. Two generations of stories, making them seem more like a fairy tale than reality. But the desert country Koruna was reality. They were reigned by a king, or even two, the old pilgrims seemed to not be sure there, with a queen at his side. A king to rule over a golden city in the desert. It had been a bedtime story when I was a child. And now I was a queen myself? Not suiting at all. But I did not object. As the female part of the reign, my purpose was to give birth to an heir. One generation ago, most of my tasks would have also included the work in the house, cooking, working on the field and things of the like. Now a palace had been built and people were serving us, taking away that work from me. It was a life I still had to get used to.