We call our kingdom "The Crystal Empire", even though it is not an empire... yet, just a kingdom... and not a big one at that. Long ago, it was ruled by the Knight of the Sun, the protector of the Crystal Princess, heir of its throne. He revealed to us how this kingdom was created to guard light and fight darkness anywhere it was found, even though we were located at an isolated far off corner of the world... from where we would be allowed to travel to many other lands. We were not to be the only ones, but members of a greater alliance ruled by the Lord of Lords.
Some years passed, and when the princess proved to have grown strong enough, she was crowned queen by the Lord of Lords himself, right after we got by one of our worst crisis ever under her ruling. To help her on that, He had revealed to her that, in the future, He wished to turn this kingdom into an empire of sapphires and diamonds, and she trusted Him, as she has always done. It is because of that that we named Him "The Diamond Maker".
In spite of being built at a south pole, where ice is our landscape and a frozen wind our eternal companion, the queen managed to make the empire flourish. She has traveled for years, finding things which are missing to us, and bringing light that gives birth to life even in this far off forgotten place.
The kingdom is mainly built and decorated with ice and crystals, and beautiful arcs, bridges and kiosks are placed everywhere. Even so, the center is especially dear to us, due to the Great Temple: a great white limestone and crystal tower, a place consecrated from the very birth of the kingdom, to the Lord of Lords. And so, God comes and dwells among us every time He wants.
There are also two regions in the kingdom: a high-tech one, with lots of advances in science. It is kind of a science fiction paradise, which has grown tremendously. It has grown enough, that we can also provide services to other kingdoms, and people from far off places come to visit us, some even depend on us. The other region is still under development, there are mainly farming lands, which the queen tends with great care, since those require more heat to exist than any other one, and we are certainly not rich in heat.
Furthermore, in addition to the frozen weather, the kingdom is also located at a very inhospitable terrain: it is full of cracks and secret mines underground, which have always made urbanization a risky business. Down there, there are dangers, treasures and monsters all the same. Sometimes we have ventured into those depths, but huge areas remain unknown to us. Other times, things have emerged and we have been forced to fight them, so that they do not escape the kingdom and invade other countries. Citizens had found their way around and the city accommodated itself around the failures and we learnt to cope with them. When an earthquake comes, or a piece of terrain collapses, we move as one, give a hand to each other, and always survive. Or at least, we had always done.
Cold has always been an issue, one we have learned to survive and make art with it, but never liked in its entirety. We do know that we have been protected and isolated because of the warrior nature of our kingdom, which would leave us all exposed if our location was of easy access to the forces of evil... and also because of the terrain we are meant to work on, which hides unknown dangers to us, and those around us... but here it is... too cold. A bit of ice is magical, even so it becomes too much in here for entire epochs. Even the princess herself was close to death years ago due to that and it took an entire quest to unfreeze us all... and sort of come out of that. Still, we are at a south pole, it is not like we can do much about it... Well... yes there could be... but I must say we tried and failed miserably... but I will speak about that later. Yet, we have grown and, as I said, the queen has found ways to resolve our problems step by step. Then again for a third time, we have been just way too close to an end.
The years after our last crisis, a war too big were took part and almost lost, were particularly bad. At that time one of the things we tried was to produce our own energy using some resources from the mines below us, unfortunately we didn't know all of its structure as well as we thought, and the cracks underground caused mayhem. We were brave apprentices back then that had too much to figure out. It was a painful time, but we learnt more about the secrets of a very close friend who gave his life for mankind a long time ago. We also learned a lot about ourselves and a great demon that used to duel in our underground was found and defeated. We passed hunger and hardship, but we were together. Even so, to be truly reborn, that is a much more difficult business. And so we slept, in a way. Our landscape became gray, but calm, and our wounds healed slowly. We struggled, but we managed to make our city grow and provide us with hope. We had few but strong friends who gave us their hand.
