The glow of the early morning was beginning to lighten up the sky, when we neared the end of the long pass through the mountains to the city of Kingdom Pass. It was the only viable access point into the Valley Lands that I knew of. It was said that there were other smaller passes higher in the mountains, but they were extremely dangerous and hard to find and sometimes weren't open for years at a time.
Large majestic snow capped peaks rose to the sky all around us, as far as the eye could see to either side of the pass. Never had I seen such grandeur exhibited in nature before. The only definition to the land that could be discerned earlier had been the deeper darkness of the passes side walls to either side of us as we had rode through the pass at night. But now a vast panorama of majesty rose all around us, as it was steadily backlit by the morning sun burning away the misty fog cloaking the pass and mountains.
The floor of the pass was a relatively flat dry river creek bed that spanned roughly anywhere from five hundred to twelve hundred feet across at any given point. We rode on a slightly-elevated highway of crushed stone that led us through the flats ever upwards.
The walls of the pass rose into even steeper mountain sides further above us. Rounding a bend in the pass I saw it before us, the wall of Kingdom Pass. The pass opened up into a wider space, and stretched across it lay the battlement fortifications of Kingdom Pass. It had been built long ago just after the colonization of this continent had begun. Our forefathers had come across the northern seas in ships that were of a creation that had not been equaled since. I knew little of the early days of our world only that we had come here from another world.
There had been sharp dissension among the early settlers over the use of technology that had led to a fracturing of loyalties, which had ultimately led to war. It had been a terrible war lasting over a hundred years and it had culminated in the building of this wall. It had been an attempt for survival by those in the minority, who had believed that the technology that had been used to get to this world was no longer something that was good for the people to know. Building the wall had worked. For over six hundred years the wall and its defenses had stood as a dividing rod between those who came to be known as the Valley Landers, and the world at large that lay beyond the mountain valleys.