Wizard Sürmu was, as his name suggested, a wizard. Imagine him with a scraggly, unkempt beard, a wizard's hat crumpled and askew, a pair of scuffed boots, and a hole at the left knee of his once-white, trademark wizard trousers. (They are called wizard trousers because they have lots of tiny secret pockets to keep wizardy stuff in.)

Actually, wizard Sürmu was quite harmless. A bit unfocused at times, so the greatest danger he posed to his fellow citizens came from escaped spells turned wild because their owner hadn't stowed them correctly in his trouser pockets—or because said pockets had holes that allowed the spells to escape.

King Löu, on the other hand, was an altogether different matter. When he was young, he was a charming prince with a dazzling grin and a keen interest in speleology, a passion that made him explore any cavities he could gain or force access to.

As a result of this, he was the proud owner of the world's most extensive collection of dried cave-salamanders and the father of countless fatherless offspring.

But one day, he ventured forth into the maze of the Caverns of Ugh, and not only forth, but also down, further down than any other explorer before him. And there, in the dregs of a long-extinct civilization, he found it.

The Yonder Stone.

It looked like any ordinary, whitish pebble, the size of a quail's egg, but glowing faintly from within. When he saw it, he couldn't but reach out for it, seize it, and clench it tight.

The moment he touched the Stone, his skin took on the color of ivory, and his hair turned into a mane of silver.

While this didn't hurt the prince, it certainly affected his success with the ladies. They still found him interesting, but more as a subject of gossip than as a bedmate. Too close were his looks to those of his dried cave-salamanders.

Prince Löu didn't care. The Yonder Stone became the focus of his attention, and he wouldn't put it out of his hand for a single moment. Fortunately, the stone was small enough to keep it in his fist at all times. Soon, the fist became the pale prince's trademark. Löu was depicted with a closed fist on all the royal family portraits, and later, when he became king, a raised closed fist was considered the new adequate greeting amongst aristocrats and loyalists.

Now you might wonder how the prince and later king passed his nights, if not with speleological studies of a different variety.

Well, he specialized in Yonder studies. Löu soon found out that every fabric or material coming into touch with the stone was immediately bleached of its color. While this would certainly have been a useful quality for a washerwoman, it posed Löu with some severe problems.

No one cared that his collection of ugly, dried salamanders was soon bleached because it wasn't colorful, to begin with. But when the midnight blue, gold-patterned gown of the prince's dance partner at the queen's ball suddenly bled of color and ended as a plain white shift, the lady in question fainted.

Unfortunately, the price caught her with his yonder-stone-holding hand, which caused the last hints of color in her cheeks to fade.

After this scandal, the young lady was never seen in society again although stories about a white witch in a night shift haunting the royal castle persist into our days.

Banned by his mother from dancing events and bored, Löu started to experiment with his stone on different species. Everyone loved the white swans now populating the castle ponds, and soon the ball incident was forgotten.

Löu's future looked pale when, one lonely night, a few months after his coronation, he walked the deserted chambers of Larktrodden Castle, his eyes on his beloved Yonder Stone. Not really watching his steps and walking where his moods took him, he reached the Hall of Legendary Heroes and the single statue that stood there.

Hewn from golden-veined marble, it represented Lord Glünggi, the national hero. Even though scholars doubted that the man had ever walked the earth, the common people knew with certainty that he had been the one to found the kingdom and to set the first Löu on the throne, uncounted generations ago.