Before the chaos began, before the nobles came to Azure Valley for Sienna-Rose and the estate gates turned away half the kingdom. King Maximus spent his days quietly at Azure Valley, not as a ruler, but as a friend of the sorceress.
He wandered through the estate grounds and the surrounding city, studying with an intensity few expected from a monarch. He asked questions about everything: the air well systems that brought cool, clean air into homes; the carefully planned water flow that prevented stagnation; the hidden channels that handled waste and kept the streets dry.
What astonished him most was the cleanliness of it all. The city did not reek of decay or waste, like so many others he'd visited. Instead, the streets carried a gentle fragrance of real flowers, not the cloying perfumes used to mask the rot of poor infrastructure. And more shocking still: there were no flies, no rot, and no acrid human stench lingering in alleys.
