This is the story of two sisters who are born into a peaceful and beautiful isolated valley. But fate or Providence has a job for each of them far from home.
The story tells of how they find a path over the forbidding crags that hem their valley in, although nobody else believed it even existed, and so they make their way at last to the kingdom their ancestors fled from long ago, though as yet they do not know any of their history.
The girls grow into women; they were teenagers when they set out from home, and each finds what seems to be a place in life and a destiny - yet it is not to be.
The older meets her prince charming and marries him. For a while they reign happily enough, yet we see the cares and responsibilities that they bear as the rulers. The younger chooses another path and so they go their separate ways, as siblings generally do.
In differing ways also, grave trials and despair come to each. Each wrestles with hopelessness and temptations, yearning for the childhood love with which they supported each other, but not finding it.
So, still separated, each makes at length for home and peace, where they are reconciled and spend their days fruitfully in happiness, although the way home is not easy either.
The story is about conquest and overcoming, through courage, honesty, faith and love. It is about how two innocents go into the World and gain much, and loose much too. They return home, yet in the wisdom each has learned, the gifts they bring from the outside back to their rustic valley are only beneficial. They also leave behind something of the simple, honest and kindly ways of the Valley in the lands they visited.
This is not an allegory, although there may be parallels drawn about choices and their consequences and the sincere effort that repentance and returning may require. It is not a fairy story either - there is no fairy godmother, no wizard and no magic unless it be the magic conjured by love for another, and courage and a good heart. It is a story embodying hope and purpose, even when the actors in the story do not know at that time what it may be.
