The Coveted is part of my exile theme stories, only steeped in the Dark Ages. Is it an adult fairy tale? A sad tragedy of times past? Or a parable of human nature that in changing remains the same, where innocent people are caught in webs of misplaced fears, laws, and regulations? It came to me on a sunny day in Berlin as I sat in an U-Bahn that passed along the broken graffiti-smeared Berlin Wall, thinking how it had locked people in - like the Iron Curtain - and how many suffered and died behind those walls that had cut through lives and loves, leaving trails of guilt and sin on all sides. And then I thought about punishments, such as witch hunts and dungeons and prisons and wars. Seeing the devastation through a foggy window, I hoped that the train was speeding into a new and better age . . .