Brothers in Arms
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
Chapter 1: The Green, the Great White Castle
I, Gord, am prince and heir of the Kingdom of White Stone, and it is my honour beyond all honours to be son to the grandest and greatest of the kingdoms of men — a realm founded in the mists of history, a thousand years gone and more, by King Wenlis the Great. From the first stone laid, our kingdom has stood upon a single principle, plain as bedrock: that all men are brothers, that we share together in the truth, the good of it and the bad alike. Upon that rock we built our empire. Upon that rock, our enduring glory.
The King, my father, rules from the Great Castle, whose own beginnings are lost to the same deep mist. The kingdom takes its name from his chiselled white stone — but no man living knows who raised him, nor whence those stones were quarried. How did the Great King find craftsmen enough? For many there must have been, and master-hands among them, to raise walls so high and so impregnable. For generations the men of my kingdom have hunted the source of that stone, within our borders and far past them, and never found it. So the castle alone is built of it: stone that has not aged, has not weathered, has not so much as greyed in the rain since the day he was first set standing.
Magic, I have heard it whispered — the castle was raised by magic, and by magic he walks untouched through the ages of men. But we know better than that now. There is no magic. There are no mythical beings. The old tales may speak of them, but the tales are no truer than the wild and fabulous beasts that the country folk swear still haunt the forests and the wastelands. In these last few generations our wise men have learned the ways of nature, prised loose the very secrets of life itself, and we have built our kingdom upon clear reason and not upon the dark and barbarous superstition of the past. Since the day we set ourselves upon that course, the greatness of our kingdom has risen — slow and sure, like the sun itself lifting at the dawn of a new day, casting the clean light of clear thought across all the kingdoms of this world.
My father has gone further still. He has decreed that no man shall speak of the old ways at all, these myths of the dead past, lest the dark and foolish thinking they carry come creeping back to haunt us. We have no need of such stupid and backward notions, nor any welcome for them; and so no man is to speak of magic, nor of the great mythical beasts — not even as idle stories, whispered over a child’s bed to settle it down to sleep.
And so it fell to me, to Gord, to be the first to set eyes upon the great mythical creature, on the fateful day it came out of the very void as a herald of the turning of the age — the end of one time and the waking of another, the day those old myths and legends rose up out of the mists of the past to shake my kingdom to its deepest foundation.
We were sitting, the King’s Council and I, at a long open table set out in the middle of the famed green lawn that lies within the inner walls of the Great Castle. The table groaned under every manner of rich and costly fare — nothing but the best for the great men of our kingdom. I looked about me and was glad of the gorgeous day: the bright blue of the sky matched the perfect green of our famous lawn, and against them stood the white of the walls, the still water of the inner moat, and the whole bright rainbow of the pennants curling on the gentle breeze that stirred our hair and kept the spring sun from sitting too hot upon us. A perfect day, I thought, to sit and celebrate our glorious kingdom.
Duke Aspeth’s eldest had come, with hair the colour of polished beechwood and a careful smile. She was the third such daughter to be set before me this year; she would be the third behind me by the season’s end. A king rules over bodies and purses, Davil had once told me, but his queen rules over hearts. Aspeth’s eldest could not have done it. None of them, so far, could have done it. I had begun to wonder, dully, whether the woman Davil had described had ever walked the earth, or was the kind of saying old men keep for the comfort of teaching it. I gave her the bow I had been giving such girls all season; she moved on; I do not remember her name now.
After that, I sat at my father’s right hand, the dutiful son, as ever. And as the precious hours went by I watched: watched the wise old men of the Council pander to him, every one of them, playing that grand old game called Survival.
Which of these exalted men, I wondered, would ever find the courage to tell my father that the course he had demanded they all agree upon was madness? To stand against him? Surely they could not believe it the right course for the kingdom. But perhaps they did. Perhaps their carefully kept little worlds admitted no knowledge of the real state of things — the woes, the hunger, the lawless and desperate men, the spectre of famine that stalked the towns and the villages beyond these walls. None of that is ever let in past the palace gate, nor past the doors of their own sumptuous houses.
I watched the Truth-Teller, and I considered him. He is the one who knows all, the one whose whole office is to speak what is true. Yet there he sat, silent, watching, and said nothing. I wished I could see behind those dark eyes and know what he was thinking. If any man at that table could check the King, it was he. But where was he? Where was the truth? Yea — what was the truth?
What had become of my kingdom? Where had it gone, that brotherhood, that fellowship in the truth, that high fraternity of reason upon which we had built everything we claimed to be?
A flash of movement at the edge of my eye broke the thought.