Add the party leader's backstory and his mentor

Ties the party leader's rigid, orders-above-all sense of honor back
to a mentor he idolized as a young soldier - one who broke orders on
the night of the Great Explosion to keep his squadron out of the
massacre, then died in it. The party leader doesn't know why at the
time; his eventual realization that his mentor's disobedience was
itself the honorable act becomes his arc's throughline. Also notes
the rest of that squadron, now scattered, as a future plot thread.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

story.md

@@ -292,8 +292,51 @@ protagonist's own conduct as a captive, starts opening cracks in that
 certainty. Still carries out his orders even as he stops trusting them.
 Publicly denounced as a traitor by the king at the end of Chapter 1 for
 questioning why she was really taken.
+
+**Backstory.** As a very young soldier, he served in an army squadron
+under a mentor he idolized - a strictly honor-bound officer who was, to
+him, something like a superhero. On the night the army was dispatched to
+the Great Mage's town, that mentor broke orders outright: he told the
+entire squadron to stay behind and went in alone. With their mentor gone,
+the squadron had no one to hold it together - it disbanded, and everyone
+in it eventually left the army to find other work. The mentor never
+returned; he died in the Great Explosion.
+
+The party leader never learned the king was actually behind the massacre,
+so he never had reason to connect his mentor's last order to anything but
+a personal choice. Instead, he built his entire sense of honor around
+faithfully executing orders and serving "the greater good," now as a
+mercenary rather than a soldier - honor as obedience, just no longer to a
+chain of command, but to his own idea of duty (which is why the king's
+word still carries the weight of gospel for him in Chapter 1).
+
+It's through the protagonist that this starts to crack: he comes to
+understand that real honor has to come from one's own judgment, not
+blind adherence to orders - his mentor's, the king's, or otherwise. By
+the story's end, he realizes the truth: his mentor almost certainly went
+that night already knowing the king intended a massacre, and chose to
+disobey orders specifically so his squadron would never have to take part
+in - or witness - that side of what "honor" can mean. Because the mentor
+sent them home instead of into the town, none of them died in the Great
+Explosion. The mentor's final act of disobedience *was* the honorable one
+- the party leader just spends most of the story unable to see it that
+way.
+
+Further chapters will follow up with other surviving members of that same
+squadron, now scattered across the world, each having drawn their own,
+different lesson from their mentor's example of what honor means.
 *(Name and background: TBD.)*
 
+### The Mentor
+The party leader's former commanding officer, and the closest thing he
+had to a hero growing up. Rigidly honor-bound. Ordered his entire
+squadron to stand down and went alone into the Great Mage's town on the
+night of the purge - almost certainly already aware of what the king
+intended, and unwilling to let his soldiers take part in it. Dies in the
+Great Explosion. His true reasoning is never stated outright; the party
+leader only pieces it together well after the fact.
+*(Name: TBD.)*
+
 ## Themes
 
 - Self-fulfilling prophecy - the act of prevention *is* the cause.
@@ -302,6 +345,8 @@ questioning why she was really taken.
   reorganize its own sense of time to live with what it did.
 - Blind loyalty vs. conscience - orders followed even as faith in them
   erodes.
+- Honor redefined as judgment, not obedience - real honor sometimes looks
+  like disobeying orders, and can go unrecognized as such for years.
 - The crown's disregard for the people who prop it up - a distant king
   extracting from a region (soldiers, subjects, this mage) that owes him
   nothing and gets nothing back.
@@ -345,3 +390,9 @@ questioning why she was really taken.
 - Whether the king ever learns the protagonist survived, and if so, when.
 - Whether/how the protagonist eventually learns the truth about her
   parents and the Official Story's lie.
+- Names for the party leader and his mentor.
+- The other surviving members of the mentor's squadron: who they are,
+  where they ended up, and how each one has interpreted their mentor's
+  final act of disobedience - which chapters/movements they show up in.
+- How and when the party leader pieces together that his mentor already
+  knew what the king intended that night.