diff --git a/story.md b/story.md
index 696be830..d13ef034 100644
--- a/story.md
+++ b/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.