Prince of Thorns

by Mark Lawrence

Prince Jorg Ancrath is fourteen years old and leading a band of brigands through a post-apocalyptic medieval landscape. Driven by rage, ambition, and the kind of intelligence that makes empathy a liability, he fights his way toward a throne through sheer ruthlessness. The Broken Empire trilogy is grimdark at its most unapologetic — a villain protagonist in a world that made him.

36 characters, locations, and items in this world codex.

Characters

• Brother Grumlow — The Brothers' scout and survivor — a lean, quiet man who moves through forests like a rumor and kills like an afterthought.
• Brother Liar — Named for the obvious reason — a Brother whose relationship with truth is adversarial and whose stories are the only entertainment on the road.
• Brother Rike — Seven feet of muscle, violence, and extremely limited impulse control — the Brothers' blunt instrument, who follows Jorg because Jorg is the only pers
• Brother Row — A Brother with a scholar's mind trapped in an outlaw's life — he reads, he thinks, and he kills because that's what the company requires.
• Chella — A necromancer who serves the Dead King — commanding corpses with a cold competence that makes her one of the trilogy's most persistent and unsettling
• Corion — A fire-mage and political manipulator — one of the powers behind multiple thrones in the Hundred Kingdoms, whose control over flame mirrors his contro
• Count Renar — The man who killed Jorg's mother and brother — the act that set a prince on the road and turned a boy into a thing that burns.
• Father Coddin — Jorg's childhood tutor and the Brothers' reluctant chaplain — a man of the cloth dragged through hell by a prince who refuses to stop walking.
• Ferrakind — A fire elemental — or something like one — a creature of pure flame bound by Builder-era forces, devastating and barely controllable.
• Fexler Brews — A ghost in the machine — a Builder-era AI personality preserved in the data-space for a thousand years, who becomes Jorg's guide to understanding the
• Gorgoth — A leucrota — a mutant giant born from Builder radiation, brilliant behind a monstrous face, and the most intelligent member of Jorg's warband after Jo
• Jorg Ancrath — A prince who fell into a thorn bush at nine and came out a monster — who burned villages at fourteen, conquered kingdoms at eighteen, and saved the wo
• Katherine Ap Scorron — The woman Jorg loved — his father's young wife, beautiful and unattainable, who represented everything the prince wanted and couldn't have without des
• King Olidan — Jorg's father — the king who chose politics over avenging his murdered wife and baby, and created a monster by teaching his surviving son that love me
• Miana — The woman Jorg married — small, fierce, and the only person who matched his intelligence without matching his cruelty.
• Prince William — Jorg's baby brother — killed in the briar patch attack, the ghost who haunts every decision Jorg makes.
• Red Kent — A Brother named for his hair color and his temper — a reliable fighter and one of Jorg's steadier killers in a band where 'steady' is relative.
• Sageous — The dream-mage who pulled strings from the shadows — manipulating Jorg, Olidan, and half the Hundred Kingdoms through dreams, suggestions, and the qui
• Sir Makin — The only Brother with a knighthood and something resembling a conscience — Jorg's closest friend, if 'friend' is a word that applies to people who fol
• The Dead King — An entity of pure entropy building an army of the dead — the existential threat that makes Jorg's petty conquests irrelevant and his monstrous talents
• The Nuban — A dark-skinned warrior from distant lands — the Brothers' best archer and quietest member, whose silence carries more weight than Rike's screaming.
• Tutor Lundist — Jorg's other tutor — an old scholar who taught him to think before Jorg learned to kill, and whose lessons echo through every clever thing the prince

Locations

• Ancrath — Jorg's homeland — a kingdom defined by its tall castle, its cold pragmatic king, and the son who burned his way back to claim it.
• Builder Ruins — The remnants of our civilization — overgrown bunkers, crumbling highways, and radioactive craters that the Hundred Kingdoms call 'ancient' without rea
• Crath City — A major city in the Hundred Kingdoms — one of the larger settlements where politics, trade, and violence intersect on a grander scale than most kingdo
• Tall Castle — The seat of House Ancrath — where Jorg was a prince, where his father chose politics over love, and where the boy who left in thorns returned as a kin
• The Haunt — The fortress Jorg takes as his first real stronghold — a mountain castle that becomes his base of operations and Miana's domain when he rides to war.
• The Horse Coast — Miana's homeland — a coastal kingdom that becomes part of Jorg's empire through the most effective of political tools: marriage.
• The Hundred Kingdoms — Feudal Europe rebuilt on nuclear ruins — a hundred warring kingdoms that don't know they're fighting over the grave of the civilization that created t
• The Roads — Where the Brothers live — the muddy, dangerous paths between kingdoms where a band of killers is both predator and pilgrim.
• Vyene — The holy city where the Congress of Lords meets — where the Hundred Kingdoms come to argue about who should rule, and where Jorg comes to end the argu

Items

• The Briar Patch — A tangle of thorns where a nine-year-old boy was impaled and forced to watch his family die — the moment that created the Prince of Thorns.
• The Builders — Us. The pre-apocalyptic civilization that the Hundred Kingdoms remember as mythological precursors — whose highways are ruins, whose bombs made the wa
• The Congress of Lords — The Hundred Kingdoms' mechanism for choosing an Emperor — a political assembly at Vyene where a hundred lords vote on who should rule them all, usuall
• The Data-Space — The ghost of the internet — a remnant AI network from the Builder era that connects buried installations and may have spawned the Dead King from accum
• The View — A Builder-era AI system of immense scope — one of the data-space's most powerful remnants, capable of observing and calculating across the entire netw

View full codex at Simulacra.Ink