Alexander

Alexander, son of Philip II of Macedon, is the child at the centre of Dark Prince. Lion of Macedon closes with his birth, and the darkness Parmenion has spent that book resisting has an interest in the baby. By the time Dark Prince opens he is about four, with a chaos spirit bound into his soul. It has not destroyed him; the two have merged, and the novel is partly about the struggle between the boy's own nature and the thing inside him. When a demon king in a parallel Greece, a land where the creatures of myth still live, becomes convinced that Alexander is a prophesied golden child whose heart will make him immortal, the prince is taken into that world, and Parmenion has to go after him. Gemmell writes Alexander as brilliant and much loved, and frightening with it, and he does not pretend that the conqueror history remembers was a simple hero. Readers who struggle with a four-year-old this clever should know the focus widens after the opening.

Appears in

1. 1Dark Prince (1991)The boy Alexander carries a dark god inside him, and Parmenion must follow him into a Greece of monsters where a demon king wants his heart.