Alexander III of Macedon --- The Great --- was born into a world of competing states that had veered between war and peace amongst themselves for generations. This turmoil was echoed in the turmoil of his early years growing up at the Archelaus Palace in the capital at Pella, where his hard-drinking father and his mystic mother warred constantly, using the boy as a weapon between them. Alexander made his first human kill during a boar hunt at the age of twelve, and tamed the legendary stallion Bucephalas in the same year, thus winning the coveted right to wear the sword-belt of an adult. Through the years of his youth he was tutored with a hand-picked group of the sons of nobles by the great Athenian philosopher Aristotle, and the friends he made during his schooling would remain with him all his life. One of them, Ptolemy, would go on to found the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt which would end with Cleopatra, and another, Hephaestion Amyntoros, his soul-mate and lover, would stay with him through life and death and into legend. At twenty, by the treachery of others, he acceded to his father Philip's throne, and so began his journey into immortality. In this, the first of four volumes of The Alexander Chronicles, we travel with him as he prepares to conquer a world without horizons...