LEGION OF ONE - BEHIND THE SCENES
The Story Behind My Story
When I was a kid, my best mate John and I swung sticks through the air, cutting down orcs, droids, whatever the mission called for. We weren’t just playing, we were building worlds. By the time I started writing at thirteen, I knew I wanted to capture that feeling of living inside a story. I also knew I’d dedicate it to him one day.
Since John passed, I’ve wrestled with how to honour him without it feeling performative. Maybe the answer is here—quietly. Not on the front page or in an announcement post, but tucked away for anyone willing to look behind the curtain. If you’ve found your way here, thank you. Legion of One is dedicated to John and his family. Not for any single moment, but because this story wouldn’t exist without the worlds we built together.
Those childhood games laid the groundwork, but the story became its own creature. Don’t let the nostalgia fool you, because this book is dark. At its core, it’s about fractured identities, the long shadow of war, and the power imbalances baked into broken systems.
Still, I wanted to keep something of that unpredictable childhood imagination. It’s not a remake of our games, but a tribute to the chaos, joy, and freedom in them. Childhood stories don’t move in straight lines; they shift and twist. This book does the same—a collection of short stories that stand alone, but together form something larger.
Original Artwork
The first snippets of Legion of One (then called A Legionnaire Story) came to life on my iPad in the back of a KC-30, mid-flight to Tasmania for Operation COVID Assist. It was moody, edgy… and destined for deletion.
Originally, the story followed three main characters who had once been part of a hive mind. Each one experienced a different phase of the war—one in the trenches, one in the capital, and one years later. It seemed like a perfect structure… but it turned out to be wildly confusing.
Having three characters across three timelines, all retroactively interpreting each other’s experiences? It was a mess.
The world of Gonda has a tangled, mismatched history.
As kids, John and I imagined massive armies and wild fantasy battles, then retconned everything into sci-fi the next week.
The only constant was the setting: it was always Gonda. Trying to recreate every childhood storyline would be impossible, so I focused on the pieces that mattered. Gonda isn’t one world—it’s three wearing a trench coat. Trenches and bayonets. Magic and monsters. Romance, horror, shifting levels of technology. It’s chaotic, it’s inconsistent, and honestly, that’s what makes it fun.
That same spirit of freedom is why I always leaned toward self-publishing. You get to build exactly what you want without reshaping it to fit a market trend or someone else’s expectations. I published Legion of One through Draft2Digital, which makes the indie process smooth but has its limits—especially with interior design.
Their automated Table of Contents system overrides anything that doesn’t fit its heading rules, which meant losing things like a Legionnaire greeting the reader at the start. I’d dreamed about fading text during bleed-out scenes, upside-down pages during the weirder moments—a fully immersive, unhinged experience. Maybe one day, a special edition can go all-in on that. For now, the story stands on its own, even without the visual flair.
Getting it there meant cutting almost 60,000 words. The early draft followed three characters, but the centerpiece was something else entirely: a lone surviving Legionnaire wandering a ruined world, drowning in flashbacks and regret. It was heavy for the sake of being heavy—pages of dialogue that didn’t say much, scenes that didn’t move. When I finally stripped it back and asked what each moment actually added, the answer was often “not enough.”
What survived is cleaner, sharper, and truer to the heart of Legion of One.
The Real World of Gonda
Port Arthur Asylum, Tasmania
One of the real-world places that shaped Legion of One in unexpected ways was Port Arthur, Tasmania. It’s a haunting place. Beautiful, quiet, and steeped in sorrow.
When I visited, I spent time in the old asylum, where I learned that silence was used as a weapon. Inmates were kept in total silence and stripped of identity. The masks weren’t just for the guards. Everyone wore them. No talking. No names. Just menial tasks and total sensory deprivation. The same tasks. The same meals. The same silence.
It shook me.
The asylum church, with its echoing emptiness and oppressive individual booths, became a major inspiration for the island where the Legionnaires are made. I won’t spoil the details, but that sense of enforced obedience, ritual, and isolation became central to how I built their origin.
There’s a cold logic to it, break the mind, rebuild the body, and call it service. But as you’ll see in the story, it leaves fractures. Cracks where the human spirit still shines through.
Caltowie, South Australia
This is one of many places that John and I used to play. The paddock, turned golf course, turned music festival venue was once the stomping ground of a group of boys.
The trees, planted in neat rows, became towering walls. Sand bunkers were trenches. Pine lattices turned into fortresses. Sticks, of course, were swords, rifles, or staffs, whatever the mission required.
There was a tree that fell once. It lay there for what must’ve been years. That fallen giant became everything: a spaceship, a hideout, a hut, a windbreak when the weather turned. It was whatever we needed it to be. The stories we told there could've filled volumes and maybe, in a way, they have.
Even now, when I look at Caltowie Oval, I don’t just see grass and trees. I still see the kingdom. I see us running around. And I see the spark of a story that’s grown into something far bigger than either of us ever imagined back then.
The Field
The third place isn’t marked on any map, but I know it better than any street or landmark. It’s the field.
Not a specific one, really, but the many nameless stretches of dirt and grass I walked while in uniform. Cold mornings. Heavy packs. The silence of waiting. The chaos of moving. The long nights filled with stars and static. In those places, I learned about brotherhood, about endurance, about what weariness feels like when it’s not just in your head but in your bones.
Those experiences didn’t just influence the world of Legion of One, they helped build it. The sense of duty. The isolation. The unspoken bond between those who march forward when everything inside them is screaming to stop. Gonda isn’t just fiction. It’s memory, reshaped.
You won’t find “The Field” in any travel guide. But if you’ve ever served or even stood in a place where silence speaks louder than words you’ll know it when you see it in the story.
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When something is unbreakable the fractures start within.
Legion of One is a collection of short stories following the men and women of the Eiserne Legion, an elite force bound by a shared consciousness. But what happens when the systems that are supposed to hold them together break them apart instead?
In a world where love, loss, and trauma are as much a part of the battlefield as weapons and magic, these soldiers are left to confront not only the enemies threatening their lives—but the internal wounds that threaten their very sense of self.
