The voices in His head chimed like an unbroken chorus of song.
He was aware of not only His immediate surroundings, but also of being many different places at the same moment, across several different continuums, and across space and time. When he looked across the landscape, He did not see the expansive primitive grasslands or the brilliant gaseous giant that hung in the sky. He saw complex carbon compounds, amino acids, charged electrons and energy-matter convergence.
He saw the evolving mathematical precision of Creation.
He was certainly conscious of the struggling primate cub a short distance away. He heard its wailing in the tall reeds of grass.
It did not interest Him.
He was certainly aware of the group of primates foraging for food along a nearby ridge and the cub’s mother panicked at discovering her missing son.
It did not interest Him.
He knew the proto-humans would be moving on soon. They had to. They would extend their search for the cub as long as they could, but the survival of the group depended on finding subsistence and shelter and avoiding predators.
The life of a single cub was not as important as the life of the entire group.
Then, inexplicably, out of some distant sensibility, He turned. He took the cub in his arms and gazed into its bewildered eyes. He showed it the world, the landscape, the ridge where the other primates were and its relationship to them. He set the cub down and watched it scurry in the direction of its fellow proto-humans.
The voices in His head momentarily, ever so slightly, paused.
Profile: The Archangel
Profile: Constantine
Profile: Constantine
His parents were set against it.
Both the Matriarch Apostolic Oracle and the Reverend Bishop Judge Advocate urged their only son to reconsider. His tutors pleaded with him. His fellow cleric Faith boys at Temple-at-Attica thought him humor-struck or fever-sick.
But Constantine tauValez knew his own mind and was determined to live his life his way.
Constantine had been born into Faith, to parents accomplished, respected and well bred. A gift for scholarship and a keen intellect were apparent even as a child.
Constantine was blessed a prodigy.
At an early age his parents set Constantine on a track toward position and authority. His Faithful tutors saw the potential to rise as far as the Principalities, or even the Seraphim. However, by the time Constantine reached thirteen and inducted into the Disciple of Michael, other ideas begun to preoccupy him.
Constantine wearied of life behind monastic walls, of the isolation of academia, and of the pretensions of privilege. A student of history, the romance of Faith’s warrior priests in ancient times—the so-called Soldiers of Paradise—enthralled the adolescent. The old stories of swordsmen on gryphon-back riding the open countryside and enforcing the will of Faith struck a cord.
He daydreamed of a life of adventure and intrigue, and of service to Faith that would take him far away from the sanctimonious world he’d grown up in.
Against all better judgment, Michael Constantine tauValez enlisted in the Order of the Knights Templar.
