The last heir of the Theocratic line that once ruled the Realm, he now looks for God's forgiveness in a quest for understanding and redemption. As the remaining member of the outcast family of Ormus, Van can no longer live in the City. He endures a peripheral existence in that region of all Gardens called the Forest. This is no regular landscape but a place ruled by the Erelia: the Animal Spirits. Here no men live in peace but at the mercy of the beasts. Here man is the weakling's soul in need of solace from the elements, from the sun and the rain, from the heat and the cold. He is the one that learns or dies.

Van was forced into this condition by his own sense of transcendental death but now finds himself caught in a prophecy where the merits of his millennial bloodline can finally be at rest. Once the heir of the line of Archons that rules the very heart of the world, the City of God, Van may wander into a path of conquest or peace. But there's the weight of memetic legacies to consider, to drive him through it and prove his will a mere mechanism of the group-thoughts that make or break a civilisation.