For all of Girards life fleeting images about the mystery if his birth had tortured his mind. Always there had been shadows of another existence, another life. Another being seeing to force him toward what it wanted. Whatever it was, it possessed him. Forced him to turn away from his everyday life and begin a sacred quest that takes him across half the world, from the Vatican to the bazaars of Istanbul and the deserts of the Middle East. There he seeks the sacred God plant that might give him the answer and which will reveal the ultimate horror, a nightmarish revelation of divine terror in which he becomes the messenger and protector of the child whose rebirth the world awaits and the ultimate evil that seeks to prevent it.