He'd first read Augustine's The Confessions as an undergraduate. It was one of the first books of philosophy that he didn't only read, but practically devoured. For a mind that was more attuned to comic-books and sword and sorcery, it was quite a feat.

He'd read it as he walked. He read it as he ate in the cafeteria. He marked it up with underlines and notes.

He'd been aimless and adrift in those days. His whole life had been revolved around wrestling, yet he'd left high school without a single major championship. What was he supposed to do in college, if not wrestle...? He continued to lift weights, of course. It was in those years that he began to grunt and scream as he lifted.

He still had comic-books...and to an extent, Dungeons and Dragons. And yet, as he grew older, the game became harder, more illusive for him to submerge himself inside of. The gamers he knew in college were different from him too. Almost alien. For them, it was just a game. They didn't even know who Conan or Red Sonja were, except maybe on the most superficial level.

They didn't share and couldn't sympathize with, the strange, almost nostalgic feeling that struck him whenever he read ancient, heroic mythology or sword and sorcery. And so he mostly just collected old adventure manuals, reading and re-reading them and feeling that inexplicable, sad longing.

A void grew bigger and bigger inside of him. The things he did to fill the void...they shamed him.

Yet Augustine...Augustine had been there. He'd engaged in crime and vandalism...simply to do it. Augustine explained that no man was evil. Nothing in all of Creation was evil in its essence. Evil, Augustine explained, was simply a word to describe what occurred when the objects of God's creation fell out of their intended harmony.

What had really struck a chord, however...was when he read, as he passed up the hill, back towards campus...was that the Law of God was written upon his heart. His very conscience, from his guilt, to his inhibitions...it was God's Law he was experiencing. God...had written His Law on his heart...

From the precipice of flunking out of college, he rose up to become perhaps the departments stand-out undergraduate. It wasn't so long after that he'd finally caught the knack for leg-locks...and with it, the ability, for the first time, to really, truly express himself on the mat.

In graduate school, he'd undertaken an independent study on Augustine's City of God. The book had been written in the final days of Rome; amidst the sack of the city by barbarian hordes. KnightMask remembered feeling helpless as he read it. The man whose writings had done so much for him, who'd bravely shared his failures with the world and in so doing, had perhaps saved KnightMask's life...had watched his home become overrun by bandits and brigands. And there was nothing KnightMask could do.

He would never forget the imagine that formed in his mind's eye of the leader of those hordes. Scowling, dark haired...his deathly pale skin adorned with tribal markings. It was a picture his imagination had draw up, he was sure...and yet, he remembered it so starkly.

There was no way he could reach across the chasm of time to defend the city...there was nothing he could do. A strange thing happened while he was reading the book. By some apparent glitch, it seemed to disappear from the library's database while he had it checked out. The book became his...indefinitely.

The rumors that swirled around Sebastian Duke said that he commanded the Illuminati itself...and that his organization was bent upon the destruction of the Catholic church. KnightMask had no way of knowing whether or not those rumors were true...or just some more sensationalized tabloid fare. And yet...it had been inside the church, had it not, that he had been purged of the vampirism that had be racing through his body and eating away at his soul...?

In the grand design of things...there had to be a reason...a reason for his being, a reason for his longing for a time before his birth...a reason for the feelings of futility and helplessness that had haunted him...a reason even...for a glitch in a library's computer system.

The imagination was a strange thing...and yet...

Every time he looked at Duke's face...he remembered Augustine's City of God. Every time he looked at his face...he felt with utter, unshakeable certainty that all the reason and rationalization in the world could not dislodge...that he was looking at the face of the leader of the barbarian hordes. In those moments, he would feel a sense of urgency...the urgency of a man who had been confronted with the reason for his being...with the dragon he had been made to slay.

No man is purely evil. Not Sebastian Duke...not Attila the Hun. And KnightMask knew, he was no less fallen and sinful than any other. And yet, he could not shake the feeling that the church was embattled...that barbarians were at the gates...and that on Wednesday Night Warfare, he was going to battle with their leader.