The defining moment of Nathaniel’s early life came while performing altar duties in a small town in the Kingdom’s hinterlands. Though he was only a low-ranking acolyte, he learned and was successful in exposing the fact that the church’s priest was Void-Tainted.

Nathaniel was lauded as a “scourge of evil,” attention which naturally led the boy to develop an inflated view of his own importance. Claiming that he had been visited by an angel during his private prayers, he announced that he would assume the priest’s duties. His predecessor’s pyre was a dramatic backdrop for the boy’s first sermon.

The townspeople were doubtful when Nathaniel, still a youth of fourteen, took over the priest’s pulpit, but he refused to relinquish it. Whatever else was true, he became an inspiring orator, able to make the faithful weep or profess glory unto Light with a cunning turn of phrase. Before long, his congregation was growing, and people were calling him “father” in the streets. Inevitably, the small town became too small for his great purpose, so he journeyed to the capital. Nathaniel quickly surmised that the ecclesiarches there lacked sufficient zeal. He demanded a pulpit, with a growing flock of adherents at his back, and began preaching his radical views.

Nathaniel’s sermonizing challenged key points of Order dogma and, more problematically, he accused many of his superiors of abusing their station. This could not be tolerated by the elites. Paladins soon barred him from entering any Church. When he was officially anathematized, his followers abandoned him and he became nothing more than an itinerant madman.

But madmen are common among the Void Hunters, and when they did not immediately shun him, Nathaniel came to view them as worthy targets for evangelism — genuine enemies of the Void, not mere pretenders like most others.