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Dream of the Endless knew when he was being watched by eyes beyond sight.Most often, it was through the magicks of mortals—scrying, divining, the like. Each time came with a charged, uncomfortably watched sensation that varied in intensity with the expertise of each observer. These methods utilized the unconscious mind—over which Dream held total authority. As such, more than simply knowing when he was being watched, Dream would know who was watching him.The Thessalians were graceless, though practiced. Their scrying always felt like icy claws down his spine, and if Dream had any blood, it would have curdled in his veins.The Fates, whom the Witches occasionally served, also made no attempt to hide their evil eyes whenever they caught on his form. Perhaps that unsubtle, proud manner was the reason for the brash stares from the Thessalians.The children of Desire were less adept at it than the witches, though their touch was subtler, teasing. All the same, they did not so much look as leer. Dream knew his sibling kept more than a few eyes on him, always looking for leverage against or over him, but Dream had nothing to hide from Desire.Some gazes were pleasant, like Queen Titania of the Faerie. Her looks always felt more like a caress than a glance, her dark, star-filled eyes tracing over him like a lover’s fingertips.Regardless, he did not appreciate these looks in on his life, and Dream soon found the best method of shaking them off was simply to look directly back at them. More often than not, observers did not appreciate being observed in kind, and he would recapture his privacy in mere moments. He would forget about them as soon as they were gone.(He did not like to think about the folly of his line looking back.)Some gazes, however, necessitated greater investigation.Shortly after the new year in the year 1195 C.E., he visited the waking world, walking in The City Found in the Middle on the isle of Cyprus. Limassol was remarkably prosperous, though Dream felt some deeper evil lurking beyond where he cared to venture. He was disinterested in the whims of zealots, and these Templars would soon be wiped away by—Golden eyes found him as he walked through a public garden.These eyes were strange to Dream. They felt… of this time, but also not of it. Briefly, he wondered if it was his father’s doing, but dismissed the idea instantly. He would not care for Dream’s wanderings unless they broke the laws set by the First Circle—and even then, care was quite too sentimental a word for what Time would do.Still, this wasn’t a typical gaze from mortal eyes. Not wanting to scare off the mysterious new presence, he did not turn, gathering as much as he could from what he possessed. The man staring at him was named Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad, the leader of the Assassin Brotherhood in Syria. A long way from home, aren’t we?But that… wasn’t the whole truth of it. He knew the gazes of most mortal souls. All who dream see him, after all. He recalled Altaïr’s latest dreams in an instant, which were memories more fantastical than the average. Golden light and ancient things—not magic, not by far, but something infinitely (endlessly) more curious.This felt similar to when Desire would spy on him through their children’s eyes, borrowing their senses. The Assassin was not a child of Desire, however. Nonetheless, he was a child of something very powerful.Dream had met the Isu, as they called themselves, when they first came to Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago. Their aspirations as a species strayed little from the ideas of conquering and enslaving others. They tried to endear themselves to the Endless with their calculations, inventions, and the species they created, but the most it inspired from the family was annoyance.Dream was glad their reality had been shaken as it was.In one reality, the Isu were responsible for the creation of humans. In this present reality, that genesis was rather convoluted. The absolute answer of where humans came from on Earth was the subject of much debate, but each answer carried in it a kernel of truth. Yes, some humans descended from an incredibly long evolutionary process involving invertebrate fish. Yes, some humans descended from an alien race remarkably similar to their own. Yes, some humans descended from the First People under Nada’s rule. And yes, some humans were, in fact, created by the Isu, and people like Altaïr descended from that line.(They were all, functionally, humans. It seemed the fate of those who dwelled on Earth to eventually homogenize into this one species. Dream had witnessed something similar in the evolution of sea-dwelling species into crabs. The humans were similar to those crustaceans, in that they had very little idea of this, or if they did, they protected such secrets with strange ferocity.)Where Dream could understand his brother’s annoyance with the Isu’s ‘calculations,’ and his sister’s irritation with their motivations for creating life, his own displeasure began and ended with the fact they controlled humans’ ability to dream. Their golden tools robbed them of imagination, leaving many of them stoic and placid. For that, Dream had reached into the minds of one thousand humans and inspired them with the ideals of freedom, choice, and life without their masters.Just a thousand would do enough to liberate them, but that estimate was for the mortal minds already capable of dreaming. Their damaged neurotransmitters, so inundated with input from those devices, meant no change happened until ten thousand dreamers shared that chainless dream.The Isu were not gods, as gods required human belief to exist. The Isu claimed to be immortal, but Dream of the Endless knew the trouble with immortality: all beginnings had endings, and anything that could draw their first breath would eventually draw their last, even for ones whose words echoed across time with advanced technology.Even echoes ended.They also claimed to control belief, and perhaps, for a time, that was true. But Dream’s intervention proved that claim incorrect.When that simultaneous dream of ten thousand humans happened, the sun reached out a flame to cleanse the Earth of the Isu, just as it would do millennia in the future to punish Dream and Nada for breaking the one of the laws set by the First Circle. Unfortunately, because the universe likes to laugh, it set a precedent for all eventual solar flares to come—an echo, so to speak. The entire affair, Dream considered with unease, felt like a vortex event waiting to happen.But Dream didn’t need worry about that right now. They were nine hundred years off from the next solar flare—and hopefully further off from a supposed vortex.So he focused on Altaïr, some fifty paces back and three stories up. The Assassin walked along the green, latticed rooftops of Limassol’s garden district, watching him with extrasensory input that told him more information on a deeply subconscious level. Being that Dream was almost entirely formed of subconsciousness, it was no wonder that he’d caught Altaïr’s eye. The ability the man called Eagle Vision was very similar to the golden eyes of the Isu, but Altaïr was still coming into his own with his control over it. But this wasn’t Eagle Vision. This was different.The extra pair of mystic eyes coming from Altaïr defied anything Dream had known before. It was not from the Isu device hanging from Altaïr’s hip, which lay dormant for now—as if it, too, were curious about the Endless in its presence.Dream could not figure it out, so he took a closer look. He stopped walking along the garden path he’d been enjoying, and felt Altaïr pause. The Assassin ducked m behind a taller portion of the roof to conceal his presence, but Dream could see him through any wall, across any distance. It took less than a thought to jump from his current position to the Assassin’s side.“What is it you think you are doing?” Dream asked in Altaïr’s native Arabic.The Assassin startled like a spooked horse, a sharp and unfamiliar pang of fear threading through the air between them. It quickly dissipated, though Altaïr was still wary of the being before him. His surprise was followed swiftly by annoyance over the fact he’d been startled at all. Altaïr mastered himself, though the blood had drained from his face. Some mortals could not cope with the mild horror of beholding an Endless, but Altaïr’s blood was older than that. The Isu and the Endless were, regrettably, intertwined. Whatever Altaïr felt or recognized in Dream’s presence before him, it kept him on his guard.But he was clearly fascinated.“You are not human,” he said, matter of factly.It wasn’t an answer to Dream’s question. He did not confirm or deny the accusation, because Altaïr had not asked a question. Ignoring that a moment, he considered Altaïr’s eyes, and came to a confounding conclusion:Whatever that gaze had been, it was not coming from Altaïr, but from a few feet above his left shoulder, for some reason.Curious.Dream did not let on that he knew of this observer, wanting to gather more information before looking back at them.The Assassin tried again, golden eyes glinting in the sun. “Are you… one of them?” A brief look into his mind told Dream he meant the Isu. A flicker of annoyance jolted through Dream, and he had to keep himself from scowling at the device on Altaïr’s hip.
“I am not.”

This furrowed the man’s brow. “Then what are you—?”“It is not common that a soul is as a spyglass,” Dream interrupted. Perhaps Altaïr did know of the ghostly gaze behind him, and he could interrogate more answers from the man. “Why is yours thus?”Confusion struck Altaïr, though his body did not so much as flinch. Ah, so he doesn’t know. Dream threw caution to the wind in the name of satisfying curiosity, and concentrated on the presence behind Altaïr.There was something familiar within the unknown. Traces of Isu power, Isu lineage, Altaïr’s lineage, but also… hm. Something that reminded Dream of his father, though he’d dismissed his involvement earlier in what was perhaps a dramatic bout of logic-leaping. Dream honed in on a point just over Altaïr’s left shoulder, searching for—There.“Who are you?” he asked the void air, continuing to ignore Altaïr for the moment.The presence seemed to startle, as Altaïr had. Dream could not get a read on the being, past a few strange seconds of understanding. He was, after all, used to divining those who divined upon him. A man, then. Uncommon for magic, but this is not magic. A young man, with an old, crowded soul. His identity, shrouded in an impenetrable white mist. Suddenly, a name—
“Desmond. I look forward to our meeting.”

The presence dissipated so abruptly, Dream expected to hear a noise.Well, there was a noise—Altaïr, who was certainly not used to being so blatantly ignored.“Who are you talking to?” he demanded heatedly. Dream supposed that his current form looked similar enough to men of Altaïr’s age that he could feel comfortable demanding such answers from him, but normally, Dream would have punished the man for his insolence.“Someone far off,” he said vaguely.“Then who are you?”Dream forgot, at times, the inquisitive nature of humans, and the iniquitous nature of questions that refused to be answered.
“Someone you shall never meet again, Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad.”

With that, he disappeared.“What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck what the—”“I’d—well. I’m surprised he. Excuse me, I may be ill.” Shaun staggered down the hall, leaving Desmond with Rebecca and his dad.“Is that who we’re looking for?” Desmond asked shakily. He made no attempt to get out of the Animus, knowing he’d just collapse like a newborn fucking deer.“It’s—yeah. Yeah, I’m pretty sure.” His dad’s teeth were chattering and he was hugging his trembling arms to his chest, as if he’d been standing out in the cold for too long. Despite it being the beginning of November in London, the global heatwave made the region unbearably warm—it would have mattered more to them, had they not been entirely indoors for the last nine days.They had relocated from the Grand Temple in New York to South London, in a place that hardly qualified as a safehouse at all. It was less safehouse, more ‘the sub-sub-basement of Shaun’s parents’ house.’ The amenities of actual human society were something they hadn’t really had even back in the Roman hideout, which barely sported any plumbing, let alone private bedrooms. God bless the Hastings and their disaster-prepping paranoia. Desmond had gone nearly 80 days without a real, honest-to-goodness shower, and had almost cried the second he stood beneath the tepid spray.The basement was outfitted like any retiree hobby room, but the sub-basement (where they slept) and sub-sub-basement (where they worked) were deep enough to withstand nuclear fallout. Whether that would carry over to solar fallout, though…“Are you alright, Desmond?”God, it was still so weird to hear his dad ask that, let alone seem to care about the answer.He nodded at first, but then started to violently shake his head. “Yeah. I guess. Actually, no. Really fucking no.”By all appearances, Rebecca seemed to be the only member of the team taking this in stride. She typed furiously on the Animus interface, eyes darting across multiple windows and then back at the server stack just behind Desmond. Her intense look of concentration didn’t quite hide the tension in her jaw and shoulders, though. Her eye twitched a little as she brought her headphones up to her ear, listening to whatever it was with her eyes closed.“What is it?”“I can’t explain it, but it… no, that’s not even worth saying out loud…” She lapsed back into silence, and Desmond tried picturing her as the competitive athlete she’d been before joining the Assassins. She must have been formidable.“Is the thought able to get my mind off that mindfuck?” Desmond asked, laughing a bit hysterically.She winced and shook her head. Her hands paused over the keyboard, before she deliberately tapped out a few keys and flicked her screen up onto the television in the center of the room. Typically, Desmond’s Animus sessions were projected through it in real-time for the team to view as one. “There are a few thousand things that went sideways just now. The first of which was… whatever that was, in general.”William spoke up, eager to focus on something. “It was like Ezio talking to Minerva, but only…” he waved his hand in the air, unable to come up with the proper adjective for it.“It was, and it wasn’t,” Rebecca hedged. “I had the same thought, though. I remember there being a spike in metadata I didn’t understand, in that instance. But I just pulled up that file from September and compared the genemnemetric synch data from 1499—”(“I hate that word,” Desmond muttered.)“—to what just happened, and they’re completely different. However, I took scans of the Grand Temple while we were there—”(“Genumenemn… nope.”)“—and what latent readings I could get there were more similar to what just happened than the Minerva memory in Rome. This isn’t Precursor at all, it looks like.”Distantly, they heard Shaun throwing up. (Desmond continued trying to say genemnemetric, the fancy made-up word that apparently meant “Animus metadata” but he just thought Rebecca was fucking with him. He got to genem and started laughing to himself, wondering if that was the joke all along.)“So what do we know about… it. Him. The…” William made the same lost-for-words gesture.“Well, he had the same temporal awareness that Minerva had, but I doubt he knew who he was talking to at first. He must have sensed the Animus observation, but thought it was Altaïr until he got a better look.”“Is that even possible?”Desmond shrugged. His dad glared. Rebecca began to tap her fingers against the desktop.“Whatever this is, it seems too big to be a secret. Whoever that is, someone knows.”William took a breath that was probably meant to be steadying but was closer to hyperventilating. “Well. I’ll grab Hastings.”Once he left, Desmond turned and found Rebecca looking at him with an intense gleam in her eyes that verged on manic. “What?” he asked, mildly alarmed and trying to hide it.“Nothing,” she said automatically, a deeper frown setting into her brow.“C’mon, Becs, just tell me what you’re thinking.” He gave her a halfhearted smile to set her at ease, but her expression turned oddly… bashful?“No, really, it’s—I think I’ve seen too many sci-fi movies.”“We’re viewing the past in a machine using the lens of my ancestors’ DNA. Rebecca, we’re in a sci-fi movie.”That seemed to shake her from whatever reservations she was having. “Don’t laugh,” she said, leveling a sharp look at him.He crossed his heart and zipped his lips.“You know the memories that you can replay? To achieve greater sync, greater detail? Where you-as-your-ancestor can influence events differently and still somehow not desynchronize despite taking a wrong turn here, using a different weapon there?”Desmond nodded.“They come with tags on them. I didn’t know how to bring this up because until recently, it wasn’t important, but those memories have DNA tags on them, when you replay them. They’re changed to that level of synchronization, in your actual DNA.”“Where are you going with this, Rebecca?”It was exceptionally rare for Rebecca to be grave. He’d seen her grow pensive or somber at times, but never like this. “The memory you just accessed, with… whoever that was? It had a tag in its memory data that matched memories you’d already replayed before. Like you’ve already viewed this memory, and—” she lowered her voice, “I don’t know if it’s possible, but the tags remind me of two-way radio signals. I can’t explain it.”Desmond knew he was the only one here with actual Eagle Vision, but his father had heightened instincts, and he suspected that continued contact or exposure around the Apple (and the Grand Temple) had enhanced Shaun and Rebecca in some ways. They’d managed to find clues and leads faster, they’d made breakthroughs and found metaphorical needles in haystacks without even trying.“You don’t have to explain,” Desmond assured her. “I think I understand. It’s… if I’m being honest, some memories have felt like déja vù. I’ve written them off as just being overly used to the Animus, but…” he shook his head. “What do you think it means? And what do you mean, two-way radio? Are you saying I can, what, speak backwards through time?”“I know it’s crazy, but this is—whatever that guy is—” she pointed to the television, where the tall, pale, man-shaped entity stared right at the Animus focal lens above Altaïr’s shoulder.“It’s possible that we’re stepping outside of what we know Precursors are limited by.”The pair stared at each other in mild shock, neither moving a muscle until Shaun and William returned. Shaun looked pale and a bit sweaty, but William had pulled himself together, as if the whole teeth-chattering anxiety attack had never happened.“Anything new?”Rebecca glared at Desmond for half a second, imploring him to keep his mouth shut about the developing theory. Desmond gave a shrug and swung his legs off the side of the Animus couch.“Rebecca thinks she may have found a tracking tag for memories of this kind.”“Will they point us to—wait, do you think Altaïr saw him again? He told him they wouldn’t meet after that moment.” William crossed his arms and stroked at his chin, the pinnacle of a pensive man.“Sef Ibn-La’Ahad was conceived very shortly after Altaïr left Limassol, so that theory lacks a lot of runway,” Desmond said, shaking his head. “You were checking Ezio’s genetic memory tags just now, weren’t you?” he asked Rebecca.She nodded, and the room held its breath as they waited for her verdict. “It’s difficult to tell without running a full-helix sweep for it, but Ezio has definitely met this guy. Multiple times, if I’m right. Connor and Haytham, maybe Haytham’s father, too, since he was an Assassin. He… I get the feeling he wouldn’t rest until his curiosity was sated.”“And he has my name now, great,” Desmond snarked.“Wouldn't be the first time a strange eldritch entity had your name, Desmond,” Shaun said, looking quite queasy again.“If that's the case, why hasn’t he found us now? Super powerful dude like that, nine hundred years heads up… doesn’t add up.”“Well, she did say we had to rescue someone. Maybe she was talking about him.”Unease flooded the room like toxic smoke, the only way to stave off the rising panic was to hold one’s breath for as long as they could. Eventually, however, they all had to breathe.Desmond brought his gaze down to the constellation softly glimmering on his palm. Aquila, the Eagle. He’d recognized it only because the Bleeding Effect had screamed it at him in stereo—and really, how many of his ancestors did he have to go through until he found one that wasn’t centered around eagles?He could still remember the feeling of that strange woman’s hand on his, smiling so kindly he almost asked to go with her when she departed.

Ten days ago.

Desmond came to from the Animus to the sounds of Juno wailing. It wasn’t uncommon, but she typically did not interrupt their work in Connor’s memories; it must have fed into her own plans. She only ever complained when Desmond was on break or trying to get some sleep.“What’s going on—?” Desmond halted when he realized his tongue was tripping out syllables of Kanien’kéha. He shook his head and tried again, but nobody was listening to or looking at him.Their attention was on the Door.Juno’s hologram seemed weaker, but also… angrier. He couldn’t tell the language she was speaking, but he’d always been good at reading people’s demeanors—came in handy when the bouncers weren’t paying attention. Even in Desmond’s dizzy state, he could tell Juno was pissed at whoever she was talking to.“Whozzat?” Desmond asked Rebecca, who wasn’t even pretending not to watch the altercation.“Just showed up out of nowhere,” she murmured, going through the motions of unhooking Desmond from his port and running through the post-session safety checklist with him. It was, perhaps, the fastest they’d ever gotten through it.“She walk right in or something?”“No. Literally appeared. If she wasn’t completely absorbed in Miss Sparklyshout over there, I’m sure your dad would have thought she was here for you.”Rebecca helped him to his feet and they both staggered closer. As they approached Shaun and William, standing at what constituted ‘minimum safe distance’ from whatever was going down, Desmond caught more and more of what was being said.“You should stay back by the Animus,” William said fruitlessly, knowing Desmond was curious enough to ignore any direct order that kept him from finding out more.Shaun, on the other hand, looked more anxious about the miscellaneous equipment he had by the Door. He was chewing the side of his thumb, a nervous fidget Desmond hadn’t actually seen before.(To be fair, Desmond spent about 99% of his time in a hallucinatory state, so it was a miracle he’d even gotten to know Rebecca.)“What is happening?” Desmond asked again, though the words felt clunky as he said them. In their Animus sessions, Connor was young, and still getting used to speaking English, and took to learning the language from Achilles with an intense focus that did not allow for aloof language-play that Ezio had a penchant for while in Constantinople.Shaun made his best guess, voice sharp and reedy with anxiety. “We haven’t ventured closer, since Juno seems quite upset, but we think this is another… incredibly powerful Being, of a sort.”“So you don’t know.”“Not at bloody all, mate. Did you want us to go up and ask?”“Not a bad idea,” Desmond muttered, rolling his neck and shoulders to shake off the sluggishness. “How long have they been talking? Why take me out of the Animus if things haven’t escalated?”“Juno has a nervous trigger finger when it comes to our electronics equipment. The second she started getting upset, we started the full desync procedure in case she messed with the Animus itself.”The idea of Juno possibly getting into the circuitry that directly interacted with Desmond’s subconscious wasn’t a comforting one.“She appeared…” William checked his watch. “Three minutes and twenty seconds ago.”Desmond considered the sight, and the four of them cringed as one when Juno threw out her arms and screeched, the terrible noise echoing throughout the cavernous Grand Temple. The woman before her just stood serene and smiling.His initial instinct was to charge forward and demand answers, all that brash teenage Connor bleeding through Desmond’s usual zen attitude. Luckily, he had three other adults hanging out in his head, and he let cooler heads prevail, even though one of them was a goddamn Templar. He reached within himself and activated his Eagle Sense, peering at the scene to gather more information.Juno remained the same, just a filmy gold hologram, incorporeal but loud even in the subtly muffled darkness. The woman across from her, however, glowed with a deep, deep blue that spiraled out from her in infinite fractals, the curve of paisley designs and twirling vines and rose bushes. Desmond relaxed somewhat, deeply comforted on a level he didn’t understand.“She’s on our side,” Desmond said, striding forward without waiting for permission.Shaun made an aborted squawking noise, his dad’s fingertips barely missed grabbing his hoodie, and Rebecca simply muttered, “cool.”The woman with the aura stretching out forever turned to watch him approach with a pleasant smile. It was so kind that he realized the smile she’d been leveling at Juno had been tight and impatient by comparison. “Oh good, you’re here,” she said, like she’d planned for the Assassins to be this confused and was just waiting for Desmond to return to consciousness.“Sure,” Desmond said, still a little wary as he tipped his gaze to Juno. Her expression was like one of those Greek drama masks, almost comically sorrowful by this point. “So… what’s going on here?”“Did you know that Juno was going to use the Device to free herself back into the world?”Juno made a thin, almost animalistic noise of desperation, wailing wordlessly in response to the accusation. Yet, she made no outright denials. Well, that certainly explained a lot.“Is that so?” Desmond said, not exactly amused but definitely unimpressed.“She was going to try to kill you as a needless sacrifice for using the Device as well.”Desmond figured that was the case. With everything pointing to them getting down to the wire before the solar flare, he had expected to be backed into a corner. Between Minerva and Juno’s calculations, the prophecies, the end of the world, and Desmond’s strict upbringing, he had come to the conclusion sometime soon after arriving at the Grand Temple: he was to be a sacrificial lamb, led to the slaughter either unwittingly or unwillingly. They were far enough from the answers they sought in Connor’s memories that it wasn’t anything to be discussed with the team, let alone his dad, but Desmond had come to terms with it.He wasn’t making it to the next sunrise after the solar flare.“Very rude, Juno,” Desmond said, crossing his arms and avoiding both their eyes. The strange woman’s gaze pierced him to a place little else did.“And Juno was meant to die a very long time ago. Weren’t you, little ghost?”The low wail of desperation the Isu gave set Desmond’s teeth on edge. “What’s wrong with her?” he said, frowning. “I have cut her off from her usual corruption methods. Only I can understand what she’s saying. I’m sure you can guess, though.”Desmond frowned a little deeper. “Are you here to kill her?”“Like I said, she should already be dead. I’m just coming to collect her.”“Without her here, will I still die if I activate the Device?”The woman’s smile felt sadder, which was all the answer Desmond needed. He sighed and rubbed at his forehead, feeling the usual ‘Animigraine’ coming on.“Great. Like, awesome,” he sighed.“There is another way,” she said slowly. “Lifetimes are what they are, Desmond. I shouldn’t even be talking to you right now.” He wasn’t surprised she knew his name, but he was surprised by the sudden weariness to her features.“Then why are you?”She pursed her lips, the final hint of her smile dropping with her change in demeanor.“Because I need your help rescuing somebody.”The popular phrase famous last words had perhaps not been (strictly speaking) coined yet, but irony was certainly a common houseguest in the home of Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad. Though the exact wording was definitely much cruder, upon seeing Dream of the Endless again, Altaïr’s first thought was, someone you shall never meet again, my ass.“You seemed shorter in my memory,” Altaïr greeted him. Of course, he knew now that this was Dream of the Endless, the King of All Who Sleep and a hundred other titles the Apple had whispered to him upon asking. King or not, Altaïr didn’t care: he was an old man, cantankerous, and freely comfortable being a bit of a dickhead when the time called for it.Dream of the Endless, for what it was worth, did not shift his expression, but his surprise rippled outward from him like a small pebble tossed onto the surface of a placid pond. He swiftly recovered, however, and Altaïr was greeted by name. His rather rude greeting was seemingly ignored, though perhaps not forgotten.He wondered why.And then he remembered where he’d just been.He’d been sitting down in a chair in his library, wanting to shut his eyes for a bit.He’d seemingly awoken in a library far grander than his had ever been. Curiosity sparkled through him like dappled light through windy treetops, and he marveled at how the annoying film over his eyes had been swept away. His various aches and pains, too, had been taken.Altaïr supposed he was still sitting in his library, and would for the rest of time.“I am dead,” he concluded.Dream of the Endless said nothing, simply observing him like a bird of prey—a hawk or, perhaps, a raven.Yes, a raven seemed more apt.“Your library is quite impressive, Dream of the Endless.”“I thank you. Though the credit lies with that of mortal minds, and my librarian.” He gave no needless praises to the absent librarian, no belabored I couldn’t manage without thems or it’s nothings that would come from the underflattered and falsely humble.“How curious,” Altaïr said, though he wasn’t certain of what in particular he found curious.For example, he stood straighter than he had in forty years, the distance between his eyes and his feet considerably further than he remembered it being. The aches keeping him company when his ghosts did not had vanished. Colors seemed brighter, images clearer, and the boggling size of the library did not trouble him. Perhaps this was the Apple’s influence, allowing him to accept the impossible with greater ease than a normal man would have.However, when Dream asked him what was curious, he managed to settle on one specific contradiction he couldn’t wrap his head around.“That I am dead, yet I dream.”Dream inclined his head some, acknowledging the paradox. “Your body perished in the waking world, but not before your soul had entered the Dreaming. The part of you that dreams still lives, and may be allowed to continue here, until which point you wish to join your loved ones in the Undying Lands.”Maria. Sef. Malik. He wasn’t so self-absorbed as to think any one of the three who’d gone before would be waiting for him to join, as the years grew longer and grayer. Knowing Malik and Maria, they would most likely be enjoying his absence, and his death would have thrown a rock at their perfectly calm and respectable, Altaïr-free, afterlife.“Is that what you wish?” Dream asked, when Altaïr seemed to have considered the matter for long enough.“And if I say no?”The barest hint of a smirk pulled at the corner of Dream’s mouth, but it was more like he’d had the idea of smirking than actually doing so at all. Altaïr no longer felt any sort of remorse for being so rude earlier.
“I do not think a man like you would choose to remain in the Dreaming; you have dedicated your life to finding the truth of reality.”

“Nothing is true,” Altaïr countered with some humor, his smirk widening as Dream gave him a flat look.
“What is your wish, Altaïr?”

Cheeky thing, calling elders by their name.
“I shall join my family in the Undying Lands.”Altaïr smirked loudly at the pulse of utter relief that flashed through his periphery. Dream, for all he concealed his emotions on his face, was an open book within his realm—and doubly so in one of the Hearts of the Dreaming such as the Library.Without warning, a great burst of sweet-smelling air gusted from behind him and threatened to knock him off his feet. His bewilderment over the sudden arrival was soon replaced by ease, for the beautiful woman before him shone with the deepest, purest blue he’d ever seen. Her presence seemed to stretch in many different spirals, mimicking the tightly-coiled curls in her hair in some manner.This was a friend. She was his first, and his last remaining at the end of all things. She was smiling much easier than her brother, and for that, Altaïr was grateful. Undoubtedly, he had given her much work over his lifetime, and aside from less than a handful, he regretted none of the lives he’d taken.He hesitated a moment before taking her hand, turning back to Dream. The poor man looked close to thinking about grimacing. Altaïr chuckled.“You are still chasing that soul in a spyglass, no?”Keen, cosmic eyes sharpened on him. Dream did not need to acknowledge him out loud, but his glare demanded he speak quickly. Just to be contrarian, Altaïr took Death’s hand and looked over his shoulder at the Dream King.“He’s still looking for you, too.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Dream of the Endless did not like to visit the waking world.If he had to visit, he would have preferred that the once-a-hundred-years deal he made with Hob Gadling were the only occasion. The single meeting he’d had with the newly-undying man still annoyed him more than a decade after it happened. He did not look forward to 1589.But here he was, inspired at least in part by Hob Gadling’s relentless optimism for times ahead. He’d spoken of ‘something interesting’ happening in the Italian States and how the rush of invention and advancements in science had made life easier to live and, therefore, worth living for a long, long time.Dream couldn’t help resenting the sentiment, at least a little.Within his realm, he had seen grand cathedrals and impressive structures replicated from the waking world in mortal dreams: great white and black marble edifices smooth as calm seas and stretching impossibly high (and round) for all to see. He’d also seen beautiful artworks and inventions from several notable minds who had perfected the art of daydreaming—fantastical thoughts of human flight, in some cases.Dream arrived first in Florence, impatiently appearing within the walled city and strutting about, glaring at any number of things and determined both to find and not find this ‘something interesting’ Hob had spoken of. He found himself disappointed at being disappointed, when he inevitably did not find anything that caught his eye.He did hear something that caught his ear, however.“…heard he’s in Roma, now.”“Then why do they still hang the posters?”“I think it’s because they unnerve the guards, and make them behave themselves better if they believe Il Assassino is waiting around every corner.”Dream would be lying if he said he hadn’t thought about Altaïr in the last two and a half centuries since his death. He thought about every human all the time, but those considerations always seemed like they were happening in a different room and not at the front of his mind. His parting words had inspired a strange fervor in Dream, at least for a little while.
He’s still looking for you, too.
None of the Assassin’s descendants walked with a mystic set of unseen eyes above their shoulders; it unsettled Dream to be unable to find more than a name of a person with whom he could not speak.Even Lucienne was reluctant to admit defeat in that quarter.
I’m sorry, sir, but the Library just doesn’t feed on future dreamers. This one hasn’t been born yet, from what I can tell.
He grew tired of waiting for this mysterious Desmond to be born. He considered asking the Three-In-One about him, but it would arouse suspicion if he sought them out. Desmond was, after all, just a man.Even so, Dream still felt a portion of his attention searching for Desmond and his intemporal gaze.
He’s still looking for you, too.
Dream resolved that if one Assassin line did not lead him to the answers he sought, perhaps another would. Following his instincts, he left Florence quickly and appeared next in Rome.This city, too, was something of a marvel. Dream remembered seeing its splendor at the height of its power some thousand-odd years ago. He had seen the placement of the cornerstone for the Colosseum, the raising of the pillars in the Pantheon, and even the beginnings of the Castel Sant’Angelo west of that. For generations, Romans walked among the vast history around them and did not see the wonderment for what it was.Dream compared Rome’s citizens to the denizens of the Dreaming. He knew his realm was a sight to behold, stopping most dreamers in their tracks when they beheld his Palace or the Gates of Horn and Ivory. But the residents, the dreams themselves, had long grown used to the spectacle that embodied his realm. It wasn’t always like that. Upon the Shores of Dreaming, where he crafted each dream and nightmare by hand, they were born with wonder that was swiftly banked in their souls. He remembered when Lucienne would walk around the Library with an undeniable sense of awe in her eyes. Now, the twisting shelves and staircases of the Library was rote and familiar to her, and she rarely flinched at a single strange thing that crossed her.Rome was a city of dreamers, he had to admit. Though not as bright as Baghdad had once been, it still shone with potential, and the accomplishment of mankind. Art, belief, construction, democracy—Rome was a pinnacle of all. Begrudgingly, Dream had to admire it for that.Still, something about the city bled with desperation, screams for liberation muffled by oppression and corruption. That darkness was rife with zealotry, and reminded him of Limassol.Yes, there were Templars in Rome, as well. There was a Templar in the Holy See. And in this world, where Templars went, Assassins hunted them with temerity.Dream realized then that his memories of Rome were limited to the lasting remains of times long-passed and not the minds of man within it. Perhaps I am too dismissive, he thought to himself. He did not attempt to correct that within himself, but he did open his mind to the dreams of Rome, taking them in as he passed by her citizens in the shadow of the Colosseum.
…eventually have to stop stealing...

…make it home in time for...

…the rest is up to you, Desmond.
There.
What? Who is Desmond? I don’t understand!
For a moment, Dream was right back in Limassol, with a different Assassin in a white, beaked hood, hunting Templars and possessing an Apple of Eden. He was right back to curiously looking up at the unseen gaze of a man far-removed from the present. This Assassin was perched precariously on the very top of the Colosseum, one leg hanging in the open air from a ledge jutting out from the ruins’ topmost level. The guards below had long given up yelling at the man to come down, knowing they were too far away to be heard, and the man too haughty to listen in the first place. The man was Ezio Auditore da Firenze, and he dreamed of a name spoken to him by a god-that-was-not-a-god. Regardless of his parentage not falling from Altaïr, he still gazed at Dream with the golden eyes of the Eagle of Masyaf…And with the same golden gaze peering over his shoulder.Hello, Desmond, Dream thought smugly.When Dream looked up at Ezio, the Assassin straightened up somewhat—like Altaïr, he was unused to being spotted so quickly, especially from such a height. Ezio stuck out much more than Altaïr had done, for even in Cyprus the scholars still wore white, hooded robes that were easy enough to blend with. In 1504 Rome, however, standing among the people in pure white robes was more garish than even the most splendid raiment of the noble classes. He wondered at the man for a while, considered snapping his presence to his side, and thought better of it. He wasn’t certain that the shock of his sudden appearance would have allowed Ezio to keep his balance on that ledge.So Dream started to walk, half-formulating a plan for approaching Desmond this time around. In his mind’s eye, he saw Ezio do an incredible front flip into a cart of hay, which predictably collapsed beneath the impact. Yet Ezio sprung up from his landing spot unscathed and uncaring for the damaged cart he left behind. He followed Dream from a distance at first, then lengthened his stride to catch up with him. Even at the increased pace, it took some time for him to pull abreast with Dream, who did not bother slowing down for courtesy’s sake.What would Hob say if he saw me now, he wondered, almost bitterly.“Signore, do you have a moment?” Ezio greeted, affable and charming as ever. Desmond’s eyes seemed to burn with the same level of curiosity Dream had for him. He knew why he sought Desmond out; why did Desmond seek him in return?“I do, Messer Auditore.” If Dream knowing his identity came as a shock, Ezio Auditore did not show it. “You are perhaps the most interesting man I have ever seen in all of Roma.”Over his shoulder, the faint presence of Desmond seemed to cringe.“I am not a man.” “Regardless of that, the sentiment stands, Signore.”Desmond cringed again.Dream pointedly did not look at him, hoping to glean a little more information now that he knew the bare shape of what was looking at him. He preferred not to wait another three hundred years between meetings just because he frightened the man off again.“Was there some kind of question I could answer for you, Mentore?” The Assassin only smiled—fetching, surely. Dream wondered how Desmond would react if he took this new temporal spyglass to bed—or to his realm. Surely that would cause him quite the stir. But no, mischief was not in the cards this day.“I was wondering what an Endless was doing in Roma, is all.”Across ripples of time—a little more than five hundred years, in fact—Dream of the Endless could make out a voice.“The fuck is an—”And then Desmond’s warm, golden presence blinked out from behind Ezio’s shoulder. Dream frowned at the space those golden eyes had just been, and sighed.
Someone, somewhere, is laughing at me.
Ezio turned around warily. “Are you…” Dream braced for a wave of annoyance at being assumed an Isu by yet another Assassin, but— “Are you speaking to Desmond as well?”Now this was interesting.“What makes you say this?” Ezio looked uneasy—not a standard look on the self-assured warrior. A muscle twitched in Ezio’s jaw. “It is not the first time I have had gods look over my shoulder to speak to another.”“The Endless are not gods. And neither was Minerva.” “I am aware. You must forgive me; the fantastical are all more easily considered as such.” He bowed his head some in deference, but the cheeky smirk on his face told Dream he was just as tricksy and playful as any of the Fair Folk. He reconsidered not taking the man to bed. “You are Dream, no?”“I am. And no, I was not speaking to him, but I was looking at him.” “Would you mind telling me who—or what—he is?” A thread of desperation laced itself through Ezio’s voice, some deep-seated disturbance of the soul. Peering closer at the source of that emotion, Dream found the source had come, ironically, from Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad, and his damned meta-prophecies from looking into the Apple for so long.
Yes, someone is definitely laughing at me.
Beyond Ezio’s emotions, Dream saw the message he had heard from Minerva, the strangeness of the Vault, and the confounding question of whoever Desmond may yet be.It discomforted Dream to admit that he didn’t know the answer to Ezio’s question. “I first encountered him almost three hundred years ago, peering over the shoulder of Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad.”“Altaïr? So Desmond is an Assassin?”A curious theory. One that felt true. “Maybe so. It is impossible to tell for certain. He has not yet been born.”“I see.” For his part, Ezio hid his bitter disappointment masterfully—but he could not hide it from Dream.“You do not. But I’m certain you will, in time.” Dream withdrew his hand from his robes and grasped his Ruby on the modest chain around his neck.“You are leaving?” Ezio said, holding his hands behind his back and observing. If watching was so inherent to their culture, perhaps Desmond truly was an Assassin.He could have left right then. He could have returned to the Dreaming and written off this entire visit as useless—Desmond had not yet returned to observe them, and Dream guessed he would not do so this day. It had been almost seventy years between when he first met Altaïr and when he died in his realm, but the Assassin still remembered that incident to a degree which spoke of his own investment into getting answers. He’s still looking for you, too.Ezio had clearly been wrestling with a similar search for answers, and his dogged determination not to use the Apple of Eden kept those answers out of reach. It did not impact Dream’s function whether or not Ezio found peace. So why, then, did he feel a sting of regret over leaving the man in this state. Haltingly, he explained why he was there.“I was not called here to any purpose but curiosity.” “Curiosity?”“An… associate told me something interesting was happening in Italy. I assumed he meant the arts, the sciences and culture, but the fact I came across you speaks to a higher scheme.” “Fate speaks most often through the mouths of the unwitting,” Ezio mused. Beneath the shadow of the Assassin’s hood, his eyes gleamed gold.“As you say,” Dream said, amused. “Altaïr was unaware of the presence over his shoulder until I saw him. I, too, have been spied upon by mystic eyes. It is unpleasant, I know.”“Who would be so bold to spy on gli Eterni?”“The very bold, Ezio Auditore.” Ezio nodded, less playful and more somber as he considered the situation. “If this Desmond has been fated to receive a warning from the gods, and then caught the attention of Dream of the Endless himself, he must carry some great bearing on the world. It makes me feel rather small,” he chuckled, though there was little humor behind it. “Yet my involvement is unavoidable.”Ezio was correct; this situation had the Isu’s hands all over it. Dream, even, had seemed called into the calculations as well.“You hold yourself with the grace and bearing of a great man,” Dream observed. “It is a shame that it cannot be remembered.” Ezio was well-used to praise for his skills and noble character, both feeding the heroism that radiated off of him. He didn’t seem to know what to do with Dream’s praise, however.He cleared his throat and thanked him, awkwardly. “We work in the dark to serve the light, Signore. My bearing can be found in the peace of this city.” An idea sparked in his eyes. “You mentioned you were called here by rumor of the splendor in Italia. May I show you some of it?”Bemused, Dream tilted his head, watching Ezio curiously. “I have been to Rome, Ezio.”That playful grin returned, making Ezio look decades younger in an instant. “Ah, but have you toured it properly? Please, accompany me for a stroll.”For the first time, Dream found himself less than eager to return to his realm, and dropped his hand from the Ruby at his neck.
“As you wish.”
“What do you mean, ‘I can’t access the memory again?’ Didn’t you say it had the replay tag on it?”“I don’t know why you can’t. It’s like it’s corrupted or something,” Rebecca said from outside the Animus, sounding a little annoyed with the situation. They’d been searching for more memories bearing that strange tag for the last day and a half, and the first one that came up—with Ezio of all people—had been so short, Desmond was immediately disappointed when the desynchronization yanked him out of the memory.
I need to temper my fucking surprise, or we’re going to just keep doing this.
“Is it possible that this—Endless guy asserted reality such that I couldn’t?”
“…it is so weird when you say things like that, Desmond. Truly.”
“Thanks, Shaun.”Desmond wandered aimlessly around the Animus Whiteroom, occasionally manifesting obstacles and stairs to break up the doldrums of it all.“Desmond may have a point,” his dad said. “What was it you found out on them? That they were an ennead of gods that created the universe or something?”
“Well, ennead typically refers to nine, and there are just seven Endless—”
“The Endless didn’t create the universe,” Desmond interrupted, feeling Ezio’s subconscious knowledge take the wheel. “They aren’t gods, either. Ezio knew their names: Destiny, Death, Desire, Despair, Destruction, Delirium, and Dream. Ezio was looking into other mystic beings once he had the Apple back from Cesare.”For a while, there was no response from the team outside the Animus. It used to fill Desmond with deep self-consciousness whenever they would mute their voices and speak without his purview, but like the rest of the horrors, he shook it off with practiced ease. He considered the inherent bias of his knowledge sets; it came from the minds of men long dead, and for as forthright as Ezio had seemed to be in life, his point of view was limited to just his own.Regardless, every so often, shots taken in the dark found a target.“Which one do you think is your little stalker?” Rebecca asked after a minute or so.“Dream,” Desmond said, his conviction sitting almost like a weight on his chest. “I’m sure of it.”“Why’s that?” she asked.Shaun spoke up. “Well, process of elimination: Desire has golden eyes according to myth, Destiny doesn’t leave his garden, Death is really only ever there at the end—”“We met her in the Grand Temple,” Desmond said. He didn’t know why he was so certain of it, but he was an Assassin, multiple times over. He knew Death when he saw her.
“…right on.”
“Yes, thank you, Rebecca,” Shaun said, miffed and a little shaken. “I mean, makes sense, she killed Juno. Sort of. But back to the question asked, the bloke in Ezio’s memories couldn’t have been the other sisters, Despair or Delirium, so that breaks things down to Dream or Destruction.”“I’m telling you, it’s Dream. Dreams happen in the subconscious, right? Eagle Vision and the Animus itself interfaces with the subconscious mind. That has to be what caught his attention.”
“Well, there you have it. Dream of the Endless, ladies and gentlemen.”

Twelve days ago.
“Rescuing who?”Death’s tight smile said she couldn’t say. Desmond sighed, shoving his hands in his pockets and gesturing for her to say what she could. Goddamn cosmic overseers and their goddamn rules. His migraine seemed to have grown a migraine of its own.With a brutally quick wave of Death’s hand, Juno disappeared. A low whir spread throughout the Grand Temple, her influence wrenched from the machines within. Even the Door seemed to flicker a little before stabilizing, leaving the entire chamber in a slightly-warmer glow. Desmond’s innate connection to the Apple meant he could feel Juno’s presence fizzle out from there as well. Death made it look so easy, but it was clear there was a great amount of power he wasn’t privy to.“Now that’s done,” Death said, chipper as ever.“Yeah, uh, thanks?” Desmond said, mildly alarmed. He kept his hands in his pockets, white-knuckled in the face of how fucked up everything was becoming.She didn’t tiptoe around it. “You have the power of ten thousand dreamers within you, Desmond. You just need to find the right dream to save the world.”(He didn’t know it then, but she hadn’t been talking about ‘the right dream’ in a general sense. She had meant the right Dream.)“The—what?”She reached forward and took his hand from his pocket. Somewhere behind him, he could feel his father and the other Assassins tensing, but he used his other hand to signal for them to stand down.“Your line is strong, and full of dreams. Find the right one.” It didn’t burn when she imbued the stars within his palm, but he still flinched when he saw them.“What are you talking about? I’m just a regular guy.”She gave him a playful smile that told him she knew he was more than that. He knew he was a very unique human, but he wasn’t like Ezio or Altaïr, or even Haytham—he didn’t lead big groups of people or inspire the masses to unite beneath one central ideology. “If you can’t do it, nobody can.” With that, she disappeared.It felt an awful lot like the sacrificial role he’d been coming to terms with. But, when Death came calling, you couldn’t exactly deny her.At first, when the echoes had finally settled within the Grand Temple, they all privately thought about writing it off as a collective hallucinatory illusion, brought on by the stress of living in what was most likely a radioactive Precursor site. Perhaps that was just wishful thinking. But Assassins did not deal in anything so pedestrian as wishful thinking, and anyway, the constellation she’d burned into his hand had not faded with time.So they packed up the Grand Temple site and fled to another safehouse. Once William had heard of the fatal sacrifice Desmond would have to make to use the Device in the Grand Temple, he all but dragged his son out of there, wary of letting him get anywhere near the door as they finished load-out.En route to Boston Harbor, they brainstormed what on earth the woman could have meant.“The power of ten thousand dreamers. You think she’s referring to the ten thousand humans that survived the last solar flare?” Desmond said, recalling Tinia’s words to him back in Ezio’s memories in 1512. He frowned up at the dark pink sky over the harbor.“How many generations yields ten thousand ancestors?” Rebecca asked, tapping her fingers on the side of the crate she’d just loaded into the cargo loading dock for the Altaïr II. Shaun paused, looking up from his tablet for a moment. “Between thirteen and fourteen generations, I think. It’s a big gap, though. It’s impossible to estimate it with any accuracy, but everyone has approximately four-to-eight ancestors in the century before they were born, and it doubles with every century before that.”“Shaun’s right. Ezio didn’t have our ancestor, Flavia, until he was in his fifties, and Altaïr had Darim and Sef with Maria before he was thirty,” William said to Desmond. “C’mon, we need to get you out of the open.”As they crossed the Atlantic, Desmond often stared at the constellation Death left on him. It shimmered the way sand sometimes did in raking light. The small stars almost looked like small portholes that, should he tip his hand to the side, would let the desert pour from his palm.It wasn’t what he expected, to bear the mark of Death. But he kept that remark to himself.“It’s Aquila,” Desmond said, realizing it after a brief session as Connor in the Animus. They weren’t going to sit around waiting for answers when they could learn more about another Assassin in the meantime.“Connor’s ship? What about it?” William said.“No, not the ship. The constellation. See?” Desmond tried to hold up his hand, but was restricted by the Animus port in his arm. “Shit.”Rebecca helped him out, and the team (minus Shaun, who was driving) crowded around to see what Desmond was talking about. He showed them his palm.“Why did she leave the constellation Aquila on your hand, Desmond?”“Well, you know, the brightest star in that particular constellation is—”“Altaïr,” Desmond said before Shaun could. “I think she was trying to point me toward revisiting Altaïr’s memories. Aside from the Memory Seals, I only ever lived a few months as him while captured by Abstergo.”William’s expression darkened—whether at the thought of his son in Templar hands or the botched rescue mission he’d authorized, Desmond didn’t know. “Rebecca, cache the Abstergo memory core and expand the genetic data.”They made landfall in Portsmouth a week later but still had no more answers than they had back in the States. Desmond spent hours on end int he Animus, but aside from the greatly-improved interface he’d been deprived of with Abstergo, there wasn’t much happening in Altaïr’s life that stood out. They paused their search while they traipsed up the A3, but once they’d settled into Shaun’s house in South London, they accessed the Limassol memory.They hadn’t quite found ‘the right dream’ yet, but they had certainly caught the trail.“Hey, Becs,” Desmond said, frowning at the small golden sparkles in his hand.“Need the ibuprofen?” she said, briefly glancing up to catch his expression.“No, it’s just—well, yeah, when don’t I need—you don’t have to throw it at me—anyway, Jesus.”Desmond appreciated Rebecca’s brand of chaos. It kept him on his toes, and back when they were worried about the Bleeding Effect while going through Ezio’s memories in Monteriggioni, her disruption to any sort of routine or trance-like state kept him grounded more than training did. Still, it was a bit much at times. He popped a few tablets and drank from the water bottle next to the Animus.“You mentioned that you took scans of the Great Temple and got some readings off it, right?”“I did,” she said, finally looking up from her computer. “Why?”“Were you taking readings just like, time to time, or was it more like, constant monitoring?”“Are you asking if I took readings from when Death was there?”“Basically.”“What for?”“It might make the full-stack tag sweeps easier, especially if you need to run the searches on any other ancestors’ memories.”“Let me look. What time did she show up, local?”“Dad will know, let me go ask.”William was speaking softly with Shaun’s mother, his face schooled into a polite expression that Desmond remembered coming up whenever he was faced with a person he really didn’t want to be talking to at the moment.Three guesses as to why Desmond recognized it.“…all I’m saying is you don’t have to eat every meal upstairs with us; it’s just a matter of courtesy, William. Ever heard of it?”Desmond hid the grin that almost came up as he met his dad’s eyes. Save me, they said. But Desmond found he rather liked seeing his dad annoyed at somebody else, for once. When he found his son would not come to his rescue, a very defeated, put-upon look crossed his face.“We’re working around the clock down there, Mrs. Hastings,” he said, forcing levity in his voice. “We hardly have time to sleep, let alone keep regular mealtimes.”“And that’s why you’re working so hard, you don’t make time to take care of yourselves—”Okay, rescue time.“Hey, dad, Becs has a question for you. Kind of urgent, I think.”“Thank you, son,” William said, fully turning away from Shaun’s mother and walking away without another word.Unfortunately, this meant Desmond was now alone with the woman. “Desmond! I hardly see you up here,” she said, peering closer at him as if she’d never seen him before.“Not for lack of trying, ma’am,” he schmoozed. Whereas Shaun already had an assumption of what Desmond would be like long before they met, his mother was much easier to craft a preferred first impression upon. “Are you all staying cool up there?” He hadn’t had the time to check the temperature above, but he knew the global heat index was getting unbearable.“Oh, we’re right as rain, Dezzy.” She pinched his cheek, and he grinned at her. “We invested in air-con decades ago. Can’t say the same for my knitting circle, but most of them find any excuse to whinge and moan.”“I know what that’s like,” Desmond said, remembering back when Shaun took any spare chance to complain about the weather in Tuscany. “I wanted to say thank you for letting us crash here. There aren’t many safe places left in the world, and you’ve done us a serious favor.”She patted his cheek lightly, giving her best imitation of an aw-shucks expression as she could give. She wasn’t very humble to begin with, considering the largess of their offer and the basement situation itself, but she clearly loved her son, and asked as little questions as necessary to get him home for the holidays.Provided they made it until then.Desmond played nice for another ten minutes before he figured she would stop harassing the team as she’d been, and returned to the Animus workroom. Shaun was topside, retrieving some more resources hopefully pointing toward the Endless throughout history, so it was just Rebecca and his dad hunched over her workstation, quiet and focused at whatever Rebecca was clicking through.“Find anything?”“Oh, yeah,” Rebecca chuckled. “Great catch on checking the scan data. If we’re able to correlate something between the Animus data and the metadata from the Grand Temple, we might be able to scan for this guy’s frequency out in the wild.”“Whoa,” Desmond said, peering over her other shoulder. He couldn’t make heads or tails of it, so after a while he stretched his back and said he was going to take a nap in the sleeping quarters one level up.“We’ll regroup in forty minutes; Shaun should be back by then.” At his dad’s order, Desmond checked his watch and nodded before walking out.In the bunk room, his eyes caught on the case where they kept the Apple retrieved from under the Colosseum. He didn’t need to flip to Eagle Vision to guess it would be glowing gold with importance. It just had… a vibe about it.They hadn’t really touched it, not since Juno had been exorcised. It was still extremely dangerous to use; if the Templars were still in possession of any other Pieces of Eden that could track them down, any continued use of it would spell trouble. They hoped that the nearby presence of the British Museum and all their stolen artifacts would conceal its presence.But Desmond felt compelled to take hold of it now. He sighed as it began to glow.
Guess I’m not getting that nap, after all.
“…I have lived my life as best I could, not knowing its purpose, but drawn forward like a moth to a distant moon. And here, at last, I discover a strange truth: that I am only a conduit for a message that eludes my understanding. Who are we, who have been so blessed to share our stories like this? Who are you, to peer over our shoulders across centuries and invoke the curiosities of powers beyond our ken? Maybe you will answer all the questions I have asked. Maybe you will be the one to make all this suffering worth something in the end.”Desmond had been here before; he’d replayed this memory for the team once they could access Desmond’s repaired subconscious after he woke from the coma. He remembered something strange happening in the memory those few times he replayed it. Tinia had caused some kind of glitch in the Nexus that jumped Desmond’s attention from Masyaf to the Message, triggered by when Ezio reached out a hand, almost touching his shoulder when he said—“Listen.”Like before, he expected the pop of light, the blinding golden glow that heralded Tinia’s arrival. But… that didn’t happen. All at once, the ethereal light within the library drained, leaving the room in hushed darkness, save for the flickering glimmer coming from Altaïr’s Apple on the pedestal behind him. Desmond held his breath.“This is different,” he muttered.Ezio’s face contorted into one of surprise for just a half-second before it smoothed into cool calculation. “Desmond, I presume?” he said.“Oh my god, you can see me,” Desmond whispered. He looked down at his hands, stunned to find them glowing, like a hologram or a fucking ghost. “You can hear me?”“Are you not here?” Ezio asked, hand still unmoved from its place on his shoulder. If Desmond hadn’t seen Ezio removing every weapon on his body, as he’d done thirteen years prior in the Vault beneath the Vatican, he would have been worried about getting hit with his hidden blade.“I don’t… no, I’m not. I’m in…” Shit, what did they call England back in the 16th century? “I’m not here.” Shaun’s gonna kill me.Ezio raised an eyebrow at him, and for a moment, Desmond felt so vividly judged that he feared he’d die of embarrassment—or desynchronize, if that were even possible while doing… whatever this is.“Sorry. I’m not sure what’s going on.”“I suppose that makes two of us,” Ezio said dryly.“Three,” a velvet-dark voice cut in, smooth as a blade to the belly.Ezio and Desmond turned, alighting on Dream of the Endless. He stood beside Altaïr’s remains with an indecipherable expression, one Desmond thought was annoyance if he didn’t know better. He turned to look at the pair standing before the Apple, and Desmond felt his goddamn heart stop.This would have been the usual point at which he desynchronized into oblivion, but while the Apple showed him what it wanted him to see, he did no such thing.“Signore,” Ezio greeted, his tone bearing some familiarity. Desmond still had no idea what happened after that meeting in the shadow of the Colosseum, but whatever it was, it must have left some lasting impression on him.Dream turned his attention to Ezio and bowed his head some. “Mentor.”And then he looked back at Desmond once more, and he wished he could simply fade into the background as he could do in any crowd before. Three’s a crowd, right? It would work, if the two most perceptive motherfuckers to have ever existed weren’t staring me down like hawks.“Hi,” Desmond said, feeling slightly mad. They weren’t even in the Animus, and Rebecca’s theory might not even hold water, but Ezio could see and hear him, which meant Dream might be able to—“Desmond?” He let out a shuddering breath he had no idea he was holding. “Yeah. I’m Desmond. Desmond Miles. Hi.” You already said that, idiot.Whenever he viewed a memory, he was used to not being the one directly in the conversation. He preferred how it was in the Animus, being able to watch Ezio’s back, such that it was. Now, he had to steel himself against the uncanny, near-physical weight of Dream and Ezio’s stares.None of them spoke for several long moments, and Desmond wondered exactly when Dream would need rescuing. He seemed perfectly free at the moment. There were, however, five centuries between then-now and now-now, so anything could have happened.Ezio was the one that broke the silence, turning toward the most interesting part of the room, which seemed to be Desmond. He felt a little flattered and a lot mortified, and held perfectly still as he was judged like a show cat. In whatever fuckery of time this was, he had no physical form, but on every other level, he’d broken out into a cold sweat.Ezio hummed. “You certainly dress as someone not from this time. It seems you were correct about Desmond hailing from the future, Signore Dream.”Dream broke his statuesque pose and strode forward, appearing to inspect Desmond as well. Please, let there be a Hole In The Ground of Eden, and let me sink within it right fucking now, Desmond thought, hairs standing up on the back of his neck.“What year are you from, Desmond?” Dream asked, pursing his lips and tilting his head less than an inch to the side. The motion itself seemed monumentous, for as subtle as it was. Desmond felt like a damn bug under a microscope, and though there was some shimmery golden film between himself and the reality of the situation, he felt the weight of Dream’s attention like an anchor, and he had no other choice but to sink—“2012. It’s November, 2012 right now. The flare—the world is supposed to end in a little over a month.”That set Ezio on edge and turned Dream’s gaze as sharp as the weapons littering the floor around them.“This is why you are searching for me?” Desmond laughed, a little tired all of a sudden. “Well, I’m searching for you because your—”Sometimes, Desmond had dreams where he was suddenly unable to speak and unable to hear anything, despite the vivid dreamscape remaining before him. Panic lanced through his bloodstream, and his eyes went wide. Was this the same power Death had wielded against Juno? Or perhaps the same power a larger cosmic force had wielded against Death herself?Ezio was saying something, responding to Desmond’s sudden panic with clear concern. Desmond tried to reach out for him, but whatever physical touch he’d gotten from Ezio a moment ago was impossible now; his hand went right through Ezio’s arm. He looked at his hand, then back up.Dream said nothing, watching Desmond with intense alarm limning his features. His eyes honed in on Desmond’s hand, and he began to reach out for him. The red gem on his chest began to glow, and—Desmond was back in the bunk room. He was breathing like he ran a mile, and his hands were so clammy that the Apple easily slipped from his palms and landed on the carpet with a dull clang. Before his hands could start shaking, he bent double and planted them on his knees, trying to regulate his breathing again.“Fuck,” he panted, looking around and reorienting himself. His watch told him almost half an hour had passed since he touched the Apple. He had ten minutes to get his shit together before he had to face the others.What the fuck just happened?When Ezio Auditore greeted Death, it was with the wise smile of one who knew he was at least a little bit late.She did not seem to be bothered by it, taking a seat beside him on the bench. He had, of course, seen her many times in his life, and if not seen, then felt her beside him, coming to call when his duty called him. He knew her. He had since he was 17, in the Palazzo della Signoria not far from here.“For all I am proud of the city on which I hang my name, I have not been back here since Girolamo Savonarola’s madness.”Death, of course, knew all this, but still asked, “Why not?”Ezio sighed, the noise rattling from his lungs like gravel underfoot. “In the beginning, stamping out the last of the conspiracy against the Medici, my sorrow fueled my anger like a wet log determined to catch fire. After a while, I had to give up and accept that my home had become my nightmare.“Every turn around a corner, I expected to hear my brother’s voice, or my father’s laugh. It grew to the point where some targets began hiding in the area around the Palazzo Auditore, because they knew I would not walk there. Eventually, I did, but it felt like walking down a dark hallway alone, holding my breath until it ended.“And then, during the bonfires, under the madness of the Apple, something changed in the city. Whatever effect the Apple had on the city, something in my soul resonated with—or perhaps ran counter to—it’s influence. I did not realize it at the time. Cristina had just died in my arms. I had buried her on the shores of the Arno, where I had buried my brothers and father twenty-two years before, with Cristina at my side. I was despondent; I paced my city like an empty shell of a man, almost as mindless as those in thrall.“And then I let my feet carry me to Palazzo Auditore. For all my determinations otherwise, what soul I had left still knew it was my home. I do not know what it is I saw, if it can be attributed to the Apple or perhaps my fresh grief driving me mad. It could have been both. But I got there, and without my trying, my eyes cleared and saw with my Gift.“I saw… my family, on our last perfect day. Claudia, scowling over that idiot Duccio. Petruccio, sneaking out because even the ill needed joy. Mother, tending roses that died without her hand. My father, laughing at me in amusement and trying to hide it. And my best friend, my brother, his face so full of mischief I almost asked his ghost what he was up to before I remembered.”Ezio turned to Death, who looked more contemplative than before. She asked him, “Then why let the city haunt your name?”He gazed up at the Campanile. “Because someone had to remember where it all started.”
And where it’s all to end.
“Madonna,” he finally greeted, voice wheezing awkwardly.“Ezio Auditore da Firenze. Suppose I don’t need to tell you why I’m here.”“No, I’d like to believe I’m a man who knows when it’s time.”“There were some close calls,” she pointed out. “You do not deal in almosts, my lady. We are creatures of duty and responsibility. My almosts always come back to haunt me. Do yours?”Death looked troubled for three seconds before she turned a brilliant smile on him. “No.”He laughed, and the pain at his own enjoyment felt cosmically wrong. Though the square was crowded, nobody looked his way. I must have passed already, to be so quietly ignored. Just an old man, asleep on a bench for the rest of his life.“But you aren’t just a creature of duty and responsibility. Perhaps I was, once upon a time. But change is the point of the story. How much we change, what we do with it.” She looked over at Sofia and Flavia, admiring masks in a vendor stall. Ezio admired them both with eyes that didn’t blink.“That’s true. Perhaps it’s the will of the damnable to carry regrets through transits like this.”“Well, you never know unless you, well, transit.”So it was time, then. He regretted leaving his girls to fend for themselves in an unfamiliar city like Firenze, but the part of his heart that still held the faintest sliver of hope told him they would be alright without him.“Do you hear that?” he said, turning his head.Death said nothing, only smiled.“I swear I thought I heard—“Ezio stood, fully facing the south, where he saw…“Let’s take a walk, Ezio.”He found he had the strength enough to stand and offer his arm to Death. They did not look back at the bench, and any sounds the crowd may have made were muffled and far-away.“It’s not often that I grant exceptions. It’s actually quite rare,” she said, vague and mildly alarming.“Am I not to die today?”“Oh, you’ve already died. Come now, wait until I’ve finished speaking.”“Forgive me, madonna.”“Hm. But right. Exceptions. The process is, you die, I take you to the Undying Lands. That small pause between death and departure is typically very, very short. But your family is important to my family.” Her voice turned serious as she looked up at him. They did not stop walking, both their feet knowing the way. “And your family was split in half for needless tragedy, for the price of mortals playing godhood.”“The Templars?” Ezio didn’t feel like the Endless being against the Tenplars was the right interpretation here.“No, not the Templars. The First Civilization.”“Those Who Came Before?”She hummed, and he looked ahead, but did not see the city before and around him. The defining tragedy of his life, eclipsed threefold by the years he had lived since then, had been orchestrated by a race long-dead and exacted by men barely-dead by comparison. Death did not elaborate, and it was only then that he remembered the strange events within the Library of Altaïr.“And what of Desmond? Is his life to be written by that same hand?”“It will, and it won’t. My older brother does not write in his Book, he only reads that which is already there—and those words change more than they stay the same. The Precursors like to believe their plans, their calculations, their manipulations are all infallible and will never change, but that is true of most groups who value domination over free will.”“One would think you would champion predestination over such independence.”“How so?”“Your family, your older brother’s duty. Wouldn’t free will be antithetical to his rule?”She laughed lightly and shook her head. “That is his realm to oversee. And besides, the unwritten is as much his domain as the living are mine. As reality is to Dream’s, and creation to my third brother. We are all as much the beginning of things as we are the end. That is why we are Endless.”They stopped in a square as familiar to Ezio as his own bones. He looked on it with a lighter heart than he had before, seeing the little changes that had stuck over time—a flower vendor here, an old minstrel there. He knew, should he turn his head, he would see his home, the place he was always meant to return to, and the souls who waited for him just beyond the Auditore family crest, still on the stonework even after all these years.“I thank you for your answers, my lady. They are comforting to this old man.”“Desmond was the one who wanted you to have them.”This made Ezio smile, and he finally turned.They were all there: Federico, Claudia, Petruccio, his parents, and even Uncle Mario. Knowing exactly how long it had been, he did not wish to keep them waiting, but he still paused and looked back at Death.“Would you thank him for me? Your brother, as well.”“Of course.”“I hope they can save the world.”“Me too.”Then Ezio Auditore joined his family, at long last.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Dream of the Endless preferred stars over constellations.Over the countless empires of mankind that rose and fell like waves on the shore, the heavens had been named so freely, as if humans had any nominal claim to the celestial bodies above. They gave clusters of them stories, which Dream could begrudgingly abide by, and then form, which he could not. As the knowledge of all these star-stories of man had been written, he knew them. And as those men died and their memories were forgotten, he still knew them.(You could read them. They’re collected in the Celestial Annex of the Library of the Dreaming.)The constellation on Desmond’s hand had been around humans for a very long time. Long before the people of Ur had thought to write it down, the Eagle had guided sailors and travelers across the seas and deserts, forming the Summer Triangle and shining brighter than any other fabled bird among the stars.As inclined to ravens as he was, Dream could not help seeing the irony here.A pattern was emerging. As an Endless, he had the distinct privilege of seeing all patterns for the last few billion years, and the repetition of some had given him quite the distaste for them. Aquila had been burned upon Desmond’s hand by a source as yet unfamiliar to him, and typically, where things were unfamiliar, he sought to make them familiar before he could be caught unawares.He could have gotten the answers from his brother, but Destiny was ever-reluctant to let the end of the story be known before it happened. Maybe ‘reluctant’ was the wrong word for Destiny’s obstinance. Stalwart was closer.So Dream sought the next wisest person to the situation.“Fancy seeing you here,” his sister greeted, leaning on a tombstone and peering at the grave before it. Dream approached, stepping carefully as not to cross the body resting there. “What brings you to the New World?”“A complicated puzzle,” he admitted. “I have need of your advice, my sister.”“Now that is good occasion for such a visit,” she replied, a playful smile on her mouth. “What’s on your mind?”
“I have found myself chasing a song I cannot hear but once every few centuries. The verses are often off-cadence and dissonant with one another, and it’s taken me nearly 600 years to realize the rhyming scheme.”

“I thought you preferred books and poetry over song and dance,” she teased.“This is not a matter of preference,” he scowled. “And you know something of it, do you not?”“Of course I do,” she said with a shrug. “I’m not going to simply give you the answers, Dream. This one’s an important tale to be told.”It was deadwinter, where and when they stood. Snow did not dare crunch beneath their feet, though they began to walk deeper into the wild woods of the American Frontier.“In truth, the entire situation is such a convolution that I fear I know not where to begin,” Dream admitted, folding his hands behind his back.“Wherever you like.”Dream explained the situation with his sister, though he was certain she already knew it. Her work took her literally everywhere, and she’d been there to hear Altaïr’s parting words to him, after all. But he explained to her what happened in Limassol, Rome, and Masyaf Castle, and she listened with contemplative focus.
“The mark on his hand showed the constellation Aquila, and when I returned to my realm, I discovered the Eagle Stone was gone from my reflectory. I know not how long it has been gone.”

“You were robbed?” she asked, eyebrows going up.“It seems so,” he says, scowling ahead. They were coming up on a church, half-built and abandoned for the season until the weather improved. From where they stood, they could make out the sounds of a scuffle happening inside. “I have tracked its location here.”“So you weren’t here for me,” his sister pouted.
“There is but a fraction of my power within the Eagle Stone; it is not my priority.”

“Is that meant to make me feel better?” she joked, rolling her eyes and looking back at the church. The fight had spilled out of the church doors, now. Father and son spat invective at one another while a silent, invisible observer watched from above.Dream could feel frustration and exhaustion rolling off Desmond’s presence from where he stood. Last they met, the man had been largely confused, somewhat embarrassed, and at the very end, panicked to the point of frantic pantomime. It seemed like some punishment or censure from higher powers than his own, for he could not track it. His experience with the First Circle had always been more on the punitive side, but his sister’s responsibility to the family was thoroughly intertwined with their council.“What do you know of Desmond?” he asked her, watching the spectre watch the fight.“He hasn’t been born yet; I don’t know all that much, Dream. He,” she pointed at the younger man locked in the fight, “will be his eventual ancestor, however. Well, technically both of them. But more him.”Dream hummed in consideration, squeezing his hands behind his back. “Ratonhnhaké:ton of the Kanien’kehá:ka. He is an Assassin, like Altaïr and Ezio.”“Aye,” she said with a nod.
“He has dreams of sailing the North Seas, half-memory and half-fantasy.”

“What’s the name of his ship?” she asked, though she clearly knew the answer, by the slight upward twitch of her lip.“The Aquila.” Dream broke his bearing to cross his arms over his chest. The man’s father got a lucky hit in, nearly gutting his own son in the process. It filled Dream with a sense of disgust, but also a pang of guilt. His own son sat thousands of miles from here, abandoned for more than two thousand years by now. How was he any better than Haytham Kenway?
Stars, but Ezio had inspired a lasting infection of empathy within me.
“Do you know what Desmond dreams of?” his sister asked, once the fight moved into a footrace. Brother and sister followed father and son at a leisurely pace, leaving no footprints in the snow behind them. Their forms were as subtle as the wind between trees.Dream shook his head. “Would that I knew, perhaps I would have more answers than questions.”“I would bet he dreams of you,” she chuckled.The thought was… flattering.“He will,” Dream corrected mildly. “He does not yet live or dream.”“Yet he is right there,” she said, gesturing above Ratonhnhaké:ton’s shoulder where Desmond hovered, incorporeal. “Almost-dreaming.”
“Perhaps.”
From what Dream could tell, Desmond was using his subconscious mind to view these moments through time. With his subconscious already fully activated (a symptom, he suspected, of overexposure to Isu technology), Dream could not manipulate it with the same authority he could for everyone around him. With the First Circle breathing down their necks, too… even a small risk to reach out to him would yield devastating rewards.He would have to see how the chips fell.They walked a while longer. The fight returned to level ground, and they stopped a short distance away to observe. Haytham’s tactics had shifted somewhat toward the sentimental, even if he justified it with the motivation to manipulate his son to do his bidding.“So, who has your Eagle Stone, brother?”
“An associate of Ratonhnhaké:ton, Robert Faulkner. It has been inlaid within the wheel of the

Aquila,

and lended itself to the ship’s speed and stealth upon the North Seas.”

“How interesting,” his sister said, amused by the ingenuity of humans. “Are you to retrieve it?”He shook his head, though sneered. “Not right now. Its disappearance now might distract Ratonhnhaké:ton from his present quest, or worse yet—hinder its success.” And the First Circle wants it this way. At least for another few decades; wait until the Assassin dies, then—“How uncharacteristically forgiving of you, Dream.”He inclined his head, acknowledging the observation. He watched father and son fight a little longer. “I am observing its usage closely. It seems that Desmond’s line is near-immune to corrupting power of both his ancestors’ infernal tools, and now, the tools I have crafted of my own power. If I do not watch things play out now, I may miss the opportunity to learn more.”“Prolonged exposure to the Dreamstones will have effects on them, near-immunity or otherwise.” He heard the reproach there. “Have these changes already happened?” Dream asked, surprised his sister had anything to say on the subject.She shrugged. “Those of Isu lineage already possess great gifts. He will possess several others that his line will not. That’s all I can say on the matter; Destiny will be displeased otherwise.”“Destiny will be displeased regardless of any joy that befalls him,” Dream sighed, watching Haytham bluff at a group of guards while his son crept around. “Desmond spoke of the end of the world. Ezio Auditore had been privy to a message warning of the same. A solar flare, like the one that wiped out the Isu millenia ago. It is still not for several centuries, but I wonder where my involvement shall factor into it.”“You know we can’t intervene unless they threaten us and our realms directly,” his sister warned. “The First Circle forbade us from even warning them about things like that. It’s possible the First Circle prevented him from warning you about it, as well.”So she knew. Dream frowned and resisted the urge to roll his eyes; his sister was wise, she had to be—but with that wisdom came a coy outlook he did not often appreciate. He felt rather like a horse led to water, every time he met with her. Dream watched Ratonhnhaké:ton depart from his father, a last barb called over a shoulder. Desmond’s presence disappeared soon after, and Dream ceased his observation of the Kenway line.
“My involvement—and yours, do not deny it, dear sister—is inextricable from this future coming to pass. I am not contented to simply wait until I am allowed answers to this puzzle.”

“He won’t be born for another two centuries, Dream. Anything could happen between now and then.”“I’m telling you, Connor’s seafaring memories ping the memory and the Endless presence tag all over the damn place,” Rebecca said, frustrated. They’d ‘lived’ through Connor’s life on high speed, up until the point he conceived Desmond’s great-great-great-great grandmother, Io:nhiòte. That had been an awkward Animus session for all involved.Regardless, they’d fast-tracked the core memories, replaying them until perfect sync with exhausting determination until they tentatively tried the secondary memories, peripheral things about the Homestead and, yes, sailing all over the eastern seaboard. None of it spiked any further contact between Dream and Ratonhnhaké:ton, except for whatever readings Rebecca was picking up from the Aquila missions.The most interesting thing they’d found from all that had been that Shaun’s own lineage had stemmed, in part, from Robert Faulkner—who sired a son sometime when making port in England on one of his many trips as a merchant sailor. That son, however, had not felt the call to the sea, and had turned to a life of study reflected tenfold down the Hastings family line.“Aw, we were always going to be friends, Shaun,” Desmond had joked, to much scowling from the other man.But other than that, they’d run out of leads. Aside from potentially indexing more ancestors from his genetic dance card, they’d bled the well dry. Bleeding Effect headaches were constant companions, and Desmond saw ghosts practically everywhere these days.“Maybe it’s the ship itself with ties to the Endless.”(“Dinghy of the Endless,” Desmond muttered, trying to squeeze his temples enough to feel better.)“I don’t think Desmond could feasibly jack into memories from a boat,” Shaun said.“Ship,” Rebecca and William corrected.(Desmond was instead chuckling, “Desmond of the Endless,” and the rest were ignoring him.)“Regardless, there might be something to that.” Shaun turned to his workstation, which had become rather red-yarn corkboard in the last week. “I traced what happened to the ship as far as I could, but it seems like it was scuttled sometime around when we think Connor died.”“We don’t know when he died?” Desmond said, drifting closer to the research corner of their workspace. He was frowning, but not from overt confusion to the question. Wordlessly, Rebecca handed him the ibuprofen.“We don’t have a burial site or a date of death for him. He sailed off with the Aquila one day in 1821, and there’s no record of it ever making port again.”“She was known as the Ghost of the North Seas for a reason,” Desmond pointed out.“Well, you know the rule—no body, no death,” Rebecca snarked.“We’re not in that kind of sci-fi movie, Becs.”She stuck her tongue out at him.“Have we considered that this Dream bloke is dead, though?” Shaun said, his fatalistic tendencies striking again.“Considered, and written off as stupid—you don’t think Death herself would send us on a quest to find a guy that’s already dead, do you?”“I’m just saying, we haven’t said it out loud and therefore not openly refuted it.”“Well, consider it refuted,” William said with a sigh. “Rebecca, I want you to run more analysis on the seafaring parts of Connor’s memories and tell me what you can find out. In fact, cross it with the scan data for the Grand Temple, and what you took off Desmond’s hand.”The order felt last-ditch, no real theory or hunch behind it. The interminable march toward December 21st was beginning to weigh on all of them, but William still expected them to keep spinning their wheels until the last minute to midnight.Desmond couldn’t stand to be around three strung-out workaholics for another second. Perhaps morbidly, he mused that they didn’t even need him anymore; he’d achieved 100% sync with Connor that morning. Even the Apple hadn’t offered another vision like the one he’d had a week ago. Besides, things were getting stuffy, for Team Basement. The cooling system for the lower levels at the Hastings’ wasn’t perfect, and it definitely gave their work area a musty vibe the last few days.Jesus. He needed a drink.“It has been a long time since I’ve met another person like me,” Hob Gadling said.The stranger looked up from his newspaper and frowned. Hob had taken the seat across from him without asking permission, too weighed down by the shite evening he’d spent waiting for someone who would never come. That bitterness inspired indulgence, which in turn inspired boldness.“I don’t take your meaning,” the man said. His voice was even, and practiced accent-free. Hob had never truly wanted to shake his own accent, too proud of where he’d come from, but over time and from his travels around the world, he’d picked up a few quirks of language here and there.“I mean, you have the scent of someone whom Death doesn’t touch, my friend.”There was no outward reaction from the man, but the energy between them pulsed with tension ratcheting higher and higher the longer neither spoke.“I can assure you, that isn’t the case. Death touches all things, and leaves its mark on that which it cannot drag away.” He spoke with an intensely somber voice, holding sorrow in his eyes where it did not hang on his face.Hob knew the look. He faced it every day in the mirror.“That she does,” Hob murmured, reluctant. “Regardless, she has not come for you, yet you wear your centuries with grace.”Realization sparked in the man’s eyes, and just the barest tilt of his head made Hob feel like he was being threat assessed. Oh, whoever this man was, he was a dangerous one. Hob had taken his fair share of lives, too many if you ask him, but this one had a fraction of whatever remorse Hob felt over the whole affair.The tension faded quickly, however, and Hob was grateful for it.“Who are you?” the man asked, his frown smoothing into curiosity.“Name’s Robert. Well. Friends call me Robbie,” he said, and held out his hand to shake.The other man considered it a moment before asking, “And your old friends? What are you called by them?”“Hob,” he said with a wide grin. “Might I know your name, then? Like I said, it’s been a very long time since I’ve met an old novelty such as we.”Amusement tugged at the man’s lips before he took Hob’s hand. He grasped his hand a little further up than Hob had been expecting, his fingers almost ducking into Hob’s shirt cuffs. Hob’s fingers, by comparison, didn’t almost anything.He looked down, frowning at whatever the hell he was feeling beneath the strange man’s sleeve. His palms were calloused and strong, and his wrist thick with scarring. But beyond that, Hob’s fingertips felt something cold and sharp tucked against his inner arm, something mechanically complex and radiating lethality.At the prickle of fear that sparked in Hob’s blood, the man finally spoke.“You can call me Connor.”“The New Inn,” Desmond huffed, amused. “Better name than goddamn Bad Weather, that’s for sure.” He kept his hood up as he went inside, grateful that the mild drizzle allowed him to blend in with the rest of the city—Ezio had learned the hard way how badly a hooded man stuck out like a sore thumb. Learned, and continued to tempt fate.The inside of the pub was warm, but these days, fucking everything was warm. The world was ending, after all. Desmond slid into a seat at the bar. It was about an hour from closing, but with it being a weekday, the crowd was fairly light.The bartender sauntered closer, a burly old man with a white beard that reminded Desmond of Santa Claus. It made him smile, which made the bartender say, “American?”Desmond laughed, the noise pulled from his gut. Jesus, when was the last time he laughed? Connor was so stoic, and even Ezio was more sarcastic than actually funny. I’m holding down the fort when it comes to this family’s sense of humor, aren’t I? Desmond thought briefly. He nodded. “Guilty as charged.” He ordered a beer, anything cold, and their conversation lulled some.“You’ve picked a hell of a time to play tourist, mate.”“Makes you say that?” Desmond asked, sipping his beer.“Most Americans come to see London all covered in snow. Now you got this piss-poor excuse for rain, on the days yer not roasting alive out there.”“I didn’t come to London for the weather,” Desmond said, raising an eyebrow.“Then what?”Desmond usually preferred a milder approach to squeezing information out of the people he served at the bar, but he appreciated that culture and age were factors here. The man clearly had some kind of authority about him, and was used to it being obeyed. Desmond wasn’t one to bend the knee just for anyone, however.“For the beer,” Desmond said, raising his glass in a toast. The bartender rolled his eyes, instantly unimpressed.“Keep it open?” he guessed, then walked off at Desmond’s nod of assent.He observed the barroom a little freer now that he had a prop in hand. If you look like you belonged somewhere and carried something everyone else did, it was more likely to get you ignored. Even though Desmond’s laughter had been loud, and he’d felt the draw of attention from the other patrons there, they’d ignored him as soon as the bartender’s attention had slipped away.Three couples, one group of friends, and three individuals dotted the room. He dismissed everyone but the solo drinkers, looking closer at their demeanors. One had their nose buried in a book, another spoke to someone on their phone, and the third…Sitting directly behind Desmond at a small table, the third was waiting for someone, a tense anxiety about him.There was something about him Desmond couldn’t place. He looked like a normal guy; in fact, he looked like the most normal guy on earth. Briefly, Desmond wondered if that was n intentional choice.Desmond turned back around in his seat, hunched over his beer, but kept his attention on the man.It didn’t take long for his company to show up. The door gave the same creeeak-slam as it closed behind the new arrival, and the man at the table breathed a sigh of relief. “You’re here, great,” he said.Whoever had entered the pub was large, well over six feet tall and built like a brick shithouse. Yet, when they passed behind Desmond, their feet hardly made a sound on the creaky floorboards. They moved with the grace of a fucking panther, and all the brutal, coiled strength of a bear.They also watched Desmond like a fucking hawk.He had a bad feeling about this.“Uh…?” the man at the table asked, drawing his guest’s attention away again. “Everything alright?”“Everything is fine, considering my search yielded nothing.”Desmond nearly swallowed his fucking tongue at the sound of his voice. He choked on his beer, coughing up a storm and trying not to die of shock.
There was no way.

There was absolutely no way.
“Not to your liking, American?” the Santa bartender said, tossing a few napkins over with the implication that Desmond would be cleaning up his mess.Desmond just gasped for breath, waving him off and patting down his pockets for the forty quid he’d stolen from Shaun’s wallet just before going out. Gotta go, gotta go now. “M’fine,” he wheezed.“…Please excuse me for a moment, Hob.”The man who’d just walked in placed a hand on Desmond’s back in a facsimile of someone helping a friend move past their cough. Desmond knew what it was: an intimidation display. He felt the hidden blade on his forearm through the thin material of his hoodie and tee shirt, and the strong grip around the back of his neck. Desmond froze. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck—“Everything alright here, Con?” Santa Claus asked, raising an eyebrow. “Everything’s fine, Terry. Just talking.” For now, his voice implied.Desmond gulped, wondering if he could hit the panic button on his communicator in a way that didn’t instantly alert the Assassin behind him to what was going on.The bartender walked off, and Desmond felt a pinch at the material of his hood before it was slowly pulled off his head. He found his reflection in the mirror behind the bar, but his tunnel vision refused to even acknowledge anything outside the wild, prey-like panic in his eyes. The taller man leaned into his space, filling his periphery with dark, tanned skin and a tremendous frown. “Who are you?” Connor Kenway demanded.Desmond was seconds from taking off like a bat out of hell, but he’d only absorbed Connor’s abilities in theory—he would have gotten maybe to the door before getting tackled to the ground. Maybe.He’d grown used to not fearing the fearsome men whose memories he’d relived. Perhaps it was his own chill nature taking over the high-strung murderers lurking in his psyche, but along the way Desmond forgot that even affable, charming Ezio Auditore had a kill count estimated somewhere in the five digits before he ever thought about laying down his blade.These men would, and had, killed first, asked questions later—with full conviction of cause.Desmond took a shaky breath and looked up at the man beside him.Connor had the I’m more displeased than normal look on his face, mixed with his I am trying to figure this out and if anyone implies I need help I’ll kill them with my tomahawk look. It wasn’t a pleasant combination.“What are you?” he asked, when Desmond didn’t answer the first question.“I—I’m—” Shit. Assassin or not, admitting my name in public isn’t a good fucking idea. His teeth were about to start chattering from sheer adrenaline. “Uh. Uhhhh…”“C’mon, give him a break, he’s about to piss himself,” the other man—Hob?—said from behind.Connor gave him another intense look, his eyes flashing gold for half a moment before his face morphed into a totally new look of confusion Desmond wasn’t familiar with.“I’m not an enemy,” Desmond blurted out, then physically cringed. “Jesus, that sounds so lame.”Connor released the back of his neck and angled his body in such a way that Desmond couldn’t help but follow him to the small table behind, leaving his half-coughed-up beer behind on the bar. Hob pulled a chair up for Desmond to sit in, a wary-but-not-scary look on his face. “Who’s this, then?” he asked Connor once they were all settled.“He would not give his name.”“I—shouldn’t you be dead?” Desmond said, lowering his voice at the last possible moment as he looked up (up!) at Connor.The other two shared a look of brief shock that was quickly masked away. “Now why would you say that?” Hob asked, more personable by far.Desmond didn’t know who this guy was. Hell, he hardly knew who Connor was, and he’d just speed-run through the contents of his life—a life, he realized, was exceptionally longer than any of them had anticipated.
Rebecca’s going to have a field day.
“Is… is it safe to talk here?” Desmond asked, his voice nearly a whisper.Connor gave him a short glare that told him he didn’t care if they were standing in front of a microphone before an attentive crowd; he wanted answers.Desmond really wished he’d run away when he had the chance.Instead of answering out loud, he offered his forearm up to Connor, who looked at it, then him, then back at his arm before putting a hand over it. He felt the hidden blade mechanisms beneath and steeled his expression. “This doesn’t tell me anything,” he said, once he withdrew his hand.“What’d your Sight tell you?” Desmond shot back.“Very little,” the Assassin said, cagey.
Well, that’s fucking great.
“How the—you—hm.”“I think it’s best you let my friend ask the questions for a bit,” Hob said, leaning back and crossing his arms. While not an Assassin, Desmond was now definitely picking up some specific vibes from the man.Endless vibes.Not Dream—but also, yeah, Dream—though mostly Death, from what Desmond remembered of their conversation in the Grand Temple. Overwhelmingly, though, Hob gave off possibly the most human vibe Desmond had ever come in contact with.The fact he glowed blue helped.Connor’s own blue glow felt almost reluctant by comparison.
Really? ‘Very little?’
A moment of brief insanity nearly had Desmond saying it’s nice to meet you, grandpa, but would have most likely received a hidden blade to the throat for his efforts.“My name is Desmond.”“And you are—” Here, Connor finally realized the semi-public nature of their conversation, and switched to euphemism and code with an annoyed twitch to his upper lip. “You’re in the Brotherhood?”Desmond nodded. “Not the one here, if there’s one, but I figured you knew that much.”“You’re mistaken. My cause diverted from the Brotherhood a long time ago.”That was… well, not disheartening, but certainly unexpected. By Connor’s steady blue glow, his ‘cause’ was nowhere near enemy alignment.“And you…?” He looked to Hob, who guffawed.“No, no way,” he laughed, earning him another annoyed look from Connor. “Ran into them a few times, admittedly.”“Clearly,” Desmond said, glancing at his ancestor.His ancestor. From the Revolutionary War. Who was pals with George Washington and chased down pages that fluttered over rooftops. The guy with a serious bone to pick with Charles Lee.Who no longer considered himself an Assassin, but still kept the hidden blade, it seems. He’d have to pick the guy’s brain about that one. Jeez, his dad would probably have an aneurysm. Speaking of which—“Who am I, to you?” Connor said, leaning into Desmond’s personal space with less genuine curiosity and more outright suspicion. Desmond knew, right then, that if he were to give anything less than the truth, it’d be the wrong option.“How many generations back is it from 1987 to Io:nhiòte?”Connor went deathly still, but not murderously still. His hands curled into fists, and for a moment, Desmond wondered how long it had been since he heard his daughter’s name spoken aloud. He felt complicated about that, the souls of four fathers having infected his brain. And then there was what Clay said, back on the Island in the Blackroom—“You are my descendant?” he asked, voice gone hoarse. His eyes, once so firmly unyielding from where they bored into Desmond’s entire soul, now bounced around in disbelief, searching for something to prove his insinuations true.Desmond nodded, and peered between them. “And… we need your help.”“Jesus,” Hob muttered, then got up to buy another round. Desmond’s hand came up briefly—not to grab anything but the man’s attention.“You too.”“I’m no Assassin, mate,” he said, mildly displeased by the thought. “I’ve lived a long time, and the one thing that’ll get you noticed faster’n anything is—whatever you lot do.”“I’ve survived this long,” Connor remarked, amused.“I’m also three times as old as you,” he coughed, before turning to Desmond, who was trying to come up with the best way to say you look great for your age without sounding like a total dickhead. “What do you mean, you need my help?”“There’s… I have a skill for finding important things that I need. It’s an ability I inherited down the line from… shit, so many people. Including grandpa here,” he said, jerking a thumb at a scowling Connor. “I don’t know what he’s seeing, but you are just dripping with information I need.”The three of them considered one another for a long while, frozen in an awkward tableau. Connor, surprisingly, broke the silence first.“He’s right. The first time I met you my own Sight told me you were… anomalous, at the very least.”“Yeesh,” Desmond muttered, looking away and grimacing. 256 years on this planet and he still wasn’t a conversationalist.“You’re buying the next round, mate,” Hob declared, giving the (former) Assassin an unimpressed look. Connor had the manners to look at least a little cowed.Once they settled with their beers, Desmond brought his communicator out on the table. The other two eyed it warily. “It’s been off. Abstergo can track most cell phones and the less this one pings on metropolitan towers, the better. But my team needs to know I’m alive before the check-in. And I need to know if I need to lie to them about meeting two bafflingly old dudes while we try to save the world.”The mild offense they would have taken was ignored in favor of honing in on Desmond’s mission. “Are you talking about the solar maximum?” Hob murmurs, leaning in to speak.Desmond nodded. “It’s going to be bad. Worse than any of us thought. Like, reset-the-Anthropocene bad. The last time this happened, granted, there were way less humans on earth, but only ten thousand made it out alive.”He was aware he sounded insane. There were moments where Team Basement would convene to speak about the big picture, and they all would have individual tells for when they hit their bullshit limit and just gave up trying to consider their situations logically. Solar flare to kill us all? Yeah, sure. Insane megalomaniac proto-human race? Fine, whatever. Gotta rescue Dream of the Endless? Might as well. But Connor didn’t have that limit, and Hob didn’t have that limit—or if they did, and they just thought he was batshit, Desmond had no idea. “We’re looking for someone. Someone that’s supposed to circumvent it all. Maybe. We don’t actually know.”“Who is it?” Hob asked, when Connor looked perfectly pleased to be quietly pensive about it. “Shit,” Desmond sighed, pushing a hand through his hair. “He looked a little different every time I saw him, but like. Six-seven? Pasty as hell, wears black all the time, glares a lot?”“Voice that sounds like it’s coming from inside your own mind?” Hob said, a grin forming on his face. “Kind of an arse?”“Yeah, just totally weird goth—wait. Wait, what?” Desmond sputtered, nearly coughing out another beer. “You know—you know him?”“Dream of the Endless,” Connor finally said, leaning back like he’d just finished a good meal and now needed the right posture to digest it. “This is quite the development. We are also looking for him.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

“HA!” was all Rebecca had to say on the matter.The others, predictably, had more to say.Seeing his dad get all huffy I’m-the-Mentor at Connor was more than entertaining; if the world weren’t ending, Desmond could have said he’d die happy having seen the spectacle.“…you’re not in the Brotherhood?”“I am not.”
“Why?”
“I chose not to be.”Rinse, repeat.Hob Gadling, however, was equally as entertaining to Desmond as his dad’s suffering was in the face of an impossible ancestor. Desmond hadn’t known either of his grandparents; on William’s side, they’d died before Desmond was born, and on his mother’s…Well. Zahra Miles never spoke of her family outside of one mention concerning her grandfather and a slew of highly descriptive French and Arabic cursing she had to bribe a ten-year-old Desmond not to ever repeat. After that slip-up, she acted like she’d never had any family outside her husband and son to begin with.“So how’d you meet Connor?”“Oh, by accident. There was this pub shutting down, some shite about zoning commissions and lack of business, which was nonsense, since I’d been drinking at the White Horse since literally 1380. She withstood wars, the Great Fire, and yet, That Bloody Woman brought it down with her taxes. Husk of it’s still there on the river’s edge, condemned since ’03. Breaks my heart.”“No shit?” Desmond said, fascinated. Shaun, a little more fascinated, lurked from nearby, still coming to terms with Connor being alive.“Swear it. Anyway, I met up with His Darkness over there once a century,” he said, nodding to the screen where Dream of the Endless remained paused in Rome. Desmond caught the wistful look in his eye, the sadness that went deeper than Desmond could make himself ask about. “Once a century in the 89th year, we met up. On our meeting day in 1989, he never showed. I met Connor instead. So it wasn’t a whole wash. Now I hear he’s trapped, getting stood up makes a little more sense and saves me some measure of pride.”Trapped didn’t quite equate to needs rescuing, but Desmond didn’t say that. “Well, we have at least the last century to track him down, give or take a few decades. Sometime between 1889 and now, something happened to him that he can’t just do his creepy un-vanishing act.”“Such a way with words, Desmond,” Shaun muttered, finally drifting closer. He introduced himself to Hob with hands that only shook a little. “I’m our resident historian, helping compile our knowledge archives for the Assassins. After the world’s saved, I’d love to sit and have a chat, pick your brain if you’re amenable.”“Sure, I’m feeling generous. You lot save the world; I’ll help however I can.”Shaun looked as if he’d swoon.Rebecca finally came barging back in, having finished her victory lap for ‘being right as always.’ In her hands were a few sensor nodes that Desmond remembered being stuck on his body when he woke from his coma. They were going to go on the item Connor brought with him.“Oh, I already know this is going to work,” she said to herself, approaching the multifaceted green gem on the worktable. “Why? Because I’m riiiight.”Connor turned to watch her, now fully ignoring William Miles’ elevator pitch for rejoining the modern Brotherhood. Desmond hid his grin behind a cough and drifted closer as well. “This is from the wheel of the Aquila?” he inferred.The gem was obscenely large, about the size of Desmond’s clenched fist. While the facets weren’t entirely symmetrical, it glittered just as much as an emerald would have. Maybe. Desmond had never seen an emerald up close before, and the luxurious lifestyle Ezio lived at times throughout his life was blurred and nonspecific.“It is,” Connor sighed. “I had to sink her in ’62.”“You might have to be more specific on that year.”“1862,” he clarified, unimpressed. “But she was too recognizable, and scuttling her was a good way to fake my death the first time.” Connor’s voice was even, but Desmond was the only one who caught the wistful regret in his posture, his facial expression. His ancestor turned to him with a glare, most likely reading the sympathy in his expression.Yeesh.Connor had not taken kindly to the idea of the Animus. Desmond wasn’t sure which part disturbed his ancestor more: that another person, or potentially persons, had been privy to the most private and painful parts of his life, or that Desmond had been all but forced into doing so for the sake of a megalomaniacal ghost such as Juno. He hadn’t yet had the chance to explain things like the Bleeding Effect to Connor, but Desmond was sure he’d also be concerned about that.Desmond was kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop, speaking of the Bleeding Effect. He hadn’t had a fainting spell since arriving at the Grand Temple, and though he was still sluggish getting out of the machine, he hadn’t had an actual episode in a long while. He couldn’t trust that the Apple, Sixteen, and the Synch Nexus had wiped away all that risk, either. It was only a matter of time before things got bad, and all he could hope for was that they finished their work and rescued Dream before it happened.So Desmond curbed his knowing looks toward Connor and tightened his arms across his chest, watching Rebecca stick a half-dozen sensors on the gem just like she would when taking Desmond’s brain scans during check-up procedures. I feel for ya, little rock. Her hands are freezing, I know.“What is it you expect to find out, exactly?” Connor asked the room, though only Rebecca could really answer.“Well, we’ve been looking for any possible way to trace or locate Dream in the real world, using the data we pulled from Desmond’s ancestor’s memories. I think whatever frequency this thing is radiating at,” the team all took a half-step back from the gem, “it’ll lead us in the right direction, if not right to him.”“That’s assuming his power isn’t completely cut off,” Connor frowned. “Like a lead box around uranium, it’d be difficult to detect the element within—or the Endless within.”The team took another half-step back at the apt metaphor.“If this doesn’t work, I’m thinking we can combine it with the Apple of Eden to see about increasing our chances—or, maybe, Desmond could combine it, since he’s the only one that can actually work the Apple among the four of us.”Connor gave the young man a wary look and said, “Would that not be extremely dangerous? Given what happened in Denver not eighteen months ago.”“That was less of an Isu tech issue and more… user error,” Rebecca remarked, wincing.Connor looked to William to explain.“Daniel Cross,” he sighed, aging a decade from uttering a single name. Desmond frowned. “He’s a former Assassin; I trained him personally. At some point, he flipped to the Templars and betrayed us. He would suffer these hallucinations, visions, he would call them. We later learned that it was equivalent to using the Animus, but without a machine. His genetic memories would simply show themselves to him without any external input.”“He went mad,” Shaun said, a little frustrated by William’s tiptoeing around the actual point. “Not only did he turn to the Templars, they actually put him in an Animus and worsened his Bleeding Effect exponentially. When you put a destabilized mind like that in charge of an Apple of Eden, nothing good will come of it.”“And you think putting an Apple in Desmond’s hand won’t yield similar results?”
Ouch, grandpa.
“We’ve been hyperaware of Desmond’s psychological and physiological changes regarding his Animus usage. There’ve been less than a handful of true Bleeding Effect episodes, so it’s like comparing a handful of salt to an atomic bomb.”
Ouch, dad.
“That aside, we don’t need to jump to any conclusions,” Hob said. Desmond gave a weak but thankful smile. “Best case, we only need to use Connor’s bloody rock to find Dream.”
Worst case, Desmond uses the Apple and kills us all.
Desmond just sighed, feeling very attacked.“Alright, I’m running the diagnostic array,” Rebecca said to nobody in particular, tapping away at her laptop. The green gem on the table glowed: at first, just a flicker of light, but quickly ramping up to a gleaming green-gold starburst. It filled the space and cast the walls and furniture into shadows.No, not shadows—clouds.The others gasped, but Connor and Desmond remained alert, falling into ready stances as they took in the scene. The space around them shifted rapidly, as if they were flying through the air miles above where they stood in reality.“This ever happen on the Aquila?” Desmond asked over the whooshing roar around them.Connor shook his head, jaw set.Desmond approached the stone cautiously. “Dream?” he asked, wondering if he could use it to communicate, the way the Apple had let him. If this didn’t work, he was going to feel really stupid—
“Desmond?”

He nearly jumped out of his skin. Dream’s voice sounded rough, hoarse in the way Desmond remembered his being after the coma.“Holy fuck, what—where are you?” he asked, forming the important questions first.“How are you doing this?” Dream’s voice asked again, but it felt further away now, like the volume was failing.“I’m—tell me where you are and I’ll—whoa,” Desmond muttered, feeling a wave of nausea overtake him. He swayed where he stood, suddenly feeling intense vertigo.“Desmond,” Connor said, his voice urgent. Strong hands wrapped around his shoulders, keeping him upright even as his body started going limp. “Rebecca, shut it off—”
“Find Shahin Al-Masri—”

Desmond tried to form his mouth around the name, tried to even ask what was going on, but his mouth suddenly tasted of blood, and soon even the golden glow went dark.
“—seizing, it’s like he’s having a night terror—”

“—fuck, hold him to the side—”

“Desmond? If you can hear us, you have to breathe—”

“C’mon, son, breathe—”

“Christ, should I call 999?”

“We’ve avoided detection this far, you can’t possibly—”

“—no, no! Desmond—!”
It wasn’t… dark. But there was definitely no sun here.Wherever ‘here’ was.Desmond didn’t really care, turning and looking around at all the gray, gray, gray around him. He felt oddly light, but also like he couldn’t possibly move from the spot he was standing in. Nothing mattered, because there was nothing here. Desmond’s first thought was:
Damn it. I wanted to see how it ended.
“Oh, for the love of—you weren’t supposed to come here yet. Who sent you?”Desmond looked at the source of the voice. A severe-looking woman in a gray pencil skirt and gray silk blouse stepped toward him from the wild gray nowhere, her gray kitten heels making no noise as she approached.“Am I in the Animus?” he asked. Even as he said it, he knew he wasn’t. The vast expanse of void before him reminded him of the Blackroom and his time in limbo with Clay during his coma. Regardless of the similarity, nobody else had actually been in the Animus with him before. Even Clay had been only a projection of his subconscious, vulnerable to bit decay in the way his corpse had been vulnerable to rot several months before.But the woman before him was real—or whatever qualified as real in this realm. For some reason, he thought he’d be seeing the other lady again, with the kind smile and the warm hands. But this woman wasn’t smiling. Her hands looked cold.“No, you’re dead, Mister Miles.”That first thought made more sense now.“Aw, shit,” he sighed, scratching at the back of his head and jolting when he couldn’t really feel it. He could see his hands, could move his arms, but when he tried to touch his thumb to his fingertips, there was no sensory feedback, only the idea of touching. “I was supposed to do something.”“Yes, Desmond. You really were. Which is why we,” she said, emphatically gesturing between them with a gray-painted fingertip, “are not going to tell anybody this happened.”Desmond got her drift, bobbing his head like a dashboard buddy. “Yeah, of course. Our secret. Me? Dead? Pssht. No way.”The gray lady, whoever she was, didn’t seem impressed by his levity. She held out her hand and told him to take a breath.Dream of the Endless was as much a fan of irony as he was a fan of his meddlesome younger siblings. That was to say: he was not.He’d long grown accustomed to the cold, impenetrable cage he’d awoken in nine years ago. Within the binding circle drawn by that insufferable amateur, Burgess, he could not access his powers, nor any new knowledge from outside that cursed golden line of paint.To make things even worse, the entire thing reeked of Isu technology.Of course it did.Between the occult symbols binding him to the waking world, the crystal ball holding him was constructed in many confounding patterns, each made of gold-flecked glass and twisting, burnished steel. Diminished as he was, he did not even attempt to escape before knowing more about his capture.The problem with that was the electrostatic hummmm that only increased in volume when he would think about breaking free. He hadn’t tested the extent of that response yet, especially when, for all intents, he was reduced to that of a mortal man. It could spell certain death, or at least grievous injury.Left with less than little to do, his mind wandered to safer topics as he held his silent vigil, glaring at the security team. More often than not, his thoughts drifted toward revenge, but to avoid triggering the punitive forcefield around him, he thought of Ezio Auditore. The concept of vengeance had consumed the man’s mind following the deaths of his father and brothers, but he’d confessed that the moment Uberto Alberti and Vieri de’ Pazzi had died beneath him, the flame had fizzled out fast. In its place was an all-consuming emptiness, curtailed by the heavy knowledge that his family would not be made whole again because he found his revenge. All it gave him was the feeling of being hopelessly lost.Like searching for ghosts in a sea of fog, he’d said. Dream had thought, then, of his sister’s realm of mirrors and mist and mice and misery.He thought of Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad and his academic approach to studying the Isu artifacts. He spent a long time observing his surroundings before hypothesizing the situation. It was a cautious way to live, but one Dream could find merit in. He observed his cage, careful to keep his mind on curiosity alone as not to activate the protective spell.Roderick Burgess must have a Piece of Eden. There was no other way this design could have come about without its influence. Burgess was boastful, but he wasn’t stupid; he would never reveal the tools that either captured or imprisoned Dream. But Dream had the advantage of knowing much about the Isu, so he eliminated several options, keeping his thoughts as slow as necessary to protect his theories from the spell’s attention.The Shroud, for one. There was no healing to be had in the undercroft of Fawney Rig. Burgess wouldn’t have valued such a thing, anyway.The Sword was a tricky tool to disprove. It was used in matters of conquest, yes, but it also carried with it the scent of blood, old blood. In those few weeks between being summoned and being imprisoned, Dream hadn’t caught that scent outside of the spilled blood for the ritual.He considered the Staves for a moment, comparing it to Burgess’ cane, but the man was an occultist; he wouldn’t use an object like that every day. Even Dream’s tools, stolen from his person and kept in the manor house proper, were not removed from the safe but for special occasions. Perhaps it was Dream’s saving grace that Roderick Burgess was too much a mystic for his own good.However, when Dream contemplated the Apples of Eden even briefly, his cage hummed nervously. It made sense. The cage was spherical, like the Apples. Its panels even resembled the metal panels of the devices. Though it held no more power than holding him, Dream knew his cage had to have been thought up by those infernal tools’ meddling.The day he thought that, the cage rattled his very teeth inside his head.It was as much an answer as he would get, sitting here with nothing else to do. So he let himself find the ‘safe’ things to think about. It didn’t take long for him to think about Desmond. That was a safe subject of thought. He’d followed Desmond’s hovering presence over Ratonhnhaké:ton for a few decades, until which point the Assassin had a child. After that, Desmond did not visit any one of Ratonhnhaké:ton’s ancestors.He’d seen Ratonhnhaké:ton fake his own death, which was amusing, and take the Eagle Stone out from the Aquila, which was not. He’d resolved to put his search for Desmond on hold, returning his full focus to his responsibilities as Dream of the Endless until which point the man was born—And then he’d been captured, and all signs were pointing toward Dream not fulfilling his 800-year-long goal of meeting Desmond.So yes, it was ironic that all his time waiting for Desmond to show up had now culminated in Dream doing nothing else but waiting for Desmond to show up.And he hated it.The routine outside his prison was exacting and precise—at first. The first year, a team of no less than five men would sit and watch him watching them. They would take detailed notes, make measurements and check the fittings on his cage every three days like clockwork. The rotations were randomized, meant to keep all of them on their toes, but eventually, things became rote by the second year of his captivity. Five men became three, became two—and the shifts became eight hours apiece. After some time, they all started to ignore him.They still panicked and clucked like hens whenever he’d so much as twitch a finger, but it was very clear—they were bored.And so was he.By the eighth year, he was largely despondent and depressed, yearning for the simple ability to disappear at will. He’d had too many eyes on him for the next three Endless lifetimes, and he missed the days when he could simply force humans’ eyes to glaze and glide over him, past himself.He could tell when someone was looking at him. He could tell who was looking at him, too. But not now. Now, he knew none of these guards’ names or stories, none of their nightmares or their comforts. Now, he could stare back at them, glaring, challenging—but they did not fear him. Not while he was behind magicked glass, and they had their little weapons and drugs.Some guards hissed insults at him, their words garbled through the glass. He did not flinch, and paid them no mind. Whenever his thoughts rattled the forcefield around his cage, Burgess would come down—to interrogate him, to taunt him, sometimes even just to smack his cane against the glass panels when the barbs did not land. The incessant banging irritated Dream more than the humming noise did, but both interrupted any attempt at peace he tried to keep.One day in November, an itch of a feeling started up behind the blooming ache in his chest. Winters in the basement were exceptionally cold, and while the guards bundled themselves in heavy coats and brought down ticking, glowing heat-lamps, these things were not given to Dream. The chill did not affect him in any way that mattered, but it made the cage brutally uncomfortable. It left his chest feeling hollow and icy at once, easily ignorable until—That itch-and-bloom feeling. It was… it was warm. He remembered what it meant. This was the itch of feeling that came when he used Jessamy’s eyes to see from a far distance. Somebody was looking.It felt miraculous, being able to feel such a thing after so long numbed to feeling altogether. It was for that reason he clung to any sign of what brought this about—he checked the binding circle, the cage, but couldn’t find what it meant or how it’d been borne. Without his abilities, it took him quite some time to follow the right thread back to the tapestry, as it were.It was a guard on the watch rotation. He was newer; he’d been hired within the last few months and brought down to gawk at Dream like all the other new recruits. Eventually, that man began shadowing the guards at the desk, and then one of the older guards stopped showing up to shift…But Shahin did not leave.By default, none of the guards referred to one another by name in the undercroft. Burgess had ‘impressed’ the importance of leaving Dream disoriented so he wouldn’t have any power over their minds—hence the irregular guard rotations. As he was well aware, however, humans were not infallible. The glass cage resonated sound better than his captors believed (considering his lack of reactions to their nasty epithets), and from up the stairs in the house proper, he would hear them greeting and goodbyeing one another. G’day, Nigel. Evening, Edward. Night, George.
How’s things, Shahin?
Shahin was hired for this purpose: to watch, to observe, to report when Dream so much as breathed. He did his part, took the pills, wrote the reports, frowned, and hardly blinked away from the being suspended in the cage.There was something incredibly familiar about Shahin. Though he sat just outside the circle of light that beamed down from on high, Dream caught that curving pout, the noble curve of a cheekbone, the slant of a nose. It wasn’t perfect, the likeness, but Altaïr’s features were strong enough for Dream to realize:This man was Desmond’s ancestor.It took everything in him not to flinch at the realization, and even more restraint to keep from staring at the place over Shahin’s left shoulder. As much as he wished to, it would have caused quite the stir had he smiled to himself at the discovery; likely, it would have gotten Shahin sent away, and then, where would they be?So Dream kept his attention on the man, though not his gaze. It was a year before anything changed.Shahin preferred to work the shift between sunset and sunrise, so he told his fellow guards. The dark circles beneath his eyes and the way his body shook from the pills told Dream that preference wasn’t much of a factor here. Regardless, Shahin and his usual partner, Victor, only showed up at night.And then the summertime hit. Earth had grown considerably warmer since Ezio’s time, and exponentially so since Ratonhnhaké:ton due to the bustling rise of industrialism choking the air worldwide. Dream remembered the panic and confusion following the eruption of Mount Tambora, and the darkening of the world in its wake. The Year Without Summer was the result of that eruption. This was an explosion of their own making.The heat outside made being in the antique manor nearly impossible to endure. The graveyard shift was now the most coveted shift on rotation, and for the first time in more than a year, Shahin was put to work in daylight hours.The guards would often walk around to keep their bodies from falling asleep, but Dream still felt their unconscious minds bloom to him through the prohibitive structure around him. Any thought of trying to reach through and draw on their dreams for strength would make the cage rattle horribly, and, in turn, wake those guards right back up. So Dream was left with strung-out, overheated guardsmen panting at the desk and hissing their hatred at him more than ever before.“I’m gonna go see what the hell’s going on up there. There’s usually a damn breeze,” Victor said, rising abruptly from the desk and hobbling over to the stairs leading up.Shahin just watched Dream, who watched the space above his shoulder. He felt foolish, sure—waiting for Desmond’s presence to appear, like children straining to unlock telekinesis when nobody was looking. Shahin still looked distinctly uncomfortable, and he checked over his shoulders once before looking back at Dream and blinking his eyes, hard.The man’s normally dark-brown eyes flipped to gold, like two polished coins cutting through the dark for a few moments. How interesting, that Altaïr’s lineage still possessed such strong genealogical abilities.He’d asked Ezio what he saw, once. The Assassin had only given him an amused look and shook his head, saying, it is different every time, but you are a friend.He wondered what that meant.Three seconds passed before… something appeared over Shahin’s shoulder. Shahin was so shaken by whatever his Sight told him that he could not hear the soft intake of breath that followed Desmond’s appearance. Yet, it resonated through the glass and cut between the physical and metaphysical barrier with a trenchant edge.It’s been 200 years, Dream mused.It was difficult to restrain the urge to speak, to move in a way that meant, hello. I see you. It was even more difficult to keep his mind from those topics that would tip his hand to the guards. They knew what he was thinking, when the cage rattled so.It was a long way off to 2012, when Desmond began visiting him in his time. Dream needed his help, and in order to get that help, he had to stay put.  The room was quiet for a while, Desmond doing as his ancestors did and simply observing the scene. He had to know Dream knew he was there, at the very least. He must have ascertained that Dream could not speak freely, either.Footsteps from the stairs drew Desmond’s attention. Victor clomped down the rest of the way, the rusty squeak of iron hinges preceding his arrival. “He move? Should get a breeze now, Burgess let us keep the top door open. It blew shut.”Shahin shook his head. “He feels strange, though.” He gestured to Dream.“Strange? Of course, he’s strange, he appeared here out of nowhere ten years ago.”“I did not know that,” Shahin said, sitting back. Victor seemed more pleased with the drafty breeze that flowed through the room than getting on Shahin’s case for stating the obvious. Dream watched Desmond and urged him to puzzle it out. Wych Cross. Fawney Rig. 1925. Shahin Al-Masri. Roderick Burgess.Desmond didn’t always show up over Shahin’s shoulder, and just for seconds at a time. Whenever he did show up, it felt like relief, relief that one day, he would leave this hell and return to the Dreaming, return to repair the damage wrought by his capture.And then he stopped showing up again, and a few weeks passed before Shahin told Victor his wife was pregnant again.So Dream settled in to wait once more.Desmond came to with a gasp pulled from the depths of hell itself. He felt cold all over, limbs going prickly as his heart worked overtime to inspire blood flow and circulation once again. Jesus, his chest hurt. He felt like he got hit by a goddamn truck. His eyes couldn’t quite focus on anyone around him, aside from the fact they were friendlies.When he blinked away his Eagle Vision, he could make out faces: Shaun, Rebecca, his dad, Hob… Connor, whose face looked straight-up slasher film.“What’d I miss?” he coughed, making a face at the taste of blood in his mouth. He groaned at the ache in his chest again. Something’s fucked up, there.The group froze, eyes bugging. Shaun gave a quiet, “nope.” before he keeled over, unconscious.Connor helped Desmond to sit up, and Rebecca darted off while Hob checked on Shaun. His dad remained frozen, a look of shock and dread still stuck on his face. Whatever happened must have been bad.“You died.”
Yeah, that’d do it.
“Briefly,” Desmond argued. “What happened?”“Are you alright?” his dad asked, swaying slightly on his feet. Desmond looked up at him, confused at the vehemence and then oh yeah. Death of a child would possibly shake a man to the firmament.Desmond nodded after taking inventory of himself. His chest hurt like a motherfucker, most likely because of the chest compressions. His breathing still rattled a bit, and his nose felt unbroken, though it was sluggishly bleeding—must have been a brain thing, then. “Yeah, dad. I’m okay.” He was filled with the extreme urge to apologize, but held back.“Whatever effect the gem brought on us, you reacted poorly to it, and it… well, it looked like an aneurysm.” Connor’s voice was even, but Desmond heard the tremble there. Shit, he’d scared them—all of them.“I didn’t mean to,” Desmond muttered.Rebecca came back with a wet cloth for him and Connor, then started fussing over him in a way he knew better than to fight. He drew the line at her telling him to blow his nose into her hands, though.“Becs, seriously, I’m okay.”“No, Desmond, you are not,” Connor said, gripping his shoulder tight. “You died. Your heart stopped for almost a minute.”His dad made a wounded noise, half-hidden behind his hand. Desmond didn’t like seeing his dad crying, so he looked at the wet rag in his hands instead.“Well, there’s nothing we can do about it, so—” He loudly blew his nose to make a point, but then made a funny noise when something felt… wrong, up there. He blew harder and there was a strange pop! feeling before a blood clot landed in the wet, bloody cloth. “Well, this could be the problem,” Desmond muttered, wheezing through the pain in his diaphragm.The group, as ever, had no idea what to do with him.He tried thanking Connor for the CPR, but he waved Desmond off, sitting back on his ass and crossing his legs. A detached, shellshocked look fell over his face, and Desmond almost laughed before he remembered—“Oh, fuck.” Desmond’s outburst had the group on high alert again, so he quickly explained himself. “I know how to find Dream.”His dad was more than reluctant to let Desmond go back into the Animus after that morning’s nonsense and the whole dying thing. While Desmond understood, he didn’t let it change his mind. “You know, people used to listen to the Mentor,” his dad muttered, shaking his head as Desmond hovered behind Shaun’s left shoulder while he researched. There was a chance he didn’t even need to go into his great-grandfather’s memories at all, if the archives could pull something up.It was Hob’s idea to call Desmond’s mother, and William’s idea to avoid taking such a dire course of action.“It’s the end of the world, mate. Every course of action is dire.”Hob had a point, so William had Shaun secure a line to her personal comm device.Desmond was nervous, to talk to her after almost ten years. Nine years, nine months, and three days, to be exact. He remembered how his dad shut down the idea of talking to her back in the Grand Temple, and how much that hurt. Fuck, but he really felt like the youngest one in the room right then. He fidgeted a little as they stood around the phone while the dialing tone rang and rang and rang.Connor caught his eye, and instead of the skeptical brow Desmond was expecting from his ancestor, he got a warm half-smile that reassured him all would be fine. Desmond took a deep breath, and coughed hoarsely when his ribs protested.“William?” a voice said down the line. Desmond felt his mouth go a little dry, and it was difficult to swallow.“Yes, it’s me. Well, it’s the team, you’re on speaker.”
“I figured. What’s going on?”
“Desmond is here, too.”Silence dropped like a goddamn warhead between Desmond and the speakerphone.“Desmond?” she said. Her voice sounded… not fragile, but brittle in the way hope could sometimes sound.“Hi, mom,” he choked out.
“You’re—oh, Desmond. It’s… it’s good to hear your voice.”
“Yeah, you too, mom.” Nobody looked at him while he wiped at his eyes. His face was surely red as a tomato right now. “I… we need your help.”
“Whatever you need, Des.”
Christ. Desmond covered his eyes and gestured for someone else to start speaking, overwhelmed. He felt his father’s hand on his shoulder as Shaun explained what was happening in as concise terms as he could.Desmond swallowed past the lump in his throat and fought back the trembling in his lower lip, transported back in time to that frightened 16-year-old boy hauling ass through the Badlands, voices calling his name getting quieter and quieter with every mile he put behind him. Shit, he’d needed his mom a lot over those years. Needed help in a way he knew he would never get from his dad.He tuned back in and gave a nod to his dad, who was not unaffected by the exchange, either. He looked sad, remorseful—did he regret keeping Desmond from calling his mother back in the Temple?“Yaah, what a thing to be called about,” Zahra said over the phone. Desmond smiled at the familiar sound of her sigh. “From what I understand, Shahin was heavily addicted to cocaine through his job as a night watchman.”“That sounds… different,” Rebecca said gingerly, wincing.
“It was after the Great War, and everybody used coke for just about anything, until it was outlawed, controlled, et cetera. But Shahin’s employer, from what he said, forced him to take those pills for years and years. Said it was to keep him awake and alert while on the job.”
“What did he need to be alert for? Who was the employer?” Shaun asked, fingers poised over his keyboard at the first mention of something he could research.
“Some old-money creep in the English countryside south of London. Burt or something. He went through security guards like babies go through diapers—most likely from the coke destroying their lives. But he never spoke of his job. Not out of a sense of loyalty or duty, that’s for sure.”
“Why else would he be mum about it?” Desmond asked, moving to cross his arms and then not doing that when it pulled at his ribs.
“Could be he was scared of being found out, if he told. My mother, rest her soul, she only remembered a little of him before my grandmother left him. She said Shahin was cursed by a djinn.”
Stranger things had happened—in just the last three hours, to be precise.“Mrs. Miles, does the name Roderick Burgess strike a chord? Fawney Rig, Wych Cross?” Shaun said, eyebrows raised at whatever he found on his computer.The hair on the back of Desmond’s neck stood up, a primal, ancestral reaction to the name.
“That’s the name. Burgess.”
The team met one another’s eyes. They had a lead—and they’d be able to tell soon if it held water. Wych Cross was just an hour and a half away.“You couldn’t talk to Dream this time?” Rebecca said, once Desmond surfaced from Shahin’s memories.Blinking the stars out of his eyes, Desmond shook his head. “No. Too quiet. And Shahin would have flipped, I think.”He relayed what he knew to the rest of the team as the truck ambled through traffic going out of London. Dream was being kept in a cage underground, with a lot of mystic and magical shit around it. He learned that Roderick Burgess possessed an Apple of Eden, which had, in part, allowed him to summon and imprison Dream in the first place.Hob, who had invited himself along, looked troubled at the dawning realization of exactly how long Dream may have been imprisoned. “He was told Dream appeared ten years before… when?”“1926.”“Christ,” Hob whispered, rubbing at his temples.Connor, who had also invited himself to the rescue mission, put a hand on his friend’s shoulder and squeezed once. Desmond felt bad for confirming Hob’s dismayed guesses, but there was nothing any of them could do about it until now.“We’ll get him out,” Connor said, voice somber as a vow.Shaun spoke up from the driver’s seat. “I found evidence of a death date for Roderick Burgess. He was also known to the world of the occult as the Magus, and was the head of a secret organization called the Order of Ancient Mysteries.”“After every war, there’d be a resurgence of groups like that, and then they’d die down. They formed in the shadow of tragedy and recruited from the grieving. You couldn’t leave a funeral without some shadowy man in a hood trying to recruit you to their cause.”Ezio would have loved Hob Gadling.“Right,” Shaun said awkwardly. “But Roderick Burgess died in 1959. He was almost a century old by then, but his cause of death was debated on several remaining records from nearby hospitals. It was declared natural causes by a home doctor, but a later autopsy showed he had the physiology of a much younger man.”“Proximity to Isu artifacts is linked to prolonged lifespans—I’m sure exposure to an Endless would yield similar results,” Connor said.“You’d know,” Desmond pointed out. He pointed at the pocket where Connor had put away the green gem. “That’s his.”An uneasy beat of silence passed through the team.“I have had this since—”“Since you captained the Aquila. I know. And yet, you don’t look a day over 40.”Connor considered that point with an inscrutable expression. “Good point,” he said. He turned back to Shaun. “How did Burgess die, then?”“The examiner called it a falling accident. Head trauma, like he hit a window.”“You think he smacked his head on the glass cage or something?” Desmond said, crossing his arms and once more uncrossing them with a wince.“Hard to tell. The Order must have done a great amount of work trying to cover up what really happened.”“So what’s the plan for when we get in there?” Desmond conceded, looking over at his dad.William had taken the role of a coordinator in the group, more advisor than leader. As it was, Desmond and Connor both outranked him in terms of experience as a Mentor—at least, technically.“If the binding circle and the cage are still there, breaking him out will be easy enough. The modern Assassin’s hidden blade, has a Vickers scale rating of 5000,” he said, looking pointedly at Connor, who seemed more amused than irritated. “Even ballistic glass would have a difficult time standing up to that material, if enough force is applied.”“Are you suggesting that Desmond stab him out of that cage?” Shaun said, disbelieving.“I’m sure it won’t need to come to that.” William turned back to Desmond. “With how secretive this place seems to be, I don’t suppose they’ll have done too much to the basement—too many chances for loose ends and loose lips. But the manor and the grounds surrounding it might have more reinforcements than Shahin remembered from 1930.”“They’ll probably be expecting some huge team to swarm them. They won’t expect one guy.”“Two,” Connor corrected. “I’m coming with you.”William muttered something about a migraine and pinched at the bridge of his nose. “Why?”“While you may have greater familiarity with Isu artifacts than I do, I have greater knowledge of Endless artifacts. There’s no guarantee they won’t use Dream’s tools against us as well. So, two.”“And… he can probably watch my back better than a drone. Sorry, Becs.” Desmond sent a smile over to the technician, but she shrugged, agreeing.William found himself outnumbered on this decision, and moved to a different topic. “We should focus mainly on reconnaissance at first. With the risks just stated, running in there blind could be a death sentence.”“Hold on, there’s one thing not adding up here—if Burgess had an Apple, wouldn’t Abstergo have swooped in and nabbed it?” Desmond said, suddenly remembering that oh yeah, the Templars.“After Roderick’s death, it seems like there was some kind of meeting between Abstergo and one Alex Burgess in the early 80s, according to the few files I managed to find on him. The Order of Ancient Mysteries’ recordkeeping is one thing, but Abstergo’s paranoia goes much, much further.”“Turn here,” Hob said suddenly. “There’s an old road that winds into the woods.”“Why am I doing this?” Shaun said, gritting his teeth as the truck threatened to tilt up on two wheels. The rest of the team struggled to remain seated and upright.“These old-money types have security that stretches down to the nearest street, watching every car that drives by, not just the ones that come down the driveway. You weren’t going to just go up to the front door and say hello, were you?” Hob huffed, checking the satellite map for the closest point they could stop without giving away their position. “There’s a thick cluster of trees here. About a mile from the manor.”“Ugh, my ribs—Not to make you multitask, Shaun, but did anything come of that meeting in the 80s?” Desmond asked, picking himself up from where he’d slid onto the floor. Really, why does the Animus have a seatbelt but we don’t?“Yeah, any mention of a man in an orb?” Rebecca added.“Yeah, you’ll have to give me a minute—”He barely maneuvered the truck to its destination, and once the engine stopped, they all sat there, breathing in the stillness and silence for a minute.“Hastings.”“On it,” Shaun snapped, pulling his laptop out of a bag and tapping away at it. Hob fiddled with the sun visor on the windshield. They’d been stopped for less than five minutes, but the heat had already grown oppressive and gross without the air conditioning in the back of the truck.Connor helped Desmond stand, then rolled back his sleeves to reveal the hidden blade affixed to his tanned forearm. It looked similar to the one in his memories, modified with newer buckles and stabilizer straps, obviously. Desmond’s looked pretty generic by comparison, even though it packed a heavier punch.“Do you think the Templars know about the Endless?” Rebecca asked the open air.The idea, as most were these days, was discomforting.“They definitely do,” Shaun said, ushering in a wave of dismay among the group. “It looks like Abstergo is paying him to keep Dream captive as he is. Hush money going back thirty years.”“Fuck,” Desmond bit out. “So there’s Abstergo agents on the property.”“With all the bells and whistles, it seems.”“And we’re going in with spring-loaded knives and a tiny drone. Awesome.”“Like I told you,” William said, sighing, “this is only reconnaissance. Obviously, if you see an opportunity after fully assessing the situation, there’s a chance we can infiltrate. But until then, you’re to observe only. Which is a situation that doesn’t call for more than a hidden blade and a set of eyes.”It was just the kind of thing someone who hadn’t been on a mission in ten years would say. Connor’s eyebrow of disapproval said as much.But Desmond just nodded, knowing that improvising was the best tool in the field anyway.“Even if we do get a better idea of what’s going on, what resources do we have to actually prepare if we need to regroup? We have no more weapons than these, no tactical support to speak of, no fallback plan in case one of us is injured or captured. You need to think about the fact we’re not going to be any more prepared than we are now.”Their hopes of rescuing Dream rested on a 250-year-old immortal not-Assassin and a man who technically died two hours ago. It wasn’t comforting, but they’d had worse odds.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

The guards watching Dream of the Endless were fighting off fear and panic. Dream of the Endless was fighting off a smile.Desmond had spoken to him. For the first time in nearly a century, Dream had spoken aloud. The first thing he said was Desmond’s name.Never had the man sounded clearer than when he spoke through the Eagle Stone. Considering all that entailed, Dream had to fight another front: not laughing. Dream swore he could practically feel Desmond’s presence before him, crisper and clearer than he’d ever been simply hovering over another’s shoulder, centuries away. He’d only managed to pass a useful clue to his location, one the guards on duty wouldn’t know enough about to be instantly alarmed with.However, the fact that he’d spoken at all, and the cage had buzzed harder than it had in fifty years, was worth reporting to Alex Burgess.Dream was there when the boy watched his father die, bleeding out right below him on the floor, between the alchemical signs for the moon and Saturn. For half a minute, he wondered if Alex, in his shocking grief, would free him from the cage. He’d even stood upright, reaching out as if to touch the glass, to taste freedom—And memories of Desmond surged back in. He would not be freed this day. 1959 was so very far from 2012. He withdrew his hand before Alex could even reconsider.So his vigil had continued.Until… today.He was positive that Desmond could ascertain his location from the clue of his ancestor’s name. Whatever power lended Desmond to see over his ancestors’ shoulders, it had worked—already worked, more than seventy years ago, in fact.His father would be laughing, if he was the kind of being to do such a thing.Alex Burgess, for all his grasp on Dream’s tools, was very old. The mechanical wheelchair lift had been installed in the late 1990s after he’d taken a bad fall, leaving him chairbound for the foreseeable future. Of course, he always mustered the strength to stand up before Dream’s cage to continue the decades-long tradition of hissing insults, spitting invective, making threats, and the like. He would sometimes bring down the tools, and the sight of Dream’s possessions would often anger him enough to rattle the cage like a hornet’s nest.Where the guards would tremble in fear, Burgess would smirk.Now, it was Dream fighting the smirk as Burgess approached, pouch of sand at his hip, helmet in his hands, ruby around his neck. “Thinking of getting out, are we?”Dream said nothing. He had nothing to say to his captor.“It’s impossible, you know. The key to it has been lost to time—to my father’s very mind. Even if I wanted to free you—which I don’t—I would not be able to wield the—”He cut himself off on a curious syllable. Dream let his eyes glide to Burgess, from where he’d been reclined, eyes closed. Burgess had gone pale—not for any physical malady, but the kind of pallor that struck a man on the verge of revealing too much.All of Roderick’s ego and none of his cautious nature had passed to his son.For Alex had been halfway through saying ap— when his self-preservation had held his tongue.Looking around at the spherical, multipaneled cage, Dream felt vindication flood his form in a great wave. The glass cage glowed softly against fittings of gleaming brass and burnished silver. When he returned his gaze to Burgess, the man was shaking.
How interesting.
Dream loosed his smile like an arrow, and the moment it found its mark, he retracted it. The cage rattled beneath him, almost violently enough to jostle him off his seat.On the coattails of satisfaction came the icy fingers of worry. If Burgess possessed an Apple of Eden—Here, the cage shrieked.Dream of the Endless now fought worry alongside his guards, though not for any reason they would know.Yet.It was a more than a little strange to see Connor beside him instead of in front of him. It hit him with a little vertigo, which didn’t help as they sprinted through the trees as quietly as they could. Their hoods did them no good in the angry sunshine that pierced through the barren, dying trees, and their jackets only amplified that. If they moved fast enough, they at least caught a breeze.“So when’d you ditch the robes, exactly?” Desmond asked, not remotely winded by the pace. Were they in the treetops, that would have been a different matter entirely.“My original ones sunk with the Aquila. The rest were in the Davenport manor when last I checked. But I have not returned in many years.”“Makes sense. Fashion styles change, whether we like it or not. And you have to change to keep to that second tenet, after all.”Connor hesitated before responding, long enough for Desmond to chance a peek over at him. His expression was stony and cold, out of place for the stifling climate. “It is good advice,” he said slowly. “Even for those who no longer swear to the Creed.”Desmond didn’t find fault in his logic. His methodology had been something similar while he’d been on the run for the last decade. Stay out of sight. Don’t get into trouble. Follow the crowd. Don’t be a hero. Still…“Why did you leave the Order?”“Aside from the fact I’d have to explain not aging?” Connor said, giving him a brief look. The sentiment reminded Desmond of the times he’d look over in traffic to see if stupid drivers looked as dumb as they drove. He rolled his eyes.“Yeah, aside from that. You could have restarted—like Hob.”They slowed to a stop at the sudden shift in conversation. They were still a quarter-mile from the estate, but this conversation felt important. It was a question his father had posed at least a dozen times before, but the quandary had remained unresolved.Connor man must have been expecting such an interrogation by his slightly-rehearsed response. “I lost my home, my tribe, and my father in a very short time.” Desmond knew he wasn’t speaking of Haytham. “Staying around the Assassins would have only spelled more grief in the long run. I knew my daughter carried similar gifts to myself, more than just the Sight. Call it trite, but I didn’t want that grief for her. My children wouldn’t be forced onto such a path. So I had to leave it behind, for all of us.” He kept his hands on his waist, taking deep recovery breaths and watching Desmond process what he’d said.Desmond wasn’t convinced. Connor’s off-handed call it trite seemed like it came from a man making too many moves on the chessboard at once. As much as his bravado attempted to convince Desmond that his family came first, it was really more in the sense that a shield came first in matters of warfare. Despite many centuries to say otherwise, Desmond still knew the heart of who Connor was: an angry man, betrayed and lied to and forced into making choices he had no say in. For him to deny his children their choice to walk a path of their own felt wrong, down to the studs.By Connor’s tense shoulders, he knew Desmond knew that. Perhaps his father would have accepted the answer, especially considering the danger Desmond had survived that morning. But Desmond wasn’t his father. He’d left the Brotherhood at 16 because he’d been forced down that path from his very first breath. He’d rejoined the Brotherhood because he believed in its mission.As much as Desmond wanted to say, I call bullshit, he knew that was a one-way ticket to Connor never speaking on the topic again. He tried to channel Ezio, and exercised tact.“But that’s not how the Templars work. You still had no choice but to be involved from the moment you vowed to hunt Charles Lee and the others.”Connor’s neutral expression flickered with disdain at the name; he’d likely not heard that name for as long as he’d not heard his daughter’s.Desmond continued, “Templars would have dragged you and your family back into the war regardless of your intentions. They did. They dragged my ass across an ocean to do so. The fight doesn’t stop because you’re done playing, Connor. In the fight for free will, not playing isn’t winning. It’s forfeiting.”A muscle twitched beneath Connor’s eye, in the same place Desmond remembered seeing whenever his father grew incandescently angry. “Then why play their game? As long as there are Assassins, there are Templars. One begets the other—to remove some pieces from the board would make an incomplete game. Even in my time, the Brotherhood was a dying order. Ezio Auditore was the kind of Mentor who would only come around once in a hundred lifetimes. Not even he could beat the Templars back for longer than a few decades. Since the beginning, the Brotherhood has been falling and failing. Now more than ever. So why fight? Why play the game?”The bitter cynicism cut at Desmond like a knife. He was aghast, surprised to see the raging fire in Connor had simmered to a weak, cold light. Here was the truth of him: he’d not spent his years of immortality living. He’d spent them surviving enough to avoid living.“Why fight? Because we have hope for the world, man.”“Hope?” Connor laughed, the noise humorless, joyless.“Yes, hope. Because, if you weren’t aware, we’re trying to save the world from total annihilation. The Templars want us to return to a state like the one humans rebelled against 75,000 years ago. That’s why they’ve been hunting for these for the last nine centuries,” he said, gesturing to where the Apple of Eden lay secured to his belt.Connor gave him a look of condescension. “Hope and free will have never been what the Assassins fight for. They are just grasping at different shades of control. Same as the Templars.”Desmond shook his head, disgust replacing disbelief. “Those things are what I fight for.”“Then you are naïve.”“I am young, but I am not naïve. I left the Brotherhood with no intention of returning or being found. The difference between you and me is that leaving was the first choice I’d ever made for myself. And as fucked up as it is, that was a luxury. Stepping away from it all is a high-handed privilege that I know is selfish and damning, but you seem to have never learned. If I did it again, right now—fuck the Endless, fuck you, fuck my dad and everybody else ont he planet—what would would be the point?”“You know nothing of the losses I’ve incurred, Desmond. Your Animus showed you a bare fraction of them,” Connor hissed, baring his teeth and taking a step forward. While Desmond hoped he wouldn’t outright attack him, there was no telling—not when it came to a man with nothing to lose.Desmond flexed his fingers in and out of fists to try to calm his nerves. “I know the losses that built you. And I know Ezio’s, and I know Altaïr’s, and more than that, I know my own. I will go to my grave still grieving souls I’ve never met. Not a single one of those losses—the ones I know, the ones I don’t—will be worth a damn if we can’t do what we can to help every single day.”A righteous fury rose up inside him, along with a near-foreign feeling of respect. Desmond realized with startling clarity that it was Connor’s fury impassioning him so, and Connor’s respect bleeding through. The one who stood before him was ice-cold, reacting to his philosophies more as an injured, cornered animal than the fiery young Assassin that Desmond had met through the Animus.Connor had nothing to say, but Desmond had said all that was needed. Both men glared at one another with mixed looks of disappointment and anger.“Think about why you’re here,” Desmond said lastly. He pulled up his hood to remind the both of them that they were there because at least one of them was Assassin enough to save the world on a foundation of hope and free will.A fallen log just beyond the treeline served as fine enough cover to sit behind. Connor was quiet, lost in thought as Desmond fiddled with the drone, a small machine that looked closer to a fidget spinner than an actual piece of technology.It was a lot to take in, really. Connor had gone several hundred years denying the purpose of his apostasy even to himself. Sure, the shame-laden nightmares caught up to him many times over the last few centuries, but that didn’t mean he had to do anything about it. He was a man who answered to nobody, let alone a Creed or Brotherhood.He’d spent the first few decades following his “death” ensuring his tracks were suitably covered. This mostly involved traveling to places he’d never been, picking up skills, languages, hobbies to while away the hours as he waited for all who knew him to die. And that was all it was: wasting time. When that eventuality passed, allowing him the option of returning to Massachusetts, he found himself stricken with fear. It took another decade to get over it and visit his old home.A healthy town had sprung up between the pines, and the manor still stood on the hill, just as imperious and unmoving as it’d seemed the first time Connor came upon it, over a century prior. A few children of the original families at the homestead remained, but all had forgotten the history of how they came there. Forgotten Connor’s mark on their lives, just as he’d intended.He’d read a wise parable while in England earlier that decade.
The price of getting what you want is getting what once you wanted.
The words had made him shiver like a spirit had passed through him. He did not know just how true they would ring for a long time, and the echoes of that truth continued to clang and sing in his mind for decades after. He had set out to be forgotten and had been forgotten, though the ache of that reality dug a deeper grave than he anticipated. When he reconnected with the world, it refused to hold him. He’d lived as a ghost that none could remember him. So, for years, he despaired in his lost identity. He wished and wished to go back to how things were.Then, he was remembered—by Desmond, through no choice of his.And that was worse than being forgotten. At first, he had disappeared to protect his children and their children from becoming trapped in the Assassins’ secret war. Then, it seemed, just as he was trying to be remembered again around the late 1980s, a little boy of his blood was born into an inexorably choiceless life in the Assassin Brotherhood.What irony. What once you wanted, indeed.
“Oh, we’ve got the live feed. Hey, Desmond!”
“How’s the signal?” he murmured. Connor’s in-ear communicator picked up his voice better than his free ear could.
“Loud and clear, no latency even with all the trees between us. Connor, can you hear us?”
Connor grunted an affirmative, still shaking off the fog from his sudden angst. Desmond gave him a look before dusting off his knees and stretching his neck from side to side.“I’m going to take a walk around, get a count on guard rotations, and suss out security.” Desmond backed away from the log in a crouch and faced Connor again. “You coming?” he asked, voice flat.
Think about why you’re here.
He followed Desmond around the perimeter without a word. Desmond didn’t tolerate Connor taking any kind of lead, and only spoke when it was to relay reconnaissance information to Rebecca and the team.“I thought my grandchildren would be more respectful,” Connor muttered to himself in Kanien’kehá.In the same tongue, Desmond snarked, “Were you, at my age?”Connor nearly tripped.“Will wonders never cease,” Connor mused, but stuffed down the smile that threatened to tug at his lips.
“As much as I’d love to put the Animus translation software through its paces, would you two mind speaking in a common tongue?”
Both men rolled their eyes.They counted a few guards about a third of the way around, but a large hedgerow near the house concealed anything to do with the manor. “We should head aloft,” Desmond observed, peering up at the trees.Connor shook his head. “Your ribs can’t take that kind of movement right now. Besides, these trees are young; they wouldn’t take your weight on most of the boughs.”Desmond shrugged—and winced. Connor’s signature I told you so eyebrow received no audience, as Desmond turned toward the drone. He asked Rebecca to take a closer look at the house while they crept further around the property.Fawney Rig wasn’t the easiest place to infiltrate. There was a fair amount of cover deeper into the property, but getting there seemed a bit… troublesome. A vast, unbroken stretch of dead, dry grass spread from the treeline to the nearest cover on any side. Any rush attempt would have to be timed perfectly to avoid detection. Their best bet was the riskiest: a guard station near the road held just one guard on duty, and he was more concerned with hugging his desk fan than keeping alert.“I see three patrolmen, most likely on hourly rounds. Guns.” Connor blinked away his Eagle Sense, face set in a frown.“The guns are for show,” Desmond said.“How can you tell?”“I saw the magazines back on the table in the guard shack. It’s too hot to carry anything heavy like that for a patrol.” Connor looked closer at the patrolmen, and caught a glimpse of the empty magazine chamber in their rifles. “Becs? What else did you see?”
“I’ve got good news and bad news.”
“Bad news first.”
“Dogs.”
Desmond met Connor’s eyes, and they both sighed in unison. “Great. And the good news?”
“They look to be just as exhausted as the guards.”
After staking out the manor for an hour, they returned to the shady spot by the fallen tree. “This place looks bleaker than I thought it’d be,” Desmond mused.
“Yes, well, we’ve been underground and out of sight for months, but this heat wave has been going on for a few weeks; regardless of whether or not we’ll perish in the superflare, there will still be catastrophic damage worldwide. Millions will probably starve from the impact to crops and water supplies, if the heat doesn’t kill them outright.”
“…a comforting thought. Thanks, Shaun.” Desmond shook his head and took a drink from his canteen.“What do you actually think Dream will be able to do?” Connor asked, switching back to Kanien’kehá despite William’s grumbling down the line. “The Endless are bound by laws preventing their interference in human affairs.”Desmond sighed but wanted to scream. His response came out sharper than he would have liked. “With any luck, he’ll be able to do enough. That’s all I can hope for.”Though the censure in Desmond’s tone was clear, Connor found himself reluctantly hoping the same.William determined that late afternoon seemed to be the best time for infiltration, as the guards would be overly tired from the heat, and the setting sun would cover their exit if they raised any alarms.
“Desmond will use the Apple wherever necessary, and Connor will use his… rock.”
Rock, Desmond mouthed at Connor, who rolled his eyes. Despite the levity, it wasn’t a comforting order to receive. Something bugged him.“This seems too easy,” Desmond said under his breath, hoping he wasn’t jinxing himself.“It does,” Connor acknowledged, sensing the same thing he did. “It will probably spell more trouble once we’re inside.”“I don’t know what it’ll be like to go up against another person with an Apple of Eden.” The thought scared him more than he’d say, but Connor saw right through what he wasn’t saying. “Shaun, does he still have it? Do you know?”
“It’s possible Abstergo already contacted Burgess for the satellite project and took away his Apple. The plan was to launch—what was it—

twelve?

—Apples up into space? Taking Alex Burgess’ would have to have been part of their plan. He might not have it at all.”
“Even if he does,” Connor said, “Alex Burgess is over a century old. Mystic artifacts or not, it’s doubtful he’d be sharper than you.”While it wasn’t anything near a pep-talk, it was enough to set his mind relatively at ease as the sun sank lower in the sky.
“I feel so weird sending you in with nothing more than a hidden blade and the Apple of Eden. I should have fashioned you up a little Q-branch device or something.”
“Don’t worry,” Desmond said, fiddling with his hidden blade, “I’ll soon have a being of incomprehensible, near-omnipotent power on my side as well.”Connor’s baleful expression almost had Desmond guffaw and give away their position. He imagined his dad was making a similar face back in the truck.“Once you’re inside, don’t forget to break the binding circle. The hidden blade should do it; it’s ceremonious and symbolic enough to serve as a ritual athame,” Shaun said.“Just drag it over the paint? Scratch art style?”Shaun’s exasperated sigh made Desmond grin to himself. “Yes, Desmond, scratch art style.”“If that doesn’t bust him out, Operation Stab the Orb is a go.”Rebecca and Hob laughed in the background while his dad grumbled, “The hidden blade is rated for piercing stone and bone, not ballistic glass, Desmond.”“Yeah, that we know of,” he snarked. “Besides, they’re curved ballistic glass panels. I’m not shooting that and risking getting killed by a ricochet. I wish we had one of those car-accident-getter-outers.”“…I’ll find a hammer,” Connor said dryly.“Listen, Desmond. It’s unlikely that we’ll be able to provide proper extraction, but we’ll at least be able to keep watch with the camera and report any trouble brewing as it comes. Keep your communicators on,” William said.The serious note in his voice worried Desmond. As much as it would suck to die twice in one day, he didn’t want to put his dad through that again. “Got it, dad. Alright. I’m ready to go.”Desmond and Connor slipped through the long shadows cast across the thirsty grounds of Fawney Rig. It was a long shot, but they’d rolled themselves in the leaves just before they began to attempt to fool the guard dogs patrolling with the others.One saving grace offered to them was the abundance of open windows in the manor proper. Though Shaun’s parents had a pretty kitted-out basement situation, the rest of England didn’t much care for air conditioning at all—and especially not these old, fussy estates like Fawney Rig. The windows were the perfect infiltration point once they scanned the sills for traps with Eagle Vision.Tense silence followed Desmond and Connor’s arrival. They found themselves in a first-floor sitting room.
“Thermal says there are four armed guards upstairs, another four on the first—all guarding what seems like a safe. Got some crazy energy signatures on it.”
“Any civilians?” Connor asked, frowning.
“Why would there be civilians here?”
“Burgess is elderly; he has an image to maintain. He’d keep some kind of medical staff, wouldn’t he?” Connor’s whisper wasn’t as quiet as Desmond’s, but it was clear across the comms.“I see… three more on the first floor. They’re all in the kitchen, it seems. Those might be the staff.” Rebecca paused, then gave a grunt of frustration. “I can’t get a read on the basement. I think there’s a signal jammer—or the concrete is just too thick.”“If history holds, there’s most likely no more than two guards stationed down there,” Desmond murmured, eyes glinting like chipped amber as he scanned the surroundings. “Any sign of Burgess?”
“Might be in the kitchen, might not. Do you think he’s down there already?”
It was an unsettling thought, but entirely possible.
“May as well take out the Apple now, son.”
“Aye-aye.”Connor headed upstairs to take out the guards there, while Desmond stole away to the basement door. There was a keypad on the outside. Scanning it in eagle vision provided the numbers 2, 4, 6, 7, and 8.“Not very inventive,” Desmond huffed.
6-2-4-8-7.

M-A-G-U-S.
When the door swung inward, Desmond felt his hackles rise. It felt like walking too close to an old television set, the static seeming to reach out for you as you passed by. Aside from the unsettling feeling, the passageway smelled like a typical musty, old basement. It reminded Desmond of his first apartment in New York. Ah, bromine. Love ya.“Top floor secure. I’m going for the s—” Connor’s voice cut off as soon as Desmond took a step inside the stairwell.He swallowed down the swell of wariness building in his chest. Rebecca said the signal was shit, remember? You knew this. Just don’t take too long. Still, the Apple of Eden started to hum against Desmond’s palm, distractingly so. Desmond shoved it in his pocket to hide the glow and crept down the stairs. The Sight helped him avoid the creaky steps in the floorboards.Two glowing red enemies sat behind a set of cage-like doors. So Burgess isn’t down here. Any further thoughts fled as Desmond caught sight of the actual cage that lay beyond.Because there he was.The Animus did not capture the actual feeling of being in the presence of an Endless, not at all. How could anyone survive a whole shift down here? Just being on the same floor as Dream stole his breath and jostled his heartbeat out of sync. It was like standing before a large tower of speakers thumping a bassline counter to one’s pulse.It made sense why the encounters his ancestors had with Dream necessitated such large amounts of data, and why they may have wanted to hide such an encounter over time. While it was strange to consider generational trauma as something physically encoded in his DNA, there was no denying the gravity of such a presence.Desmond took one halting step forward, softening his footfall at the last moment. He hid behind a thicker portion of the wall to disguise his presence from the guards. Even so, the feeling of being watched was familiar—and oddly comforting. In his ancestors’ memories, Dream’s attention often set their teeth on edge. But for Desmond, it made him smile.He assessed that there was no camera presence in the room. Just two breathing obstacles between Desmond and his goal. It took a few seconds to zip the Apple up in his pocket without making a sound, but once he had secured it, he went on the attack.Desmond went for the stronger-looking guard first, wasting no time before sinking his hidden blade into the man’s neck. He died with a stunned expression frozen on his face. The second guard was still gasping by the time Desmond turned his attention that way, half-rising from his chair. He was felled next, and Desmond turned swift as a dancer to lay the warm corpse atop the other, kneeling on the cold floor beside them. He froze in place, straining his ears to listen for any alarm or attention headed his way.When none came, he wiped his blade on the Abstergo uniform and looked up.Dream was smiling.Desmond approached, sauntering forward with more theatricality than he had any claim to. “Nice to meet you, finally.”Dream said nothing. There was a noted tension in his shoulders that Desmond didn’t like. There must have been a reason he wasn’t speaking or even pointing out any helpful hints.“Shit, is there a… key or something?” he muttered, looking over the orb in Eagle Vision. Shahin’s memories yielded no useful information about the cage, too embroiled in the usual eldritch horror of looking at an Endless with Eagle Vision. But that could have been the cocaine.Dream lowered his gaze to the floor, and Desmond’s eyes snagged on the binding circle. “Oh, that’s right.”He released the hidden blade’s mechanism again and knelt before the golden paint on the stone floor. He smiled up at Dream, but he was looking behind him with a stricken expression. The glass started to hum—And Connor released his hidden blade into Desmond’s back.There was so much sensation, so much feedback that his body was sending him, that Desmond couldn’t move. His right hand remained clutched around the Apple of Eden, and he got a sickening sense of dejá vù—like this was Rome and Lucy all over again.When Connor pulled back, Desmond slumped forward, his head glancing off the vibrating glass before smacking on the stone floor. Dream… Dream was above him, crouched over him with a wild look in his eyes. He looked like an angel in this light, haloed around him as stars danced in Desmond’s field of vision.Desmond rolled his head over to Connor, but his heavy heart kept his eyes closed; childish fear kept him from seeing Connor’s face, kept him from confirming the extent of the betrayal. Why had he done this? Was he really so far beyond hope that he sought to stamp out the rest of the world’s? The world had gone all gold and shimmery, and Desmond knew then that he was dying. Connor had struck a lung or something, and it hurt when Desmond coughed, like something was shriveling up inside himself.A bang on the glass reverberated above him. He blinked groggily, seeing two slender, pale hands beating at the walls of the cage. The humming was louder now, incessant.“You thought…” an unfamiliar voice wheezed from beyond the door. “You thought you could come and free this monster?”For a man with over a hundred years under his belt, Alex Burgess stood at the door with a concerning amount of confidence. In one of his hands was an Apple of Eden, glowing a weak, watery white. Desmond’s Apple glowed gold, and always had, but he could hardly feel it where it dug into his side. Alex wasn’t armed with just one artifact—he also held a rather terrifying-looking helmet, a dark leather pouch, and wore a glowing, pulsing red ruby.Desmond finally raised his eyes up to look at Connor, who stood… still. Too still. His expression was pained, and overly tense. Muscles in his jaw feathered wildly as he fought…The Apple. Burgess had used the Apple on Connor. At the revelation, a pulse of white passed over Connor’s form, restricting his body even further. The agony rolled off him in waves.
This is more like Rome than I thought.
Desmond wheezed a laugh at his own joke as Alex continued to monologue from the door, his withered old-man voice rising and falling in waves of madness. Desmond gritted his teeth and poured his will into lifting his leg, dragging it in to his chest—“—and the world will understand that it was not Roderick who—”
C’mon, just a little more…
 
Desmond coughed on his blood again, panicking a little as his inhale didn’t go as far as it normally did. Red spilled from his mouth as he grunted in exertion, driving his foot down across the binding circle, over a marking that looked just like a key.A huge whoosh of something that couldn’t have been air pulsed through the room, like a thunderstorm was building right on top of him. His ears popped as pressure built in the basement.“—and now you bleed, just as my father bled, and you will die, just as—”Desmond looked up at Dream again.His eyes had started to whirl with dark nebulae, and shadows flickered in all the corners of the room—though that could have been the blood loss. The Apple in Desmond’s pocket heated unbearably against his side, making him cry out soundlessly when it burned through the fabric. Instinct alone guided his trembling hand to grab it as it started to roll across the floor, and instinct again told him what to say.“Open…” Desmond rasped, hardly able to take in air. “Open the cage.”His command to the Piece of Eden was heard, and obeyed.The panels of Dream’s cage fell apart, crashing to the stonework in large shards of glass and twisted metal. Not a single one touched Desmond where he lay bleeding across the binding circle. He blinked at the place he’d smeared his shoe across the markings, and he smiled weakly.He’d done it. He’d freed Dream as bidden. He’d done his part, like Altaïr and Ezio had done their part. Was this the moment that void lady said was ‘his time?’ Everything felt so gray and cold down here like this. Even the wild, horrified screams of Alex Burgess sounded far off. He closed his eyes…
“It is nice to finally meet you, too.”

His eyes fluttered open at the velvety dark voice. Desmond groaned weakly when two thin, toned arms picked him up. They shouldn’t have been strong enough to hold him, but they were, and… he felt safe. Something whirled beyond him, blue and white and… well, endless. He wanted to look longer, but then a voice said—
“Sleep.”
—and he did.The Apple’s thrall released Connor the moment Burgess fell to the ground unconscious. The sudden release had him falling to his knees, gasping for air. When his eyes refocused from the sudden surge of wind-that-was-not-wind, they landed on the pool of his Desmond’s blood, his grandchild’s blood—He was going to be sick.Whatever Dream had done to Alex Burgess, Connor didn’t care. He’d obviously left the man alive, by the way the geriatric twitched and moaned in his sleep. The Endless practically ripped the vestments off of Burgess’ body, before taking the green gem of the Aquila as well. He seemed rather smug about it, but that wasn’t what Connor focused on.He’d picked up a pale, bloodied, insensate Desmond, then stepped through a swirling portal into… into nothing.They were… they were gone. What did that mean? Was the world saved? Was Desmond still alive? The surge of power at the Endless’ release had been substantial, but it hadn’t felt… world-savingly substantial, not by far.Desmond was gone. That was all Connor could think.He staggered up the stairsteps to the manor’s main floor, leaving a bloody handprint where he leaned on the wall. The communicator in his ear finally connected to the fluttering little drone bobbing nervously outside the door. “—at’s going on? Is that blood? Connor, where’s Desmond? Did you find Dream?”He didn’t know which question to answer first, or even how to answer those questions.One voice won out over the rest. Hob.
“Con, you’re covered in blood. Is it yours?”
He shook his head. “It’s Desmond’s. Burgess, he—” The words refused to be spoken. Air refused to be breathed.Hob sucked in a breath, clearly leaning too close to the microphone. “Is Desmond… downstairs?”“No.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“No,” he said, this time with a hysterical laugh. “He—Dream…” He moved to shove a hand through his hair, but upon seeing the blood on his palms and sleeves, he thought better of it. “They’re gone. They disappeared into… I can’t explain it.”
“But Dream was freed. What about Burgess? Is he…?”
“No, he’s down there, but he is not dead.” Sense started to return to him, like a brief moment of sunshine in a storm. “Burgess had his Apple of Eden. Something must have tipped him off, because when I went into the office to retrieve the tools, he was waiting for me. He had his Apple of Eden and all of Dream’s vestments on. I couldn’t—I couldn’t stop him.”“Stop him from doing what?” Hob asked, worry evident in his tone.“He—” Connor lifted his eyes to the drone, imagining himself speaking directly to William Miles. “He made me attack Desmond. I tried to aim the blade where it would do the least damage, but it still hit a lung. But Desmond managed to break the binding circle and open Dream’s cage.”There was some shuffling on the line, a heart-wrenching noise far from the microphone but loud enough to still be heard. Rebecca’s voice shook as she took over. “Did Desmond take the Apple with him?”Desmond was gone. The only sign of him was his blood and—“No. There are two Apples of Eden down below, but Dream took everything else with him. The helmet, a pouch, a ruby—and my gem, too.”“And Desmond?” Rebecca said, trying to hold it together.
I know the losses that built you.
“I’m sorry,” Connor said, shame building in his chest. He could drown in that shame.
Not a

single

one of those losses—the ones I know, the ones I don’t—will be worth a

damn

if we can’t do what we can to help every single day.
“I’m going to retrieve the Apples and…” Connor trailed off, still haunted.
Think about why you’re here.
Would he even be welcomed back, having done what he did?
“Follow the drone; it’ll lead you back to us.”
“Very well.”