Sorry for the long hiatus, I had to overcome some life challenges, and in doing so my idea for this story changed. Now, I have one with a lot of depth and this will be of epic length (or multiple stories) either way, this may be my first shot at creating a whole universe...eventually. Either way, it's much more refined and I've spent a lot of time making piecing everything together so make sure you read this prologue again it's changed and foretells some new things to come! I know you may have few questions, and some of you are excited to see me return. (I'm equally excited!) Be sure to check out the end of chapters as I'm going to include a few codex entries in future chapters to expand upon the lore and my changes to it.

Also, for those that follow or were PM'n me about my other story (Dream Turned Reality) info is on my profile about where I am with that. so check it out.

That's all for business. If you're new here, then I welcome you to AoE!

In the year 2148, explorers on Mars discovered the remains of an ancient spacefaring civilization. In the decades that followed, these mysterious artifacts revealed startling new technologies, enabling travel to the furthest stars. The basis for this technology was a force that controlled the very fabric of space and time.

They called it, "the greatest discovery in human history…"

Pfft, if only they knew...

My yuuma once said that humanity, throughout history, has been little more than one grand puppet show. There's always a string attached to the shadows, manipulating the course that humanity ran.

I didn't believe any of it at first. Assassins. Templars. Isu. Eden. It sounded like some cracked out conspiracy theorist jargon, if only slightly more intelligent. In my early teenage, years I called her out on what I thought to be bullshit. That's when she introduced me to the Animus.

A device, created long before we knew anything about protheans, mass effect or life beyond earth. It allowed me to relive history as it really happened; displaying entire lives of my ancestors, al stored and my DNA; like some virtual reality game that seemed too close to reality to be fake.

And It was.

It opened my eyes. And I realized...we got damn lucky.

The world almost ended in 2012.

It was almost enslaved in 2018.

A city, lost for millennia, was found and then lost again. Sacrificed to save us from ourselves. And the corrupting power of the Isu. It's said we'd need its power to save the world again one day. I hope Consus was wrong.

The Isu, the ones that came before us; the precursor to humans. Humanity's creator, and enslaver.

Bet you didn't know humanity was originally a slave race. I wouldn't have believed it either. Then again, 200 years ago, no one would have believed life existed beyond Earth.

We were still asleep, back then. In some ways, we still are.

The strings of the many attached to the manipulative hands of the few. The Templars. We have been warring with them for thousands of years, longer if you believe the stories of our origins. I do. I've lived them after all.

Centuries of war fought in the shadows of other wars all for possession of these Pieces of Eden; Artifacts created and left behind by the Isu, scattered across our homeworld; some hidden, some lost, some found, all of them dangerous. Even in their absence knowledge garnered from the deciphered codices has uplifted us in ways no other race could possibly imagine. Medicine, agriculture, technology. If the other races ever discovered exactly how we came up with these innovations...that none of it was Prothean...you know, that'd be kind of fun to see. But it's corrupted us just as equally...as power always seems to do in the wrong hands.

You might have heard of Abstergo Industries. A conglomerate of people in powerful places that slipped an iron grip around the throat of the world right under everyone's noses... Such is the Templar way. Having had the advantage for long, after killing off all but a meager few of their opposition (my ancestors)...they became arrogant; drunk off power, they'd all but forgotten their goal.

There were times, long before then, where the Templars were striving for peace…just as we are. We disagree fundamentally on methods, but sometimes I wonder if peace might have been achieved had we worked together to do it. But time and again they lost themselves in the fight. They refused to listen when we told them that Juno was exploiting them. She exploited all of us. The Instrument of the First Will had penetrated both sides and succeeded in giving Juno the power she needed to enact her plan.

All you need to know about Juno is that she was a psychotic Isu bitch.

But without her, we might have never turned the tide.

The dissolution of Abstergo left the Templars in shambles. Not much has been heard from them in the last one hundred years. The more honorable of them stayed for a time to help take Juno down, but they fled to the shadows after that. To rebuild, I assume….Even though it's been a century, I expect them to return at some point. Maybe they already have and we just haven't caught wind of it yet… And The Pieces of Eden, the Isu's most powerful technologies and the source of all these conflicts….gone. Lost in the Garden of Eden. Well, most of the known ones anyway. the location? unknown since the fall of Juno. Perhaps it's better that way.

Now, humanity is in a strange place. Thriving in a galaxy that clearly wasn't ready for another race with such power and ambition. In a short amount of time, humanity has staked its claim as a force to be reckoned with.

And the Brotherhood, the Assassins, the Hidden Ones?... we do what we've always done.

We work in the shadows, fighting for those forgotten in this surge through the galaxy. While humanity searches to find its place, we search for the everlasting truth. For Peace.I don't know what form it will take, for the peace we seek cannot be humanity's alone. If I have learned anything about this galaxy. It's that it functions better as a whole than a sum of individual parts.

Regardless of where this new journey takes us.

Our creed remains the same.

We will work in the dark to serve the light.

My name is Israel Tatem.

And I am an Assassin.

Read, and Review you, beautiful people!