Chapter One: I See Shadows

He didn't feel pain, not really.

His nerve endings were fried before pain could even be introduced. Skin blackened from the thermal energy passing between his weak atoms, and he was connected to the orb like a leaf is connected to a tree.

And then a strong breeze came through to break that connection.

He fell slowly, floating through the pressurized air until he rested soundly on the stone ground.

He saw bright lights, and believe them to be stars.

He fell asleep under them, his fingertips numb as he reached for them.

..

It was the crackle of the fireplace that he woke up to. Shadows danced across the ceiling and he missed the stars. Wood split and fractured as the fire covered it, kindled it for warmth. A soothing form of destruction. It blocked out the draft from the window across the room on the right.

There was a sink underneath it, and a leaky faucet dripped every three seconds. Two meters from the sink was a door, and one pair of shoes.

He wiggled his toes, and felt the wool socks keeping them war as well as the blanket on top of him. He sat up.

The shadows of the fire seemed to jump at him, chasing after him but they couldn't get past the barrier of the wall. His shoulders relaxed, but they were still stiff. His tongue felt twice the size of his mouth, stiff as well.

He didn't try to stand, already feeling dizzy from sitting up, but he looked around. The cabin was barely big enough to hold what it did. He was in one of the corners, adjacent from the fireplace. The small kitchenette was to his right, across the room, and the only exit was beside it.

There was a small recliner and a table with two chairs taking up the corner beside the fireplace. Another blanket was haphazardly tossed over the recliner, and a pile of books was stacked beside the splotchy fabric.

He wouldn't be alone for long, he mused, as there was bound to be someone else to come back for those books. And so, he sat in the bed, racking his brain for answers

Where was he?

Why was he here?

He couldn't remember much, just the strange taste of electricity on his swollen tongue and the smell of metal and stone.

He could remember the lives of men that were not him.

Altair, the man who walked as he wanted before subcoming to the shadows as a Master; Ezio, a man thirsty for revenge but then poisoned by its never-ending hunger; Haytham and Connor, a father and his son who tried to kill the other over their differences, before realizing what they had in common.

He could remember all these memories, all these lives lived so long ago, but he couldn't remember him. Couldn't remember why his right arm tingled or why he wanted to be high up to see the surrounding area.

Get to a vantage point. Have the upper hand of your enemies.

That's what it was telling him, and his left wrist felt bare without the familiar rub of leather. Instead, all he found was a design of dark ink that only raised more questions.

The crunch of snow outside the door caught his attention just before the door opened. He had no time to hide or lay back down, to give the illusion he was still asleep. The person had their back to him, dragging in a tarp of chopped wood. The wind blew in snow and the tarp dragged it in as well. He watched them shake out their boots and dust off their jacket, before turning to him.

She looked at him, her tan skin darker in the shadows but er eyes were a smooth hazel. A dust of freckles were sprinkled over her nose and across the apples of her cheeks. Her long black hair was pulled back into a braid that was thrown across her left shoulder.

There was a hunting knife holstered on her right thigh but no other weapons to make her a threat. Not that he could defend himself at the moment, anyway.

"It's about time you woke up," she says, her voice raspy from the harsh cold air outside the cabin. There's a trickle of sweat down her cheek as she sheds her thick coat and hangs in on the back of a chair.

He opens his mouth to speak, but his throat is dryer than his sarcasm and he goes into a coughing fit. Doubling over, his chest constricting and contracting with each hack, she comes to his side and offers a ladle of melted snow. It was cool on his tongue, and the ache in his throat ebbed away.

"You've been out for almost a week, you need to put fluid in your body."

He nods and gulps from the ladle, but she makes him wait for the second.

"You'll throw it back up if you drink too fast. Let it settle."

He felt the nausea but it slowed and cooled just as his throat did. She offered him another ladle a few moments later. He sipped it slowly, watching her kick off her boots beside the other pair at the door. Her pair were much smaller. Taking a few blocks of the chopped wood, she sets them into the fireplace and the flame crackles and hisses at the snow as it melts into the kindle.

She grabs one of the chairs and pulls it to the side of the bed, a bucket of melted snow at her feet for them to drink from.

"Do you know where you are?" she asks him, and he shakes his head, throat still too sore to speak. Her lips purse as she sits back, arms folding over her chest. "About 80 miles south of the Canadian border. There's a little village, Copenhagen, a few miles up the road."

He nods, drinking the water before offering her the ladle. She takes it and drinks her own gulp. When she offers it back, he declines with a raised hand and she drops it back in the bucket.

"Do you know who you are?"

The question doesn't surprise him, but it still catches him off guard. He looks at her, deep brown to smooth hazel, before shaking his head again.

Her lips purse again, but they seem to be more in annoyance than anything else.

"Well, I'm going to call you John, because I don't know who you are and there's no way to get you to a hospital in this blizzard."

"The date?" he asks, works broken and cracked from the nonuse of his vocal chords. Her eyebrows raise up, but then fall back down.

"December twenty-seventh, twenty-twelve. You just missed Christmas. I cooked rabbit."

She stands and moves the chair slightly, picking up the bucket of melted snow to put it on the small counter beside the sink.

You did it. You saved them.

The voice shocked him. He looked to her, but found her back still to him, and the voice did not match with her own. He looked toward the fireplace, and the shadows danced more but none of them spoke.

He closed his eyes and rubbed at his head, confused by the sudden sound.

Well done, my friend. Well done.

There was a different voice, this one flowy and with a thick accent.

His head. It was coming from his head.

"You okay, John?" she asks, pulling him from the spiraling thoughts. He looks up at her, confused. She holds a white box in her hands, her hunting knife resting on top of it.

"What's that?"

She sits back down in the chair, setting the box and knife on the edge of the bed near his legs.

"I need to change your dressings."

He went to ask what she meant, but when she reached for his right arm, he saw what she meant. It wasn't until she began to unravel the bandage around the appendage that he saw the extent of the damage. At first it looked as a simple burn near the top of the dressings, but the more she unraveled, the pinky-tan skin turned grayish and the same consistency as leather. And then the strange black lines began, standing out like a circuit board against the dark gray skin.

Now he understand why he couldn't feel the gauze on his skin - the nerves had been fried all the way down to the muscle. He could barely wiggle his fingers.

The dressings had faint dead skin broken off around the threads weaving back and forth into each other, and the splotches of scabs and dark blood bled through the gauze.

"I'm surprised you can move your fingers," she comments, opening the box and pulling out fresh sterile gauze pads. She sets them to the side and produces a bottle of blue colored liquid. It's soothing to the touch when she applies it to the peeling skin. "It almost looked like an electrical burn, but there's no exit wound, just entry. I thought I may have to amputate it, but blood flow is good and the skin is healing slowly. It will take some time, and leave a nasty scar, but you may not need to lose it."

He watches her cover the surface area of his arm with the goo, and then she loosely presses the sterile gauze to his arm and wraps up again with rolling bandage, using the knife to cut it once she's used as much as she needs.

"You know a lot about burns," he comments, eyes still settled on the bandage. His arm shouldn't look like that. Shouldn't look like a dark gray with those strange black lines that worked up his arm from his fingertips.

"I'm an EMT. House fires are more common than you think."

He takes the reply with a nod.

"I never got your name."

She closes the first aid kit and puts her hunting knife back in the holster on her leg.

"Nina."

It rolled off her tongue and onto the tip of his.

Nina, don't follow me! I can't stay here any longer. I can't be what they want.

The voice was his own, not one of the strange ones taking over in his head. He looks at her, trying to find some familiarity in her features, but the smooth hazel was cold and relentless, just like the blizzard out the cabin.

"How did you find me?" he asks when she goes to put the first aid back in a cabinet and goes to curl up in the shabby recliner near the fire place.

"You found me," she replies, wrapping the throw blanket around her body and angling herself to be facing the door. It was as if she didn't blink. "I was out checking traps, and you called toward me, half dead by then. You were bleeding pretty harsh from your arm. I got you inside and cleaned you up. You passed out during me bandaging you."

She glanced at him from the corner of her eye. "I'm not surprised you don't remember. Must have taken a bad blow to the head. Fell off a cliff or something. That burn though…"

Her eyes don't touch him, they just stay on the door, listening to the whistling of snow and wind outside.

"I've never seen a burn like that before."

She is trustworthy.

The voice was deep and stoic, the quietest of the three in his head. The thickly accented one seemed to hum some strange tune, almost like it was being created all at once.

He looked toward the window above the leaky sink and instead of seeing a blizzard outside, he found the rolling hills of Tuscany beckoning him. He could taste the sun on his swollen tongue and smell the sweet scent of fresh grapes.

He blinks, and all he sees is the flicker of shadows on the wall trying to jump him and the dark blizzard outside the cabin. The draft peaks through the warmth, before disappearing again.

"What are you doing here?" he asks her, looking toward her, only to find her eyes closed and hard face relaxed.

He sits for a few moments, and at no reply, he eases himself back into the bed and rolls onto his side, facing toward the wall. It blocks out the shadows and the draft, his toes warm from the double layer and the closeness of the fireplace. He won't sleep, but he will rest as he thinks.

"Trying to find a purpose," he hears her whisper sometime into the night. Looking back at her, their eyes meet. Smooth hazel is suddenly rigid with past and mystery, begging for answers to a question she doesn't even know.

He says nothing. Simply turns back and lets her take the silence as his reply.

Aren't we all?