Author's Note: The epilogue is a tricky little thing. I love it for a variety of reasons, but there is a chance it ruins everything. If that happens, just hit the back button and substitute your own reality and know that you do so with my blessing.

Also, apologies to people of Santa Fe, it was picked at random.

Epilogue: The Legend of Desmond Miles

Desmond Miles once wrote in his diary two Romes have fallen. This is what is known about the end of the world. This is what knowledge survived past the Hundred Years. I'll make sure we built this third to last. I promised.

In the old calendar, it was in the year 2012 that the Assassin Desmond Miles travelled to the ruins of Sianahk'ab in the jungle of Guatemala, where he discovered what remained of a power network established by the First Generation, who had known of the Sun Cycle and had prepared a means to counteract its destruction, so the world would not die in flames a second time. This Shielding, however, would not function as it should, for the time had been too long, too much had been taken away in these endless years since its original conception. And so came the Hundred Years, and so all the world went dark when its machinery failed, when all its glorious, vital technology became dead under the force of the Shielding.

Chaos followed this darkness as people struggled — and often failed — to adapt and survive when everything changed. Few records of these early years remain, much was destroyed, burned in different flames, abandoned and lost in the immediacy of other concerns. What is known, is that many countries and societies fell apart under the strain, returned to the more vicious ways they had only just began to leave behind.

This was the world Miles and his companions returned to, this was what they found when they finally left the jungle behind them to rejoin people that were already beginning to form gangs, or, to use expressions far older and yet newly applicable, tribes and clans. The Diary of Desmond Miles, incomplete as it is, constitutes one of those few records, but the Diary only describes small portions of the world, at least in the beginning and Miles himself is an unreliable narrator, sometimes switching personalities and languages as he writes, seemingly without noticing, his sanity and the trace it left in the writing, coming and going like the tide.

What is known, is that Desmond Miles led his companions north; they crossed through Mexico and into the fracturing United States. Along the way, Miles was joined by others, by surviving Assassins looking for him, drawn by a message that, miraculously, survived the Hundred Years and was preserved in full for all the future to hear and bear witness to the call to arms that had made Miles' success possible.

It wasn't only Assassins who came, however. Normal people joined them, when they lost everything as their metropolises fell apart, people who found themselves outcast when their neighbours remembered ancient superstitions and drove them away. People who had began walking away, with no direction in mind at all, other than the desperate need to find something in the night.

Miles and the Assassins were a safe place. They were powerful and strong, they knew how to fight and survive and Miles opened his arms to all who would accept it. Machiavelli once said to me 'if you must be a prophet, be at least an armed one'. I laughed and told him to write that down. I'm beginning to see his point.

So it was, when Desmond reached the region that had once belonged to Santa Fe, seven years after the Shielding had first come up. In Santa Fe, a new religious sect had come up, had barricaded themselves and began terrorising the countryside around it and the people who found themselves under its sway. The sect believed that an angry God had come down on them, had cursed them for their faith in their gimmicks rather than Him and the only way to appease Him would be to destroy all that still remained of the old knowledge. Everything from the time before the Shielding would have to be destroyed, would have to be sacrificed as prove of their repentance. They had burned a man once already, before the Assassins came, for adhering to his own beliefs.

Tomorrow, we will make battle in the ways of old, Miles wrote in the Diary. An army assembled on a field outside the town. There is an old highway here, I can't help but notice, I can't help but see. And yet, there will be a medieval battlefield strewn across it. Sometimes, our guns still work, but they are no longer reliable, not as reliable as crossbows anyway, or arrows. We have assembled a small unit of warriors armed with slings. They are as good as bullets, once you work out how to use them.

I found this sword. I don't know where it came from, or what it means that I should stumble over it right here. It is an amazing blade and it calls to me with its temptation. But I wonder, can I still afford to resist it? Have I lost that freedom in Sianahk'ab?

Tomorrow we make battle. You do not go to war against an Assassin army. We have left the shadows behind now, it is time to prove our mettle.

After the battle was won, Miles reinstated a new government in Santa Fe, watched over and protected by no more than a handful of Assassins, but secure enough when their hands were still bloodied in the aftermath of their victory. Something changed after that, but these are missing pages and posterity does not know. One way or another, Miles and his company stopped moving, stopped their aimless wandering across the land. Miles must have seen that there was another way. Fighting were they encountered wrongs was one thing, but it was random, guided by chance more than anything and the darkness all around remained. Miles founded a town, out in the open, in what the Diary calls the open prairie, finally.

The settlement became powerful quickly, a centre of trade and, moreover, a centre of sanity and security. It was in this place, that Miles began building the Hastings Library, named for one of his most trusted companions, who would guide and guard it against all the onslaughts of time and who would make it outlast the Hundred Years.

There was once a great library at Alexandria. And I remember walking its halls after the fire. I wish I could have wept then. And still, there was something in the scorched stone, something like memory.

Every ship, every traveler who came to Alexandria had to surrender all its written words, its scrolls and books to be copied for the library. And I think, why don't we do this here? We could built an archive of memories. Not just what is in our heads and our genes. Who knows what is lost already? No, we need to preserve all of this. Another world will come, will built on what we can leave behind. I made a promise to fate.

And then came what is now called the Watershed. Then came the time that Miles, an old man by then, pulled back from the forefront. When he called all the Assassins back. Miles and the Eyrie — I call it the Eyrie, this new fortress of ours, but only when I'm alone with myself — had spread their influence far, their message of temperance and freedom, their pursuit of knowledge and the prowess on the battlefield had earned them admiration or at least grudging respect among all the new nations that populated the continent. In the Watershed, Miles reinstated democratic elections in all towns he directly controlled and after a year, he was gone. The Assassins vanished among the people, returned to where they had come from. But gradually, the example was followed in other places, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not.

There are similar stories found on all continents. There was Lian the Heroine in Asia and the Assassins of Old Europe. They all were gone after the Watershed, only what they had built endured, only their memory stayed for a little while. There was prosperity again, as much as was possible with these limited means, but humanity had proven its persistence in the face of insurmountable odds before. What is destroyed, can be rebuilt.

What was more, there were the the people who emerged at the end of Hundred Years, who had built a world with arbitrarily limited tools, who had fought and died and suffered so that there was going to be something of value left by the end of it all.

The knowledge stored at Hastings contained one last treasure, meticulously preserved on paper, staked high in one special storeroom and guarded by a tomb.

Rebecca is dying. It's cancer. We've known for a long time, but we couldn't treat it and she is in pain constantly now. She asks for a proper death and Lucy looks at me like I am the leader.

I put a blade to her. I cannot do anything but grant her wish. What else am I to do? She smiled at me.

Her life's work is complete. She told me that a few weeks earlier. For months, or years I am no longer sure, she sat and scribbled down the Animus program code. We have tried to preserve what knowledge we can, but we are few and so much was lost in the early days. With the Animus in a hundred years we can regain it. We can sit down and rebuilt what was lost. We cannot test the code, of course, but I trust Rebecca's knowledge. I trust her. I owe her my life uncountable times.

As for Miles himself, nothing is known of his life after the Watershed. There is no place and date of his death. His family, his son and granddaughter were sometimes mentioned in documents from their time, only to suddenly vanish before the Hundred Years ended. There are no places of pilgrimage, except for Hastings and the Eyrie, now preserved as a museum. All that remains of Miles are the disparate pieces of his Diary and what they tell of him and his splintered mind, what they reveal of his struggles with himself and the world, with the destiny he had found at the end in Sianahk'ab and the promise he made there.

The museum was a large, elegant building of glass, transparent from the inside and a darkly reflective mirror from the outside. Despite its size, it held a certain grace in its structure, curved like the wing of an eagle in flight, frozen in the very moment before it dived to its prey.

It was the largest museum for the Second Generation on the continent, famous the world over for its research as well as its exhibits. Here, the Animus Network had originated and here the catalogues and a large portion of the original collection of the Hastings Library were still kept. Here, too, were the remaining pages of the Diary on display, the only proof that a man named Desmond Miles once walked the world. The only proof, if you so will, except for the world itself and all it had achieved, now in this age of the Third Great Civilisation.

In the advent of the new year's celebration, the museum was almost silent. Those few of its visitors who still wandered its airy halls were quiet, reverently, in the ruins from which they had come. Its invisible walls were opened to the bright, grand celebrations on the wide square outside and the streets of the city. A low, red and purple evening sun painted the ground and the revellers and danced on its own between the artifacts.

A man stood by the long row of displays that harboured the pages of the Diary, of what remained of them. Fires and time had destroyed large portions of it and finding the rest, or an unblemished copy perhaps, was one of the greatest treasure hunts of the modern day. Despite its name, the Diary had never been a book. Rather, it was a collection of loose pages of different sizes and quality, written with ink or pencil of charcoal, one line even had been scribbled in blood — not Miles' own blood, there were no genetic records of Miles himself. Through the centuries, marks had been left on the paper, strains of dirt or water or blood and the edges were dulled and faded.

The man walked slowly along the row, eyes fixed on the pieces of history. He stopped, sometimes, as if reading, but his attention was elsewhere. The room was empty, except for him and the woman watching him from the entrance. Dressed for a new year's party, she still wore the small silvery badge that identified her as an employee of the museum.

She watched him for a moment longer, then walked across the polished tiles to stand at the man's side, studying him for a moment before she spoke. He was dressed in last year's fashion, a white hoodie pushed down from his head, the shirt puffy enough to allow him to hide his hands in his pockets. He had an odd way of holding himself utterly still, in the way resting predators might. An attractive man, she decided, with his piercing eyes under dark brows, their cool intensity offset by the sensual curve of his lips.

"It's fascinating, isn't it?" she asked, looked away from him and at the display. She caught a line of writing, where Miles had had to change from thin blue ink to pencil. We are still counting the dead. Ours and theirs. Death makes no difference between enemies.

The man smiled a little, as if at some private joke he wouldn't share. He said, "I come here far too often."

She didn't answer immediately, thinking that she hadn't seen him here before and he struck her as a memorable man. Before she could think of an answer, he looked at her directly for the first time and for a moment she couldn't think.

"Is it true?" he asked quietly. "There are no descendants of Miles? And no Assassins in the world?"

She looked away because she had to. Her mind was empty under those eyes and their impossible gold. She cleared her throat before she spoke, trying to collect her thoughts. "That is how it seems. No one ever scanned into the Animus Network was related. Not to Miles, not to an Assassin, or a Templar for that matter. Sometimes they appear in someone's memory, but they are usually only short images. There are experts who claim that Miles made it all up, that he went insane."

"Do you believe that?"

She laughed a little. "No, a madman couldn't have done what he did. Don't you see? Desmond Miles saved us, not just from the Sun Cycle, but from dying in the stone age. He built the first Assassin fortress, he founded Hastings so we would have something if we survived the Hundred Years." She looked at him again, her own intensity suddenly matching his. "Maybe he wasn't completely sane, but he can't have dreamt all that up. It's not possible. If it were, we'd not be here, having this conversation."

The man nodded and they stood in silence for a time, side by side, watching the display. She felt him move and it startled her. He lifted his hand and reached out. He wore fingerless gloves in stark black, shining like leather, vanishing under his sleeves. She gripped his hand and held it. "Don't," she advised gently. "You'll set off the alarm."

"Sorry," he said and it sounds dejectedly enough.

She smiled a little. "But I understand it, trust me. Wanting to touch that little piece of history. It makes it all more real."

He took a step closer to her, looking past her to let his eyes rest on the console that controlled the stasis field around the Diary's pages. "If you give me back my hand, I'll let you go to your party."

She was still holding on to the hand she had snatched away, looking down at his long fingers she briefly wondered what it would be like to lace them with her's. "Do I have to?" she asked and gave him a pointed look.

He put his head to the side, smiling brightly. It transformed his face, from cold to dazzling. He slipped his hand from her grasp only to curl his arm around her waist. "If I get a drink?" he smirked. He gestured at the Diary pages. "I used to be a bartender."

She followed the direction of his gaze, then turned her attention to the end of the row of displays, to the last page. She walked the few steps, glad to find him following.

"The last page is considered somewhat cryptic," she explained. "There is much speculation over it, I've seen it all." She laughed. "What do you think he meant?"

His gaze fixed on the paper. The page was mostly empty, except for a few strains of dark brown and the two lines, scribbled hastily with a red pen low on ink. On a few letters the pen had torn through the paper, leaving welts like scars behind.

"It's nothing," he said dismissively. "Just the ramblings of an old man."

For a moment, the dazzle faded and there was an edge of sadness and loss, making him seem so much older than he looked. For reasons she could not name, she felt impossibly tense, as if her spine was about to crack. Then, suddenly, he smiled again and the tension broke away as if it had never been. "Now, about that drink…"

He pulled her forward gently, made to go. His touch vanished for an instant, but before she could react he slipped his hand back to her waist.

"So what is your name?" she asked, walking through the empty museum.

He chuckled, tucking his other hand back into the pocket of his shirt. "Promise not to laugh."

"Promise."

He drew her a little closer, his chin pushed past her temple and he lowered his voice and there was laughter in it, low and inviting.

"It's Desmond," he said.

[from the Diary of Desmond Miles, dated Summer 2061]

The face in the mirror is lying. It doesn't belong to me. It's someone else, but I don't remember the names, there are too many of them. Lucy looks different. She has changed. She is old. We all are old. Not only in body, but in spirit. Looking back it seems so strange, to think that there was once a different world. That I ran away from my parents and bought a motorcycle. I remember the day I went into Solomon's Temple with Malik and Kadar. Everything changed then. And there is Damascus coming alive around me. Venezia is beautiful, but you don't get over the stink unless you were born to it. Roma. Paris. Tulaytulah. Lying in my lover's arms in Sirahidaa before everything else. All the places I've seen and never been to, all the lives I've lived.

I'm forgetting again. Too many things in my head. All the time, I'm never alone. I have forgotton how to wish for silence. But there is something I still need to do.

There is this story I'm telling the people when they come to me. It is what I whispered to my children when they were young. What I will keep telling them. About an order of murderers, who stand in the shadows to defend the light. I will tell them that we do not follow blindly the truth. I will tell them that we are not bound by morality or law. I will tell them to be wise. And I will remind them to be free.

It is a story, told by a madman at the end of his path.

It is a story about two warriors so skilled that death itself bows to them. And I am certain that they will return, the way all religions tell it, in our hour of greatest need.

After the Hundred Years were done, a new world climbed from the ruins and ashes of the old, shaking off its shackles once again as it stood under a blue sky, the sight unimpeded by the forcefield that had protected them for so long. After the Hundred Years, everything had changed and because of this, the world had began anew. The Hundred Years ended in Year 1 of the New Count.

The world rebuilt itself, repaired the terrible wounds that had been ripped into its flesh and maybe even had its people grown wiser in those years. Wise enough, at any rate, to avoid some of the mistakes made by previous generations. Two great civilisations had come and fallen, this was the third, determined this time, to last.

Dawn slid through the city while the streets were still alight with celebration. The music and cheering carried on the wind, even up here, where he scaled the wall to find the edge of a rooftop. He looked down for a little while, the tiny dots of light as they danced, exalting in their existence, in the hopefulness of another year before them, secure in the knowledge that they, finally, had arrived in the enlightened age promised and prophesied for so long.

There was still a war boiling just underneath the surface of the world. The truce he had forged under the canopy of the Shielding was over, its terms fulfilled and all the old adversaries had returned to their strongholds and the fighting began anew. The Templars were still there and because of that, so were the Assassins, holding the balance the way they had always done. It was true, no relation of Miles had ever been scanned into the Animus Network, no Assassin and no Templar, but not because they didn't exist.

He remembered Altaïr — Altaïr, who had come back one day with a long, disfiguring scar across his face — and Rebecca going through the Animus programme code, scribbling to down from memory. For months they had used up all the paper they could import. There had not been any way to test it, of course, but the future had proven the brilliance of their work. Especially when one knew about the slight change they had applied to the code. Rebecca had little trouble identifying the White Eagle code, the part that scanned for specific DNA, and then she had altered it to exclude what it found. Assassin and Templar memories would forever be filtered out by the new Animus, hiding them from the scrutiny of the public and from each other.

He remembered, too, going through the pages of his diary, deciding which to keep and which to burn. The last page had been written so much later, stupidly so, perhaps, in his darkest hour and then forgotten.

He pulled his hand from his pocket, still clutching the page he had stolen from the museum. He smoothed it out, holding vast against the sharp wind that tried tucking it from his grip. Almost he felt tempted to let go, to let those last words of a dead prophet be blown away, set free like an eagle as the chains fall from its feet. He didn't, of course, but the lure was there nevertheless.

He looked down across the streets and wondered if they could feel the shadow he cast over them. All of this world, too far advanced to think him a god, but still paying homage to a man who had been nothing but a bartender once — and a sinner in Solomon's Temple and a murderer blinded by grief. He was and still is all of them. He could never separate himself even if he tried and they were there, guiding and protecting him. They were temptation and salvation in his mind, all of it and — deep down — none of it. It was too large, too much to comprehend, even now. He had always known it would end like this, but he hadn't known he would still be there to see it. He had never even contemplated, in all the years, that he could one day stand on a skyscraper and watch a new year's celebration. Endlessly amused by the irony, he mouthed the number to himself. "Two-zero-one-two," he laughed in the night. "New Count, mind." The future had come, opened its arms and embraced him, snatched him away from the welcoming arms of death like a jealous lover.

He looked down at the crumpled paper in his hand, at what he had written so long ago and the emotions were as fresh as they had ever been.

He crushed it in his hand, stuffed it back into the pocket. It had been careless leaving the page behind. Like a stupid child looking for attention, wanting these new people to look for him, to wonder at him, marvel at the words that had, indadvertedly, shaped so much of who they had become. Taking it back now might be too late, countless copies had been made of this, its likeness scanned into too many computer systems all over the world. Treatises written about the meaning of it and how it connected to Miles and the Assassins and the past. He could take those away later. The memory of the world was, despite everything, short-lived and fickle. They would forget this piece of paper ever existed, would pass it down into legend and eventually discount its existence. He could wait.

He lifted his gaze to the sky, strewn with stars, glittering and no longer quite as unreachable as they once had been.

He took a running start, saw the edge of the building come to meet him and the horizon seemed to reach for him, hold him in flight. He had never belonged only to himself, but he was still free, in those short, precious moments above the world.

In the Year 1 of the New Count, Desmond Miles had written two lines on squared paper, so forcefully the pen had torn through it:

And still nothing is true.

And still everything is permitted.

"Two Romes have fallen. The third still stands. And a fourth there shall not be." — Philotheus of Pskov (originally a reference to Tsarist Russia, but here used in a wider context)

"Hence it comes about that all armed prophets have been victorious, and all unarmed prophets have been destroyed." — Niccolo Machiavelli

End

Author's Note: A huge thank you to all of you who read this story, who favorite-ed and alert-ed. An especially huge thanks to those who bothered to leave a review, made my day every time! I hope it was an enjoyable ride for you all and I apologise once more for that terrible hiatus in the middle of this thing.

I'd love to hear what you lovely folks all think of the story as whole!