AN: So ends a bulk of work that has hauled me right through my 20s. Wow. Alarming. This finishes the Battle of Eagles series but if they ever remaster AC1 or give us more AltMal content you know I'll be right back here typing up assassin soap operas. Although I'll probably be on AO3 and not this much-loved ancient beast of a place. Thanks for all your reviews over the years! Thanks also to nemonus who gave great advice on this chapter as she gave great advice on most chapters, although in this case I ignored most of it because Self Indulgent I Am Unstoppable. Come say hi on tumblr! thumbsup emoji

Epilogue

Impossible Things

He has a strange dream, Malik, at the end of a night.

It wouldn't be so surprising except that he's hardly had the energy to dream these last three months. The rebuilding of an Order as vast as the Brotherhood – there are men in far places who learned of the coup only after it ended – is no easy task, for any of them. To his credit Altair has taken the worst of it on himself: he puts himself out among the peasants and the novices, little though he likes it, and he goes from suspicious face to suspicious face and humbles himself in turn.

Weeding out the betrayers – novices have mostly been forgiven without punishment but banishment or worse awaits the traitorous higher ranks – has kept Malik busy, even with his Sight and Altair's combined. And still there is a sense that they have not gotten all of it, that the rot goes deeper than the man, down to the oaths he brings to life.

We fight like an army, but we aren't one. They have debated it, into the night: how the Brotherhood should look. The world is different now than it was when they were kids. The Crusades ending and the Mongols still out there, the kings fallen and the kings newly crowned. The Templars remain their enemy, clearly – no one has found Ali's body yet – but they have learned other ways to hide besides in the robes of the retracted Knights Templar. Robert de Sablé, Malik thinks, he who grabbed at generals' ears and attempted full-frontal assaults, would not recognize the army he led before Altair finally shoved him from its top.

Perhaps it is time for a more stealthy, truly assassin approach, 'till they find their way in this new land. Perhaps the Old Man of the Mountain and his fortress of killers is a legend showing wear about the details. Perhaps…

But all this ruminating brings Malik dead, exhausted, dreamless sleep, until the dawn of a day like any other he's had.

In the dream he is at home. Not his home now, small two-room space at the very edge of Masyaf, with a little leafy courtyard out back, room enough for himself and his son right now. And it is very much right now, Malik has made clear. One day it might not be enough space. One day it might not be far enough away from that fortress of stone and secret. One day he might want to take Tazim over mountains and across seas, to see new places and shed old ones. He has told Altair all this and Altair has understood, or done his best to understand, the uncertainty and hurt flicked past his face but he at least has tried. Tinges of Jerusalem rooftops in how they make their peace. And for now Malik has made himself a place in the village, in the Brotherhood, that he can handle.

This is not the place he dreams himself in. In the dream he's in the home of his childhood, the small house, the fields stretching out past the eye's limit, the sheep bleating behind the pen. In the dream he knows he's dreaming, clear and cognizant a dream though it is, and he goes to look at the sheep with a certain wonder, holding out his hand for them to sniff and lick and sneeze on.

Then he turns around and of course Kadar is there, squatting on his haunches in a bit of tree shade.

"Oh," says Malik.

Kadar looks much older than he has the last times Malik's seen him. Looks his age, in fact, with a hint of beard and wrinkles around the eyes. He'd be – early thirties? Mid-thirties? Somehow the older brother has lost track.

But at least he looks like himself now, and not like the hideous bulging Apple creature he'd been before. But that… "That wasn't you," Malik says aloud. "I know it wasn't."

Kadar stretches his arms over his head, then pats the ground next to him. Malik walks over and sits down.

"Sorry, Malik," his brother says. "I guess it hasn't always been so easy."

Malik shrugs. "Whoever said it was supposed to be?"

"But Tazim is cute! And stubborn, I can tell. I've got a little warrior nephew. He'll get into such trouble, it'll be great."

"Still isn't talking yet, though. I wonder if all the disruption hasn't…"

"He will. He'll be fine." Kadar says with a wry grin, "Just don't hover over him like you hovered over me and it'll work out."

"I'll try. No promises." Malik hesitates. "Kadar…"

"Mmm?"

"Nothing. Never mind. It's a beautiful day, isn't it? We should enjoy it."

"We can enjoy it anyway. What is it, Malik?"

He frowns. "It's just…this is a dream."

Kadar shrugs. "OK."

"And so that makes this a bit of a meaningless conversation, doesn't it?"

"Huh?"

"Sitting here talking with you – I'm not complaining!" Malik says. "I've missed you so much. But you don't actually know anything about Tazim talking or having a nephew. You've never met him. It's been…you died so long ago, you know."

"Oh, Malik," Kadar sighs. "Can't you ever just enjoy a thing?"

A sheep bleats. From the direction of the house Malik can hear the thin call of a woman singing.

"Sometimes we don't know things," Kadar says, and it makes sense in the dream but Malik'll puzzle over it awake for years to come. "Sometimes we can't know, until it happens. I don't know. Impossible things or not, that doesn't mean they all have to be bad all the time."

But Malik places no stock in impossible things. "It's not really you now and it wasn't really you then. With – with Altair, what he was seeing and talking to. And all the times in the bureau when I thought maybe I heard…I didn't. I couldn't have," he says.

"You couldn't have," says Kadar. He grins. "Stubborn older brother, just like his son. Always has to know all the time."

Well, it's true. Malik leans back against the tree truck, arm across his lap, enjoying what feels like real sun and real breeze and a real easy, peaceful day.

"Remember that time you left the pen open and the ram got out?" Kadar asks. Malik shivers.

"Sure I remember. I was the one who had to chase the thing down!"

"Father helped a little bit."

"More than a little bit," he admits with a laugh. "But at the time it sure felt like I was the one who was going to get eaten."

"By a sheep? Who are you, Altair?" Kadar gets a wicked little glint in his eye. "Altair is still afraid of sheep, you know. He'll never tell you. But he is."

"Hah!"

"I'm glad you didn't leave, though, Akhi. That would have been rough."

"What?" Malik frowns at him before remembering this is nothing but his subconscious talking itself out. How else would Kadar know how close he came to going for good?

He shakes his head. "I still might. I don't know. Altair is…"

Kadar scratches his cheek. "He's Altair. He can't help it."

"That doesn't make it easier."

"Whoever said it was supposed to be?" Kadar teases.

Malik groans. "Listen to you! So scandalized when you found me and him – and now you want to play matchmaker?"

"I like watching Altair squirm," his little brother says, serene.

"And here I thought you were always his biggest fan."

"I am! Have you seen the kick-flips he can do?! But sometimes he's a jerk and I can't let him get away with that, can I? What kind of brother would I be? I'll be a little cackle at his shoulder, although not all the time because that's an awful arrogant shoulder and, uh, no offense, Malik, but sometimes that shoulder gets naked along with your shoulder and then I want to claw my eyes out. But like. Supportively."

But this is more pretending than Malik can do, even in a dream. "I know that's not true," he says.

Kadar looks confused. "What's not true?"

"The cackle at his shoulder – Kadar, I said already I know this is a dream. And not just a dream, but…" Malik looks out into the distance. The fields. The sheep. His mother singing out of sight. The life that was his once. The life that could have been. The life he's spent all his days trying to redeem, or live up to, or make up for. Some apologies have to end, though, he's learning. It isn't fair to Altair and it isn't fair to himself – isn't fair to Kadar, either – to carry around these stones even after throwing them aside. Sometimes forgiveness has to be unyielding to be real.

"I guess this is the last time I'll see you," he says. "Altair's hidden the Apple. And I…" He touches his brother's hand. "I think I have to keep going," he says.

"I know," says Kadar, and closes his fingers around Malik's. "Don't worry about it."

If time can pass in a dream it passes then, until Malik blinks and yawns. Kadar twists to look at him, wide-eyed, young again, the beard gone and the grey bleached out, a child's face on a child's body. "Oh, not yet!" he says.

"Not yet what?" asks Malik, although he also doesn't want to go. The idea comes to him: if this is the last time, then let it be like the first. He stands up, dusts himself off…with both hands, he realizes. And yet he feels off-balance now when he hadn't just before! Oh, how strange. He shakes out the hand he hasn't had for years, Kadar at his shoulder, his mother's voice behind, his father in the sheep pen hard at work, and he knows what he'll see when he looks up. And he looks up, and he sees it.

Long and low, grey tangled fur, fangs bared in a snarl below eyes squinted in focus. Claws and snout and musky wild smell. Malik laughs. Finally, the wolf.

"Uh oh!" Kadar says.

Malik says, "I've got it, don't worry." He turns to reassure Kadar with a grin but then he wakes up instead.

-i-

It's Tazim's fussing that's awoken him. He sits up, rubs his eyes, wondering. Strange, strange dream. How many times he'll have to say goodbye.

Well. This time's for good. It has to be. If he's going to keep moving on in this life.

He goes to the baby and scoops him up. Someone knocks at the door. "It's open," Malik says, his hand full.

A messenger opens the door and bows his head, but doesn't bring his feet over the threshold. "A message from the Grandmaster," he says, then recites from memory: "The architect says the space will work, but it will take long hours of chiseling under such a heavy structure. There will need to be enforcements and other routes added, of course. You should come see for yourself. The Grandmaster will be gone for three days to the mountain village to discuss things there. He is thinking of stationing Darim there as a guard, it will be a good spot to learn patience in, but he will hear your opinion first. He will come to visit you tonight, before he goes."

"Very well," says Malik, and the messenger leaves, which in retrospect is a shame because new faces are sometimes enough to distract Tazim into a better mood.

Sure enough, Tazim kicks out a little leg with a whine. Malik settles into a chair, props his son up between his legs and smoothes the sweaty ringlets of hair, but Tazim keeps whining. Usually that means a louder, more involved cry is coming. Malik sighs.

"It's the best space for that thing, at least for now," he muses. "Deep underground – we'll change the plans as we have to so that no one else can find it, of course. I don't know. If I thought I could get him to destroy it…if I thought it could be destroyed…"

Tazim scrunches up his face, a real yell building. He lashes out at his father with a pudgy fist.

"Don't be mad at me. I didn't create the Piece of Eden. Or that little broken piece the old man found…a whole world's worth of these things, waiting to drive men mad for some reason only they know. At least he made it to his funeral at last, and it was him they buried. Not some Apple thing."

Malik gives Tazim a bit of his robe to distract himself with. It works, for a minute.

"I remember that map it showed us, after Altair killed Al Mualim," he says. "Those lands on it that don't exist. What if they do exist? What if we thought we knew all of it and we barely know a bit?" He shakes his head. "Let Altair build the library and put all that knowledge away. Braver men than us will have to master it. Maybe that'll be your story, little assassin."

Tazim lets go of his father's robe, sniffs once and starts to wail.

Malik bounces his knee. "Noisy, noisy assassin," he says. "Don't you want to learn the rest of it, do what your father couldn't?"

(It isn't the worst wound he has suffered in his life. The battered, healing body he must haul around as he relearns his tasks – learns to hide his irritation, learns to listen to others first, learns to say, "These things are precious, and these people, and I will not cast them aside" – is a frustration but not an insurmountable one. Sometimes Altair thinks he would be better off djinni than man, an immortal gathering of power not limited by the body's meat, which must always wither and rot. But then he remembers the djinn he has known in his life, and frowns, and shakes his head.

It is not the worst wound. The worst wound he has known already. And he told the messenger to tell Malik he'd come later, but still he strides the paths of Masyaf to the place his heart and bulwark are. Malik will see him and raise an eyebrow and step aside, let him in. At least for now, for this time, if not for the rest of it, redemption and forgiveness not a moment or singular act but a lifetime's work…

He has never been afraid of hard work, for Brotherhood or lover. Altair knows he is the weaker of the two, but he will find his way.)

Tazim cries. And his father can't know when he'll stop, or when he'll say his first word, or what battles he'll win, or what losses he'll suffer. Malik spent all his childhood guarding Kadar from a future neither boy could even imagine, but fate was there to find them anyway. Promises and stories. No endings, really, only different turns of phrase.

He thinks as he tries to soothe his crying son that there is so, so much he doesn't know… So much he can't know right now, about his future, about the futures of Tazim and Altair and everyone dear to his life.

He cannot know that Maria will fall in battle one day, a shock of white hair flowing from under her hood as she routs her enemies even at the last, her death the last great battle, the last days of Masyaf and its fortress center, the change that sends their descendants underground: to Italy, to Turkey, to new lands beyond any Al Mualim ever knew. The Order begins to contract with her death, as the Crusades give way to new wars and the assassins to new politics, to a certain kind of obsolescence. The focus goes elsewhere, after Altair builds his library: Venice, Rome, some place they'll call America. Both Templar and assassin lose favor with the ruling lands and retreat to shadow. Al Mualim's regimented army-Order becomes a thing of memory, then of myth.

Meanwhile in her death Maria is given the absolute respect – unquestioned, undoubted, from all sides and all parties – that she fought for so hard in life. She would not be sorry with her fate.

Malik cannot know, also, that Darim will die young, too young, a martyr at the blade in this twilight time to prove himself. Always so reckless...they were never able to smooth that out. But how could Altair's son be otherwise? So they will bury him, and Altair will suffer that day as he has never suffered, and Malik – who knows from misery so sharp and near it builds up in your lungs till you cough it up like bloody consumption tissue – will hate Darim, just a little, as the dirt is tossed in the grave. But by then he will understand that hate is just grief's kinder side.

He cannot know that Sef will leave too, in his own way, fleeing to Constantinople, to the faint reaches of the Order. All his days he will struggle with the secrets of his family, the burdens of his role. But he will marry before he leaves, and have children. Altair will see his grandson before his last son goes.

Malik cannot know that his own son will marry too, and have a son, and name the son Kadar in honor of the uncle he couldn't ever have met. He cannot know that Tazim will also have a daughter and that Sef's son will be handsome like his grandfather and even-tempered like no one Malik has ever met. That Tazim's daughter will go with Sef's family. That one day, in a different land long after both Master Assassins are gone, there will be another baby named Tazim – Altair's great-grandson and Malik's, both. That they will be as maybe they always were: parts of a whole, complete. And the legacy is sent down through the generations.

He cannot know that one day they will stand together as old men in the finished library, he and Altair: hair silvered, but the robes still a perfect fit. Altair will have a bit of a stoop from all the bones he's broken in his life. Malik's back will ache worse with each morning. But what they built together will surround them – the Apple hidden deep below strong stone, quiet, waiting. In the end neither man will be able either to destroy it or help it achieve its mysterious desires. But they will harbor it until the last of them.

Until Malik falters from disease, of all things, and how can he even be bitter? To live to be so old as an assassin master is such a ridiculous notion it's a little embarrassing; not a day goes by that he doesn't hear his old teacher Faraj's voice in his ear, warning him of short life for the Brotherhood's chosen few. He wonders if Faraj would be surprised or just delighted to have been proven wrong. Anyway at the end he's tired, and misses his family, and knows his son will be fine.

And after Malik goes – this he cannot know but he can and does suspect – so too does Altair, quickly, weeks later, from what no one is ever quite sure. (And some say he never died. Some, the desperate in far cities crowded and crumbling, or distant pasture dried to death under the sun, or on stinking ships carrying cruelty and disease across the water, some say the Grandmaster could never be killed and would never die of his own doing. So he must still be out there. So he must be on his way. Malik, if he'd been alive to hear of these rumors, would have been delighted. Altair, who hated superstition, turned into a superstition all his own! Malik, if he'd been alive, would have started half the rumors himself.)

Whatever Altair goes from, Malik would not be surprised to know, he goes with a smirk. Because he outlasted the Dai of Jerusalem, the cocky little shit, and because he means to mock Malik for all eternity when next they should meet.

Until that end, though, they guard the Apple, its dangers and its blessings, they guard their Order and their legacies and most of all they guard each other. As they have always done. Always so obstinate, these two old men.

Malik cannot know that he will come across Altair in the library and make his way down the slippery stone steps, a pain in his side and in his lungs that will be much more than pain very soon. He will tap Altair on the shoulder and the Grandmaster will turn, and look thoughtful.

"All I have done," he will say without preamble.

"All we have done, novice," Malik will agree.

"Maria would be quite impressed, were she here." It's a bit of a question. Malik will nod.

"Not only her," he will say. "Our children, our families. To think of what my parents would say—"

"And Al Mualim," Altair will mutter darkly. He is nearing eighty-five but he has never forgiven. "After all his scheming to separate us if he couldn't have the both of us enslaved."

"We've never been able to prove that."

"I know it's true. He saw your brother as an obstacle and saw a way to be rid of him. He used me and I let him." Altair will hesitate. "Kadar…"

"Would be in awe," Malik will say firmly, and soften his grip on his Master's shoulder to a caress. "Surviving the Mongols, surviving the Apple of Eden, that time you threw Abbas off a cliff. He wouldn't be able to stand it, he'd just implode. My god, Altair, do you realize – he'd be an old man now, if he lived."

He will look around at the chilly, cramped space, sturdy shelves and trap doors under a high dome, deep beneath the fortress. A world-class library, built to hold just one thing. "Dai Faraj would be pleased with the scholarship we've done," he will say. "And Hamid with how far our trade routes went."

"Rauf with how annoying his damned recruits continue to be. I do not have the time to show novices how to swordfight! When did I ever have the time?"

Malik will laugh. "I bet if he were a hundred years old Raed would still be calling me Lord."

"Yes, and…"

"Mm?"

"And my parents," Altair will say, looking off at nothing, slitting his eyes. "If they could see what the Order became."

Malik will say softly, "We've done a lot. We've become more than we were, more than we knew."

Altair will lean back into his touch, humming agreement. Things will be quiet a bit. Then:

"Actually, Malik, I always knew I'd get you to scream yourself hoarse the first time we—"

"I will kill you," Malik will sing out.

But he cannot know any of this yet.

Tazim is still crying. Malik hoists him up against his shoulder. "Any time feel free to stop," he says. "I'm making myself nauseous with the rocking."

The baby makes a small squeak of a sound little more than the exclamation: "-!" Malik drops his arm forward a bit, settling Tazim further down so he can see his face. "Done?" he asks. "Done or just getting started? Or haven't you decided yet?"
Tazim falters in his crying. He sniffs and wrinkles up his face, then brings a hand to his mouth and begins to gum at his fingers. Malik watches him, amused. Tazim tilts his head, sniffs again, is momentarily distracted by the sheer miracle awe of possessing a thumb. Then he looks back up, not at Malik's shoulder exactly but a little ways past it, eyes narrowed. He holds the expression a moment, and then he smiles.