The Truth
Disclaimer: I don't own Assassin's Creed, 1 or 2; they are the property of Ubisoft.
A/N: A one shot. It's been in my head for the longest time when I beat the games and using my realistic logic, I decided to put two and two together. This sort of bashes religion BUT it also bashed evolution so it's an equal bashing all around. This is all hypothetical; it's a fic meaning FICTION! WARNING: There are spoilers to both games inside, read at your own risk.
As Desmond stared into the Apple in his hand, he began to see it glow, the light almost over powering him, seeping into the colors of the room, of his skin and clothes. When the brightness was too much, he closed his eyes, an arm raised to defend his unprotected eyes. What power this one light had, a light that blinded and deafened as a roaring silence filled his ears.
However, something else began to fill them.
It was soft, like the call of an old owl, but it demanded attention. When dark brown eyes opened, Desmond saw that he was surrounded but eternal white, a purgatory of the empty white. There was just him, and a small blue light, smaller than his thumbnail. It seemed to grow, extending tendrils of blue in every which way, like blue spikes all around. Form began where tendrils ended, creating an image that was and yet wasn't true to form. The center, where the blue began, grew brighter and brighter until it exploded, the partials shooting out like a firework, revealing the completion of the blue.
"Minerva."
The ancient goddess smiled, eradicating warmth, care but at the same time, she wasn't smiling, it was as if her gorgeous face had never moved. "So you have arrived," he heard but didn't hear with many voices. What was this, he'd seen her lips move but they didn't at the same time! "Desmond, we have been expecting you for eons." The assassin nodded, unsure of what to say exactly. "You have questions."
"You said that you and the other gods created us humans. I find that hard to believe," he said, after all, it was the first thing he had thought of. As to why he was there and what she had meant when she had spoken through Ezio could come later. "There are signs of early life, theories and studies that say we evolved. You honestly can't expect me to believe that you created man."
The goddess sighed, her breath sounding tired as her head lowered, truly lowered. "We have created your kind in our image, you, who are merely copies of us." Desmond crossed his arms. "When we had arrived, this planet had life but it was dying. Nothing would have lived after the skies were poisoned, the waters tainted. The world was crumbling when we arrived, a shell of perhaps something glorious. There was a life growing to be the dominating species of the wasted world, but we stopped them, wiping them from existence as we stopped the destruction and cleaned the inhabitable planet. From there, we restored it, truly seeing it was a glory to behold." As she said this, images of a desert like flatlands appeared all around, the skies blackened by smoke and smog as it snowed ash. In the distance were mountains, one exhuming the dark clouds, a volcano. There were primeval primates, human in a way but still apes in others. A group of them, staved with parched lips, dried furry skin, all looking at the volcano with an ancient sadness in their eyes.
"You killed the first humans?" Desmond all but shouted, unable to comprehend why. "What for? They were our ancestors!" he shouted, his hand waving over the short primates, the tallest male barely coming up to his chest.
"No, they were in the way. Where they left off, your kind began, our children. That kind would have been humans, yes, but we needed something with more understanding, a language, thinking minds rather than just basic primal instinct. Thus, we created your kind. In Eden, your kind thrived and survived. Your kind became quickly advanced, taking to the waters and land, spreading to the furthest reaches you could before we separated the lands."
The world was suddenly erupted into a bright light the revealed blue skies and grasses on the earth below. The planet suddenly lifted away from Desmond's feet, almost as if he was flying into space, the planet shrinking and rising to be in front of his eyes as Pangaea separated into the continents the world knows it now.
"Your numbers increased rapidly, something we were not expecting but allowed, which had later ended us. It was then that your kind began religion, each one having us as the deities, something we accepted. However, many of your kind turned from us, only believing in the one you called God, a man made image."
Temples with carved statues filled the purgatory, murals all around with images either carved, painted, bejeweled, ancient priests and priestesses bowing in front of alters of objects. The Roman and Greek gods flashed before the Egyptian's, Celtic, Norse, even Buddhist, Hindu, and American Indian carvings, before crosses, moon and star, and star appeared.
Desmond frowned. "What about the video that 16 had? There were two people with the Apple, running away, Adam and Eve. They weren't in some stone temple or even in caves but a building. Explain that."
The goddess frowned, her eyes set cold. "Traitors, the first ones to turn from us, stole from us. We destroyed that kind all together, having to destroy what we had worked hard to build and rebuilt mankind again, telling them about the two, thus the story began, altered by your kind as time went on." The images focused in on Adam and Eve, what man saw them as, the many images before the two themselves came into form before Desmond; Adam was slightly taller than the assassin.
"So what you're saying is that we're Human 3.0? That you took away a species that was evolving into us then wiped away the first test subjects?"
"Father of Adam and Mother of Eve were not adequate to understand the power, nor was the kind that came before yours and your own kind," she said, her tone changing from a mothering to that of a scorned woman. "We allowed your kind to see the remnants of Father of Adam and Mother of Eve and hear the tale of the two traitorous thieves before your kind killed us, murdered us." Wars played out all around, each one intermingling together, turning into a massive battle.
"I saw you, you Minerva, in a room, the Apple in your hand as you made those around work like slaves, the Apple glowing bright than the fucking sun! I'd seen that before when Al Mualim controlled innocent people in Masyaf! I saw it through Altair's eyes! You didn't created us to be some sort of project, you created us to be your slaves, to do whatever you wanted! Admit it, you never allowed us to leave Eden, to fuck like rabbits, we were too much for you and your fucking kind!" he shouted. "You separated the continents in hopes that we wouldn't gather together again to destroy you but we did!"
"Enough of this!" the goddess shouted, her arms spread wide. "I have called you here for a reason and now that time has come. No more questions, no more explanations," she said, her hand extending as it touched Desmond's forehead, filling his mind with knowledge.