Eat, And Know Me

Mobile homes. Glorified tin cans. The heat, it bounces off the metal and ricochets off the walls. I can feel it vibrating in the floors, in the refrigerator, on the fucking toilet lid, in my head.

In my head.

Lucy. She is rapping on the excuse for a door, just a piece of plastic bolted to a metal shell that's been my home for the last two weeks.

"What," I mumble.

"May I come in." There is no question in her voice. She's coming in, whether I give the OK or not. I don't give her the satisfaction of an answer.

The door opens, and the Arizona sun blasts through the crack. I cover my eyes.

"Desmond," she says. Her voice joins the bouncing heat rays. It's all a jumble in my cranium. If this continues, my skull will crack apart. The fissures are already forming. I'm sure of it. Can Lucy see a hairline fracture in between my eyes?

"Desmond," she calls again. She is leaning over me, her breath smelling of coffee and whatever else she decided to slip into the mug. Probably whiskey. "Dez, are you with me?"

I laugh, short and sharp. My hands are covering my eyes, and my elbows are planted on my legs. I'm sitting on a mattress. Or at least, I'm sure it resembled a mattress at one time. Now it's a sagging load of springs. There is a brown stain in the middle of the fitted sheet. I've been sleeping on this shit-stained bed for two weeks: Two weeks since we escaped our hideout. The van bounced across states, don't ask me how many, until we reached this, this outpost in the middle of the desert, with nothing more than a satellite, a house trailer circa 1896, and a bomb shelter stuffed with Twinkies. I fucking hate Twinkies.

"What does that even mean any more?" I ask her.

She swallows. "Nothing, I guess. But."

"There's always a 'but,' isn't there."

She sighs. "But. We've uncovered … something."

"That's why we're up here, isn't it." I look up and center a glare out the window, yellow and foggy and smaller than a toaster. I know the van is out there. And inside it, the Animus. "Because of that thing. To put me back in that thing."

She looks down at her hands. "It's your choice."

I leap from the mattress and bear over her. I can feel the cracks spreading. "It was never my choice! Ever! And now … Now I'm not even here. I'm never alive, unless I'm gone. Nothing is left. Do you get that? And you knew. You knew what this would do to me. You've watched it happen before. And you let it happen."

I'm screaming, and I don't care. She's crying, and I don't care. Her back is pressed against the peeling wallpaper, and during my yelling, I've leaned in close to her, my arms on either side of her head. I hear the noise of more voices outside. The door opens. Sun on the faded linoleum. A hand on my shoulder.

"Desmond."

It's Shaun. He is tugging on me, and I let him. He leads me out the door, and I let him. Lucy is close behind.

"This is wrong, Shaun! It's the bleeding effect. He said it himself! Nothing's left. Just let him -"

Shaun's hand grips my arm. I look up, numbly, at the sun, as it nears its noonday peak. My eyes water, yet I stare. Shaun opens the van's back door and leads me into the yawning darkness. He answers her with his usual cold precision. "Let him what, Lucy? He has no chance of ever reverting to his normal self. His mind is gone, and his body will soon follow. We must remember our purpose. The Pieces of Eden must be recovered, and we must learn as much as we can." I hop into the back of the van as Shaun prepares to shut the door.

"Desmond!" she shouts as she tries to maneuver around Shaun and see me. "Desmond, is this what you want?"

I laugh at her again. I can't help it. As I lay down and the Animus slides over me, I'm still laughing.

There is a click, and then a soft breeze. Somehow, I know it's not really a breeze, but what is reality? I can feel its cool fingers on my skin, and goosebumps break out in response to its touch. It's more real than anything I've felt the last two weeks. Also caught in the breeze, white strings of mathematical code flit by me, like tumbleweeds in this empty hall that exists between times and ancestors. In the white fuzz of that in-between place, Shaun's voice echoes in my head.

"Desmond. We've found the strands of another set of Codex pages. Seems that Ezio managed to uncover this final set after the battle with Borgia in Rome."

"Who is the author," I ask with lips that aren't mine, but a digital projection of my DNA code.

"It's Altair, again."

I'm confused. "His last entry -"

"Right. We read all of the first set of Codex pages, and they ended with Altair saying he was dying, old age or hell if I know what, but that he wanted to look at the Apple one more time. You remember this, yes?"

How could I forget? "Yes."

"Well, he did look. And he wrote what he saw. And then he killed himself."

I'm stunned into silence.

"Right. Heavy. So. There's your purpose. I'm putting you into Ezio at the moment he first read the pages. They are no doubt a direct narrative of what Altair saw through the Apple. I hope I don't I need to remind you the vital, invaluable nature of this knowledge."

"No. But … Why not put me in Altair, if we know when he used the Apple?"

Shaun chuckles. In this vacuum, he sounds like God, booming overhead and below and from the side, all at the same time. "You really are a daring bloke, aren't you? No, Desmond. You know you're dying, right? Well, I'm trying to prolong it. This whole saving the world business, it's falling on you. You heard that Minerva sweetheart, didn't you? Point is, I don't want you falling apart on me any faster than necessary. And if whatever Altair saw was enough to kill a man like him, well … Let's just say you're not made of the same stuff, genes or no genes."

"Go fuck yourself."

"Only with lube, old chap. Now give me a moment while I make the connection ..."

And so, with Ezio's hands, which are also my hands, I read.

Ra. Amaterasu. Mithras. Sol. Apollo. I worship you. I worship you. I worship you.

Let me become one with you again. Give me a taste of your light. Parch my lips. Scorch my tongue. Breath your fire through my body. Let me become one with you. This mortal frame, I despise it. I loathe it. It is but a servant to you. I give it freely.

The ancient religions, they were right. We must worship the sun, for it is mother and father and beginning and end. We eat the plants, which grow from the sun. We eat the animals, which eat the plants. When we die, the plants spring up from us. So even in death, we continue to serve.

I need you. Don't leave me.

Minerva.

No matter how many times I gaze into the Apple, I see nothing. Have I drained it of all its secrets? Is it, too, nothing but a shriveled lump of organic matter, longing to be reunited with its creator? I've brought the Apple up close to my face, thrown it against the wall, pounded on it with rocks and my fists, and still, nothing. Nothing.

I've reached the limits of human experience. This body cannot come any closer. I cannot accept this. I will not accept this.

For decades, I have reflected through the written word, and many revelations have come to me through this practice. Perhaps now, if I write down what I saw through the Apple, I will gain some insight. Perhaps I will feel the warmth again, however fleeting. Let this be my meditation on the sun.

For months, I had been wrestling with the concept of death. Not just any death, but my death. It happens to most men at least once in their life. Ironic, for an Assassin to be frightened of that which he has already given to thousands of people. I had lived a full life. Loved, lost, loved a second woman, had two sons. Seen the rise of a stronger Brotherhood, with most of the improvements and changes happening under my own guidance. However, no family or accomplishment could have been large enough to completely eradicate this fear from me.

I am older than I once was. My body is past its prime. Age, even now, makes gripping this quill a chore. I was terrified of that steady march of time. The Apple provided glimpses outside of that constriction, and I found myself hungering for it in ways I had never hungered for anything before. At the urgings of my wife and closest brothers, I had put the abomination away for many years. But with death breathing so close to me, I vowed to look at it only one more time. I put my intentions in my journal and removed the Apple from its hiding location: in the floor and under a loose slat of my own bed chamber.

With no more hesitation, I gazed into its swirling, ruby depths, and I felt my body giving way. I knew that my consciousness was transitioning through time once again. Almost immediately, I realized I was moving backward in time, not forward. My speculation that the Apple would show me the end of the world was wrong.

Moving forward in time always came with a feeling of forward compulsion, much akin to the leaps of faith I would perform off the tops of the highest towers during my missions. Everything is coming at you, faster than you can process it, and as the ground approaches your face, you wonder if you'll be able to respond in time.

All of the inventions that I gave to the Assassins – steel, guns, stealth maneuvers – they came to me through glimpses at Assassins in other times. Usually, they dwell in worlds I cannot put in words. Worlds of constant light, constant noise, constant sound. These visits, these temporary departures from my "current" frame of reference, were hard on my mind. One night, I broke out of a vision just in time to realize I didn't have my hands around the throat of some unseen attacker, but my youngest son. My own wife had to pry my fingers off.

Moving backward, however, had the opposite effect. If time is a horse, galloping steadily ahead, moving backward in time is giving the steed a stern one-rein halt. When a rider gives this signal, the horse, if well trained, will plant its hooves in the dirt and skid as the force of its own motion came crashing back into it. The rider, if caught unawares, can easily tumble out of the saddle and land directly in front of the horse's muzzle. However, I had grown accustomed to it. As a result, moving backward in time was, if nothing else, more predictable than moving forward. I allowed my awareness to be stopped, thrown forward with the motion, and, at last, pulled back.

When I opened my eyes again, the organs granting me sight were not my own. When I flexed my hands, they were the hands of a stranger. The legs, marred with the scars of another's battles. I was inhabiting the body of some ancient ancestor.

It wouldn't take long for me to realize just how ancient.

He, or I, or we, was naked. Were naked. Standing in the middle of a barren plain in the gloom of a cloudy day, this young body was exposed to all that would gaze upon it. And there were many gazing upon it. Immediately, I felt intense shame. I wanted to turn away from this crowd of onlookers, but the instincts and reactions of this ancestor played against my own. This was always how it was. At first, living through the scenes of another was difficult, until I remembered that time would play out its events. I could fight it, or I could submit. As it is with most things, it was easier to submit.

I turned to the crowd and looked at them for the first time.

About twenty people were standing around me, keeping a ring about five paces away. Shame covers truth. And in my desire to be covered, I hadn't realized that they were also nude. There was nothing arousing about this sight: They looked old. Very old. Their hands were gnarled. Their black hair, tangled to the point that it formed chunks that clung to their skulls. Their faces were pulled taught against their jutting cheekbones and eye sockets. Their knees awkwardly protruded from their legs. There were men, women, children. I wanted to think them all of an advanced age, but even the youngest babes had this appearance. When I glanced at my own body, I realized that it was of better build and health than the others. Not by much, but enough that I felt better in this form than I do on a daily basis in my actual aged form.

One of them stepped closer to me. A woman. The only way I could tell was the lack of facial hair and male genitals. All other features of both genders were identical, since the breasts of these women were flat and shriveled. With empty, sad eyes, she lifted before me a baby, no more than a few months old. A gray, skinny thing, all dust and loud cries.

The ancestor's body responded to this cry with a rush of paternal longing. I wanted to hold this baby. I wanted to end its crying in any way possible. The feelings removed all doubt: This was his son.

"Ahh," the woman pleaded, still holding the baby aloft.

Her primal urging awakened a need in me, as well. Food. How long had it been since this body had taken any real sustenance? I was starving to death. They were starving to death. And they were looking to me, as their leader, to save them.

I looked past them at the empty landscape around me. For as far as the eye could see, nothing. Dust. Ash. A cold wind that was ripping at my skin. I looked at my toes and found some of them missing. Frostbite, from nights spent in this lifeless desert unprotected. I forced my eyes upward, and the sky's color matched the landscape. This was not the gray clouds of a rainstorm. This was a heavy, thick covering. This layer of fog hovered in between the earth and space. No sunbeam could penetrate this. I knew that the sun hadn't been seen by these people for a long, long time. And the lack of its rays had killed the plants. Then most of the animals. A few species were surviving, but only by becoming more brutal and savage. These beasts killed their lovers and ate their own children.

Somehow, my ancestor, even without knowing words such as "loyalty" and "compassion," knew that this was not a fate he wanted for his tribe. It was better to die. And that was the only fate that seemed open to them anymore. Their species, after all, did not have the massive fur coat or the brutal tusks of the mastodon. Nor did it have the speed and adaptable digestive tract of the deer. Nor did it have the stealth and cunning of the saber tooth tiger. No, it was a nearly defenseless species. All that was left was death.

The baby cried again, and this time, my ancestor reached for it, put his arms around the bony body, squeezed it tightly to his own thin chest. Out of his lips, my lips, came a cry that echoed the baby's. And then, the rest of the tribe joined this cry.

A final dirge to the human race.

But no. The ancestor looked up again, but this time, slightly to the west. A mountain. Fear rocked through my body, and I handed the baby back to his mother. I shivered, not from the wind, but from the sight of the unholy mound that reached into the dusky, invisible heights of the heavens. For centuries, my ancestor, and his ancestor, and his ancestor's ancestor, had avoided this mountain, with the finality of the deer avoiding the tiger. It was danger, death.

Although its top was obscured by the dust layer, I could still see a faint light where the pinnacle should be. It was an eery, yellow light that illuminated the bottom of the fog like a candle's flicker against a stone ceiling. This light was not human. More than that. It wasn't natural. It wasn't nature's order.

But nature's order was killing them. Through some mistake of genetics, it was their fate to die. I wouldn't have it.

The woman, baby close to her, sensed my intent. She screamed and threw her soot-stained body around me. The rest of the tribe picked up her scream. I was their only hope, and I was leaving them. Wasn't it my duty to stay by their side while their far weaker bodies failed them? Shouldn't I be the one to howl for them, as they had howled for my father, when they died?

With ease, I removed her arms from my side and forced my way through the ring of screaming skeletons. With bare feet, I began to trudge toward the mountain. Their cries followed me long after my ears stopped hearing them.

As I progressed forward with a steady, slow trudge, the land was gradually inclining. It was so slight a change that I didn't notice it until the ground beneath my feet began to harden. The soft ash of the earth gradually gave way to sharp rocks. The calluses built from a lifetime without boots saved me from most of the pain, but a few sharp points still managed to gouge through the tough layers and bloody my heels.

Periodically, I looked upward. The closer to the mountain I drew, the brighter the light became. Instinctively, I knew this was my destination. I would have to scale the mountain and reach the source of this light if my mate, child, and people had any hope of survival. It is difficult to describe this thing, instinct. It is so far removed from the daily habits of modern man that we dismiss it as a behavior of beasts. As a warrior, however, the sensation did not catch me completely unaware. Many times in my past, I have sensed an enemy lurking close by, or I have somehow just known the right moment to duck a throwing knife tossed with deadly precision by an unseen foe. My ancestor's confidence that his answers patiently waited at the top of that mountain was similar to these warrior reactions.

It was truth.

It just, is.

Inclining land gave way to rock walls. As the real climb began, I was reminded that I was trapped in the body of a man starving to death. If I had been in the body of the man I was twenty years ago, it would have been an easy climb. As an Assassin, I had spent years training on cliff faces and the sides of buildings in preparation for my missions, and I only grew more fit and agile each time I served the Brotherhood with my blades. However, this was not the body of my youth. It was the body of my ancestor.

And although the lungs were less than two decades old, they struggled to draw breath. The legs burned with a fire I had felt only after running for hundreds of miles. When I forced my fingers to cling to rocks, the bones ground together and sent waves of pain rippling down my body. Each step was agony. Each breath taken, a conscious effort. The air grew thinner and thicker at the same time: thinner in oxygen and thicker with dust. Tears streamed from my eyes.

Just as instinct had told me that my answers waited for me at the top, I knew that this body would not survive this climb. I would make the top. I would not allow it to fail me until I had done so. But once I accomplished that goal, this body would be spent. I continued only by thinking back on the desperate cry of the mother and her infant. With this grim determination, I climbed, for hours and hours.

After what seemed like days of climbing, I dared to looked down, and I saw nothing, just swirling, gray dust. I had the uneasy sensation that I had been climbing this rock wall forever. That somehow, the world had ended, and this was all that existed: This rock, this cloudy air, this pain, this intense desire to reach the pinnacle.

And the pinnacle, what a sight, even through my tears. The light was not some distant glow, but a throbbing, pulsating thing that radiated from a source just out of my grasp. It breathed in and out, sending wave after wave of yellow light through the gloom. The hair on my arms stood up straight, and my heart pounded with a need that it had never known before. The climb continued like this for what, again, felt like days. The closer I grew, the less aware I became of the pain. Darkness fled from the air around me. Now, I was floating in a bath of this intense light. The top grew brighter and brighter, until I had to shut my eyes just to continue.

Warm. That is what it felt like. It felt, warm. It had been so long since this body had felt real warmth, my own consciousness had struggled to find a word for the feeling, as well. The rocks under my fingers were almost hot to the touch. My hand wanted to leap back when it went to grasp some of the darker rocks, but I forced it down. The air and ground grew hotter and hotter, until I began to sweat and the skin clinging to the cliff faces took on an angry red color.

My hands reached up. I knew that my fingertips were at the top. I couldn't see, but instinct told me it was so. The light reached out for my body and lifted it up to a flat, level surface.

I was sprawled on the burning ground. My breath came in ragged gasps, both from the impossible physical feat I had just accomplished and from the exhilaration ripping through my body.

What was this?

Where was I?

Before I could ask more questions, the light spoke.

"Rise, father of Desmond, father of Ezio, father of Altair, father of Adam."

Those words compelled me to do so. I could refuse as easily as the ocean refuses to go to high tide, as easily as the flower refuses to open its petals. It was against nature's order. I had to obey. I was on my feet.

I forced my stinging eyes to open. Before me, I saw the source of the light. A flame, arcing high into the empty blackness of space. It encompassed the entire mountaintop with its licking, searing, reaching arms. Everything within my ancestor reacted in the way all beasts do at the sight of fire. I wanted to run. I wanted to leap from the mountain. How was I standing so close, without burning alive? Was I even alive any more?

"What brings you to this holy ground."

But I could not answer it. The ancestor did not have language. I longed to answer this voice, but nothing in my natural being had given me the tools to do so. I fell to my knees and felt the skin curl away from the stone underneath.

"You are weak. You are but a scrap of organic tissue vomited up from the elements of this new planet. You are no better than the first crop of beasts, lumbering lizards of no intelligence. Perhaps it's time we wipe the land clean again. No species has passed our test, least of all you.

"Yet. Yet, I ask you again. Answer, or die. What brings you to this holy ground."

A test. This was a test.

I rolled my dry tongue around in my mouth. I opened my cracked lips. I drew in breath, and the air scorched the inside of my lungs. Somehow, somehow, I forced out a word.

"Love."

The flame grew brighter, brighter, brighter, reaching higher, reaching up and outward, into the blackness of space, into the stars. The entire earth was covered in a flash of stunning, blinding light. Somewhere, far below, the humans screamed and ran for their caves. The dust layer, burned away.

"You answer well, human. You have passed the test. Eat now, of the Apple of knowledge."

In the center of the flame, where the fire was blue and orange and white, I saw a figure beginning to form. Gradually, the fire shrank as it condensed into this body. A woman, with breasts and red, flowing hair, and a body of moving, liquid flame.

"I am Minerva, and we are Those Who Came Before, for we have been here since the beginning. We have molded this planet to our liking, after the sun of our own planet was consumed by forces beyond even our hubris. We are a race that, like you, relies on the sun for our survival. Unlike you, we are more direct in our consumption, and we are made in its image. Your form is a reflection of our own, yet you take in the sun and its life-giving energy more indirectly, in a way that will not sap the life from this star as quickly as we did. You, and all other species of this that we call Earth, will absorb the sun or eat that which absorbs the sun, but never draw directly from it.

"And you, father of Adam, shall lead the humans into a new era of enlightenment. This planet shall be our new home. You have secured this future, for you have tasted the light of the sun and the light of awarness and formed a word."

I realized that her fingers clutched a ruby-red, swirling mass close to her body. From her mouth of red magma came more words.

"Eat, and know me."

Her hands came forward. First, any remaining hair burned in a flash off of my body. The flesh of my arms then peeled away, until I saw the bone of my fingers. My eyes, reduced to a dripping jelly. Skin dripped off my cheeks. Yet still, I grasped it. I brought the flaming Apple to my face, and, now nothing more than a skull, I bit down.

Truth. Reason. Knowledge. A hunger for things left unconquered, unknown. The bite was one, but I wanted more. My mind, given but a taste of what Minerva brought with her from some distant realm beyond any human's reach.

My form was made new. It was still the ancestor's original structure, but it received that which it had lost and some that it had never known. Tanned skin, toned muscle, flowing, black hair. My vertebrae cracked apart and reformed into a straighter, more linear shape. My jaw, more angular, less jutting. My brow bone, smoothed in and replaced with a higher forehead, to make room for the rapidly expanding brain. She had remade me in an image much closer to her own. And, in turn, closer to the sun.

I looked about with my new eyes, and saw a clear, crisp night sky. The moon hung low. She was still standing there. However, she was no longer a destructive flame, but the gentle, coaxing warmth of a spring sun. I could feel her love for me in every pore. I fell to my knees before her.

"You will serve us, father of Adam. Here, at the base of this mountain, we will recreate our home, Eden. And you and your people will help us mold that which we have lost. This Apple is all that is left of our home, but we shall make more. And with them, we shall make this a planet fitting for your race as well as mine.

"Rise before me once again."

As when I first arrived in this body, I was crippled with intense shame. I was naked before her. How, how could I be naked? I still resemble so closely the beasts that slither and eat their own young. How could she want me, me, of all vile creatures, to serve her?

"This bond, this vow of servant and master, shall be sealed with the language of the word you first spoke. Love."

Her hands wrapped around my face. Her fingers felt like moss and sand and fresh spring water. I wanted to cry out, to tell her not to taint her own form with the dirt of my lips, but I was struck silent by her majesty. When her lips touched mine, I shuddered in violent pleasure. Birth on her lips. Life along her teeth. Procreation on her tongue. I wanted to drink it in, forever. I pressed my body against her, my own shame forgotten through the fire of longing.

What did I want? Did I want to make love to her? Was that even possible? No, no to make love, for that is just the act of reproduction, which is, in its own way, a worshiping gesture to the sun. To make new life that will forever be dependent on it. What better way is there to show trust and love than to give the fruit of your loins in the care of another?

No, I wanted to form into her. I wanted to be one with her. I wanted her to burn me again. Leave me as a husk, a crisp. Whatever the sacrifice, I'll make it. Just take me into you.

But she pulled away.

I fell on the ground and curled up in a groveling position. Once there, I realized the Apple had been placed in my own hands.

"Take the Apple to your people. Feed it to them. Let them, too, taste that which is beyond their nature. Together, we shall rebuild Eden."

She turned away from me. And my heart broke.

I lifted my forehead from the ground and reached out to her. At last, I found the new words. "Minerva. Please."

But she didn't stop. Just continued her slow walk away from me, tiny flowers and curling ivy springing up in the wake of her step.

The memory ended, and I came back to my own time. Back to my bed chamber in Masyaf.

This retelling has granted me no satisfaction. Minerva is no closer to me. And unlike my ancient, first ancestor, I do not know how to serve her. If I had a task, any task that I knew she wanted me to fulfill, I would give everything in my being to her. To serve her.

My life is meaningless now.

Better to serve the sun in the ground, than above it.

I come out of the Animus, shaking the dreamy haze that is always there after a long session in this high-tech coffin.

Shaun stands next to me, hands me a glass of water. I gulp it down. I had been sweating, profusely. And not just from the inside of the broken-down van.

Of course, he had been watching all of it closely, reading with me. But did he feel it, too? No, he didn't have this cursed bloodline in him. Somehow, the effects of this crazy bitch's kiss had reached through the generations. Somehow, I had felt an echo of Altair's longing. It hurt.

Shaun was never the patient type. "So. What now."

I rise from the Animus and burst out the van. I look, again, at the sun.

A heartbeat. Another heartbeat. And then, it hits me.

"I know what I gotta do now. Pack everybody up. Everything. We're leaving."

"What? But, where, Desmond?"

"Orlando."

Author's Note: I do not own Assassin's Creed II. If I did, it would have been about Altair. Just saying.

Send some love, and by love, I mean reviews. Not like Apples or anything. Been awhile, so be gentle with me. Heh.