The dream - if it is a dream - alway begins in basically the same way. I'm going to meet him, and when I get there he's happy to see me, welcoming, like family. I feel like I'm coming home after a long time away.

We sit down and talk, and at first everything's great. I don't know what we say. I don't know what it is that I say, but whatever it is, his face darkens. He stares at me from under his hood, which even now, he wears. Then, suddenly, he's chasing me, angry, filled wiith rage. And I run.

The dream varies here. I've fled to the east, to the west, north, and south. I've tried to evade him by dodging New York traffic, tried to lose him in Amazon swamps, and I've hidden among workers building the pyramids. I run across countries, nations, the entire wold and time itself. But always... Always he finds me in the end. I can't run from him because he's part of me, but more importantly, I can't run from him because I know that whatever he wants to do to me, I deserve. What I don't know, is why.

Finally, he tracks me down. He could kill me quickly from the shadows, but he doesn't. I always end up on the ground, looking up at him, at Altair's face. My face.

He yells at me. And I know whatever he's saying is truth, and it hurts me worse than the blade he's drawn from his scabbard. Again, his face contorts in rage. And again, it's my face. As he swings the blade down, the subtle differences extinguish and it IS my face I'm looking at, except now I'm on my feet standing over him and my blade is plummeting towards his heart. My heart.

Desmond flung himself off the ground and away from the imaginary blade. In the process, he flung himself over the edge of his bunk, and nearly to the cement floor below, if he hadn't caught himself on the rail.

"Whhaaa!" Shaun shot up from his mattress, and gun in each hand, and Lucy had already vaulted to the floor, ready.

Rebecca continued to snore, unaffected.

"What's going on, Desmond?" Lucy demanded, staring about, jumping at shadows and trying to see in the dark. Desmond waved her back into bed and climbed (favoring his right leg, which had been battered against the metal bunk railings) back up and under his blankets.

"Sorry. Sorry... I had a nightmare."

"Ah..." Shaun flopped back onto the pillow, still holding both guns. Desmond wasn't sure he had even woken completely.

Lucy relaxed and moved back towards her bunk. She paused and glanced his way.

"You haven't slept well, lately, Desmond. Anything in particular bothering you?"

"Besides the coming apocolypse? No, can't think of anything," Desmond replied dryly. Lucy sighed and nodded in agreement; Desmond expected her to climb back into bed. Instead, she turned and walked out of the room. The door snapped shut softly, and Desmond realized in the following silence that Lucy hadn't been sleeping very well, either.

Since escaping the warehouse, the four of them had moved north. Lucy had spoken of a cabin in the mountains where they might find sanctuary, but they had come across some problems.

Two days out, Lucy returned from scouting flustered and irritable. It was as close as she came to being afraid, and that worried Desmond enough that he had dropped everything to listen to her report.

The Templars were moving. They had made quick work of the map Desmond had revealed to them, unwittingly, and set teams to hunt out the Pieces of Eden that were accessible. Unfortunately, there was one quite close. And in Desmond, Lucy, Rebecca, and Shaun's path to the mountains.

"We can't just let them take it," Lucy insisted. "This is all the force the Assassins can send, right here," she gestured to the four of them gathered together, "and if we can't get this artifact from our own vault before they can, the world really is doomed."

The plan was simple. Enter the Assassin vault that the Piece of Eden was secreted in. Don't let the Templars take it. Don't lose any more people than the Assassins had already. Shaun, however, had a nasty way of complicating things.

"Look at the map," he pointed at the glowing, globe projection the Apple had showed Altair. "The Piece that they must be hunting for is supposed to be further north, isn't it?"

"This map is centuries old," Lucy argued matter-of-factly. "And our maps today aren't perfect, either. There's enough reasonable distortion to explain the displacement."

"Hmm," Shaun replied, unconvinced. "Well, that's all very well. We can assume you aren't wrong, for now," he scoffed, annoyed, "but there is still much research to be done if we're going to beat them in there. Whatever traps or locks or codes our Assassin ancestors have set up, we need to find out where they are and... and..." he trailed off, coming to the same conclusion Rebecca and Lucy and even Desmond did at the same time.

And that's how Desmond found himself, once again, slipping into the past, into a new host with a new past in a new time. 1700's France.

"So... we're looking at a guy named Armande," Rebecca reported. "He was an assassin right before the French Revolution. I think he dies somewhere in the chaos, because Shaun and I haven't been able to find much about him after things settle down."

"We're putting you in about ten years before the Storming of the Bastille," Shaun added. "So you won't be in any immediate danger of being there when Armande gets his head chopped off or some such nonsense."

"Some such nonsense?" Desmond asked, worried. "Anything in particular I should worry about?"

Shaun's eyes slipped fractionally towards Lucy before answering. "Doubtful. Just follow him around like you always do, and we'll have what we need in no time. This is the most recent synching yet, so we don't need to dive in decades before the actual information, like we had to with Ezio."

Desmond almost groaned at the memory. He could have done without the thirty years of aging that Ezio had experienced, feeling in fast forward as his body became heavier and slower with age as time slipped away. He already felt old at 29, without having to live the whole life cycle in a few days.

"Thank God."

"Of course, Armande, is already 37 when you're synching up with him, so don't expect to feel like a spring chicken."

"That WOULD be too much to ask," Desmond muttered.