Leaving the corpse of Ristoro behind, Ezio paused for a moment to look around the courtyard where he had ended up after the battle. He'd caught, out of the corner of his eye, a flash of what might have been an entrance to the underground caverns where those wolfmen made their homes. Sure enough, there was indeed a wolf skull set into the wall nearby, standing above yet one more of the tiny, swinging doors that stood in front of the tunnels that he was clearly going to need to go down into once again.
Crouching down in front of the door, not wishing to bruise his toes again in an attempt that he suspected would not go any better than the one he'd made previously, Ezio picked the lock with his hidden blade. Slipping down into the caverns once more, Ezio took a deep breath of the stagnant air all around him, taking the Apple out of the hidden pocket within his robes.
Aeon appeared once more, the familiar flicker of the Apple's light shimmering about his form for a moment, before he tucked the Apple safely away inside the hollow space of his torso. Nodding to the man in black, Ezio turned his eyes forward and began making his way deeper into the catacombs. Quite contrary to his expectations, the pair of them seemed to be making their way through the dilapidated remnants of someone's palazzo.
There was the expected, unsettling feeling of forging a path through a place that had been full of life and sound, and now stood empty and devoid of anything of the sort; even as he shuddered, however, Ezio pressed determinedly forward.
The smell of dry, rotten wood all around him caused Ezio to wrinkle his nose, overwhelming even the feeble scents of the ivy he could see climbing down into the dilapidated structure from those places where the roof had caved in. As he continued farther, making his way ever downward since he'd been inside enough of these places to know where he was most likely to find the secret documents that these wolfmen – who seemed to be rather curiously absent from this place in particular – stood guard over. Even if he hadn't had such a great deal of experience with the wolfmen and the catacombs they guarded, Ezio would have still known that the most logical place for important documents to be stored was down as far as one could manage.
That way, even if such a thing was discovered, one would still be able to put as much security as one could manage between whoever was attempting to steal that which was to be protected and the item or items itself.
All of that made perfect sense to him, but what Ezio did find himself wondering about was just where this hypothetical security was. It hardly made sense that all of the wolfmen would have found themselves drawn away from this place; even if the other faction, the one that had taken to styling themselves as some kind of acolytes of Aeon, had grown so powerful that the wolfmen had ended up needing to split their forces in order to deal with them, he'd have expected to encounter at least some of them on his way down into this place.
It might have any number of things keeping them away, but Ezio made up his mind that he would continue to be on the lookout for any more of the wolfmen; as well as any of their allies.
As he continued on his way down into the guts of the skeletal building, with Aeon's occasional assistance to traverse those expanses where the floor had fallen in or the pair of them found their way blocked by the remains of a wall, Ezio found himself surprised all over again when he ended up staring down into the remnants of some kind of ancient church. He could have sworn that he'd been making his way into someone's old residence; the remains of an ornate palazzo to be sure, but still a place where someone had been living.
Still, he'd never heard of anyone actually living above a church in anything but some of the stories that Mother had read to him when he was small, so Ezio didn't know precisely what to make of what he was seeing at the moment.
Making his way up to what seemed to be a gate made out of bronze, if the sheen he could still see was any kind of indication, Ezio peered through the gaps in the gate – substantially taller than anything that Aeon had been able to comfortably toss him over – at the contents of what was clearly the room that he'd always found guarded by wolfmen in the past.
Before he could do much more than contemplate the gate barring their path, however, Ezio heard the familiar snap-hiss of Aeon's Ethereal Blades and stepped out of the way as the man in black calmly and quite literally cut his way through the gate that had once stood in their way. Thanking Aeon for his unexpected assistance, helpful as it had been, Ezio made his way into the room where the wolfmen had been storing the scrolls he had been hunting for for nearly as long as he had been staying in Roma.
Once he'd taken the scroll for his own, Ezio made his way back out of the underground church and up into the open air and falling dusk of Roma once more. The sight of Aeon's familiar black-clad form making its way up to stand beside him drew his attention, just before Ezio found the Apple deposited in his right hand.
"Grazie, amico," he said softly, as Aeon's form was once more subsumed by the artifact's light, vanishing once again to wherever it was that he went when he left.
More and more, Ezio had found himself wondering just where that was; if Aeon did have anything to do with those who created the Apple – long-gone as such a people seemed to be – there was little doubt in his mind that such a place would be beyond anything he had ever seen. Perhaps even beyond the imagination of anyone but Leonardo or little Maria; given everything he'd seen, even during such brief glimpses as he'd been able to stand, Ezio thought that such was more than likely the case.
He wondered how he and the others might make Aeon feel comfortable speaking about the wondrous things that he must have seen, even though such a world had been lost to anything but memories, and almost slapped himself for how simple such a thing seemed, if only in hindsight.
Yes, it was true that he would have to convince the others – Machiavelli in particular- if the way he clearly felt about Aeon was any indication, and if such thoughts had not changed since the last time the pair of them had spoken – to support him in this endeavor, it seemed as good a first step as any, to make Aeon feel comfortable in the place that he was staying. Having made up his mind, Ezio turned his path toward the pigeon coop.
In order to make such a momentous decision, he would need the support of the Brotherhood's leadership as a whole.