ALTAIR
A hardwood box-spring marked by the countless generations of novices who came to lie here each night, in order to hand their souls over to that divinity called sleep. Some bed linen worn by its labor, moth-eaten, bleached by successive washings. The naked walls polished by time are bathing in shadows. They seem empty, yet they have gathered thousands of lonely thoughts.
It's not the same cell I occupied when I joigned the assassins; every room look the same though. Not even a single dissimilarity. Nothing to avoid the rush of memories each time I come here... That's why I dislike to sleep in it. That's why the dawn, or occasionally some member of our Brotherhood, find me such a lot of times lying on a roof, in a hay cart, or on the top of a tree, aiming for the night quiet under the constellation I bear the name of.
"I'm sorry Altaïr".
The reminiscence suddenly blows, as coruscant as the Creation itself. The memory of an emaciated face, more pale than a corpse, with deep shadows under the eyes, emptied of the desire to live. And the scarlet streams flowing out of his slitted throat...
Ahmad Sofian used to be an assassin, and the final accomplishment of his career was to take his own life.
"I'm sorry Altaïr". It were his sole words before disappearing into limbo. His last speech, to a teenager in state of shock, orphan since the day before, watching him bleed to death.
Thirteen years ago, during the first siege of Masyaf led by the Salah Al'din's forces, my father Umar Ibn La'Ahad failed in the mission given by Al Mualim and killed by accident some nobleman from the troops of the invader. As a peace term, Salah Al'din commanded to get the life of the murderer. I watched the head of my father rolling down at the gates of the citadel. Few days later, Ahmad Sofian, who was previously captured by the enemy and have confessed my father's name under torture, ended up taking his own life right in front of me, eaten up with remorse.
I was eleven.
"I'm sorry too" I whisper to the pallid specter who stares at me with his eyeless sockets.
He was slouched against the door like the Christ nailed to his cross, with this unbearable red smile, more erubescent than innards, etching on his dead body the chalice of the penitent. Overwhelmed by the pain he caused and his suicide will cause. And I was standing paralyzed, crushed by the violence of the scene, seeing again and again my father's head rolling, Ahmad's throat cutted, the death surrounded the room in a vortex which couldn't let the mind sane...
I felt no fear. No pain. I was not myself anymore. I was out of myself.
From this moment... something has changed.
I realized. I realized that mankind, animals, and all living creatures in this world are assured to die; it is only a matter of time. We are breathing the Death. We're living by it and for it. We're seeping it out of our pores at each and every moment of our short and cruel and pathetic existences. A human being borns to die, and in this immeasurable, macabre dance, who lasts only for smithereens of eons, I've just figured out a way to transcend that everyone believes as a duality yet, instead of the two faces of the same coin.
I'll become the Death. A more powerful and perfect assassin than everything the Brotherhood could imagine or expect.
None of this was real. Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.