I'm glad to finally be able to write once more. Despite the fact that it has only been a few weeks, it feels as though I haven't updated in months!

I know that last chapter, I referred to our young French lass as Amy Sorel. I also know that there is a pretty decent group of SC fans that believe that Amy should not have that last name because the game itself never gives it to her. And finally, I know that that little dispute is just going to have to be accepted by the audience. I mean, Raphael adopted her, so she gets his last name. Nice and simple.

Surely this cannot be natural...

It was easy for Taki to think such things as she watched the abnormal sight below her. The kunoichi, crouched on a tree branch, looked down into the ravine that was subject to her scrutiny. In the darkness of night, what she saw seemed twisted and nightmarish. Although perhaps it was as such even in the light.

At the bottom of the ravine, the ground was literally writhing. The dirt churned and heaved every which way, tossing the foliage that dotted the area in a perverted imitation of a chef tossing a salad. At first, Taki had thought this unbelievable occurrence was the work of a demon; but she had quickly discovered that whatever had initiated this localized abnormality was not of demonic origin.

Because of that, the voluptuous ninja was stumped. Her skill, in terms of identifying invisible forces, did not extend past demons. So she was at a loss for what might be causing this phenomena before her. The only conclusion she had come to thus far was that despite that this anomaly was not demonic, it was definitely not natural.

Not being able to solve this problem frustrated Taki to no end. As an independent woman who was used to being able to take care of things single-handed... not being able to do so was irritating. Even worse than that, this damned situation only added onto her list of worries. Between defeating Mitsurugi, stopping Siegfried, and her usual demon hunting work, Taki really didn't need anything else on her plate right now. Still, this phenomena couldn't just be ignored... it was a seriously worrisome aberration from nature's normal course.

But what could she do about it? Taki couldn't manipulate the earth's behavior... all she could do was observe. Settling in for the night, she proceeded to do just that: curious as to whether this abnormality would pass, or if it would evolve into a greater catastrophe.

"The heaviness of this bag is relative to my strength, so I'm not really burdened by it... by if I possessed normal abilities, this thing would would be a pain to carry. What did you put in here anyway?"

Amy, walking alongside her new armored companion on the beaten dirt path that led away from Wallachia Castle, eyed him indignantly. "Need you ask? I brought only what is essential for travel. I cannot afford to be frivolous with such a serious matter."

Cyril dug one of his hands into the bag to find out just what these 'essentials' were. The first thing his talon tipped fingers ran into was soft and squishy. Wrapping his hand around it, he withdrew a cupcake, wrapped in some sort of preservative paper. Since he was devoid of his helmet for the moment, Cyril was free to give Amy the most cynical look he could muster while he waved the sweet dessert at her.

"Only the essentials?"

Amy was unfazed. "You do not believe that food is essential?"

He rolled his eyes. "In terms of meat and bread and whatnot, perhaps. But this is a cupcake; this is not going to help you make it through the day."

"Psychologically speaking, it does possess that ability."

Cyril deposited the unhealthy snack back in Amy's travel bag. "Do you have a comeback for everything?"

"It is easy to have a retort for foolish comments."

Irritated by his newest acquaintance, Cyril fumed in silence. A few hours ago, he had admired Amy's advanced intellect (Relative to her age, that is) but now it only served to annoy him. "Why am I carrying this for you again?"

Another cocked eyebrow from the French girl. "Isn't carrying things what brutes do when they aren't banging rocks together?"

Cyril stopped in his tracks. Without a word, he dropped the travel bag to the ground, and then silently continued walking. As expected, Amy's indignant shouts followed him.

"H-hold on! Where are you going!? You can't just leave it there! There are quite a few amenit-erm, necessities under all of those sweets!"

Cyril shrugged and continued walking. "Brute no understand. Brute dumb. Bang rocks together."

Cyril couldn't see it, but Amy was pretending to choke him from a distance. "Fine! I'll carry it myself, you thick-skulled Neanderthal!" A series of mumbled, eloquent insults followed, but Cyril heard none of them. He continued walking, content that he still had the ability to drive any woman insane.

"Do you think the Templars are after these...swords?"

Yusuf paced to and fro within one of the Assassin's many secret hideouts in Constantinople. He was intently focused on the Templar journal Ezio had brought to him. "I do not know, Ezio. As far as I can tell, these...uh -what do they call them- 'Spirit Swords', have never been connected with the Templars or the Assassins. Of course, I can't claim to know everything in our history, but I have never heard these -or anything like these- mentioned in our order. However, it is clear that the Templars are aware of these weapons. This journal is evidence enough of that."

Ezio stroked his graying beard. "If these objects are as powerful as the Templars seem to believe... it could shift the balance of power here in Constantinople. Just like the Apple of Eden..."

Yusuf closed the journal and tossed it on a nearby wooden table, startling an Assassin initiate who was starting to doze off. "So we are going to send a few of our brothers after them? Maybe even a Den Leader? I'm sure they can handle it."

"I am not so sure. None of our initiates have experience with artifacts of extreme power."

"But you do?"

Ezio gave one of his reassuring smiles to the Arabic man. "Don't worry Yusuf; I'll be quick about it."

Yusuf watched the aging Italian man leave the Assassin Den. He jokingly shouted after him, "And yet you'll be gone for months anyway, because you'll be swooning the nice European ladies, I bet!"

Xandra, chosen Sentinel of Demeter, looked out over the vast expanse of forest that covered this beautiful continent. This unexplored new world, largely untouched by the destructive hands of humanity. She brushed her armored fingertips across a sturdy oak, one that must have been hundreds of years old. The semi-mortal woman cast her veiled gaze up to the thick treetops above, musing over the future of this land.

Should she and her comrades be successful in their endeavors, then this world would not cease to exist; the Cycle would be broken and a perfect world would be born. But 'perfect' was a matter of perspective. Whose perfect would the new world be? Would it be Demeter's? A world where only glorious nature existed, and no humans plagued the earth with their vile poison? That was the future Xandra envisioned.

But the world of perfection could just as easily be Eros'. As the most faithful believer in human compassion and love, Eros would certainly push the humans to thrive. What did that mean? It meant that the humans would do what they had always done; they would destroy forests with their axes, rend the pure skies with their corrupted fumes, and slaughter the beasts of the wild for their selfish needs.

Personally, Xandra hated humans, despite having once been one herself. Yet even in her mortal life, Xandra had tried as hard as possible to separate herself from her race. She had become a hermit of sorts, on a quest to purge the inherent evil of humanity from her soul. She had found little success; no matter how hard she tried, she was still a degenerate human. She was still a cursed being who plagued the natural beauty of the world. Her very existence damaged nature. Such realizations had crushed her spirit, but Demeter had seen fit to revive it in ways Xandra could never have imagined.

Now she was more than human. She was beyond them. Beyond the cancerous creatures that harmed her world. The only reason she would save the wretched humans was because it was an unfortunate 'side effect' of stopping the Cycle. To save the world, and all of its natural beauty, the Cycle had to be broken. And by breaking the Cycle, Xandra would save the humans as well, whether she wished to or not.

Buried deep in the confines of her 'enlightened' mind (Or so she believed it to be), Xandra payed little attention to the physical world around her. Still, it was nearly impossible to not notice the storm of light that was forming off in the distance. Xandra raised her helmeted head to witness the clouds gather at a single point a few miles away. They were glowing slightly with a faint bluish aura, and forming a weak vortex at the center point of their convergence. Intrigued by this phenomenon, Xandra called on the power of Demeter's gift, the Falcon Cloak, and let the wind carry her avian form towards the anomaly.

Little Pyrhha, with her innocent gaze, stood at the foot of Tira's haphazard bed as she watched the girl, her new mother, toss and turn in a frenzy of discomfort. The little Alexandra girl had come to wake her new mother for some reason her young mind couldn't even remember now, but watching Tira writhe on her rough sheets dissuaded the child.

Pyrhha had been lucky to find Tira's small room in the first place. As a resident of Ostreihnsburg castle, Tira had claimed a tiny chamber in the North tower for herself. Pyrrha had only seen it once, when Tira was thinking of some poor malfested guard to ditch the young girl with (Solnholfen had negated the duty when Pyrrha refused to stay with anyone whose face she couldn't see). In the end, Tira had left Pyrrha in a room two floors down from her own, but had neglected to lock the door behind her. All of that childish cooing and cuddling had exhausted her.

None of this really mattered to Pyrrha. She was too intrigued with the idea of what her mother might be dreaming about.

"What are you waiting for, Engel! Strike me down! Kill me!"

Surrounded by the highest ranking members of the Birds of Passage, who looked on this ordeal with stony faces, Engel stood across from her mentor, unwilling to lift Eiserne Drossel against her.

"What are you saying? I-I can't..."

"You must! It is your mission, which you must not fail at any cost! Or have you learned nothing of what it means to be an assassin?"

Engel trembled, unable to believe that this was happening. Here was her mentor of many years, who she loved like a mother, ordering the initiate to cut her down. Peeking through locks that would, in decades to come, be green, brown, and white, Engel looked into the faces of the ring of observers. Surely this was some sort of test... they couldn't possibly want her to kill someone of such high status and skill. All she had to do was wait, and they would tell Engel that she had made the right choice.

But the girl's mentor knew that her silence meant her student would not do as she was told. Not without a reason.

"If you can not do it for me... you will do it for yourself!"

The older woman rushed Engel, withdrawing a wicked curved dagger from within her robes. As she came within distance, she brought it down on her student, though Engel easily blocked the blow with her ring blade.

I knew it... another training exercise... that's all this is.

Engel would have liked to believe that. But as each vicious blow from her mentor landed, it became more and more clear that this was no exercise. Her mentor... her mother; was trying to kill her. Engel could see it in her eyes and movements. She had seen it plenty of times when she accompanied her teacher on missions. For a few moments, Engel managed to block out the realization such behavior would bring upon her.

Despite the ferocity and lethal intent of each strike, Engel skillfully blocked or dodged each one. Whenever there was an opening -which there were far too many of for her teacher to be doing anything less than dropping her guard on purpose- Engel refused to retaliate.

"Damn it, Engel! Defend yourself! I will not hold back any longer!"

Engel said nothing. Every second, the weight of reality crushed her a little more. Her mentor was trying to kill her. She would not stop until either she or Engel was dead. This was a kill or be killed situation. And unless Engel killed the one person she loved; she herself would be dead... and according to a promise she had made with this same woman, that was unacceptable.

This revelation, changing Engel's demeanor in a matter of seconds, numbed her. She just stopped thinking, because it would keep her from surviving. She stopped feeling, because it would stop her edge before she killed her opponent. All that was left was her mentor's mantra: kill them before they kill you. Anyone who threatened your life was an enemy to strike down without mercy.

With mechanical drive, caused by Engel's emotional shutdown, the assassin fledgling began to counter her mentor's deadly assault. The two combatants exchanged flurries of lethal steel, but neither managed to hit the other. If anyone could see their eyes, they would have noticed the cold, dead look they had. Here were two souls, who held great affection for another, locked in a brutal fight to the death. Both had closed their hearts. Both had steeled themselves, with their own respective methods. But only one fighter truly wished to survive; and when only one combatant has the will to live, then the other will surely die.

So it was, as Engel swung her weapon in a violent arc at the exposed midsection of her mentor. With sickening ease, the lethal edge sliced through skin, sinew, and muscle. In a spout of blood that covered the killer, Engel's mentor collapsed on the ground.

For a moment; one tiny moment, in the entire stream of time, the world was silent. There was no cry of agony, no cheers or jeers from the audience, or any shout of victory from the winner of the battle. Just absolute silence. That one moment was all it took for Engel to regain her senses. Rational thought, and with it, realization, crashed into her mind. Her eyes fixed on the crumpled form before her, causing the girl to fall to her knees, quiet and shaking.

She reached out her hand, covered in gore, to touch the face of her fallen teacher. With what ounce of life the woman still had in her, she brushed her own fingers across Engel's cheek.

"G-good... very good Engel... I...I'm proud of you..."

With those last words, the victim of fate slipped into the void. And once more, only a moment separated her death and the agonizing scream of sorrow that followed. Although the assassins who watched would say there was a clear victor; both combatants had truly died that day.

Tira awoke with a start, drenched in sweat... and in tears. Within seconds, the deranged malfested realized it was a nightmare; a shadow of her past that should have remained buried. The memory fresh in her mind, she sobbed. Both sides of her cried, as they were forced to recall the most painful memory they had. If only Soul Edge had wiped their mind as well.

After a good two minutes of this, Tira noticed that something was not right with the status of her room. But it took her a few minutes to realize what it was. There was something in here that shouldn't have been, and it had its chubby little arms wrapped around Tira's waist.

"Mommy?"

...

"What do you think you're doing?"

The answer was very forthcoming. "You were sad. Hugs make people feel not sad, and I don't like seeing mommy sad. So, I gave mommy a hug, to make her happy!"

What a stupid little twerp. Thinking that this would do anything...

A lot of conflicting emotions arose within Tira's divided mind. On one hand, she didn't appreciate this physical contact with a sniveling child. But on the other, it was slightly comforting. Although that may have been the pervading feeling of her jolly side.

Just this once?

...fine. But never again! Not with Ciri, not with this stupid kid, no one! Not that this is doing anything useful-

Shut up and let the kid give us a hug. No one ever hugs us these days anyways. And you know you just called him Ciri right?

Just shutp up and enjoy your stupid hug.

So, this is a short chapter because I need to catch up on two other stories as well. Now that I have writing capabilities again, the next update won't take so long. Until next time.