Disclaimer:I do not own Ezio or any other mentioned Assassin's Creed characters, they are the property of Ubisoft. As for the historical characters mentioned… well.. I guess they belong to history… or themselves…

Ezio peeked quickly out of the side of his eye. The sky was a perfect blue above the tiled roofs of Florence, but he did not notice it. Although his back was firmly stuck to a dark corner in the interior of the church tower, the ground of the piazza outside the church loomed towards him like a monstrous wave and he felt his head go light.

It had been two years since the day of his fall. There was some slight scarring at the back of his head from the incident, but otherwise there was no lasting damage, except for this. He soon found that he was unable to look downwards at anything from a certain height. It wasn't so bad in the first year, but grew progressively worse after he fell off a ladder in the kitchen. Although he wasn't hurt in that particular fall, it was so embarrassing that he told no one about it and his personal phobia regarding heights and falling grew.

"Come on Ezio… there's a ladder out here to the roof," Federico's head popped into view from the outside of one of the tower's gothic-style windows.

Ezio shook his head furiously. The lightness was so bad he almost felt like throwing up. Inching his way along the tower walls, he slowly made his way to the stairs where he descended to the cathedral below like an old man, tightly gripping the rails of the stairway.

After a long long spell, he made it to the bottom of the very long flight of stairs.

"You sure took your time," his older brother was standing at the open doorway of the cathedral.

Glum and frankly quite annoyed, he pushed past his brother into the busy piazza.

The streets were bustling with activity as Florence readied itself for a week-long festival that would carry on all day and into the night. A large array of vendors were setting up makeshift stalls and a significant number of minstrels and entertainers were either plying their trade around street corners and in various piazzas around the city or setting up small wooden stages were mystery plays commemorating the life of John the Baptist, the city's patron saint, were performed.

Ezio was in no mood for the festivities. This pathetic state that he was in wasn't how he had dreamed his life would be. His shoulders drooped low with the burden of his failures and it seemed every time he passed by a stall selling figurines of the saints, their painted eyes were mocking his cowardliness.

"Hey!"

"Hey there!"

Ezio only turned around when a hand fell on his shoulder and pulled it back. He spun around quickly and found himself staring into the ruddy face of a peasant woman with a large apron.

"What's wrong, child?"

Not knowing the strange woman who had stopped him, he mumbled something under his breath, shrugged the hand off his shoulder and started to move off.

"Here," a fluffy pastry dusted with fine sugar dropped into his hand.

Eyebrow raised, he looked up at the peasant lady who was arranging a checkered cloth over a basket of the same kind of pastries.

"Nothing bad lasts forever," the ruddy-faced woman leaned downwards, lifting his chin with a fleshy hand. "So keep your chin up and enjoy your life… you're too young to be walking around like an old man with a hump on his back."

He never saw the woman again, for she disappeared into the crowd, but he never forgot the taste of the sugared confection she had dropped into his hand.

His elder brother found him some time later sitting on a bench beside the street with a semi sugar-powdered face.

"There you are!" his brother pulled at one of Ezio's sticky hands. "Come on, everyone's waiting for us!"

Ezio was dragged halfway across Florence to a part of the city that had a lot of older buildings. A large group of children waited for them to join in a game of hide and seek. As soon as they determined which child was going to be doing the seeking, everyone quickly scattered in different directions.

"Pssst… up here brother," Federico had found a hiding spot somewhere up on a strip of narrow roofing between the first and second floor of an old house. He reached out to his brother below, "Quick, give me your hand!"

Ezio grabbed his brother's hand and tried to pull himself up the broken masonry of a crumbling wall that was beside the building. However, his fear of heights and falling combined with a lack of practice in climbing in general made it very difficult for him to get up onto the roofing. As a result, he kept slipping on the crumbly stone. Federico pulled as hard as he could, but was unable to lift his brother up.

"I'll find another hiding spot," Ezio let go of the hand and quickly ran down a short alleyway that led him to a rather overgrown garden. Running down the garden path, he came to a stone doorway barred by two, heavy metal doors. He noticed that they were slightly ajar.

He quickly slipped through the narrow gap. Beyond, he could only make out the faint outline of cobwebs strung across an infinite expanse of gloominess. Holding onto the metal ring of the ajar door, he peeked out of the gap to see if anyone had followed him to his hiding place.

Suddenly, he heard a kind of sucking sound, there was the sensation of air rushing out of the gap and the door slammed shut! Panicking, Ezio pulled at the metal ring with all his might, but was unable to budge the heavy door. Anxiety and fear started to well up in his stomach as he began to realize he was stuck in a dark, dark place. Turning around, he could barely make out the faint outline of pillars and blockish stones of the walls.

Pulling furiously at the ring, and later pushing against the door, he found that he was far too weak to move it. After a lot of huffing and sweating, he finally yelled at the top of his lungs.

"HELP!"

"Federico, help! I'm in here!"

He must have screamed for quite a long time, but no one came to his aid. Finally, feeling hoarse and a little desperate, he wondered if there was another way out of this strange stone maze. He had heard from some of the children that it was some sort of old burial area and that it extended far underground and sometimes the passages opened up into crumbling tunnels that led into and outside of the city.

It was some time in the early evening and sunlight still flooded into the tunnels though cracks in the masonry. However, these gaps and holes were usually found high up on the dome-like ceiling and quite unreachable for the height-phobic Ezio.

Knowing that it would soon get dark, and not wanting to spend the night in this horrible place, Ezio quickly made his way to the nearest flight of stone stairs and descended into a dusty labyrinth filled with old bones, crumbling stone and some resplendent-looking sarcophagi. Although his heart was pounding like a hammer, he made his way as quickly as he could around the winding corridors, avoiding the bones and sarcophagi as much as he could.

Getting out of this massive mausoleum was quite a challenge as many of the corridors and pathways led to crumbled bridges and broken stairways. Rubble and dead-end pathways often meant that he had to turn around and find his way out another way. And all too soon, the light slowly faded into pitch black darkness.

Standing on a landing somewhere in the upper floors, he watched in terror as the light from a gap in the ceiling turned a dusky red and then faded to grey and eventually, nothing. As the darkness creped in from all sides, a nasty, all-consuming fear welled up from inside. Sweat beaded up on his brow as his eyes shifted around quickly, searching the darkness. The shadows took on strange shapes and it seemed there were strange flitting figures racing through the darkness just at the corner of his eye.

Out of intense fear, a kind of mad desperation was born. A slight burning sensation raced up his back, over his head and caused his eyes to smart. Ezio blinked back hot tears, and saw an eldritch, blue light flicker at the edge of his vision. Then, in an explosion of colour and a rush of a kind of static, the pitch blackness of the mausoleum was awash with a kind of strange, dim, bluish-grey light. This light outlined every arch and pillar and some of the stones on the walls.

Screaming in terror, Ezio ran madly through this eerie world. His mind constantly bombarded by thoughts of monsters chasing him, of damnation and of the devil trapping him like a spider in this horrible, nightmarish world.

He ran and ran … until his foot hit a stone and he found himself lunging forward onto a flagstone pavement covered by the dust of ages. Coughing loudly as the stirred dust entered his nostrils, he looked up into what appeared to be a sparkling, arched doorway, outlined in a whitish glow on an otherwise blank wall.

Although he was still somewhat panicking, Ezio got up quickly from the floor and placed his hands on the sparkling doorway. It was the one not-so-scary thing that he had encountered this entire nightmarish evening. The wall was cold and dusty and despite running his fingers around the edges of the doorway, he could not feel any sort of indentation.

Eventually, his fingers ran over a bump on the otherwise even wall. Looking under his fingers, he saw a protruding piece of masonry that seemed to sparkle more than the other stones on the wall. Instinctively, he ran his palm over the bump and pushed against it. There was a distant sound of moving metal parts and then the "doorway" swung outwards!

Suddenly, as soon as it had appeared, the eerie-lighted scene vanished. The little boy found himself staring down a long, dark, unlighted corridor. The shock of having the entire wall move away from him soon transformed into a new fear - of being completely swallowed by the lightless darkness.

Then, at the moment when he felt that he might just curl up onto a screaming ball, Ezio saw the faint glimmer of moonlight at the end of the tunnel. Crying uncontrollably and running as fast as he could, the little boy tore through the corridor at breakneck speed. As he neared the exit where moonlight streamed through a circular opening into the city street, he saw the multiple faint glows of a bunch of torches held by a small group of men who were disappearing down a sharp angled corner of the street.

"H- help!" he choked. The tears strangled his hoarse voice as he ran after the group.

Fortunately for Ezio, an observant man at the end of the group spotted him. There were shouts of relief and much to the little boy's surprise; he saw the familiar face of his father emerge from behind the men.

Fearing a reprimand from his father, Ezio held back a little, but found himself wrapped up in the embrace of two strong arms. He buried his face into his father's neck and allowed his tears to flow freely.

He never noticed that most of the men in the group appeared to be of the somewhat unsavory sort.

Picking up his son in a single sweep of his arms, Giovanni held the little boy close. The relief he felt was immeasurable. When Federico returned alone after having lost Ezio, he immediately alerted his network of "friends" who formed search parties to comb the city.

However, his relief soon turned into concern. Ezio was shaking uncontrollably.

"Ezio, what's the matter?" he stoked the boy's hair and tried to get his son to look at him.

Ezio merely clung tighter to his father, shaking his head furiously, he kept his tearing face firmly against the velvet collar of his father's long coat.