Hey, if you don't hate me already...here it is: the finemezzo. Wow. I wrote this in one sitting; all in one go. So much to say, but I'll keep it shortened to two words: THANK YOU.
There'll be an epilogue in the new year, and then that really will be the final instalment of Everbound. Happy New Year to all; I hope 2016 brings you every fortune you could wish for!
Ready for the penultimate instalment? Okay. Here goes.
FINEMEZZO
The sky is the world's omniscient eye.
She sees all; she glows for some and weeps for others. She remembers. She mourns; she moves and in the morning, she forgives. But what she saw that day over Fort George was unforgettable. It rendered her heart so much that — for Ratohnhaké:ton — she slowed down time itself.
The very moment of the blast was the very moment Connor stopped.
It was the very moment he could bear running no longer. The very moment he turned against the tide of Templars, desperate to see what he may or may not have lost. It was as if a sixth sense seized every joint in his body a split second before it happened. It was an electrifying agony; a jerk so sudden that not even François was quick enough to stop him. It was as if he knew.
And right before his eyes, the boy-Assassin watched his family fall apart. It was the crash that started it. Billows of smoke started spilling from the tower, spitting bricks across the crowd. In slow motion, the structure rocked...and the roof began to collapse. Connor felt the clink of every brick on the ground, like stones on his own back. The building was not yet reduced to rubble...but it would be within minutes. Seconds, maybe.
If his parents weren't dead before, they were now.
The sky opened up her grieving arms to the boy. Without moving or changing, she swallowed the manic crowd and all of its sound. They were still there, of course. But Connor was alone. Just him and his immeasurable grief.
The shock was shattering. Simply shattering. Many more of his friends had died that day; hundreds of souls swept too soon. But this — this — was something he had not experienced in a long time. Not even at the death of Achilles: he'd expected that. In his bodiless stupor, Ratohnhaké:ton relived the nightmares of when he was a boy. Watching his mother trapped under a pile of rubble. A warrior reduced to a powerless victim. Nothing he could do to save her.
Oh, how joyous he had been when he found her again — how tightly he held his mother in his arms. How he had wept at the emergence of his father: not bodily, but his return from behind the veil of order, purpose and direction. How he had praised the deity that tied their fates back together, believing that no more harm could be done.
What a double-edged sword fate possessed. How easily, how cruelly it could slash the strings of their paths. The Assassin would never again see the weathered but warm face of Ziio. Never again would he hear Haytham's deep-rooted chuckle. Never again would he know the completeness of family. The beautiful fragility of fate.
Seconds later came the physical sickness. A knife, plunged so deep into his stomach, that every time it twisted he felt the heartbeat in his head and chest slow down. He felt the tears collecting in his throat, each one concentrated with so much pain it was poisonous. No coherent words, thoughts or even breaths would come to Connor. The sun's light passed straight over his eyes, seeing him — in that moment — as a dead soul.
He was.
The moment the sky let go of her grasp on time, everything changed.
Connor was forced back into the crowd with enormous impact. The bell had swung its last, but the rattle of the unified Templar regiment swept the boy along. There were few men who had not been evacuated now, but it meant nothing to Connor.
He hardly noticed that the other three Assassins had stopped. He did not hear all three of their cries as they ran back for him. He did not feel their fingers tugging on him; dragging him as if he was sedated.
The sky closed the last fingers of light from the Assassins. From a single peak in the clouds, she watched as they escaped with the last of the Templars through the fort entrance. She could not bear the foreboding in her heart; she could not bear to watch the destruction. So when the last man left the closed the crevice. She shut the light away from the world.
Seconds later, the cannons fired for the last time.
The booms continued; rolled up and down the sea front in waves. This time, the shots were aflame. The wind screamed as it was flayed with the fire...and whined as the balls flew towards the fort.
The first collided with gunpowder; the rest were fleeing men had to cover their ears; explosion after explosion set the sky alight. Seconds later, the great monster of a smoke cloud thundered upwards as one. The chain reaction was complete.
The ground shook like the eardrums of hundreds. A dangerous blaze orange and yellow and white glazed their eyeballs permanently, more colossal than anything they had ever seen. It was an image which would burn into their skulls forever, grief or no grief.
It was minutes before there was silence in the woods again. The Templars had ran and scattered and disappeared from the Earth, for all the Assassins knew. But there they were left standing alone: the only four survivors.
The choking blackness illuminated them ironically. Around them a plain of blood, rubble, dust, fire...and loss. Neither man nor woman spoke; any single word would reveal just how much their glorious, numerous Brotherhood had been reduced to. They couldn't believe it yet. They didn't want to believe it yet.
Nevertheless here they stood — three of them — with hearts sagging under the weight of tonnes upon tonnes of mortar; scream upon scream of death. They stood before the vengeful, fiery eye of fate and watched their world in pieces.
Connor was the only one to kneel to the earth. Only two lives could he think of; two lives could he mourn, fingers digging into the soil, teeth wavering, throat gagging with the sickness of it all. Not even the presence of François, Aveline and Eva could comfort him. Nothing could. Not even the sky; not even the whole of nature. Nature herself was mourning a terrible mistake: the death of a love bound so strongly by destiny.
There and then, Connor Kenway learned a lesson he should never have had to. It was a lesson, in the heavy silence of the woods, which spoke to him softly. A lesson his mother would never live to learn; a lesson his father would never live to hear.
Even fate is a contradiction.
Tumblr: nothing-lesss (three 's'es)