In the end, what saved Kassandra were stories.
Across the ages, people kept telling the same tales, anchoring her wayward memories with myths and fables and legends, making them real even when she started to doubt her own mind. Familiar names—only a bit twisted through time—still lived on through poems and plays: Hera and her rages at Zeus's infidelities, the twins Apollo and Artemis, as different as day and night, wise Athena guiding the worthy to victory… those well-known, well-worn yarns comforted Kassandra's weary soul like a thick woollen cloak wrapped around shivering shoulders.
The tales once told beside a roaring hearth fire by poets such as Homer were put to parchment, then to paper. And, as stories changed, drifting from their point of origin like a leaf being carried away by current, so did their audience. Figures such as Medusa, once seen as simple monsters, became tragic victims of the gods' cruelty. Clytemnestra, first reviled as the unforgivable murderer of her own husband, turned into an incarnation of righteous fury, while Medea was reclaimed as a feminist hero by modern authors. And so on and so forth.
Kassandra utterly devoured those stories. Gnawed at the marrow of them as if her life depended on it—which it was true, in a sense. The world did not change, she had so often told herself, people did not learn—and yet through those tales, Kassandra was repeatedly proven wrong. She listened to every wandering minstrel she met, read every book she could get her hands on, saw every play concerning the culture—the people—she'd left behind on her exile. Every time she felt like a wide-eyed child rediscovering the sound of her own name.
Then came the turn of the modern age, and with it the advent of a whole new manner to experience the wonders of human imagination.
The silver screen.
Through cinema, stories became a feast for the senses. There, the cyclops that faced guileful Odysseus seemed as monstrous as the terrible brute that had fallen to Kassandra's blade so long ago. Harpies were so terrifyingly lifelike that children hid behind their parents whenever they sprang on screen. And Kassandra could almost feel the sea-spray upon her skin as the Argo cut through the waves, to the awe of the audience, who surely had never tasted the joy and freedom of sailing upon the seas.
Some of these flicks were dreadful, however. In the 1960s, Kassandra settled in Rome, where she went on many dates with a sweet, but ultimately dimwitted Italian girl who was utterly smitten with the numerous actors who played the great hero Herakles on the screen. Kassandra… did not share her taste for these musclebound fools. Nor was she pleased with the liberties taken by the plot of those so-called 'epics'.
"The Argonauts left Herakles behind when his lover Hylas was absconded by nymphs," Kassandra tried to explain, one night they had gone to see yet another movie depicting the great hero's adventures. "Herakles couldn't have accompanied Jason all the way to Colchis. And that's not how he met Iole, she's the one who—"
Sweet Delfina had thrown her hands in the air. "Gesù, why are you always like that?" she'd shrilled, to the great amusement of a few men smoking cigarettes on the front steps of the cinema. Kassandra had shot them a dirty look, and they had hastily turned away. "It's just a dumb movie."
"His name is not even Hercules," Kassandra had muttered—and that had been the last straw, it seemed. Delfina had jutted her pretty little nose in the air, turning on her heel and leaving Kassandra to shrug and say, "It's true! Why can't people remember that his name is Herakles?"
Sometimes the experience was more melancholic, leaving her weary and wistful. For one, watching Rudolph Maté's The 300 Spartans had felt like being hit in the gut. The movie had been filmed in Greece, near a village in the Peloponnese; two millennia had gone by, and yet Kassandra had recognized that countryside—those verdant, hilly expenses, with Mount Taygetos looming in the distance—as if she'd seen it only yesterday. Here, Leonidas was a powerful display of masculinity, a strong-willed, yet fair-minded ruler who was a father to his men. Kassandra did not know why seeing something that was but a simulacrum of the grandfather she'd never even known had shaken her so much.
For some strange reason, she had always figured Leonidas had looked just like Nikolaos, even though it had been her mother who had shared blood with the great king. Perhaps it was that her father—stepfather—had seemed a giant to her child's eyes. Nikolaos had been the one who had taught her how to fight; Kassandra owed her warrior's edge to the Wolf of Sparta as much as she owed it to her mother. Myrrine (was that truly her name? Sometimes Kassandra feared that she was remembering it all wrong) had described in length the countenance of her noble sire: the steel in his gaze, the severeness of his features, the gravel in his voice. Still, whenever Kassandra closed her eyes, it was Nikolaos's tired face that she saw in her mind when picturing her grandfather. Even now she felt the same, shaking her head and thinking, no, this is wrong, as the false Leonidas enjoined his troops to fight on the screen. People clapped and cheered as he made his last stand, as he died for his people and his kingdom; Kassandra only remained silent, ruminating over half-remembered regrets. It took her nearly half a century to summon enough courage to see another cinematic depiction of the Battle of Thermopylae.
And what a movie that turned out to be, Kassandra thought with some dismay.
Kore ga Sparta no ryuugi da! Gerard Butler's Leonidas roared in a theatre in Tokyo, kicking that poor Persian envoy down that impractically large well (nothing of the sort had ever existed in Sparta, Kassandra wanted to scream at the top of her lungs). In Spain, people laughed at Esto es Esparta! while the French-speaking version of Kassandra's grandfather shouted, spittle flying from his mouth, Nous sommes des Spartiates! Every time Kassandra wanted her seat to swallow her whole. Why did she keep subjecting herself to this torment, she often wondered?
The truth was rather silly, it turned out.
Kassandra looked upon the actor's rendition of Leonidas and saw Brasidas instead.
It was uncanny. Could a man reincarnate into the body of another more than two thousand years after his death? This Leonidas impersonator could have been Brasidas' distant descendant—but as far as she was aware, her old companion had sired no children before his untimely demise. Still, the more she saw that dreadful movie, the more she grew to believe Brasidas would actually… rather enjoy it. Those scantily clad Spartans, with their bulging muscles and inability to speak without screaming, would surely have brought a laugh from the man's lip—and perhaps an appreciative comment or two. Brasidas had lived and died for Sparta's sake; he would surely be proud that his beloved city would go down in history as home to the world's greatest warriors—even if they had become the butt of a few jokes or two in the process.
(Brasidas would also have laughed and laughed if he'd heard Kassandra admitting that she found the actress playing Queen Gorgo—her grandmother—to be very oh-so-very pretty. He would have never let her live it down, truly.)
Kassandra first watched Troy in a hostel in Brasilia, on the small screen of the laptop of a German university student. Every Saturday they gathered in the communal room for a drink, a meal—and probably a joint or two (they were university students, after all). Two were archeology students, another majored in linguistics, one girl was doing her master's in political sciences, while the last tenant just lived here because 'the place has good vibes, dudes' (and because it was dirt cheap). All laughed raucously throughout the movie ("What's with making Patroklos a sidekick of Achilles?" the political sciences girl had said, when the credits were finally rolling. "He was a powerful warrior in his own right in the original text!" "And Achilles' boyfriend too," another girl had piped up, "according to Post-Homeric sources." After a while, one of the boys had added, "At least they picked a good-looking guy to play Hector, right?" which was something everyone could agree on, at the very least.)
Kassandra could barely remember what the man had looked like, to be honest. Instead, something in the steely gaze of the actor bringing Achilles to life had commandeered her attention, and a familiar fear had gripped her guts whenever he had strolled on screen. She did not remember Alexios' face, not really. They might have shared blood, but the time they had spent together as a family was but the blink of an eye in the span of Kassandra's lengthy existence.
No, it was something else that left Kassandra cold as she watched the actor's performance. The urge of violence, barely contained. The surging anger, ever brimming under the surface. The utter disregard for any life but his own. Alexios had been raised as an animal, a guard dog fit to unleash upon the Cult's enemies. He was an Achilles without the calming touch of a Patroklos, a born warrior who had been promised fame everlasting in exchange for glorious death.
Alexios had instead lived and died in obscurity, a mere pawn in the eternal war ever raging between Templars and Assassins.
I saved him, Kassandra kept telling herself. Much like his mother had prophesied, Achilles had chosen to meet his death at Troy for a chance to be immortalized through the words of poets such as Homer. Alexios had instead passed away in his sleep, an old man living the indignity of a mundane existence. Upon his deathbed, had he cursed his sister's name for stealing him away from his destiny?
Kassandra did not know; it had been six moons since his passing when she first set foot in the little Lakonian village in which he had settled at last, six moons since his children and grandchildren had gathered around him for one final blessing. Upon reaching the small estate where Alexios had raised a family, Kassandra had been greeted with cold looks and colder words in spite of the warmth of the Peloponnesian summer.
"Who are you, again?" his son Agapetos—a surly older man with eyes full of suspicion—had asked Kassandra when she had appeared at his doorstep. Kassandra had tried not to let her dismay show; she had been a weary soul who had seen more than seventy winters by that point, she knew well enough to keep a lid on her emotions. "I don't remember the old man speaking of a cousin."
"I don't remember him speaking of any sibling either," his wife had added from the inside of their home. She too had looked upon Kassandra with much distrust. "Who were your parents?"
Kassandra's smile had been forced. Brittle. Behind the woman, a few children peered at her. Was there something of Alexios in those wide, wary eyes? In those little frowns, those stubborn sets of little jaws? Perhaps there was, yes. But Kassandra had not known her brother well enough to tell.
"My mother was a distant cousin, yes," she'd said. "My sympathies for your loss. I wish I could have—" (Kassandra had shaken her head, knowing that nothing she could say could ever mend the breach that had grown—or, rather, that had always existed—between her and Alexios, that breach that had now widened to a wide chasm separating her from his family.) "I should take my leave, I believe. I would rather not impose on your hospitality."
That night, camping alone outside the village, Kassandra had dreamed of that first dinner they had shared as a family—she and her mother and Alexios and Nikolaos and even surly-faced Stentor, gathered together in her childhood home in Sparta. She had thought that moment the first of many happy memories, a sign that everything was finally in its proper place.
But taking Achilles out of the battlefield did not mean making a farmer out of a soldier. Alexios in peacetime acted like a defanged wolf prowling among sheep, unhappy and unsure of his place in the world. Perhaps the Cult had stolen from him his future as well as his past, leaving him a man so broken he could not think of a way to make something out of his hands besides using them for violence.
Still, Alexios had survived; he'd lived long enough to meet these grandchildren, which was a feat of which mighty Achilles could not even boast. Had the fleet-footed warrior himself not told Odysseus in the Underworld that he would have preferred to be a slave to the plough rather than a king ruling over the glorious dead? There had not been any movie made about Alexios's life and battle-feats. Perhaps there might have been, had Kassandra not intervened to pry him from the Cult's clutches.
Perhaps. For now, like her mother and Phoibe, like Herodotos and Barnabas, Aspasia and Alkibidiades, Miigwaans and Natakas—like everyone else she had met on this long and arduous journey—for now, Alexios existed in her memories, flawed as they were. That meant he would cease to exist the moment Kassandra gave the Staff to young Layla Hassan—the moment she would finally reach the end of her path. It had been him who had first spurred him forward—him she had rushed to save as a child on Mount Taygetos. Was she finally ready to say goodbye to her brother, and all the others whose memories had kept her warm through so many long nights?
In the large, ever cold space of the vault leading to fabled Atlantis, Layla turned to face Kassandra, gasping and gaping. They were standing in a place ripped right out of a legend, and yet it was Kassandra's sudden appearance which had stunned Layla into a startled silence. Kassandra examined the young woman's face closely.
She would have enjoyed knowing more about her successor—the very reason for her prolonged, unnatural existence. Kassandra had learned much about Layla from their comrades of the Assassin's Brotherhood—her complicated past with Abstergo, her natural skill when it came to navigating the Animus, her dedication to the cause—but she would have preferred if they had met before this fateful moment. Perhaps then they could have become friends; perhaps Kassandra could have told her all the stories she carried, could have passed them on to Layla just as she was passing on her duty, her burden.
But there wasn't enough time. Kassandra smiled, wistfully, as she handed the Staff over to Layla. Those stories would die with her—but that would be alright. As long as there would be people—ever-curious, wonderfully fallible people—there would always be more stories. Odysseus' tale had not ended with his return to Ithaka, after all; who knew what Kassandra herself would find as she followed her loved ones to the other side?
What a story it would make, once she would know.
With one last promise and prayer, Kassandra once more left Ithaka to set out on another journey.