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Compromise — Description

“In a clearing in the forest I crouched and regarded what I held in my hands: my mother's necklace in one, my father's amulet in the other.

To myself I said, ‘Mother. Father. I am sorry. I have failed you both. I made a promise to protect our people, Mother. I thought if I could stop the Templars, if I could keep the revolution free from their influence, then those I supported would do what was right. They did, I suppose, do what was right - what was right for them. As for you, Father, I thought I might unite us, that we would forget the past and forge a better future. In time, I believed you could be made to see the world as I do - to understand. But it was just a dream. This, too, I should have known. Were we not meant to live in peace, then? Is that it? Are we born to argue? To fight? So many voices - each demanding something else.

It has been hard at times, but never harder than today. To see all I've worked for perverted, discarded, forgotten. You would say I have described the whole of history, Father. Are you smiling, then? Hoping I might speak the words you longed to hear? To validate you? To say that all along you were right? I will not. Even now, faced as I am with the truth of your cold words, I refuse. Because I believe that things can still change.

I may never succeed. The Assassins may struggle another thousand years in vain. But we will not stop.’

I began to dig.

‘Compromise. That's what everyone has insisted on. And so I have learned it. But differently than most, I think. I realize now that it will take time, that the road ahead is long and shrouded in darkness. It is a road that will not always take me where I wish to go - and I doubt I will live to see it end. But I will travel down it nonetheless.’

I dug and dug until the hole was deep enough, deeper than that which was needed to bury a body, enough for me to climb into.

‘For at my side walks hope. In the face of all that insists I turn back, I carry on: this, this is my compromise.’

I dropped the amulet into the hole and then, as the sun began to go down, I shoveled dirt on top of it until it was hidden and then I turned and left.

Full of hope for the future, I returned to my people, to the Assassins.

It was time for new blood.”

-Connor's soliloquy in the last pages (pg. 451-452) of Assassin's Creed: Forsaken