Everything around him seemed strangely calm and normal - the buildings of the Vatican stood just as they always had, resplendent in the bright light.The memory of what had just passed in the vault came back to him, great surges of recollection overwhelming his consciousness. There had been a vision, an encounter with a strange goddess - for there was no other way of describing the being - whom he now knew as Minerva, the Roman goddess of Wisdom. She had shown him both the distant past and the far future in such a way as to make him loathe the responsibility that the knowledge he had gained placed on his shoulders.

With whom could he share it? How could he explain any of it? It all seemed so unreal.

All he knew for sure after his experience - better to call it an ordeal - was that the fight was not yet over. Perhaps one day there would be a time when he could return to his home town of Florence and settle down with his books, drinking with his friends in winter and hunting with them in autumn, chasing girls in spring and overseeing the harvests on his estates in summer.

But this was not it.

In his heart he knew that the Templars and all the evil they represented were not finished. In them he was pitted against a monster with more heads than the Hydra, and like that beast, which it had taken no less a man than Hercules to slay, all but immortal.

‘Ezio!’

His uncle’s voice was harsh, but served to make him snap out of the reverie that held him in its clutches. He had to get a grip and think clearly.

There was a fire raging in Ezio’s head. He said his name to himself as a kind of reassurance: I am Ezio Auditore da Firenze. Strong, a master of the traditions of the Assassin.

He went over the ground again: He didn’t know whether or not he’d been dreaming.