He shook himself to rid himself of his demons as a dog shakes itself to throw off water after a swim. But still his thoughts dwelled on his mystifying experience in the strange Vault beneath the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican in Rome. The building from which he had just emerged, blinking into the unfamiliar sunlight. Everything around him seemed strangely calm and normal-the buildings of the Vatican standing just as they always had, still 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 had placed on his shoulders.

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

All he knew for sure after his experience-better 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 hometown 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 had taken no less a man than Hercules to slay, all but immortal.

"Ezio!"

His uncle's voice was harsh, but served to snap him out of the reverie that had him in its clutches. He had to get a grip. He had to 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.