“ He then remarks, to himself quietly,‘ I have seen enough for one life.’”
separated by centuries together. There was no better setting for this game than Istanbul, a city whose architectural bones are built upon the literal crossroads of Asia and Europe, closing the gap between old and new, past and present, Altair and Ezio, character and player.
The opening sequence of Assassin’ s Creed: Revelations takes the form of a letter Ezio sends to his sister.“ Should my skills fail me or my ambition lead me astray,” it reads,“ do not seek revenge or retribution in my memory, but fight to continue the search for truth so that all may benefit. My story is one of many thousands, and the world will not suffer, if it ends too soon.”
At the end, Ezio discovers Altair’ s skeleton in a lightless vault, a library buried beneath the stones of Masyaf, the setting of the first game. After realizing the place is desolate and he was searching for nothing, Ezio accepts the limitations of his own time and of his own ability to find meaning, as if in a moment of existential reckoning. Succumbing to a calm inner voice, he refuses to seize the omnipotent artifact hidden in the sept. He realizes that the journey that led him here gave him more than the destination ever
could. He then remarks, to himself quietly,“ I have seen enough for one life.”“ I have lived my life as best I could, not knowing its purpose, but drawn forward like a moth to a distant moon, and here at last I discover a strange truth: that I am but a conduit for a message that eludes my understanding. Who are we to have been so blessed to share stories like this? To speak across centuries? Maybe one day you will have the answers to the questions I have asked. Maybe you will be the one to make all this suffering worth something in the end.”
The best stories, like those of Assassin’ s Creed, are the ones that stay with us, that bridge our beliefs and reveal aspects of ordinary life we never knew, that deceive us with their maturity and passion, that make us pay attention to what we do. They not only propel us into new challenges but also equip us with the emotions to overcome them. Hence my decision to become a Honors History Major and Film & Media Studies Minor. Hopefully I’ ll see it through without a major hiccup or reversal of fortune. Because as the motto of the Creed commands,“ Nothing is true, everything is permitted,” and as such we are the architects of our destruction or the pallbearers of our success.