The Starry Maiden

My Sister's Keeper

Astraea

Island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, 2017

This has certainly been a lot longer than I had hoped when I had put myself into Ilios' stasis device. I wonder when I would have woken up if it hadn't been for the earthquake that shattered the whole thing. I had come to completely disoriented, and alone. It had woken me up during what is called the "Golden Age" of Ancient Greece by scholars now. Scant years after the death of Perikles, now recognized as the father of democracy. Which was about two thousand years earlier than I had wanted... Mind, that is less time than Dike and I had been traveling the ancient world together... But the earthquake had not only awoken me; it had also completely destroyed what little had been left of Ilios' laboratory facility. After all the years it sat there, I suppose it was lucky that it lasted that long in functioning order. So, I suppose that makes me lucky for it having cut my waking time into a fraction of what it would have been.

But now... I look out over the Tyrrhenian Sea and breathe deeply. It's finally time.

I watch as the menacing black clouds sail over Vesuvius speeding towards where I am aboard a ferry minutes away from the scariest moment of my life at that point. I finish getting myself ready for a long swim.

I have been in hacking into the weather monitoring equipment hooked to the internet in this area to keep an eye on how the currents are fairing. Luckily, that is a fairly lowkey hack that won't garner the attention of anyone important such as the likes of Abstergo, the Brotherhood, or Erudito...

And now I have a loose goal of where I am going to plant myself to be miraculously 'found' on a deserted island. Deserted being a relative term. I found a smattering of islands that are decently out of the way, but ones that some locals use are base jumps for longer recreational boat trips. My odds of being found are pretty high, but they are deserted enough that it could take a while... Which is something I want. My body type is so completely different now that I need something to attribute it to. Minor starvation could do it. So long as no one looks too closely.

The real problem is going to be with my family. I'm going to have to be very careful to never let them see my bare skin. I may be more durable than most people but I'm not indestructible. And that shows with how many scars I've earned over the last two millennia... Luckily, the three scars on my face are easily hidden and light enough that a light layer of foundation ought to cover them just fine.

I look back to the storm and feel the energy coming from it. Something I hadn't been able to perceive then. That storm is anything but natural. I wonder whether it was always meant to happen the way it did... And if so, what made it that way... No Isu ever took credit for my existence back then and, despite the thousands of Isu sites I've seen in my search for the vault left by Astraeus and Eos, I never found evidence of research about what could have changed me anywhere.

I wade into the water and begin a well-paced swim in the direction of the small collection of semi-deserted islands.

As I suspected, it has taken long enough that a normal person would have begun to feel the effects of not only dehydration but minor starvation as well. I've spotted a few boats too far off in the distance in the time since I arrived on this little island, and by my count it's been around 14 days. Which someone who would have been at my body type would have lived this long well enough with water, like I have made sure to have a source of.

I light the fire I had built and begin to wave at a sailboat. That seems to be aiming for this little island for a rest stop.

The unfortunately strange circumstances of my falling off the ferry will have garnered some attention but hopefully it more or less has stayed local between the nearby communities in Italy and my home city in Canada. I have hopes for a nice couple of decades away from the whole Templar-Assassin conflict to spend that time with my family. I have gone to some pretty drastic preparations in order to hide my presence from all involved parties. Many of these preparations having been put in motion more than a couple of decades ago.