Outside Florence, Summer 1501
The city was full of eyes.
That truth had settled into Elias's bones like humidity in old parchment. One shared glance too many, one pattern repeated, and his carefully stitched illusion would unravel.
He needed space. Not to escape—but to breathe. To divide his identities further apart.
A plan took shape: a quiet villa in the countryside, no more than a day's ride from Florence. Modest. Unremarkable. But wholly his.
---
The Purchase Was Invisible
Through Niccolò's persona, he contacted a minor notary in San Casciano, a sleepy hillside town with a dwindling population and fertile soil.
The villa was bought in the name of a dead sailor's son, whose documents he had acquired years earlier. The trail was fragmented, forged, and untraceable.
He paid in coin through a middleman—never once signing a paper himself.
The property became known to the locals as "La Casa dei Due Silenzi" — "The House of Two Silences."
---
He Built It With Purpose
Not for grandeur. For secrecy and control.
A hidden cellar with two exits.
A concealed chamber beneath the stables.
A small private chapel where he could "confess" to no one.
And a mirror, set within the library wall—not for vanity, but for daily face rehearsal.
Here, Elias trained his second skin—Niccolò—perfecting the limp, the lower voice, the change in breath.
He began sketching other faces in charcoal. Not yet alive. But soon.
---
The First Whisper of Legacy
By candlelight, he reread the journals he had written over the past year. Notes on coinage, grain prices, naval movements, and the whispers of strange weather patterns.
He added a new entry:
> "When I am old, I will have a son. And that son will be me.
Not merely a name—my soul, my memory, my will.
He will be born from the union of flesh, but shaped by the burden of truth."
He would not stay young forever. That would draw suspicion.
Instead, he would age like any man, and when the time came—he would give the world a son.
And then another.
Each child is another version of himself. The face would change. The mind would continue.
---
But Secrecy Demands Sacrifice
He learned that one of the Salvini apprentices—a boy named Tommaso—had spoken in passing about how much Niccolò "resembled that young banker's son, Elias."
It was said as a joke.
But jokes, Elias knew, were only truth wearing a smile.
Two nights later, Tommaso's body was found in the Arno.
The cause? "An accident. Wine and river don't mix," the gossips said.
But Elias knew better.
> "Anyone who learns the truth must vanish. Even the innocent. Especially the innocent."
---
From the Hills, He Watched the City Burn Gold
Back at the villa, standing on the slope beneath an olive tree, Elias looked toward Florence, its towers golden in the dusk.
One life was already being carved into two.
But soon, he would need more.
More lives.
More faces.
More distance between each mask.
Because eternity, he knew, was not a gift.
It was a labyrinth.
And he was already deep within it.