They sent him out not as a boy anymore, but as one of the Brotherhood.
Arkan stood on the ridge of a low roof and watched the square below breathe. Lanterns bobbed like insects, and the stone platform in the center of the market was slick with the night's damp. On the dais a man knelt, chained at the wrists, face wet with the city's shame. Around him, Templar soldiers laughed with the new ease of those who wield power without conscience.
Saif al-Din crouched beside Arkan and spat toward the platform. "They always do this," he muttered. "Break a man in public so the rest will bend their backs."
Arkan felt something heavier than anger gather in his chest — a slow, molten pressure that had been building since the markets and the old woman's hands and the infant eyes in the alleys. He had seen cruelty before, but tonight its intimacy unsettled him; it did not belong to a nameless enemy. It belonged to men who wore uniforms and made law, and their indifference landed on families like broken tile.
Beside the dais, a stooped woman clutched a bundle to her breast, salt tracks like rivers on her cheeks. She had the worn patience of those who pray before dawn and beg at noon. When the gaoler kicked the prostrate man's side, she cried out in a voice that was half prayer and half broken rope.
Arkan slid from the roof and dropped into shadow. He moved as he had been taught—eyes always on the route, breath held between steps—but once he was near enough he could not keep his distance from the simple human scene. He knelt at the old woman's side, the rasp of her voice cutting the air.
"Who is he?" Arkan asked quietly.
She looked up at him, and for a moment the tiredness in her face sharpened into accusation and then into supplication. "My son," she said. "They took him because he could not pay the tithe. They call it law. We call it hunger."
A child—no older than eight—pressed against her skirts and grabbed at Arkan's sleeve, his voice high and thin. "Will they take all our fathers?" he whispered. "Who will work the fields? Who will tell the stories?"
Arkan's hand tightened on the leather of his own glove. He had dreamed of choosing sides because the Creed promised a cause; he had not expected the cause to feel like this—raw, small, and terrible. For a heartbeat he saw only the lines of his training: plan, execute, vanish. Then a different thought, stranger and more dangerous, surfaced: what is the Creed for if not to shield people like this?
Night folded over them and the group withdrew to their rendezvous. The camp felt colder under the stars, and the embers of the training fires looked small and fragile. The Master watched them as always—part shadow, part judge. He did not need Arkan to explain the sight from the square. The old man's voice slid into the quiet like wind through a slit.
"You looked at the people tonight," the Master said.
Arkan answered, his knuckles still stinging from the tightness of his thoughts. "I saw them being broken. We kill the instruments of cruelty, but cruelty keeps growing. What good is a blade if the root remains?"
The Master's eyes were impossible to read. He tilted his head as if listening for echoes. "We cut roots, child," he said finally. "But a root is not the whole tree. The world is not felled by one blade. It is altered by patient work. You want to move mountains with a single strike; instead learn which vines to loosen and which stones to pry."
Arkan hesitated. "And if patience means watching—watching children cry, watching mothers plead?"
"Then patience will kill you," said the Master. "Yet frenzy will kill us. Remember why we strike. Remember what we protect. There is more than one way to be useful."
They argued in fragments until the frost died on their boots. Some of the apprentices were content to accept the Master's lesson; others, like Saif, seethed and pushed toward retaliation. Lian remained silent, hands folded, her eyes taking in every muscle in Arkan's face. Yunus watched the flames and made no comment; his silences were the type that could later become decisive speech.
Over the coming days, their missions pressed on like a metronome. Arkan found himself walking through the same neighborhoods—their stone and smell, the same vendors who braided onions and the same mothers who dared not look in their children's faces. The Brotherhood's work continued in steady, surgical strikes: a corrupt tax-collector's ledger vanished in the night; a storehouse of confiscated grain loosened under the eyes of two watchmen who never knew the hands that relieved them. Each small success resonated as a whisper, not a trumpet.
Once, on a wet morning, Arkan was tasked to return a packet of medicine to a widow two streets from the river. He found her kneeling outside, tending to a neighbor's child whose arm had a fever boil. The widow's hands trembled as she accepted the herbs. "Bless you," she said, and offered him the hard, honest smile of someone who had known men who did both harm and good. The moment was small enough to be invisible; it sank like stone into Arkan's resolve.
But not all changes are kind. Eyes from the city began to watch them with a different intensity—Templar patrols felt thicker in the market; whispers hinted at informants; the Master's face grew more alert. One dawn, the Master gathered them and his tone was paper-thin with warning.
"There will be a crossroads soon," he said. "The Templars are deepening their hold. They will not be pushed by fragments alone. We will be asked to choose paths that bend men differently. You will be tested not for how well you kill, but for how well you understand what to save."
"How do we know which to save?" Arkan asked, the words crude with fear and hunger.
"By learning which lives, when spared, will protect others," the Master said. "By being ruthless where need is ruthlessness, and merciful where mercy will cause a rebirth."
That evening they watched a patrol execute a man accused of barter with forbidden goods. The soldiers were unstoppable, their faces blank masks as they read the charges and hammered the verdict. The crowd watched in stone silence. A mother clutched a child and did not cry. Arkan could feel the layers of sleep and small courage in that woman's hands. He wanted to tear the Templars from their pedestals, to drop them into the mud.
The Master did not stop him from hating. He taught him to temper the hatred. "Hate is an instrument," the Master said once, catching Arkan by the wrist after he had watched the man fall. "It burns as much as it consumes. You will use it. But you will not be used by it."
In the weeks that followed, Arkan's anger hardened into method. He planned raids that would expose the merchants who fed the Templars' coffers. He learned to read networks as the Master had taught—syllables of supply, veins of coin. He watched men in fine cloaks moving their ledgers through midnight halls and traced the trail back to places of hunger. The Brotherhood's strikes became less about spectacle and more about economics: disrupt shipments, cut briberies, free detained laborers quietly and quickly.
When the hour came for one particularly dangerous strike—a convoy of coin meant to pay a newly enforced quota—Arkan volunteered to ride with a small team that would intercept it at the mountain pass. They rode at dusk, the air hard and sharp. Lian moved with the precision of someone who thought every motion through before it began. Saif gripped his sword with the old, bristling pride. Yunus rode behind them, his horse a dark shadow, unreadable as always.
The convoy churned dust into the pass. It was an ugly, small world of guards and ledgers and heavy boxes. Arkan's breath curled in the cold. The fight that followed was quick, violent, and precise—not the raw, public cruelty of the square, but the clean, aimed efficiency the Brotherhood favored. When it was over, the boxes of coin were gone, the guards silenced, and several prisoners freed who had been bound in the lead cart.
Arkan looked at the freed faces—hollow with exhaustion but lit with the gentle flame of something changed. In those eyes he found the answer the Master had given him. This work could be small and meaningful. This was what he had become — not merely a blade, but a lever under a boulder, designed to shift weight until structure rebalanced.
Yet as they rode back toward the camp beneath a sky washed with dawn, Arkan realized that his choice would not be painless. He had learned to take life when the Creed demanded it. He had also learned to choose which lives to shield. Both acts cost him pieces of himself he could not yet name. He felt older. He felt more dangerous.
On the ridge where the camp rose like a crown of stones, Arkan paused and turned his face to the city below, thinking of the old woman, the child, and the mother who had not cried. He folded the image into himself like a secret and let the embers of the fires behind him warm his hands. His resolve narrowed into something clearer than anger or fear—a vow that his blades would be used to protect the small things that allow life to be lived: bread, laughter, a child's story.
He did not know how far that vow would carry him. He only knew he could no longer be satisfied with mere strikes. The war between Templars and Assassins had been fought for generations; he now believed its axis could shift if the lives jammed under its weight were considered, not just casualties. In the silence of the dawn he whispered, to himself more than to the rising world, "I will be more than a shadow. I will be a reason."