wolfsfussel

Altaïr rode beside Malik for an hour or so, the men were talking while the injured boy sat in the back with the injured dog. "If Stephen is dead and he was the leader they will replace him quickly and go on as before, it would have been far more beneficial to question him." Malik wrapped the reins tighter around his wrist and nodded, "I doubt it would have ended well for Maria had she been with him when his part was revealed." "We discussed that before she left and she felt she could trust him and would accept no interference from me. She is an independent woman who doesn't want protection." Surprised he had been aware of the situation Mal

Maria walked out of the small tent that served as her office, narrowing her eyes against the low late afternoon sun. There were a group of small children playing a few feet away with their mothers or sisters keeping a watchful eye over them. In the beginning new arrivals had been kept together to try to help the people better settle but as the numbers of terrified civilians crossing the border increased it became more a matter of finding them any place they could huddle together and try to wait out the war. Her hand reached behind her to rub at her aching back and one of the women standing in the group smiled, "It is close now your child wil

His fingertips trailed along the rough surface of his desk inching ever closer to the orb. A plain silver thing it somehow managed to looked harmless and benign at times but Altaïr knew that to be a ruse - there was more danger in this ball than all than the blades he had ever faced - the last vision the artefact had shown him had taught him well... It calls to you, luring you as a siren from the depths of the ocean dragging any unguarded mind into an abyss, drawn to your own ruin by the promise of everything your heart desires and nothing it truly needs. Would he ever be able to master this thing, this relic? Al Mualim had believed himself

Altaïr's patience was stretched to the limit. Maria was obviously in labour and refusing to be attended to. He moved across the floor of the room they shared and glared at her for the thousandth time but her smirking face told him she was still not yet ready to back down. It had started just before dawn... He had felt her weight shift from their bed and when he opened his eyes she was standing bent over one hand clutching the bed the other pressed against her stomach. He sat up, "Are you alright?" "I'm fine, it's just a twinge. Go back to sleep." He lifted the blankets in a silent invitation to her to get back into bed. He fell asleep aga

Malik and Tazim reached Masyaf with no further dramas other than the boy running from his sleeping roll to eject the contents of his dinner from his stomach. It hadn't taken Malik too long to soothe his troubled mind and he was almost glad that the boy was showing signs of trauma from the earlier events. Most of the novices in the training ring who witnessed his arrival were older boys and Malik noticed a great many of them were slacking in Rauf's absence. Altaïr came down from the study to greet them, for fresh air as much as anything else and Malik took the opportunity to inform him of the young man's "heroic, if idiotic" involvement in the