Chapter Text
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions
TS Eliot, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock
Prologue
Leonardo bent over his workbench, mesmerized. The markings he was frantically setting to paper seemed to flow from his fingertips, undirected by his conscious mind. They were lines, dozens of lines spanning pages and pages of parchment. They intersected, branched, twisted into patterns of their own volition. These were - symbols more than lines, arcane and unsettling when he looked too close.
But as he studied them, he could see there was a rhythm to each sequence, a dance, an ebb and flow. He watched how they unfurled before him. He had seen them captured in encoded messages on the scrolls Ezio brought from his travels, along margins of obscure forgotten notebooks, in warped patterns on the walls of his dreamscapes. This was not his own doing, though he had drawn them, and could not rest until he was able to decipher them. He could see glimpses of other worlds, as though looking into a mirror that looked back at him. They told him stories, speaking of joy, sorrow, passion and dedication - a shared truth, a unifying creed. And each path he mapped relied on the others, each line carried in the channel carved by its precursor. Some were ancient markings, and the paper they had touched curled into papyrus rather than parchment, the codes obscure and faded. (And there was one that stretched from antiquity into the distant futures mapped on bright white smooth paper, where the ink was too uniform to be drawn by a quill).
But he could see how they overlapped, how one transitioned to the next in a shared lineage of blood and belief. His hand moved in an unstoppable purpose he had not cultivated and could not control. And it was all laid out before him, the divine present and futures past.
Two markings caught his eye. One reflected fire, unrest, revolution, standing out like blood on a piece of broken glass. The other brought dual whispers of smoke and metal, the clangs of contraptions not yet created, and a certainty of disruption.
And these two lines balanced each other beautifully. There was a composition of form to them, one that would cleave a minute into seconds if he could just bring it into focus. He was an artist, he knew the beautiful and the ugly and how they each contained the other. And he could see how these two paths yielded to each other, the way a wave met the shore. There was space here, a moment that he could spin into futures past.
Leonardo's mind was always buzzing with possibilities, with worlds he would create and destroy before dusk, with plans and paintings and the beauty of every star in its fiery sphere and a beautiful smile. And… his smile. And what he would do to get more of them from that beautiful, serious mouth.
And he knew. He knew where the gaps in the pattern were. And he knew he could bring these two worlds together, smooth the abrupt endings and tie them together in the way they longed to be made whole. He could harmonize the world the way the heavens moved in musica universalis. He could build futures.
Well. Genius waits for no man. He moved a page and started to sketch the outlines.
I'm not content to merely capture the world. I want to change it.