1944, Germany

Reality unwinds like a spool of matter and two bodies exit the jade green void. "Why here, sir?" Adelaide asks, her luxurious black heels slowly descending into the mud, "What's the strategical value, exactly?"

"I always did admire yuh brash choice of words Addy." The wet dirt ends where a stone path begins, "Though that may have been an era on mah part, mistaking a challenge of authority for adorable earnestness. Since you attempted to steal my empire from my apparent progeny."

Adelaide Winthrop is not a woman to shake in front of danger. Her pointed chin, tightened by ten years of bi-monthly botox injections, rises high while her hands sway loosely at her sides. " You were dead, sir, it was a necessary strategic move. That boy didn't and doesn't know the mechanics of the things we set in motion. If you had left some type of testament other than finances perhaps I could have deemed him a worthy successor to your legacy."

Thomas stops walking, his hands were, but his smile remains unmoved, "Yes, yes. Brash as ever. Though at 68 puhaps it's more of a...crankiness than wit, Hm? Here we are." The uneven stone is segregated by a wooden door frame that pours into a lavish steeple. caramel-colored walls and brass candelabras sit beside a velvet carpet, somehow unstained even though Adelaide heard voices echoing from afar down by the stage. A statue of Jesus weeps over three men and fear slowly rolls up her spine like death's cold hand.

"Sir...Thomas. I have served you well for years, even when it was not in my best interest to do so! Please," she begs. Thomas walks beside her his hands now in his suit jacket pockets with his pinkies exposed. Adelaide couldn't understand why despite her mind's cries for her to run away she followed at his side. Too loyal for her own good. "Don't let this be how I end...I was supposed to be apart of the Animati!"

They approach the stage and Adelaide sees three men. two are bald but the one has a beard, the other is as smooth as an egg, and in the center a handsome, clean-shaven man in yellow. "Adelaide!" he exclaims, "Finally. Why are you...why is she making that face?"

"What face do you mean brothuh?" Thomas steps up beside the man and it was only then Adelaide realized they were, in fact, one in the same. "Oh Ah see now, you mean the look of absolute terror? Ahen..." A coy smile rises beneath his reddish-brown beard.

"Adelaide forgive...me." The man in yellow says glaring at his dapper reflection in Thomas Alpha, "I was immature in those days. You aren't here to die sweetheart," he places a gloved hand on her glistening tear soaked cheek, "You're here to be rewarded."

"ya wanted in on the Animati for years dear, worshipped it and the gospel I preached long past the need to for mah appeasement," Animus Alpha says, "Well, here you are."

To Be Continued...

This is a brief biography explaining how Animus' grandfather 'Machiavelli' as he is known, became immortal and the passed the gene to his son Leonidus, who then past it to Thomas.

In the days of Jerusalem's reigns being held by the Catholic church two knights who upheld god's decree commanded the legions behind the holy lands' walls;

Baron Knightfall of the Hospitaller

and the Templar Duke of Newcastle,

The once honored Hospitaller was cast out of the church thanks to the greed of Pope Frederick II and his plots.

Though where one brother in arms fell, another rose.

Newcastle climbed with never before precedent expedience within the churches' order. He became the elite of all Knights Templar, given the tasks no other men would dare take or be asked to.

In the years up until his fortieth year, The Duke had seen many of his fellow men in arms die bloody deaths, yet he continued forward, even outlived Frederick.

Eventually his successor asked the Knight to acquire for him what only the divinely chosen were allowed to know the location of for it's own protection. But this new pope was greedy as the last, more so even.

The allegedly divine sent Thomas out into the wilds of the sahara on his fortieth birthday, with forty men, where he walked for forty days and forty nights.

The prints in the sand grew fewer as the trail of bodies began to take their place. Men dropped and died in the blazing heat underneath their roasting chain mail. Until only one made it to the forty first night where upon under the pretense of a miracle or science he was guided by the full moon into a lit path way of mountains, to what was sure to be his sanctuary.

Within the caverns he traversed with as much haste as his weakened body would allow, searching for food, water, shelter. Anything that offered the promise of another day. It wasn't death that spilled a cold wash down the back of the burned and overheated warrior, but the thought of a dishonorable death..

It was within those, what he later discovered to be catacombs, he found the cup of cupsl The Grail.

The golden chalice rose to his ivory chapped lips and sated not only his thirst, but his hunger, and even his fatigue instantly, and he never required them a day after that. This was over 800 years ago. What he did with the mighty challice is a mystery the Duke would take to his grave, and that grave has sat vacant for over eight hundred twelve years, five hundred forty nine days.

A chronological order of the Newcastle lineage as the events transpired in history.

1. 1845 - Memoirs of An Immortal (Machiavelli, the first Newcastle explains the birth of Leon Newcastle)
2. 1898 - Victorian Vengeance (The story of Thomas Newcastle's conception in England)
   
3. 1906 to1913 - Chronicles of Animus: A brief History (Animus explains his life in New York as an Orphan a century ago.)
   
4. 1951 to (?) - What is, What Was, and What Will Be
   
5. TBA

Machiavelli Newcastle

Leonidus Newcastle

Thomas Newcastle (Animus)

You've heard the stories, you've seen the news. Perhaps you've watched the unofficial documentary, the 60 minutes special, the tv film.

But no one knows who I really was.

--------------

New York, 1906

In those days New York in the summer was an oven. Perhaps some days a literal one. The metal of the buildings and stones of the roads would make one feel like he were a shepherd's pie. His innards the cooking morsels in the summer dry heat. But in those days we didn't complain, especially the poor. We knew no one was listening.

My mother had died- of consumption the doctor said. Though unless it was consumption of male dispose I suspect the more likely verdict to be death by rape and beating.

Never the less she was gone, and I was alone on the streets. Child labour was drying up as new laws were enforced. A seven-year-old on the streets of an American city, an immigrant that hadn't shaken his accent then at that, was forced to do many a thing an honorable man might deem...dishonorable.

It began innocently enough as a simple avatar of information, couriering it between my employer and the men he deemed necessary to weild it. My frail and dirty frame would stand in prespecified areas and wave a newspaper, shouting titles that were not on the page, stories that only interested certain men. But I'd never actually sell them to anyone who didn't know the return signal. These pages held stories not meant for mass digest. Eventually, I moved up from there to smuggling drugs, opium mainly, from Chinatown out into the boroughs for the upperclass horse fiend.

My employer appreciated my, gumption as he called it. He was a large man of mostly muscle and what space was left, hair. Built not in the way men are now of bars and plates, but steeds and plow. Hammer and anvil. A worker, a survivor. It was no wonder he took to this young rapscallion with the affection of a father to his son.

New York 1912

The Titanic had gone down , woe was the world for losing a basket full of rich bastards. The amount that sunk to the Atlantic that night died of starvation on a weekly basis in the city she cast off from, the city casting them off from her. But no one would miss them was the difference.

I had gotten too cocky in my time as courier. My favor from my employer clouded my judgement to the point of cavalier candor. I spoke with a fresh mouth one time too many to my employer's beneficiaries and eventually even to him. What was once welcome was now overstepping. He allowed me to sit in on small councils with local hands and I had challenged his decision. So he had to make a choice I now realize was necessary, lest the entire organization crumble.

I was thrown in a ring with boys with twice the years and weight on them, my fresh mouth forced shut with old dirty knuckles. He would watch. The other men would laugh and cheer and throw bills around betting, but the employer would simply watch with a deep focus, hands clasped ahead of his mouth. The one still hand in a rambunctious field of fisticuffs and gambling. I was broken many a time, left for dead. It took weeks to heal, one time months. At times on my hospital bed however my employer would throw in a wad of greenbacks. I'd turn my neck slowly, he'd wink at me and then leave.

It went on like that for a year. Until something interesting happened to a very interested child.

He became a man.

New York 1913

Fourteen years old I was, my accent had faded into something of a New Orleanean drole due to my english accent coupled beside that of my employers southern one. My close proximity to him made it rub off on one another like the paint of two carriages shearing one another on the open street.

In the ring I was untamable. My skills had become something like a prize fighter. A jab, a hook, a cross. Those weren't thoughts anymore to be designed, they were feelings to be acted on. Sensations that only required me to abide by my instincts. I was a champion. But then one night, the unexpected happened.

My employer entered the ring. Without his shirt on he was even more intimdating than usual. His hands wrapped in dirty leather. His feet bare and kicking up dust. I remember they had long nails, like an animal. Sharp to a point as though by natural design rather than personal.

All my training went out the window, as he quickly and methodically began to decimate me.

But as I laid there, my teeth scattered across the floor, blood painting the dusty concrete canvas, he kneeled down, looked me in my one good open eye, and he whispered something that confused me,

After he stood and kicked me hard, over and over again sinking his clawed toes into my stomach until the small holes began to become one and only the thinnest of flesh held me together. Just then, as death entered my domain. I felt a surge of unknowable energy. Blood felt like warm wine in my veins. My wounds like the cutting motion that had opened them were reversing. Zipping back up one cell at a time (I say cell now because I've grown to understand such things, then not so much), he carried me out on his shoulder before anyone else could see.

I awoke the following week, more lean, faster, even more intelligent. I understood what he meant. Alone, in a cottage beside what appeared to be a castle, I understood.

A man needs to be tried before he can be true. A man needs to be torn out of the old, before he can be born anew.