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Ratohnhaké:ton is a child of the snow.
Born during a blizzard on an unseasonably frosty April night, with the wind whipping at the walls of the longhouse and drowning out his mother’s cries as he pushes his way from her body.
He emerges red-faced and screaming, his eyes screwed shut against the firelight and his tiny fists swinging at the air like he’s already trying to fight off the world. Kaniehtí:io lifts her son into her arms and tucks him against the warmth of her chest, and she does not mind the smear of blood on her lips when she kisses his dark hair.
She names him Ratohnhaké:ton, ‘life that is scratched’. Her son is born from something already broken, and she sees a future that is fragmented and torn. But just as the snow remakes the world in heavy white, Kaniehtí:io trusts that he will gather up the pieces best he can and build them into something whole and perfect and new.
Yes, Ratohnhaké:ton is a child of the snow. He is a solemn child yet playful and flurrying all in turns; his skin freckled like snowflakes and a tinkling giggle like melting ice.
But snow, Kaniehtí:io knows, does not last forever. And so comes the fire, melting away the snow and taking her with it. The fire burns, and burns, and burns, and the rain does not come.
🪶
Ratohnhaké:ton is laid to rest on the streets of Boston on a snowy February morning. Connor emerges in his place in a swirl of frosty, wide-eyed youth; all of thirteen and aching with innocence.
Achilles wants to dust the snow from his long hair and wrap him in thick blankets in front of the fire to protect him from the cold. He wants to push him out into the snow with nothing but harsh words and the clothes on his back and wait for the blizzard to swallow him whole. He wants to put a knife in Connor’s hand, he wants to take it away, he wants to keep him and he wants him to leave Achilles to rot. In the meantime he sends him to the store, with nothing but a purse full of pounds and a new name that was somebody else’s, once.
The name Connor means ‘hunter’. Achilles watches as he walks away, at the misplaced teenage confidence in his step, and he pictures a wolf pup, gangly-legged, grinning with pride over the single rabbit clamped tight in its jaws.
🪶
The snow follows Connor everywhere he goes.
He becomes cold, stoic, solemn; growing upwards and outwards into a sheet of impenetrable ice. The playful flurry of his youth has left him, and in its place is something quiet and imposing and still.
The years pass, and they see snow dyed red with blood and ash-grey with gunpowder, friends gained and lost; betrayal and victory in equal measure. Battles are fought amidst flurries of frost, fights that see bloodied corpses frozen solid; blue turned red and red turned blue. Despite his gloves, Connor’s hands are never truly warm.
But oh, the fire. The fire inside him burns like death.
🪶
If you were to ask Connor why he likes the snow, he would tell you that he likes the muffled quiet that it brings, the utter stillness; how it soothes and silences his thoughts. He likes how it cleanses; the way that it wipes everything away and makes it all clean and new, if only for a little while.
It does not snow on the day that Connor kills his father. There is nothing to wipe the slate clean or wash away the blood from his hands. The horrid, rasping gurgle of Haytham’s breaths echoes in his ears for days afterwards.
Sakataterihwáhten.
Maybe.
Maybe not.
🪶
When the relief of victory comes, it is as an avalanche.
The Templars lie dead, and the British have slunk back over the sea with their heads hung low. But the snow, bitter and bruising where it once was his quiet refuge, has swept the world with it; leaving Connor shivering on his knees in the frozen rubble.
The snowflakes settle on the sombre grey of Achilles’ grave, on the shattered bow of the Aquila, on the blighted forest floor where Kanen’tó:kon once lay dying, his eyes damp with fear.
On the roofs of the longhouses, empty and cold, a memory frozen in time. Their inhabitants have been pushed out into the blizzard with their hands empty and their faces tipped up towards the weeping sky; forced out of time, out of memory, out of Connor’s reach.
The fire has burned out, the snow settled. It's a brand new world.
The wolf howls, its frostbitten muzzle stained with blood, and lopes back towards the forest.