Florence, 1476. Ezio Auditore is twenty-one and he does not know yet what he is. He knows that the Auditore family is respected, that he is talented in ways that trouble authority, that there is a girl and a rival and the specific vitality of a young man who has not yet understood that the world has a design for him. The blade in the crowd is not yet his blade. But it will be, and the game is patient about the distance between the young man on the rooftops in the opening session and the assassin the blade will require.