 Written by: Markuz, May 16, 2021 Hello everyone and welcome to our in-depth analysis dedicated to the game’s ending and the context surrounding it. This is not going to be your standard analysis of the ending though. In fact, we actually planned not one, not two, but a series of in-depth articles that will explain in detail all the aspects and context that are needed to fully understand the game’s ending along with the several references to the lore and narrative established in the past games connected to it. Because of that, we’re not going to start from the ending itself but from a specific starting point and from there we’re going to follow a logic and narrative path through several articles in order to gain all the elements and details needed to fully understand the ending of the game. That starting point is none other than the Animus Anomalies or, more specifically, the hidden dialogues within them rather than the final video – we’ll have time for that at a later stage. Thus, after quite some time not discussing the plot of the franchise on our channels we’re so happy we can finally go back to our analysis and so, as we usually say, sit back, relax and enjoy the ride… So, why are we starting from the hidden dialogues of the Anomalies? It’s easily explained. Sort of. In order to understand the ending of Valhalla and why Loki / Basim did what he did, we need to understand his motivations and those of his mistress, Alethia, and those are pretty much rooted in the Isu era.
One of these anchor points, as we’ll see when we get to analyze the events that took place in Jotunheim, is the whole story surrounding Minerva, Juno and Jupiter from Assassin’s Creed II to Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag and possibly beyond, but all that will probably require a dedicated article as well, so before we get into that, we thought of starting from
As you probably know by now, the Anomalies are not only interesting because of the Modern Day feeling they give to the player or the chunks of the final video they award when finishing them. They do, in fact, also contain these dialogues by two supposedly unknown people, a male and a female, that date back to the Isu Era. As mentioned by Layla in the modern day of the game, the female voice is Aletheia while, as we get to know while playing the game, through the Jotunheim arc and even during the end of the game, the male voice is that of Loki, the creator of the Anomalies himself So, what do we get to know through these dialogues? Let’s have a look at all of them in what we believe to be the proper order in which we should listen to them: AUDIO LOG #1 Female: I have spoken with the Mother, the Father, the Sacred Voice. They have assured me their success is imminent. Our people will survive the cataclysm. Male: Six times they have tried to save us. Six times they have failed. Forgive me if I have my doubts. Female: The Mother is working on a seventh. A bold solution...risky. But she is confident it can work Male: And what does the Father say? Or the Voice? They are strangely silent these days... AUDIO LOG #2 Male: Curse that Mad One, that one-eyed wretch! He has taken our son! Imprisoned him for invented crimes and locked him away! Female: As he said he would, love. Do you not remember his threats? You should have been more careful. Male: Have we no power to stop him? To save our son? No recourse? Female: What can we say? And to whom? Must the world know about our children? Must your wife learn of us? Is that a risk you want to take? Male: I must do something! Anything! AUDIO LOG #3 Female: My love, what happened? You are flushed, trembling. Male: An eye for an eye. A son for a son. For if ours must suffer needlessly to the end of his life, so too will his tormentor. Female: What...what have you done? Male: The poor boy collapsed so suddenly. Felled by the faintest taste of mistle-berry. With his father standing over him, weeping! (laughing) Female: Reckless, foolish! Were you seen? Do they know it was you? Male: (laugh) AUDIO LOG #4 Female: Wake, my love, wake! Soldiers at our door. They've come for you! For us. Male: Let them take me. I have no more fear. Let me air my wrath in the courts. Female: They'll kill you before they let you speak! Male: I'll appeal to the Council. They must know what the Mad One has done. Female: They are upon us! Now is not the time! AUDIO LOG #5 Female: Have you heard? The High Council has stripped the Mother of her title. For gifting our tormentor her seventh method of salvation. Male: The seventh method? Is it viable? Why were we not told? Female: I've heard whispers and rumors. It seems the seventh requires a human host. Male: A human host? Do you mean...rebirth? As one of them? Female: Yes. But it's a small loss for a greater gain. A risk we must be willing to take. AUDIO LOG #6 Male: The Mad One is away, wandering in lands afar. He searches for a way to resurrect his son. Asking every leaf and stone for answers. Female: We can use this to our advantage. To steal the seventh, the serum and its catalyst. Male: It should be ours. For all the suffering he has wrought. Female: Our minds are attuned, love. As sympathetic strings. Male: When the time is right, just right, we'll go. AUDIO LOG #7 Female: Ah! Stop...stop! Male: Keep still, love. You are injured. Now let me see.... Female: Ah! No..no more, please. Let me..let me die. Here. Where all is quiet. Male: No! This is...this is NOT your end. There is away. A Piece of Eden, a staffed attuned to this method of transfer. It may work! Female: Or I may end up like the outcast's husband. A beating heart without a mind. But do what you must...I see no other way. AUDIO LOG #8
Male: Be still, love. And let the current flow. Let it take you. Female: Is this ....? This is dangerous. It may not work. Male: Until we have the serum, this is all we can manage. Female: Will you not ask the Mad One for me? Ask him for the serum. Beg him for it. Male: He will not listen. And I would sooner see our world obliterated before I gave that man a view of me on my knees. AUDIO LOG #9 Male: My Love, Are you there? Speak and tell me you live. Female: I.....I live. If this is living. A mind without a body.. Male: And do you feel... Female: I feel myself. My sense of being. Nothing more. Nothing less. No pain or joy or passage of time. Male: And yet, you are with me. And I with you. And together we will endure. AUDIO LOG #10 Male: My love, the time is now. The cataclysm is upon us. The Mad One has gathered his trusted eight to his secret hall. Female: Remember the calculations. You must act with precision. Every small step must be accounted for. Male: I’ll remember. They are burned into my brain. Female: How long till your rebirth? Male: A long time, love. You must wait in your endless present, and I will sail the black sea of nonbeing. But if all goes well, I'll find you again. On the far side of our doom. We'll be together. Again. Quite a lot to unpack there right? So, while keeping in mind that the order in which we showed the messages represents the flow of events that we have envisioned, this is what we got to know from the Anomalies and through some of the events shown in the game. As we know, Loki and Aletheia have kept their union secret from the public and, at least for a time, from the higher ups in the Isu hierarchy. One of the reasons for that is that Loki already had a wife but, as we’ll see in an other article, also potentially because they belong to different cities, groups or castes of the First Civilization, and more specifically two that at some point have been on opposing sides of a war. But we diverge.
What we see in the first file is exactly that: Alethia tells Loki she had talked with all the three leaders of her side of the First Civilization and was assured that the Isu (or at least this specific group) would survive the impending cataclysm, even though the first sixth methods devised to avoid it, which the Assassin’s Creed fans might remember from Assassin’s Creed 3, always failed. This also tells us that these conversations take place after the methods failed and before the catastrophe itself. Aletheia also got to know from Juno that there was a seventh method that she was working on and apparently such conversation happened separately from that with Jupiter and Minerva, as Loki says that they have both been silent in the recent time. In the second conversation we get to know that on Loki’s side another Isu called Mad One, which is confirmed to be Odin because he’s defined as one-eyed, has imprisoned Loki’s and Aletheia’s son for invented crimes. This is directly connected to what we see at the end of the Asgard arc, where, through the Mythological veil of Eivor’s mind, Odin binds Fenrir, Loki’s son, with the unbreakable cord that was forged for him. Why Odin did that, is again the topic for another time, but suffice to say that he had already threatened to do so, as mirrored in the Asgard Arc, and that Loki was very much angered by Odin’s actions and especially by his and Aletheia’s powerlessness caused by the fact
This prompted Loki to give vent to his anger in another way, that is vengeance. As a matter of fact, he got to kill Odin’s son in return, through the use of mistletoe berries, another act mirrored in the Norse mythology, where Loki caused the death of Baldr, the son of Odin and his wife Frigg, through the use of an arrow or spear made of mistletoe, the only thing that could hurt him. While hearing of Loki’s deeds, Aletheia criticized him, worried that he might have been seen and that Odin’s wrath might fall upon them. And as expected, that might have happened. In fact, in the subsequent file in our timeline, some soldiers reached Loki’s and Aletheia’s hideout. Judging by the mythology arcs in the game, the house of Angrboda, Aletheia’s counterpart in that story, is located in Jotunheim, which, again in our opinion, represents the area of the world overseen by Jupiter’s group of the First Civilization during the Isu Era. Loki didn’t seem to be as scared as Aletheia. On the contrary he was sure he’d be able to explain everything that happened in the courts, even appealing to the Council, a political authority that had control over or was directly made up of the Father, the Mother and the Sacred Voice, as we’ll see in the next file. This, in our opinion means that Loki, a member of Odin’s group or caste, of the Asgardian area of the world if you will, was ready to appeal to the Council of a different political group and a warring one at that, as long as he could out what Odin had done. The next file in our idea takes place some time after that, either because Loki was apprehended and then released or more likely because he and Aletheia were able to escape the soldiers. In the file Aletehia mentions that the Council, or better yet, the High Council has stripped Juno, who was the current Mother of Wisdom,of her title, and that was caused by the fact that she had given Odin, here called tormentor by Aletheia, the knowledge or the technology to use the Seventh Method of salvation.
Thus, in this file we get to see that Loki and Aletheia finally know that the seventh method is viable and, especially, that apparently the populace was not told about it by Jupiter, Minerva or the Council, possibly because there wasn’t time or resources to make it work for everyone in time. Once our two protagonists get to know this bit of information and that they are not going to get access to the seventh method, they decide to steal it. In hindsight, what Loki did to Odin’s son gave him the proper time to plan with Aletheia how to steal the seventh method along with the serum and catalyst needed for it to work, as Odin was still wandering the world to find ways to resurrect his son. But their plan, too, suffered a major setback. In fact, Aletheia got fatally injured and the next conversation sees her close to her death, almost resigned to her fate, but Loki devises a new plan, that is transferring her consciousness into a Piece of Eden, in a similar way to what happened with the fifth and sixth methods of salvation shown in Assassin’s Creed 3. The fifth method involved transferring an Isu conscience to a synthetic body and then to a human host while the sixth involved transferring an Isu conscience to long lasting machinery, like the Grand Temple. In this case Loki plans to do something in between them, that is transferring Aletheia’s mind in a Staff of Eden, which initially worries her because there’s a chance she might end up like the quote and quote “outcast’s husband”, that is Aita, the husband of Juno, who was the test subject of the fifth method which, alas, failed and left him quote and quote “A beating heart without a mind”. This also shows that, after being stripped of her title, Juno was probably exiled (and in Valhalla she said she’d escape anyway). During the transfer process, Aletheia is still worried about this method, so much so that she seems to rethink all of this and asks Loki
Eventually Loki succeeds in his plan, transferring Aletheia’s mind in what we know as the Staff of Hermes Trismegistus, which is why we saw her appear in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey as a supposed guide for Kassandra through the Staff itself. Thus Aletheia enters a new state of eternal being while staying in the Staff and this is where she and Loki devise their final plan to survive the Toba Catastrophe: while Aletheia will keep staying in the Staff for thousands of years, Loki will have to find a way to steal the seventh method as they had originally planned. Time is not on their side, though, and the cataclysm is upon them, so the two turn to one of the tools that the Isu are most known for, the calculations, that is looking at several potential futures based on different variables and events through the use of First Civilization machinery like The Eye or some specific Pieces of Eden. It’s not clear what they used to obtain said calculations, but through them Aletheia and Loki see that there is a small and specific window of opportunity for Loki to get to use the Seventh Method and, in a way, survive the catastrophe. That is why Aletheia from the Staff reminds Loki to account for every step of their plan, because if he diverged from it, the future they saw in their calculations would surely not come to be.
And considering what happens in the final video after the anomalies, we can safely say the plan was a success and that Loki did account for every step… And that’s it for the very first part of our analysis, now we do have our first anchor point that will prove to be useful for our next step. In fact, in our next article we’ll take a journey to Asgard and will try to pierce through the mythological veil and provide the context for what actually happened during the Isu Era. You really don’t want to miss that. Go to the SECOND CHAPTER of this series or go back to the HUB.
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