 Written by: Markuz, May 16, 2021 At long, long last our analysis of the ending of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and its context has come to its closure with an episode fully dedicated to the Modern Day part of the game, its hidden details and especially its ending, so SPOILER ALERT HERE just in case. We are going to briefly discuss the tangled and inconsistent narrative threads that came before Valhalla and how the game tried to reconnect all of them all the while trying to redeem Layla’s character. The article will also touch upon the Animus Anomalies before delving into all the little details and intricacies about Basim’s plan, how that is connected to Desmond’s sacrifice from Assassin’s Creed 3 and how he manipulated Layla towards his own goals, while also providing a confirmation to a theory that fans have been discussing for over a decade. Finally, we are going to discuss Layla’s sacrifice and her encounter with Desmond in the Grey and what might be in store for Basim in the future! So without further ado, let’s dive intointo the Modern Day ending of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla! First off,to fully get the conclusion of Layla’s story, we need to have a look at where Layla was coming from before the start of Valhalla, how convoluted her story was and how massive of a challenge it was for devs to try and redeem her character and story. It’s not gonna be too long, I promise. Layla was an Engineer that by 2017 had been working at Abstergo Industries for 11 years already. In those years she did everything she could to be promoted to the Animus project by Sofia Rikkin – no, we won’t use the pronounciation from the movie, we’ll die on this hill – but all her efforts did not bear any fruit, especially because of her attitude of going against guidelines and protocols.
During her research in Bayek’s memories in Egypt, she encountered six First Civilization vaults where she found just as many messages left for her, collectively known as the Empirical Truth, which were introduced by a narrator andthen voiced by apparently six Isu messengers. Now we have analyzed these messages in our Breaking the Code articles back in 2017 and 2018 but the gist of the messages was that Desmond’s sacrifice to save the world from the Second Disaster in 2012 was considered as an act of defiance towards time, whose algorithms would course correct the flow of events in order to cause another catastrophe to happen, as it was meant to occurin Desmond’s time. The supposed objective of these messages was to warn Layla and to trust her with averting this new catastrophe which was bound to happen once again… but this entire plot, which was supposed to be Layla’s motivation for the future… was almost never mentioned or even recognized by the characters and events at play in the second part of Layla’s journey, in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. In Odyssey, Layla, who had transitioned to the Assassins… off screen… and her Animus technician Victoria Bibeau never really felt or even mentioned the urgency caused by a supposed impending catastrophe.
In these messages the Empirical Truth retransmissions were only briefly mentioned and in negative terms. In fact, judging from the game, Aletheia hijacked whatever tool the messengers had used to send their recordings to Layla in Origins in order to send messages of her own dismissing what Layla was told about earlier in Egypt while she also elevated herself as a supporter of the humans against the other Isu who would instead manipulate them and use them as useful apes… Which is… kind of ironic considering both that Aletheia’s character too was hugely changed in Valhalla towards a manipulative one, as we’ll see, and also that Aletheia as a goddess in the actual Greek and Roman mythology represents truth. In another audio message aimed at Layla,Aletheia presented herself as an Isu who, differently from the other members of her race, didn’t mean to interfere and meddle with the humans but to enable them, and had even gathered some other like-minded Precursors to help her with it, butthis narrative thread too, was abandoned. Instead, in the Heir of Memories quest and in the Fate of Atlantis DLC for the game, we got to see that Aletheia showed herself both to Kassandra in Ancient Greece and to Layla in the Modern Day. In the Modern Day specifically Aletheia instructed Layla, who was still supported by her friend Victoria, to follow Kassandra in her exploration of three simulations that Aletheia herself had prepared, in order for Layla to unlock the full potential of the Staff of Hermes Trismegistus… although it wasn’t clear at all why Layla would need to have a fully unlocked Staff to begin with. Eventually, following Kassandra in Aletheia’s simulations actually caused the Staff to corrupt Layla, which prompted her to kill Victoria with “the throwTM”, to suggest that if she had known she would kill her, she would have never told her she was a bad cook, cause yes, that. Actually. Happened, and finally she even got to cripple Otso Berg. So by the end of Odyssey’s post launch we had an entire narrative thread about a new impending catastrophe that nobody had talked about in over 2 years across the entire franchise, and we didn’t even know how it would manifest itself on the world, we didn’t know how Layla would be able to avert it, we didn’t know what Layla was even meant to do with the fully unlocked Staff and on top of that we had a main character that was an inch away from being turned into a full on villain.Oh and let’s not forget that she also promised to destroy all Pieces of Eden. Now picture yourself as the creative team of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla in front of all that convoluted and inconsistent tangle of narrative threads. What would you have done? How would you have tried to redeem Layla?That’s where the ModernDay and First Civilization
So first of all, the Layla we see at the end of 2020 is way different from the energetic and annoying know-it-all character we have seen in the previous games. She is worn out. She is exhausted. The first things we see about her is that she is smoking and taking pills… and above all she is still under the influence of the Staff, which is now kept in a dedicated case, far from her reach. The reason why she was still kept by the Assassins amidst their ranks as a key player, even after killing Victoria and being corrupted by the Staff, is because she is closely connected to the Staff itself and the retransmissions, but that did not happen without precautions. Keeping her instability in mind, she was put in a new Assassin cell with fan favourites Rebecca Crane and Shaun Hastings, because they had already had a lot of experience with a quote and quote chosen one Assassin, Desmond Miles, who suffered severe cases of Bleeding Effect, which caused his mood too to be quite unstable at times.
Oh, and Valhalla casually shows that Shaun and Rebecca are in love now, they got married and are even trying to have a baby . We can’t stress enough how absurdly limited was the discussion by the community on this… But we digress. The second element we see at the very beginning of the modern day section of the game though, is a full segment dedicated to the upcoming new catastrophe hinted at in Origins, showing that the Valhalla creative team *did* pick up on that. In fact we can listen to a radio news show, featuring an expertthat states that since the coronal mass ejection of 2012, the one that Desmond helped shielding the Earth from through his sacrifice, the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field has increased exponentially, causing several kinds of issues across the globe and an infinite aurora borealis that can be seen from anywhere in the world, leaving scientists pondering as to why all of that is happening.[aurora borealis, earthquakes, satellites crashing to the ground, a good chunk of North America losing its GPS service. The premise of the Modern Day events in Valhalla is that the Assassins at some point towards the end of 2019 received a crypticaudio file coming from quote unquote “an unknown source north of the arctic circle” with a signal beneath it. While the signal gave them the coordinates of Eivor’s grave, located in the United States, close to the city of Concord, in Maine, the audio message told them to find the Wolf-Kissed, to find the Mad One and to find the sender of the message itself in order to avert the impending catastrophe that would hit the Earth once again.
He sent the coordinates to Eivor’s grave so that Layla and the Assassins could explore her memories and track her story up until the ending in the Yggdrasil Vault so that, due to some motivations that we’ll see later,Layla would feel compelled to reach it and eventually relinquish the Staff of Hermes Trismegistus so that at last Basim would be reunited with his loved one, Aletheia… But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Another very important Modern Day element in the game is the set of so-called Animus Anomalies parkour puzzles that Layla can find in the England and Norway maps. As briefly mentioned in-game, and more thoroughly explained by former Narrative Director Darby McDevitt in the recent Ending discussion, these puzzles are literally anomalies intentionally created and placed by Basim / Loki in Layla’s Animus simulation in order to tell his side of the story, compared to Odin’s side witnessed in the Mythological arcs. In fact, the Anomalies don’t only feature the dialogues between Loki and Aletheia from the days and weeks prior to the Toba catastrophe, which come from Loki’s memories, but eventually lead to the Hidden Truth video, which is also based on Loki’s memories from the Isu era as it does show Loki’s hijack of the Seventh Method, which we can’t see in the Ragnarok video counterpart as that was based on Odin’s memories within Eivor’s DNA. Keeping to the topic of the Anomalies, as we saw in our analysis of such puzzles at the start of this series of articles, it is clear that through Valhalla all the events involving the Staff, Kassandra and Layla in Odyssey, have been repurposed from an attempt by Aletheia to help Layla and the humans, which we discussed earlier, into a piece of her manipulative plan in order for Layla to eventually bring the Staff to the Yggdrasil vault, so keep this in mind as it will be important for the game’s ending. As she completes the anomalies in the game Layla discusses them with Shaun and Rebecca, stating that she recognized Aletheia’s voice and while discussing her, Laylaalso mentions that it was not clear what was real and what was invented from the Fate of Atlantis simulations in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, echoing what a lot of fans, including us commented back when the DLC was released.
It’s interesting to see the few messages and dialogues where Layla discusses her remorse, because in those Shaun and Rebecca mention that they do understand her, while her old team, after what she did, doesn’t. Maybe it’s just our interpretation but this, in fact, looks a bit like a jab from Ubisoft Montreal to the Quebec studio that worked on Odyssey, with Montreal stating that they understand Layla’s character – and by extension the player – while Quebec did not… or maybe we’re just reading too much into things. In general, aside from the first scene dedicated to show the impending catastrophe and introducing the Modern Day, all the other dialogues, including the Anomalies are optional, although very interesting content, making the Modern Day Ending of the game, the second and final mandatory Modern Day scene in the game… albeit one of the most shocking and compelling for hardcore fans in the entire game. It starts right after the historical ending that we saw in the latest article of this series, and it picks up especially because of the events shown in it. As it happened in Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, the lead towards the next step is based on an eureka moment by Shaun connected to Desmond’s sacrifice in 2012. According to Shaun, when Desmond activated the so-called Global Aurora Borealis device, the Earth was actually protected by a sort of magnetic field that looked like an aurora borealis covering the world, as shown at the end of Assassin’s Creed 3, which actually shielded the planet. Shaun then realizes that since Desmond sacrificed himself, that shield, that magnetic field has always stayed activated (that’s why at least in Valhalla Layla can see the aurora borealis in the US), and he states such magnetic field is growing stronger every day, hence why all the issues hitting the Earth shown at the start of the game.
It’s not clear why, maybe because of the presence of the spherical device, but the Assassins realize that the Yggdrasil Vault is where the magnetic field triggered by the global aurora borealis device originated in the first place so they set up to go to Norway in order not to turn it off, as the Earth still needs its protection about the potential upcoming new coronal mass ejections, but to turn it down to the state it was in, when Desmond activated it in 2012. Despite the expected issues that Layla might have with the Staff, Shaun advises her to bring it with her in order to reach the central room of the Yggdrasil Vaultso that she can protect herself from the high levels of heat and radiations caused by the magnetic field. Layla also has a realization moment where she says that everything she’s previously done and everything she’s learnt has led her to this moment although… Yeah, that’s… debatable. Eventually Layla gets to the Gates of the Yggdrasil vault with the Staff, while keeping a radio contact with Shaun. She opens the door with the pronunciation of the Isu language placed on the Saga stone, like Sigurd did in his time, and takes the elevator to get to the actual Yggdrasil chamber… where she immediately loses her contact with Shaun. When she gets to the chamber, what she finds is of course radically different from what Eivor found in her time. The temperature has risen, as the radiations have, as expected, following the idea that the chamber is where the magnetic field is originated. The tone and lighting have also changed from a cold blue to a hot red one and of course most of the ice has melted in favor of several pools of water, which also caused some of the bridges to fall.
After a brief parkour session in the chamber’s ruins, Layla reaches the Yggdrasil’s roots and while it’s not possible to reach it, the illumination is all focused on the spherical device that Sigurd touched to turn the supercomputer down in the 9th century A.D.. As if nothing happened, both Basim and Svala are still hanging from the Yggdrasil’s claws, even though their body has greatly withered in the millennium in which they were hung up and kept alive by the machine… and of course, as soon as she reaches the area, she allows herself to be clutched by one of the claws, hoping to keep herself alive while holding the Staff… but sadly the Staff falls from her hand… which will be key to the events later on. Layla immediately wakes up in the Valhalla simulation that she had already witnessed in Eivor’s memories… but a lot of elements are different now. For example, she starts from the final room, there are a lot of glitches all over the place, and most of the tables and chairs are amassed at the entrance of the supposed hall. This, again, is to show that the Yggdrasil supercomputer is overclocked now, and not functioning properly as it used to. When Layla turns her back, she actually sees a black room representing the Grey, the digital space made up of all the networks that encompass the modern world, a digital afterlife if you will, and the same space that Juno had been living in since she was freed by Desmond in 2012… before being killed off in the Assassin’s Creed Uprising comics. In the GreyLayla sees the three Nornir stating “The past we spun, the present is done, the future comes on faster”, to which Layla wonders if *they* are the ones that are pushing the Yggdrasil machine to its limit, as they state that they will keep weaving forever, in fealty to their master. Now, you might remember from the early articles of this seriesthat the Nornir in the Mythological Veil represented the calculations operated by Odin and the Isu in general. Following that, then, Layla is implying that the calculations, which are one of the main features that the Yggdrasil is capable of, are the reason why the machine is continuously working towards its limit. In other words, someone, the so called “master”, has been causing the Yggdrasil machine to create calculations non-stop in order to overclock it, thus bringing the Earth’s magnetic field to grow in strength and causing all the issues across the globe. When Layla asks who this master is, Basim appears, which immediately prompts Layla to understand that he was the one that sent the Assassins the message containing the coordinates to Eivor’s grave.
Keeping the ruse, and not telling her the full picture, Basim explains how that came to happen. He mentions a “friend” who we’re going to meet soon enough, that is there in the Grayto help him and together they used the calculations to locate Eivor’s probable resting place. Basim then sent the coordinates to the Assassins from within the Yggdrasil and through what he calls “the digital lattice that enwebs the earth like a Spider’s nest”. By that he means he used the Gray, the sum of the digitalnetworks that surround the Earth, like the internet for example, to send the message to the Assassins and it’s very likely he did the same to drop the Animus Anomalies in Layla’s Animus simulation of Eivor’s memories. While using that as an example, Basim mentions that at his time, at Loki’s time, in the Isu Era, the entire world was connected with a similar system making it, as he calls it, “a single organism of technology” and, in a brief line he finally confirms what fans have been theorizing for more than a decade about the Pieces of Eden and the First Civilization Temples, that is that they all commune, that they all speak as one and thus can somehow interact with each other, forming the so called Isu Wireless Energy Lattice which is not a name pronounced by Basim, but instead is dropped in one of the files in Layla’s laptop, when discussing where the Staff of Hermes Trismegistus is drawing its power from. This also means that potentially Basim may have been talking to Aletheia as he was trapped in the Yggdrasil the entire time, even when Layla got the Staff of Hermes Trismegistus in the first place. Basim then goes on to show Layla the spherical device, the same device touched by Sigurd in the 9th century AD and suggests to slow the machine down together, as the catastrophe is at hand after time course corrected the flow of events – another reference to the retransmissions in Origins. At this point it is clear, after knowing what is really happening to the Yggdrasil device, that Basim is tricking and using Layla for his purposes. In fact, reading through the lines (or checking the 1 hour ending discussion with Darby McDevitt), the game is actually showing that Basim is the “master” that has been causing the Yggdrasil to generate the countless calculations that caused the machine to overclock and raise the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field. He’s possibly been doing this since 2012, as that’s when the network of Isu Temples needed to shield the Earth was activated by Desmond, so the Yggdrasil was very likely reactivated at that time, making Basim able to… wake up within it and to take control of it, while still not being able to get out of the simulation because of the condition his body was in, after more than a thousand years. That’s why, starting on 2012, he began his process to overclock the Yggdrasil, which led to the dire situation on the Earth already at the end of 2019. At that point, after catching wind that Layla and the Assassins had secured the Staff of Hermes Trismegistus containing
Well, way to go for this masterplan, which indeed ends up with Layla accepting Basim’s suggestion, and approaching the spherical device in a way that mirrors Desmond’s sacrifice almost to the letter both physically and narrative wise. In fact, we see Layla getting closer to the device and slowly putting her right hand on it, exactly like Desmond did, and both acts of sacrifice are actually caused by the manipulation of an Isu that would then be freed from captivity – Juno in Desmond’s case, Loki / Basim in Layla’s case. So that’s what happens, Layla touches the pedestal and once… it is done [on screen: Kudos if you get the reference], and only then, Basimtells the Nornir to stop, meaning that he has the Yggdrasil stop its continuous production of calculations, bringing the machine back to its standard routine, and thus also bringing the Earth’s magnetic field and its shield back to their standard operational level. Of course, Basim disappears as he’s got what he wants, while Layla – and the player especially – are in for a treat. In fact, in the Grey Layla sees a figure seemingly made of light in the distance, laying at the base of a stylized tree. The character presents himself as “The Reader of the calculations”, a character that has spent his so-called new life reading the calculations in the last 8 years, that is, since 2012, from within the Grey, and on top of that his voice is that of Nolan North, the voice actor of Desmond Miles. So yes, as you might know by now, in this very moment Layla is encountering the essence of Desmond, who evidently transferred a copy of his conscience in the Grey as he sacrificed himself in 2012.This is also a confirmation from way back,
Desmond’s... or rather… The Reader’s task is, while being in the Grey, to constantly run and re-run the calculations in order to avert the catastrophe hitting the Earth once and for all. In fact, he states that by slowing down the Yggdrasil Layla did indeed save the planet, but time would course correct the events once again causing another catastrophe to occur, wiping out the world and the human race with it. His plan is to start from that very moment when Layla slows the Yggdrasil down, which is a certain fact, and run the calculations in order to find a future, a timeline, amidst the millions and millions of possibilities where the catastrophe does not hit the Earth, exactly like the Isu did during their time, and the tree that we see is visual representation of that, a tree of possibilities if you will. And yeah, there’s a chance that Desmond running all these calculations in the last 8 years also had an influence on overclocking the Yggdrasil. Layla, though, seems to suggest a different approach: instead of starting from that specific moment, she suggests going back to 2012 and see the millions and billions of possible timelines that never came to pass where Desmond did not save the world, but where the survivors might have found information about the catastrophe which could then be used in the real world to prevent the catastrophe cycle from happening again. While this surprises Desmond, this is not just a random way to show that Layla is a smart character. In fact, the files in Layla’s laptop offer an interesting precedent to what she suggests here. Indeed, this idea was actually developed by her in the years since she witnessed the final retransmission in Origins. In fact, in her notes she actually says that her Animus can’t change the past or reality, but it has the ability to suggest potential virtual alterations to the past events (which we see as the choices in the various games) in order to extrapolate what might have been and *that* might help her in the future, quote and quote “for a better understanding of what tragedies were avoided”, which is exactly the case now. In the notes she even calls herself a reader of the calculations like the Isu were in the past,so this reference in her notes from the months and years before the events of the game actually foreshadowed what she would actually do to stop the catastrophe once and for all. In fact in this moment she decides to stay with Desmond to sift through all the new timelines they have decided to analyze, confident in the fact that she would still survive the heat and radiation in the Yggdrasil chamber because she has the Staff with her… but sadly Desmond tells her that she doesn’t have it anymore and that’s where she has a moment of understanding. Now it’s not openly stated what she is referring to but we believe that’s the moment she realizes she has been tricked by Basim in order for him to obtain the Staff and be able to cure himself so he can walk the Earth once again… Whatever the reason, in this very moment Layla, who is presented with the chance of leaving the simulation and save herself, if she’s quick enough, decides to sacrifice herself in order to help Desmond find the solution that will stop the catastrophes from happening ever again, no matter the cost, no matter the time they will need to do it, which we believe is indeed the best attempt at redeeming her character, considering the mess of events and actions she was coming from at the start of the game. The moment she makes the decision, she is turned to a being of light too, indicating she has become a reader herself too, and interestingly enough, looking at this picture, they do both seem like two novel and digital Adam and Eve in front of the Tree of Knowledge… But there’s no time to linger, and now the focus shifts to Basim, who is finally ready to fulfill his 77000 years long plan. At long last he has released his body from the Yggdrasil claw, having it fall on the ground close to the Staff of Eden. Thus, he finally and painfully uses its healing power to bring his body back to the state it was before being hung up to the machine and in a final move that shocked us when we played this for the first time, he talks to Aletheia, asking if she’s still in the Staff, confirming that the final objective of the plan, as we discussed in the article dedicated to the Animus Anomalies dialogues, was for them to meet again on the far side of their doom, and be finally reunited after so long, after getting rid of Odin and his reincarnation and of Layla, the so called Heir of Memories.
And finally, once again mirroring the ending of Assassin’s Creed 3, a close in on the freed Isu character shows that they’re about to ominously walk the Earth again, to achieve their own goals… This could have been the last part of the Modern Day ending, but instead there is also a final epilogue, where we see that through the Grey Layla sent an audio message to Shaun and Rebecca telling them what happened and the choice she made and where we also see– plot twist – Basim, dressed with modern day clothes and of course a t-shirt featuring a wolf. This scene is… weird, because on one side we have this reborn and pretty dangerous Isu who is also very well versed in the Assassin arts who we just saw manipulating Layla for his own purposes and on the other one we have Shaun and Rebecca who at this point should be up-to-date on everything that happened… but their behaviour is… uncertain. It’s not clear if they are worried to upset him or they don’t want to fight him to avenge Layla because they might end up dead… whatever it is, they keep talking to him as Basim and his smirk try to grasp what has happened in the more than 1000 years he’s been imprisoned, even explaining to him why the Hidden Ones are now called Assassins and especially telling him the name of the new mentor, William Miles. Basim, to his credit, seems to actually be interested in taking the fight to the Templars, but to do so he actually asks to meet William in person and who is to say that that is his true purpose? That’s the beauty of Basim’s character after the Modern Day ending of the game, as he is so multifaceted that neither the characters nor the player can fully trust anything of what he’s saying without thinking he might have a second purpose to it. Thus it’s going to be interesting to see this meeting with William, especially because Basim wants it to happen face to face and not on the phone… IF that’s even going to actually happen on screen. After all, we’ve been waiting for that helicopter at the end of Origins for too long, forgive us for being a bit skeptical. Eventually Shaun and Rebecca decide to leave the cabin to look for William, while surprisingly leaving Basim alone and unchecked with Layla’s Animus and the Staff containing Aletheia’s conscience, which leads Basim to the final moment of the epilogue, where he walks to
So this seems to be Basim’s real goal now that he has found his wife. Based on the Norse Mythology and the mythological arcs in the game, he should be looking for Fenrir for sure, to see if he’s still located in the prison chosen by Odin, but he should also look for Hel and Jormungandr, the other two children he had with Aletheia. How will he find them? Will we see that in the upcoming DLCs for the game? That’s hard to say right now but having him as a new playable character in the main ending of the game cannot be by chance right?.... RIGHT? And that’s it for today’s article and finally, at long last, for this series too. We just want to thank you for joining us in this sort of adventure amidst the hidden meanings of Valhalla’s main game, and for bearing with us, waiting this long as we analyzed and shared our opinions on what we believe to be the most interesting narrative aspects of the game. And now we just have to wait and see if these themes and these topics will be picked up in the DLCs. Fingers crossed right? Go back to the TENTH CHAPTER of the series or go back to the HUB.
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