Reda

"I am a wanderer, always searching, never finding. Maybe one day."

―Reda

Reda was, by all appearances, an Egyptian nomadic merchant and child prodigy who regularly made rounds throughout Lower Egypt and Cyrenaica with his camel Amun during the reign of Ptolemy XIII.

Still alive centuries later as representative of the Thousand Eyes merchant guild, Reda toured England during the reign of King Alfred the Great, was present in Norse-Gaelic Ireland under High King Flann Sinna, and visited West Francia in the final years of Emperor Charles III's power.

Biography

Allegedly an orphan, Reda travelled throughout Egypt with his camel, mostly selling rare and legendary weapons and carbon crystals. Also a gambler, Reda encouraged customers to buy the randomized content of the Heka chest, a mystery box. In 48 BCE, Reda came across the Medjay Bayek of Siwa in Yamu, who was passing through the village towards Alexandria. Reda introduced himself to Bayek, offering to sell his goods to the Medjay if he needed them. By 38 BCE, Reda also extended his travels to the Sinai and Upper Egypt, yet strangely had not seemed to have aged a day in the ten years since Bayek had last seen him.

Without any known aid, Reda somehow survived into the late 9th century, by which time he had founded the Thousand Eyes, a secret merchant guild run by local orphans. While passing through the Mercian county of Ledecestrescire in 873 accompanied by an Anglo-Saxon man, he came upon the settlement of Ravensthorpe and met the Viking Eivor Varinsdottir as she assisted the Raven Clan in making their new home. Reda explained to Eivor how his guild operated, wherein completing contracts for him was rewarded with opals, which could then be traded for rare and exotic gear. Shortly after setting up shop, Reda entertained Sylvi, Eira, and Knud with an exaggerated tale of Bayek and Amunet's mission to seek justice for the murder of their son Khemu. Eivor heard his story as she passed by and stopped to listen, commenting after he had finished on its fanciful nature, to which he replied that all his tales were simultaneously "perfectly and mostly true".

In 879, Reda later expanded his business' reach to Ireland and established a shop in the heart of Dublin's market square, though he would not stay for long, moving again merely six years later into Francia during Rollo's siege of Paris in 885 and placing another shop in Melunois on an island in the Seine. Eivor encountered Reda and the Thousand Eyes again in her dreams of Svartálfaheimr while exploring her visions of Odin's efforts there to rescue his son Baldr. As enigmatic in the 'dream world' as he was outside of it, Reda told Odin that he had studied under Loki and would apply the lessons in an unconventional way which he claimed would let him survive Ragnarök, but remained vague and did not share more.

Personality and traits

Reda had an acute business acumen and respect for his customers. He also had a quick sense of humor, casually poking fun at regular customers. Across their various meetings, Reda provided differing stories of his parents' deaths, one of which was that an Alexandrian Phylakitai had caught them stealing and boiled them in a bronze bull. Later on, he told Bayek that his father was poisoned by his mother, and that she was later killed by a hippopotamus. When Bayek called him out on this story's departure from what Reda had once said earlier, Reda joked that Bayek's memory was off after suffering heat stroke in the desert.

Behind the scenes

Reda's tale of Bayek and Amunet's life contains embellishments of what is depicted in Assassin's Creed: Origins, though this can easily be attributed to the dramatic flair required for a storyteller. However, at the story's end, he says that "they met upon the river's edge [and] separated. She travelled east, he west". This runs counter to the events of Origins and both its accompanying downloadable expansion packs, The Hidden Ones and The Curse of the Pharaohs, since it is instead Amunet who travels west in order to assassinate Julius Caesar in Rome, while Bayek heads east into Sinai to work on expanding the Hidden Ones there, and then to Thebes and the Valley of the Kings to investigate rumors about a curse of undead pharaohs plaguing the land.

Gallery

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  Concept art of Reda in Origins
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  Concept art of Reda in Valhalla
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  Reda at his stall in Kanopos
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  Close-up of Reda
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  Reda sitting at his tent in Ravensthorpe

Appearances

• Assassin's Creed: Origins (first appearance)
  • The Hidden Ones
  • The Curse of the Pharaohs
• Assassin's Creed: Valhalla
  • Wrath of the Druids
  • The Siege of Paris
  • Dawn of Ragnarök
• The World of Assassin's Creed Valhalla: Journey to the North – Logs and Files of a Hidden One (mentioned only)