Agaté
- "Our moment is now. With the kidnapper dead, and safety restored, my mission will be complete. I will find peace."
- ―Agaté to Aveline about Antonio de Ulloa, a kidnapper of African slaves.[src]
Agaté (c. 1722 – 1777) was the Mentor of the Assassin Brotherhood in Louisiana, operating from his hideout in the Louisiana Bayou.
Enslaved from a young age, Agaté came into contact with revolutionary disruptor François Mackandal, who taught him the ways of the Assassins. Following the death of his Mentor in 1758, Agaté traveled to Louisiana, a marked man, and hid in the bayou.
Agaté subsequently established the local Assassin guild, recruiting Aveline de Grandpré and Gérald Blanc, whom he trained to be his agents in New Orleans. After the Templars' presence in the bayou notably increased in 1766, Agaté went further into hiding, constructing a hidout deep within the swamp.
Although Agaté cared for his students, he was quite secretive in his dealings with them. Due to Aveline's natural impulsiveness and disinclination to follow orders, Agaté clashed with her frequently and eventually began to doubt her loyalty to the cause. Over the years, their mutual distrust of one another caused the two to grow apart.
When Aveline returned to Agaté in 1777 to tell him that Louisiana's head Templar had been her own stepmother all along, Agaté attacked Aveline, believing her to have betrayed the Assassins. His student managed to prove victorious, however, causing Agaté, who was overwhelmed with humiliation, to leap from the top of his treehouse to his death.
Biography
Early life
- "He calls himself François Mackandal, my own mentor – the leader, the priest, the Brother, to whose cause I devoted my life. He was put to death by fire. I failed to prevent it."
- ―Agaté, on his Mentor, 1766.[src]
Born on the western coast of Africa around 1722, Agaté was captured by slave traders at the age of seven.[1] Transported to the Americas, he eventually ended up on a plantation on Saint-Domingue. There, he became acquainted with two other slaves, Baptiste and Jeanne, and fell in love with the latter.[2]
In 1732, the trio came into contact with the Assassin François Mackandal, who took them under his wing and taught them to read and write. Unlike Jeanne, who was kept in the dark about the Brotherhood, Agaté, along with Baptiste, was trained to become a full-fledged Assassin, receiving tuition in the use of poison and weapons.[1] When Jeanne found out about Mackandal's violent ways, she grew frightened of him, forcing Agaté to cut all ties with her, to prove his commitment to the cause.[2]
In 1738, Agaté officially joined the Assassin Brotherhood, following which he escaped the plantation at Saint-Domingue with Mackandal and Baptiste; Jeanne refused to join them and stayed behind. For many years he fought alongside his Mentor, until a failed attempt to poison the colonists of Saint-Domingue resulted in the capture and execution of Mackandal in 1758. Abandoning Baptiste, Agaté tried to reestablish contact with Jeanne, whom he still loved, but found out she had been sold to a merchant and taken to New Orleans.[1]
Mentor of the Louisiana Brotherhood
- Agaté: "What is an Assassin without discipline? You will regret your insubordination."
- Aveline: "I'll take that chance."
- —Agaté and Aveline during an argument.[src]
After he arrived in the city, Agaté soon learned that Jeanne had already left Louisiana, her destination unknown. Following his discovery that Jeanne had a daughter, Aveline, who still lived in the city, he decided to remain in New Orleans and keep watch over her. In 1759, Aveline took it upon herself to rescue a slave, but was caught in the act, prompting a swift intervention from Agaté.[1]
Impressed by her dedication to pursuing freedom and justice, he took Aveline on as his pupil and, following a few months of intense training,[3] inducted her into the Assassin Brotherhood.[1] That same year, Agaté also recruited Gérald Blanc, Aveline's childhood friend, and trained him to become a spy and information officer. In tutoring them both, Agaté became more of a Mentor for the Assassins than a warrior, which made him a target for the Templars, who were gaining power in the region.[2]
Agaté subsequently hid in the Louisiana Bayou for safety, establishing a network of servant contacts and designating Aveline and Gérald as his agents within the city. When a nascent cult came to the swamp in 1766, Agaté, suspecting Templar influence, retreated further into the bayou and built himself a hideout. After he learned that the followers' leader was calling himself "François Mackandal", Agaté sent word to Aveline to come meet him.[2]
Following the arrival of his student, Agaté informed Aveline of the situation and then assigned her the task of uncovering the false Mackandal's identity and affiliations. Before his student's departure, he handed her a blowpipe to use and recommended she seek out the smuggler Élise Lafleur, who might be able to help Aveline in locating her target.[2]
Some time later, Aveline returned to inform Agaté that the imposter, who had been working together with Rafael Joaquín de Ferrer, had been eliminated. When her Mentor inquired further, Aveline remained deliberately vague; in actuality, she had discovered from the imposter, who had been Baptiste, that Agaté and her mother had known each other. The fact that Agaté had chosen to keep this connection hidden from his student strained the relationship between the two, with Aveline visiting less in the coming years.[2]
In 1768, Agaté sought to deal with the perpetrator of a rash of disappearances in New Orleans. Like Gérald, Agaté believed the Templar governor Antonio de Ulloa to be responsible and subsequently sent word to Aveline to meet him in Saint Peter's Cemetery, his last safe haven within the city. There, he gave her the order to assassinate de Ulloa to prove her loyalty to the Brotherhood, as Agaté found his trust in Aveline to be faltering.[2]
While Agaté remained in the cemetery, Aveline carried out her mission, setting up an ambush and then cornering the governor. However, she decided to spare his life in return for more information that could help her dismantle the Templars' slave trafficking operation.[2]
Regardless of her success in procuring a valuable Templar lens and learning more about the Templars' machinations, Agaté lost faith in his student, as she had disobeyed his direct orders. When Aveline then expressed her intention of journeying to Chichen Itza, Mexico to seek out the Templars, Agaté explicitly forbade her to go, though his student defiantly ignored this command and went anyways. In the years that followed, Agaté and Aveline began to grow apart.[2]
During Aveline's absence, rogue Spanish soldiers began raising havoc in the bayou, intent on seizing control of it. In response, Agaté set up several voodoo signs near the swamp's only road, in an effort to scare away the troops. In 1771, Aveline returned from Chichen Itza, though Agaté refused to acknowledge her and only grew angrier when she presented him with a piece of a First Civilization artifact known as the Prophecy Disk.[2]
Agaté responded angrily that she should not have unearthed the relic and told her to remove it from his sight. As she put the object away, Aveline attempted to warn her Mentor of the troops that had been bribed by the Templar Vázquez, though Agaté replied that he was already well aware of their presence, having made plans to outwit them.[2]
Aveline then offered her help in ousting the intruders from the bayou. Agaté begrudgingly accepted, instructing his student to silently poison members of a patrol as they passed his voodoo signs, thus making the troops believe they had fallen under a voodoo curse. Despite this brief success, Agaté and Aveline remained distant and would not meet again for several years.[2]
Confrontation with Aveline
- "You would fit me a coward's slow, pointless death? As you did Ulloa? I will not live with the dishonor. I--"
- ―Agaté to Aveline, right before falling to his death.[src]
After uncovering the identity of the "Company Man" during her mission in New York, Aveline returned to the bayou to consult her mentor, only to find that he was under the belief that she had been turned to the Templar cause. She attempted to convince Agaté of her loyalty, but he refused to listen.[2]
After defeating his pawns whilst under the influence of his hallucinogenic poison, Aveline confronted him directly at the highest point of his homestead. However, Aveline chose to spare his life, but Agaté could not live with the dishonor and dove to his death, thus committing suicide in front of his student.[2]
Personality and characteristics
- "Who-- Who are you? You look like a faithful student I had once, long ago. She no longer exists."
- ―Agaté to Aveline after one of her long absences.[src]
Agaté's experiences as a slave, suffering much violent abuse, left him emotionally scarred and paranoid. For most of his life, Agaté had trouble mentally processing his broken relationship with Jeanne, often being reminded of her during his interaction with Aveline.[2]
Nonetheless, Agaté appeared to be a very experienced and invaluable mentor to Aveline, reminding her that her impulsiveness would lead to trouble. At times, he was harsh with her in his words, but only did such to help mold her into the Assassin that she later became. However, he also showed doubt in her loyalty to the Assassins, and on one occasion admitted to having a dream that she had turned her back on the Order.[2]
Despite all of his concerns, he seemed to genuinely care for his student and viewed Aveline as his own child, revealing that if he had pursued her mother, Jeanne, she could have very well been his daughter.[2]
Agaté appeared to be a skilled freerunner and climber; on an occasion when he requested his student to meet him in the heart of New Orleans, Aveline found him perched atop a church roof.[2]
Agaté also possessed knowledge of voodoo, making use of it on one occasion during the events within the bayou. When confronted by Aveline, he used a certain hallucinogen that hindered her ability to see and made lifeless practice dolls appear to be hostile and human, as well as creating the illusion that he could vanish and reappear a distance away.[2]
Trivia
- Agate is a gemstone renowned for its bright hues and fine grain. But there is a Greek name Agathe, derived from the word agathos meaning "good".
Gallery
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Concept art of Agaté -
Concept art of Agaté's hut
References
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