Arno Victor Dorian (born 1768) was a Master Assassin of the French Brotherhood, active in the years surrounding the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. He is also an ancestor of the Assassin Callum Lynch.[2]
The only son of the Assassin Charles Dorian and his wife Marie, Arno was orphaned at a young age, with his mother leaving the family after discovering Charles' allegiance and his father being assassinated in 1776 by the American Templar Shay Cormac. François de la Serre, the Grand Master of the French Rite of the Templar Order, adopted Arno as his ward and raised him alongside his daughter Élise. Over the years, Arno and Élise became close friends, and later lovers.
In May of 1789, François was killed at the Palace of Versailles as part of a coup within the Templar Order, and Arno was framed for the murder. While imprisoned at the Bastille, he met the Master Assassin Pierre Bellec, who told Arno of his Assassin heritage. Wracked with guilt over his past failures, Arno joined the Brotherhood in the hopes of avenging his biological and adoptive fathers, while also working to uncover the true instigators of the French Revolution.
Throughout his journey, Arno gained various allies, including the Marquis de Sade, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Élise, who had recently been inducted to the Templar Order and sought revenge against her father's murderers. Arno and Élise soon discovered that François-Thomas Germain had orchestrated de la Serre's death in the hopes of reforming the Templar Order, and instigated the Revolution to this end. When the Assassin Mentor Honoré de Mirabeau accepted an alliance with Élise on behalf of the Brotherhood, Bellec poisoned him, forcing Arno to assassinate his former teacher.
After killing most of Germain's subordinates, Arno was exiled from the Brotherhood and shunned by Élise and fell into a drunken depression until his lover returned for him. Arno and Élise thereafter resumed their mission to eliminate Germain, which they eventually accomplished in July of 1794, thought it came at the cost of Élise's life. Arno thus sank into alcoholism once more and resolved to leave France altogether.
Accepting a mission from the Marquis de Sade in Franciade in exchange for passage aboard a ship bound for Egypt, Arno crossed paths with a young boy named Léon. Together, they uncovered Napoleon's plan to recover an Apple of Eden from an Isu temple underneath the city and, though Arno refused to take action at first, he soon regained his sense of duty and prevented Napoleon's men from taking the Apple, sending the artifact to the Egyptian Assassins for safekeeping.
Following this, Arno decided to remain in France and eventually rejoined the Brotherhood, rising to the rank of Master Assassin. By 2014, his genetic memories had been studied by both Abstergo Entertainment and a member of the Initiates, an Assassin-allied hacker group, to locate the remains of François-Thomas Germain.
