The sea was the strangest of sights in the world of ideas. Because this realm was shaped by observation and the fantasies of the living, the sea had become quite the mystical place.


    The endless body of water was too salty to host most life and there was no reason to navigate it besides some commercial routes that were faster than land with favorable winds, but most didn''t bother as all commerce could be done on foot.


    Umar had never known how true that would become.


    As he was nothing more than a wisp of a dead person, his interaction with the realm of the dead was… different from what assassins that only peered through their still-breathing bodies. From the port city of Aramita, Umar took a step onto the water.


    And he floated.


    Apparently, a figment of a person''s cognition could walk on water. Who would have thought?


    For a moment he would have expected that the journey would have been as simple as walking on the ocean for a few minutes, after all, because no one was observing it actively nor living on it that meant that it would be infinitely smaller than a city in this plane of existence.


    But alas, the weight of legends and fantasies was forced onto him.


    The citizens of Ydaz were used to deserts of a myriad sands that expanded further than the eye could see, so they were acquainted with them. Stories of monsters sleeping underneath the sands didn''t faze them, but the same couldn''t be said for the dunes made out of water instead of sand. Ydazi people had a fascination with the sea. A sea whose dunes constantly moved in an ebb and flow, a land whose soil was liquid instead of solid.


    Those fascinations played against him.


    The ocean should have been small, trivial, but he was met with mountains and valleys of ever-changing shape, reaching hundreds if not thousands of meters. He may be able to walk on top of the water, but he was still affected by the powerful currents.


    "Dunes!" He screamed as a powerful current lifted him upwards. Like a reverse waterfall, he was pulled to the heavens by one of the almost vertical faces of the saltwater mountains.


    If it weren''t because he was a fleeting thought, an already-dead man, he would have feared. But there was nothing else that could kill him.


    Besides oblivion, that was.


    The old assassin couldn''t drown. The old assassin couldn''t be hurt from falls as great as the heavens.


    That didn''t stop the currents from pushing him down to the bottom of the ocean.


    Anyone else would have been terrified, but Umar… was quite ecstatic at the sight. The world of ideas already had a cyan tinge to every detail, but that held truer than ever with the bottom of the ocean. The caustics of the water were exaggerated down here, clearly a product of human imagination rather than the real actual phenomena. The lights were so potent and created such vivid imagery that it reminded him of the northern lights of the tundra of Loyata. Although instead of green and pink, these were grey, white, and cyan.


    Not a more beautiful sight, but another sight. People tended to compare and put arbitrary scores to sceneries, but age had taught Umar that there weren''t better or uglier sights, they just were. The beauty of the golden sands couldn''t be compared to the singed whiteness of the snow. They were their own thing, and that was good.


    "I should get out of here." He murmured underwater as he saw movements in his periphery.


    If the legends of great storms and walls of water had formed literal heaven-scraping mountains, then heavens knew what the maritime monsters could be in this reality.


    By all accounts, monsters couldn''t exist in the world of ideas. There weren''t any sapient or living entities in this realm, only the perception of them. He had traveled the whole Qiraji desert and failed to find djinns, dwellers, rocs, sandwalkers, and whatnot.


    And that was even counting his years alive, not even now in his ''un-death''.


    But legends were more exaggerated by the inhabitants of the desert.


    With some difficulty, Umar found a current that pushed him back to the surface. He took a deep breath as he surfaced as a reflex, even if he no longer needed air thanks to his lack of a body. The fact that he could unconsciously do that relieved him a bit. It was a vestige of his lost humanity. And he would do anything to get it back.


    After a handful of days, he was able to find a purchase in the shape of land. Instantly, he knew he wasn''t in Ydaz anymore.


    It felt wrong saying it, but he had a… connection to his homeland. A mental link that told him "You''ve lived here all your life, born and died here", but he no longer felt that link. And even if he did, the vegetation already told him everything he needed to know.


    The most vegetation someone would find in Ydaz would either be in noble greenhouses, sparse oases, or farmlands birthed from the blood of the sultanah. But those places still were desertic, those still carried the thoughts and legends of the sands with them.


    This place didn''t.Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    Trees tall as houses. Undergrowth as thick as waste water. All he could see was vegetation, and that unsettled him. It was even hard to see the soil, there was too much plant life to feel the land. It was even more unsettling once he considered that plants should be green, but such color didn''t exist in this realm. The best his senses could catch was vague cyan silhouettes to give a hint of color to the foliage.


    "Well, here I am. On the lands across the oceans." Umar''s voice was carried in all directions, yet nothing responded. Not even the Greater Understanding. "Answer me! What should I do now?"


    The old man grunted as silence was all he was met by and continued walking. He still had a few months of life thanks to Karaim''s granddaughter acknowledgement, but that gained cognition was fading away. He needed to find answers and solutions fast.


    The thick forest disoriented him a bit. It was big in the sense of the ocean, artificially born out of the collective unconsciousness, but not as expansive as it should be. The foliage was dense and the trees tall, but it only took him a few minutes to walk out of it as it lacked the gathered cognition typical of human habitation.


    "This looks like… Oops." Umar held himself to that thought. His time in this world was already limited, and the more he thought, the shorter he would cut it. He had to mindlessly move around lest he wanted to die out of… thoughtlessness? "Nope, don''t think about it. Coming up with a term requires too much computational power. Move on."


    The humid-looking forest ended quite abruptly, if that was the case in the world of the living or just a byproduct of cognition, he couldn''t know. The vast undergrowth was substituted by mud and dirty waters as he arrived at some sort of floodplain. He had never seen a flooded landscape quite like this, but it reminded him of the delta of the Eyana River at Sadina or the Loyatan fjords.


    But way muddier.


    He skipped around the small patches of land he could find as his first attempt to traverse the floodplains had caused him to nearly sink. This water isn''t walkable, got it. Whether it was the effect of observation from other people who had sunk or just because the ocean worked differently, Umar didn''t want to risk swimming in mud.


    His journey across the floodplains was more tedious and longer than the thick forest as space was mostly existent here, meaning there should be people nearby. And after a handful of hours of sluggishly trudging the islands of dirt, he managed to find… something.


    A city it was not, but at the same time, it wasn''t like any of the villages he had once known. Not the sandstone of Ydaz, nor the wood of Loyata, but instead the houses were made out of leaves and mud. Well, there were also mud buildings in Ydaz, but the color of the soil was different enough to surprise him.


    Unfortunately for him, Umar couldn''t get a good look at these foreign people beyond the ocean. His weakened self didn''t have enough power to gift them with the observation to define their image. The clothes and weaponry lingering around did give them an idea of their technological level, and they didn''t seem to have mastered metalworking quite yet.


    They had trinkets made out of soft-looking metals like copper or gold, but their preferred method of weapon-making was through some sort of crystalline stone instead of metals. Umar''s observations were fickle at best as he could only see outlines devoid of any color. Glass was quite an interesting sight in the world of ideas, though. He could already see through most entities if he ignored them enough, but glass seemed to be always present yet always invisible. A difficult state to describe.


    "The Greater Understanding guided me here. There should be something. Anything at all." The shadow murmured in growing desperation as he oversaw some children playing a game of ball that consisted of kicking a ball over a horizontal hoop on the wall.


    Umar lingered in the village for a few more days, his head completely devoid of thoughts. He could almost stay indefinitely in the realm this way, thoughtless for eternity, but besides that being no way of living, he wasn''t perfect. As much as the assassins took pride in being ''shadows'', he wasn''t a real entity of penumbra at all. He had thoughts, ideas, wills, and dreams. Those were things that uselessly and constantly drained his energies and existence.


    It was inevitable. He was fading.


    "No," the Shadow stated. "I refuse to vanish. I refuse to die. Until my last breath, until my last thought, I will continue trying to find a way to ignore you. Do you hear me, death? I''m not going to fall for your charm, you cruel mistress!"


    He raised his fist at the heavens, even if the skies of the world of ideas were a sad thing composed of grey imagery.


    Rustle.


    All his alarms cried out in perfect synchronicity as he heard a noise. A noise in the world of ideas. Umar spun around trying to find the source of the sound.


    "Who goes there?" His voice was potent. Defined. Observed. He realized. Someone is observing me and that gave me more presence. "I know you are here. Reveal yourself."


    He heard of pathetic whimper before a set of eyes revealed themselves. Red. Bloodshot like his assassins. No, not quite. Umar knew the effects of Enlightenment and drugs on the world of ideas. Perhaps the principle of the figure was the same, but he was too acquainted with the effects to know those weren''t red eyes of tobacco. For starters, tobacco didn''t cause eyes to be bloodshot in the world of the living, but the same couldn''t be said here. The herb seemed to affect people’s eyes in the word of ideas, or at least, the perception of those eyes. But the shading he was seeing was wrong. The figure had consumed a different substance.


    "Oh, I beg your pardon, great spirit!" The figure bowed, even if Umar could only see their red eyes, the movement of those eyes told him enough to intuit that. "This one is thankful for your presence."


    Are you high? Umar almost asked that, but he refrained from doing so. Of course, the figure was high. Enlightenment needed the intoxication of the mind and the body, even if it didn''t seem to be the Enlightenment he was acquainted with.


    "What is your name?" The assassin asked to play safe. At least if the figure disappeared, they would have gifted him enough cognition to stay afloat for a few more weeks by just answering his questions.


    "This humble servant goes by the name of Mictlantecuhtli, oh great spirit!" The figure continued bowing, but now that Umar had a name for them, they became more defined. First, he heard the voice more clearly. By the end of the sentence Umar could tell the speaker was a man. Second, he saw the outline of the man, confirming his musings.


    "Mictlantecuhtli, huh?" Quite a tongue-twister of a name. He kept that to himself. Which was hard.


    They were on the world of ideas and he himself was but a remnant cognition of a dead man. It wouldn''t be wrong to call himself a thought. So, most of the time, when he was speaking, he just was… thinking aloud. Conversation as a shadow of a man gone was… curious.


    "Indeed, oh great spirit!"


    Now, for his third revelation, Umar noticed that they weren''t speaking the same language. The curious name was a dead giveaway – heh, dead – but the problem was how they were communicating. Neither of them were speaking, but as he had said, thinking aloud. Speech may be bound to tongues, physical and metaphysical, but the same couldn''t be said for thoughts. They were more primal, more instinctual. Even the newborn babe who had no notion of language could still think, even if communicating was a bit different.


    In this realm of thought, it would appear that language wasn''t a thing.