All those who seek peace—Dzo shuple. Humans will prosper despite every aspect of nature working against them. But, for once, there will be a place where only peace persists. Whether they are positioned in an eternally defensive position or at the edge of the world, the place where people seek peace alone will be none other than a secluded zone, free from outside influence and from themselves: The Sea of Solitude.

  The sea route has brought Lish to an island with a lonely meadow beyond the narrow sandy shore topped with a line of pines. The slope up to the great forest is gentle but steep, appearing as though a crown atop the grassy head.

  “I’m alone now, eh? That place, that Nowhere, dissipated just like that. Anyways… What to do—what to do?”

  “Shelter, warmth, sustenance, and maybe an ultimate goal”.

  “Natural terrain should provide enough shelter, warmth I can get from fire, I can pick some berries or something off the trees, and… but ultimate goal…”

  The human body is quite fragile when exposed to the elements. Lish knows this all too well; how else would he have gotten those scars?

  He first climbed up the hill. “A forest has a lot to offer to an orphan soul”, after all. Out towards the sea, the eye could see only the solemn waters, untainted by human hands. About a nautical mile away, there is a reef boundary; if a ship wanted to dock on the island, its keel would be in a whole lot of trouble.

  “No-one’s coming then. I should get off this island as soon as possible. I have places to be, things to do, you know?”

  “Doesn’t it feel a bit off?”

  “What it?”

  “The wind blows from the west, but this damned hot weather tells us we’re in the tropics. Either this island is in the subtropics or at the bloody poles, or there’s a force making the wind blow backwards, your call.”

  Mostly, 3 things can influence the direction of the wind: a large body of water, a prominent mountain range, or a terrible disaster. Clearly, Lish was not in the subtropics; with a tall spruce forest and a meadow up the hill, it was even surprising, in weather as hot as this and on a landmass as isolated as where he was, that the forest would grow so expansively.

  “We’re next to an ocean, are we not? The wind will always blow from the open waters. Besides, we don’t know whether this world follows the layout and the rules of ours—the planet might even revolve in reverse.”

  “We are, but supposing that we are back home, at this altitude, with this strong a wind, from this significant an angle could mean either we’re in the anti-trades or the subtropics.”

  Too many variables to conclude a verdict. Nothing to pine about, though, survival comes first.

  Lish was starting to feel a bit famished.

  “Who knew the dead were eternally starved?”

  “Come to think of it, how did we get around Nowhere?”

  “An empty stomach, an empty brain—let’s figure that out once we have an improper meal, yeah?”

  If he could remember, the “gown mistress”—the Angel who welcomed him in Nowhere, hushed about the intricacies of this world’s cycles for a little bit as he exited:

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  “You, the named ones, have been blessed with extra-residual abilities collectively called ‘Equalizers’. These are what you need to achieve your goals, whatever they may be; these are what you should be more than familiar with, so you can use yours at once whence the occasion comes…”

  The job of a cataloguist is to know everything and anything adjacent. Aside from Lish being primarily a strategist who has played way too much chess in his downtime, he knows everything there is to know about supply chain and frontline wellbeing.

  During World War II, on the Eastern Front, both the Germans and Soviets foraged for food. Since it was common for the Finns to gather from Mother Nature, they did the same, but on a larger scale. They knew the land, what to eat, and what to avoid, but for Lish, this was a whole new world.

  A spruce forest in the tropics, coniferous in humid heat. If it were pine, maybe, just maybe, he could have eaten well.

  “If it’s blue, it should be safer to eat. If it’s yellow, it should be bitter and poisonous.”

  “You remember the cowberries from Kola? The terribly cold, sour, frozen berries, only good for sustenance? Used to boil them on the branch and all and bury them in sugar just to have some kind of variety. Those were the times, eh?”

  “Well, there’s a first for everything. ‘You’ll never miss if you don’t shoot’, was it? The red one looks like a raspberry but a bit too firm—the blue one looks like a foxberry but smells sweet… The choices—the choices.”

  A spruce forest in the tropics, filled with the signature berries of the far north.

  He ate the blue one first; it went in quite easily; bit of a bitter aftertaste.

  Food poisoning rarely causes quick death. It enters the digestive system and gradually releases its toxins as gut acids break them down. These acids also try to neutralize the toxins as much as possible, but ultimately fail because they lack the necessary defenses. Once spread throughout the body, whether bacteria, parasites, or mycotoxins like ochratoxins, they slowly destroy even the tiniest parts until they can no longer support life.

  However, neurotoxins like tetrodotoxin, which is found in pufferfish, can kill someone instantly: lethargy, tremors, nausea, paralysis, and respiratory failure, in that order, within about an hour. If you eat enough, though, you'll die even faster.

  Lish has entered paralysis. His throat swelled up a moment ago; he had fallen just before, and now he’s spasming on the ground while being unable to do anything. He cannot speak, he cannot move, he cannot live anymore—soon his life will falter and the “Hell Hospitaller”, as he was called, will die from the sustenance he O so desperately needed.

  “It tasted so sweet too… I guess not every poison tastes the same. Reminds me of that time we almost drank cyanide tea. When was it? ’89? Panjshir? Good times we’ve had then, eh?”

  He is too calm for a call for fright. “Ice in his veins,” as they say, but only a cocktail of toxins is coursing through them at that moment. And to think he welcomed his fate and reminisced about his past; once dead, he’d always been ready for the next… Tragic.

  He was brought into this world, seemingly from the grave, and now he’s sinking six feet deep once again… Such tragedy.

  Lish is now unconscious. His esophagus has long been swollen beyond the point of suffocation; his liver should now be a bluish green; vitality is slipping away from his body… How tragic.

  The infamous Hell Hospitaller, if nothing else, is known for his single quote: “I don’t see tragedies as mere misfortunes, but a call to change from the god up above—I’m quite prone to change, after all”. His ideal is even engraved on the statue commemorating the surrender of a foreign enemy under the humble peasants of Limsa, on an evergreen shrub.

  “In memory of those who have fallen in the War of Smoke and Silence…

  To those of districts 3 and 5…

  Change for the better is your salvation—the legacy of eternal ease is your reward.”

  The ease, however, didn’t last.

  Lish was a survivor—every mission he had been sent on, he had lived through and completed without a falter in his discipline. But his last one, on that fateful evening in a Tan Cang shipyard, he fell. He fell, with knowledge that could have guaranteed lasting peace.

  Once again, he had fallen. What could God have planned for him in this world? He knew medicine, after all. Maybe the world had fallen to pestilence, and he was the key to the cure. Or his mind could’ve set the world on a better path as its king. Or perhaps, he was there to catalog and develop these intricacies alongside technology from the old world.

  We may never know…