The Cross-Realm Code of Conduct - Exit Velocity and Form Integrity
They say there is a road beneath all roads, a path that runs under the roots of the mountains and the veins of the sea. It is not for the living, but sometimes the living find it - in grief, in trance, in dream, or when the world above tears open.
If you walk it, the air will feel wrong, as if the wind moves in both directions at once. You will meet faces you knew and faces you never wished to know. Some will call your name. Some will try to give you gifts. Some will offer food that smells like the memory of your happiest day.
Do not take it.
If you eat, you will belong to this place, and it will keep you. Your blood will carry its rivers, your bones its stones. You will forget the sky above.
Do not look back.
The way is made of your will alone. If you turn to see the place you came from, the bridge will vanish behind you, and you will stand here forever, neither of here nor there.
Walk forward.
When you see the gate, do not stop. Do not speak until the sun is warm on your face. Do not answer voices calling from behind, no matter how dear they sound.
If you do these things, you may return. But you will not return unchanged. The dust of that place will cling to you, and in dreams, you will still hear the music of its halls. Someday, when the road beneath roads finds you again, it will know you - and you will know it.
The Paiute story of the Kingdom of Shin-au-av is one of those myths that sits right at the crossroads between underworld journey motifs and a kind of proto–near-death experience narrative. It speaks of a chief so stricken with grief at his wife’s death that he seeks out the Spirit Land itself. This is not a vague “realm of the dead” but a defined place beneath the Earth, entered through a specific passage and protected by supernatural guardians. The journey is not without peril - there are trials, tests of will, and encounters with beings who do not obey human laws of time or space.
When he reaches Shin-au-av, it is described as a paradise where spirits dance in joy, a place untouched by human suffering. Yet even in this beauty, the rules of the realm are absolute. The chief is warned not to look back as he departs with his wife, an instruction that mirrors countless other myths - from Orpheus and Eurydice in Greek legend to certain Hopi emergence tales - where disobedience fractures the bridge between the living and the dead. Inevitably, he glances back, and she is lost to him forever.
The thematic weight is twofold. First, it reinforces a truth found in many indigenous cosmologies - that the spirit world is governed by its own laws, and human desire cannot override them. Second, it hints that the underworld is not merely a place of the dead but a separate reality with its own permanence. The "looking back" motif may signify that once awareness turns again toward the mortal realm, the thread binding the two is severed.
What makes Shin-au-av unique among underworld myths is that it is not painted purely as a place of judgment or shadow. It’s a land of joy and dancing, suggesting that death, in Paiute thought, may be less about punishment and more about transformation - but one that cannot be undone without consequence.
If the story has roots beyond myth, it could be a cultural memory of subterranean spaces the Paiute considered sacred - vast caverns, mineral-rich hollows, or geothermal zones. In a more speculative sense, Shin-au-av could be interpreted as an altered-state reality accessed through ritual, grief-induced vision, or something akin to a shamanic descent, where the rules of engagement mirror those of dream logic and quantum observation: once you look back, the outcome collapses into finality.
The “don’t look back” rule shows up in a surprising number of cultures, often in connection with crossing thresholds between worlds. It tends to surface in three main contexts: journeys to the underworld, escapes from supernatural captivity, and liminal crossings (like emergence from chaos or a magical transformation). Each time, the act of looking back collapses the fragile link between realms.
Eating or drinking in the otherworld is another universal red-line rule, every bit as potent as “don’t look back.” Across cultures, ingesting food or drink in a supernatural realm binds you to it - often permanently - because in mythic logic, consumption is contract. To eat is to accept the host’s hospitality, but also to take in its essence, its time, its laws. Once inside you, that place owns part of you.
Taken together, the “don’t look back” and “don’t eat or drink” rules form something close to a global travel manual for crossing between realms - not in the Lonely Planet sense, but in the sense of deep, archetypal law. Across cultures, these two prohibitions are almost always present in stories of underworld journeys, spirit land visits, or encounters with beings from other realities. When you break them down, they appear to be protecting the same fragile principle from two different angles.
The First Law – Don’t Look Back
Looking back is a reorientation of focus toward the realm you are leaving. In mythic logic, movement between worlds is intention-driven - a kind of spiritual momentum. A backward glance re-establishes the tether to where you’ve been, collapsing the liminal bridge and snapping you back into the old state. This could be symbolic of quantum observation: by “measuring” the departure point, you collapse the possibility of full transition into something irreversible. In a practical shamanic sense, it’s about not splitting your will between realms.
The Second Law – Don’t Eat or Drink
Eating or drinking is the deeper commitment. While looking back reorients your consciousness, consuming the otherworld’s food reprograms your essence. It’s an internalization - literally taking the realm into yourself. In myth, this is the point of no return, because the realm now exists within your body. You’ve altered your resonance, making you incompatible with your origin world. This mirrors ideas from sympathetic magic, where consuming something is akin to binding yourself to it.
How the Laws Work Together
The First Law protects exit velocity. Don’t look back, or you lose the momentum to leave.
The Second Law protects form integrity. Don’t consume, or you won’t be the same being that set out — and so you won’t be able to return to your original reality.
In speculative terms, these might be fragments of an ancient, universally understood protocol for safe dimensional travel. If reality is structured in layers - physical, spiritual, temporal - then these laws keep the traveler from entangling with the target layer in a way that can’t be undone.
It’s possible these laws survive because they were originally functional. If shamans, mystics, or altered-state travelers actually encountered realms where consciousness alone allowed crossing, these taboos would be the difference between a round trip and a one-way passage. Over time, they calcified into myth, appearing in Orpheus’ underworld, Persephone’s pomegranate, the Hopi emergence stories, and the Paiute’s Shin-au-av.
If both laws are broken - if a traveler looks back and consumes - the myths suggest the crossing becomes irreversible and total. In some cultures, that’s a fate worse than death; in others, it’s simply a transformation into someone who no longer belongs to the human world at all.
If we strip every cultural variation down to its bare bones and stitch them together, we get something that reads less like a regional folktale and more like a survivor’s briefing - the kind of thing an elder might whisper to someone standing at the threshold between worlds, knowing the crossing is dangerous, knowing there’s no time for philosophy.
The returning curse may be the most dangerous part of the journey, because it extends the reach of the other realm into the waking world. Those who survive often develop an obsessive pull to chart what they saw, as though the act of mapping could anchor the memory before it fades. Stones are marked, crude diagrams are drawn in the dirt, and paths are retraced with a fever that borders on possession. Yet, each time the directions are given to another, something shifts. A fork that was once to the left becomes a right. A landmark vanishes from the description. The entrance is described in a way that sends the seeker in circles until exhaustion sets in.
Some traditions describe this distortion as an intentional enchantment woven into the traveler’s mind before they leave. The other realm, unwilling to be overrun, plants a false memory thread that subtly frays each time it is unwound. Others suggest the traveler themselves is the instrument of protection, compelled by a subconscious loyalty to guard what they have touched. In either case, the effect is the same - the true path becomes a ghost trail, visible only to those the place itself allows.
This selective amnesia and distortion may be more than supernatural defense. If the crossing depends on a precise alignment of time, place, and the traveler’s state of mind, then a perfect retelling is impossible. The story inevitably shifts because the conditions can never be identical twice. The false directions are not merely errors but a byproduct of reality’s own resistance to being navigated in both directions. It is the other side closing the door gently, yet firmly, in the face of those who try to return without its consent.
Some versions go further, claiming the curse is not limited to words. Maps decay. Stones erode faster than they should. Even memories that were once sharp become riddled with gaps. Eventually, the traveler themselves forgets which parts were real and which were dream - until the day the road beneath all roads finds them again, and they no longer need directions.
Breath as currency is older than coin. In arid lands where the air itself feels rationed, there are tales of gates and guardians that accept no metal, no jewel, only the warm rush of a living exhale. The act is never casual. It must be measured, deliberate, often performed in rhythm with unseen markers along the path. The offering is not simply air escaping the lungs but a sliver of the self carried on it, something more essential than words.
In some stories, the breaths are counted. Miss one, and the way closes. Offer too many, and the traveler grows pale and unsteady, as though their shadow no longer quite fits their body. This toll is said to be irreversible. The spirit fragments are not destroyed but stored, held in the keeping of the place or its wardens. Those who return often speak of feeling lighter, not in the sense of relief but in the sense of being incomplete, like a song with its final notes missing.
This “breath tax” reframes journeys such as the chief’s descent into Shin-au-av. The exhaustion described in such tales may not come from distance alone but from the incremental loss of what keeps the body tethered to the waking world. Each step is not just movement through space but a slow transaction, the traveler paying with vitality to buy passage deeper into the realm. Some who never make it back are said to have spent themselves entirely before reaching their goal, their last breath taken not by death in the mortal sense but by the road itself as payment in full.
If the air is truly an exchange medium between worlds, then breath becomes more than survival- it becomes a binding agreement. Every inhale draws in the place, every exhale surrenders a part of the self to it. The road beneath all roads may not only test resolve through rules of sight and sustenance but through the simple, constant act of breathing, each one a silent signature on a contract few ever read.
Some crossings require no gate at all, only the correct alignment of presence and place. A traveler may find themselves stepping from a sunlit plain into a fog that wasn’t there moments before, and by the time the fog parts, the world has shifted. These moments are governed by laws as strict as the ones carved into the bones of older myths, though they are less often spoken aloud. The crossing itself will disguise its own edges, and the unprepared may not even realize they have entered until they are too far to turn back.
There are rules about weight. Stories from coastal peoples tell of travelers commanded to leave something behind before passing into another realm - a stone from their pocket, a tool from their hand, even the coat on their back. The loss is always small enough to seem harmless, yet heavy enough in meaning that it subtly unbalances the traveler. The item becomes a tether point, claimed by the other side, ensuring that a part of the traveler never leaves. Without realizing it, they have left an anchor in the soil of the place they thought they were only visiting.
Then there are rules about sound. In some traditions, every footstep in the other realm must fall in silence. Even the scrape of fabric or the click of a stone underfoot is seen as an intrusion that draws attention from things that are better left unaware. The most experienced travelers walk as if they are weightless, pressing their presence into the background until even the place itself forgets they are there. Breaking this quiet is said to “wake the floor,” causing the path itself to shift or fold until there is no way forward that resembles the way they came.
Certain crossings also obey a law of witness. To be seen by a native of the other realm before you have completed the journey home can bind you there, not because of malice but because recognition in that place is a claim. The gaze of the other is a hook, and the moment it sets in, the crossing stops being yours alone. This may be why some travelers wear hoods, masks, or layers of dust from their own land, blurring the outline of who they are until they are safely back on the soil that remembers their name.
Taken together, these unspoken rules expand the cross-realm code beyond the warnings about looking back or eating the other side’s food. They speak to a larger truth - that passage between worlds is not just a matter of physical direction but of negotiating every aspect of one’s being. Breath, weight, sound, and sight are all currencies in the places that lie beneath the surface of what is known, and each has its own price if handled carelessly. The code, in all its variations, is not a collection of arbitrary taboos but a survival manual written in the only language these places understand - action, offering, and restraint.
Long before the stories fractured into separate myths, these laws may have been more than cautionary tales - they may have functioned as an operational form of proto magic, a structured way to manipulate the invisible mechanics of crossing. The rules are not random prohibitions but components of a ritual architecture, each one sealing a different vulnerability of the traveler’s soul. Bound together, they form a complete warding pattern, a portable fortress carried in the body and mind.
In this view, “don’t look back” is not just about focus, but about closing the rearward gate behind you, collapsing the path so nothing follows. Refusing to eat or drink is a shield for the internal self, preventing foreign essence from rewriting the traveler’s pattern. Breath control - the breath tax - is a calculated sacrifice, a tithed fragment of the self offered in a way that keeps the rest of the spirit intact. Weight offerings ensure the traveler leaves behind a deliberate anchor rather than letting the realm take one at random, while silence conceals their passage entirely, reducing their presence to a ripple too small to track. Avoiding the gaze of natives completes the binding, preventing any living contract from being struck without consent.
When performed together, these actions would create a kind of metaphysical seal, holding the traveler’s identity stable across the distortion of crossing. In magical terms, the body becomes both the vessel and the spell, the traveler a living talisman designed to survive a realm where the laws of matter and spirit flow differently. Each law addresses a specific mode of capture - visual recognition, energetic assimilation, physical anchoring, auditory attention, contractual exchange. Their binding into a single sequence may have been humanity’s earliest field-tested method for moving between realities and coming back whole.
It is possible that the oldest shamans did not see these as separate rules at all, but as facets of a single act - the rite of return. Crossing without them would be like walking into a storm without a shelter. With them, the traveler carried an invisible architecture of defense, each movement and restraint reinforcing the others until the pattern was unbroken. Over millennia, the unified ritual splintered into myths: Orpheus’ forward gaze, Persephone’s untouched banquet, the silent steps of the Hopi emergence, the masked wanderers of the Celtic sidhe. All fragments of a once-whole technology, still humming faintly in the stories we tell.
If this is true, then the road beneath all roads is not merely a place but a system that responds to this proto magic - perhaps even shaped by it over time. The rules would not only protect the traveler, but subtly bend the crossing itself to allow their passage, as though the realm recognizes the pattern and grants safe transit to those who carry it.
If these laws are indeed the remnants of an ancient proto magic, then the myths are not just stories but coded survival guides, whispered across generations long after the original practitioners vanished. They may survive precisely because they were never written down in a single volume to be burned or lost, but scattered across cultures like seeds, each one germinating in a different soil yet carrying the same genetic pattern. The rules have endured because the road beneath all roads has endured, and whatever waits there still demands the same terms of passage.
It may be that the original rite was not invented at all, but discovered - an observation of how reality itself behaves when crossed at its thinnest points. If so, then the universality of these laws is not a coincidence, but the echo of a deeper structure in the world, something as constant as gravity yet hidden from plain sight. The myths keep it alive, not as academic theory but as living practice, dressed in stories of chiefs, lovers, gods, and dreamers who dared to step past the edge.
Those who return may never speak of the whole truth, whether by curse, forgetfulness, or choice. But the shape of the code remains visible in the warnings, the taboos, and the fragments of ritual embedded in tales from deserts, mountains, islands, and ice. To follow them is to walk in the footprints of travelers who came before, tracing the contours of an invisible architecture that might still, even now, open when called in the right way. The laws are not just a memory of how to come back - they may be the only reason anyone ever has.