Basim Ibn Ishaq in ninth-century Baghdad — the young thief who will become the Assassin we met in Valhalla, the game reaching back to show the origin of someone the earlier game revealed as something far more complicated. The Creed's founding statement lands differently in Mirage than in any other AC game because we know where Basim ends up. Nothing is true is the philosophy. Everything is permitted is the warning. The session is the beginning of the education that will produce the man we already know.

Baghdad at its Abbasid peak is the game's most formally considered setting in the series — the Round City, the House of Wisdom, the specific texture of the world's most advanced civilization at its height. Basim moves through it as a thief first, as an initiate second, and the distance between those two identities is where the game's first session lives.