explosivecombat | 022. [Text]

With matters of one's heart and soul so close in mind, due to the recent holiday and all the romantic connotations therein, I ask that you forgive the possibly morbid nature of the question I have for you tonight:

The state or condition of one's soul is often brought into question when their deeds are brought to light or held up for scrutiny; the concept of the damned and those destined for salvation aren't new concepts by far. However, I have to ask what that means for all of you - do you accept your soul as existing only as a metaphysical concept, a matter of faith, something unproven and intangible? Or is it something undeniable where you come from, not a matter of faith but rather proven to exist? Does it fail to exist for you at all?

Or, perhaps, is it something else entirely - something that was rendered from one of the above options into another?

I suppose I should apologize for such heavy subject matter; I imagine some will find it rude to attempt to quantify such a thing. However, it's been something I've had reason to consider lately, so no apology is forthcoming.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

That's unfortunately true, yes. I'm sure we'll come to know everything eventually, but some things still elude us.

What means are those? In my world, it's usually achieved by vampirization, although I'm sure there are other means. They're generally incredibly messy, though, so they're mostly avoided by most mages with anything resembling standards.

It's generally believed that they're returned to Akasha, the root of everything, and then either stored there or recycled depending on what occurred during that person's life. It's quite hazy, though, given that no one has actually managed to observe Akasha in any form.

Well, the means we have are more for others' benefit than the benefit of those who own the souls in question; it's possible to harness the soul's energy for the sake of performing things that would be considered miracles by most. Given that it involves either killing someone or essentially playing God with their soul after they die, to say nothing of the part where it prevents them from passing on and may, in fact, be very akin to torture for the soul in question because the physical form they end up taking surely can't be pleasant...well, it's completely verboten as a practice, for rather obvious ethical reasons. It doesn't stop some people from trying anyway, of course, and there have been several successes in more or less crystallizing the soul such that it might be used, but it's highly unpleasant business either way.

As for what happens beyond death, it's generally left up to individual interpretation as a whole; I have somewhat more information than most, as I've had a few things explained to me back in my world by someone who would know, but even then what was said was very vague and I didn't understand a fair amount of it until later in my life. There is a point, though, where the soul cannot be brought back into this world - that's presumably when it passes back through what we refer to as the Gate. I don't know that what lies beyond the Gate could be called the root of all things, exactly, but apparently it's God's domain.

But then you get into the complications like Truth, which isn't quite God but the mediator between God's domain and the mortal world, and the part where Truth is an actual definable entity while God is not (God, as I understand it, is more of a force than anything; that which keeps the world and the principles that govern it in balance and makes sure we don't do any horrifically stupid things like try to defy physics or...I don't know, rip open the fabric of time or communicate with realms that may or may not exist, or just generally horribly break the world in general) and...well. Needless to say, theoretical discussions among alchemists tend to get rather interesting rather quickly, and not always in a productive way.

We certainly don't have anything like that--the soul is an element that can be used in specific ways in magecraft, I suppose, but it's absurdly difficult to do so and is not really worth the effort when there are plenty of materials that are easier to work with and produce more results. I really doubt that it would prove to be some sort of miracle substance that would allow you to perform True Magic in my world.

That actually does seem fairly similar to how things work in my world--there are accounts of people who had reported that they had gotten close to reaching Akasha simply disappearing without a trace. It seems as though that anyone who enters is unable to leave whether they are alive or dead prior to doing so, but we've always presumed that there is some way to bypass that which no one has accomplished yet.

Furthermore, with us, we don't really have a definable entity like that--it's more that we just have a force like your God that is typically associated with the world itself that has a fairly strict set of rules to it. True Magic can bypass them entirely but it's extremely rare in this day and age, and there are slightly more common abilities known as Reality Marbles that can temporarily bend those rules but do so at great cost to the user.

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