natural-law
Soul
A soul is the animating, self-aware essence present in all living beings in Zemia.
A soul is the animating, self-aware essence present in all living beings in Zemia. It is the foundation of consciousness and identity, and the mechanism through which all Magic is performed.
Souls are the only thing that are able to directly manipulate Mana, aside from Magentium.
The Nature of the Soul
A soul is, among other things, a creature's sense of self. It encompasses:
- The feeling of being in your own body and awareness of where your body is.
- Memories, which stored within the soul rather than the body.
- Values, personality, relationships, and the ongoing sense of being a continuous person over time.
- Emotional and psychological state.
Souls are shaped by experience, damaged by trauma, and strengthened by discipline. For most people, their soul is a relatively stable and coherent thing they never need to think about. For spellcasters, it becomes the most important tool they possess.
The Soul and Magic
See Also: Magic
When someone casts magic, they extend and shape their soul outward, using it as an interface to influence the flow of Mana in the surrounding environment. The soul imposes structure on otherwise inert Mana, giving it direction and form.
This makes magic inherently deeply personal. You cast spells through your own sense of self. The shape of what they can produce is fundamentally constrained by the shape of who they are, and who they perceive themselves as.
For most untrained people, this means simple, instinctive effects: concentrating Mana in the palm by imagining a clenched fist, or repelling it by imagining pushing something away. Adepts spend years learning to extend and articulate their soul-shape with precision, enabling them to produce complex, controlled effects at will.
Soul Damage
Although the soul is resilient, it is far from indestructible. Certain forms of extreme stress, most notably reckless spellcasting, can cause it to fray or deform, with lasting consequences.
Causes
The most common cause of soul damage is magical overextension: attempting to channel more Mana than one's soul can manage. The soul-shape is not infinitely elastic, and Mana tends to naturally repel attempts at being shaped. If a caster puts too much force on their soul attempting to redirect mana in ways it resists, it distorts under the pressure before the spell can be completed. This often leaves the caster gravely altered.
Soul damage can also result from extreme psychological trauma and any kind of severe damage to your sense of identity over time.
Effects
Soul damage manifests as a partial or total loss of aspects of the self. Because memory is stored in the soul, damage frequently produces amnesia-like effects, which can manifest as losing memories or just as losing the felt connection to your own past. A person may retain factual knowledge that they had a family, for instance, while no longer having any emotional connection to them: the knowledge is present but hollow, as if read from a book.
Beyond memory, soul damage can produce:
- Loss of motivation. Forgetting not just what you cared about, but that you ever cared about anything.
- Depersonalisation. Feeling like an observer of your own life, detached from your actions and feelings.
- Identity fragmentation. Past memories may no longer feel like your own.
- Emotional blunting. Your ability to feel any strong emotional state can diminish, producing a flat, affectless state
In severe cases, a person may become so altered as to be effectively unrecognisable, where they are no longer themselves in any meaningful sense. This outcome is widely considered more disturbing than death in most Zemian cultures.
Recovery
Whether soul damage can heal is a matter of ongoing scholarly and theological debate. Minor damage, especially from a single incident of overextension, may fade over time as the self reconstitutes. More severe damage appears permanent, though some religious traditions hold that the soul can be mended through spiritual practice, divine intervention, or reconnection with one's past.
It has been proven that in these more minor cases, meditation can aid in the healing process. For this reason, the Meditation Island, Ƶknami, has a significant industry of helping visitors heal their souls, to mixed success.
The Soul After Death
A universally observed phenomena across Zemian cultures is that the souls of the dead travel to the moon shortly after their passing. It has been observed and recorded independently across every major civilisation, and there little doubt that it occurs.
What it means, however, is entirely contested. Scholars and theologians debate what happens on the moon, whether damaged souls are affected in their ability to make the journey, whether souls persist there.
These questions are among the central concerns of Zemian religion and philosophy. Different traditions offer radically different answers, but the majority consensus lies largely in the beliefs of Zemia's most popular religion, The Pantheon.
Cultural Attitudes
Most Zemian cultures place significant moral weight on acts that risk or damage the soul. Adherents of The Pantheon, for example, believe that a significantly damaged soul is unable to travel to the moon on death and is instead sentenced to endlessly wander the void of space, causing intentional damage to another's soul is a crime worse than murder. They also claim that immoral deeds can weaken the soul.
A person who has suffered severe soul damage exists in an ambiguous social and legal status. They are still alive, but the question of whether they are still the same person has implications for matters like legal responsibility, property, and family bonds.