Afterlife

One of the first philosophical questions man has ever asked was "What happens when you die?" With the vast number of religions in the universe, each believes itself to have the definitive answer. However, as is usually the case with most matters, the truth is much more complicated than many would have you believe. In reality, everyone has things a little right, and everyone has things a little wrong.

## The Soul

All beings capable of self awareness in the universe possess a unique spiritual signature. It doesn't matter if they are humans, elves, dogs, or a sentient magic item, they all possess it. This signature is called a great many things by different people: essence, qi, spirit, etc. For the purposes of this discussion, we shall refer to it as a soul. The soul is an energy that serves as a record of all the experiences one goes through in life. For most, it begins life as an empty husk, but all of those experiences create energy within the soul. The stronger the experience, the stronger the energy. Thus beings who have very extreme experiences have stronger (and more valuable) souls. Beings with the strongest souls tend to be the type of people who are remembered historically because the major, world-changing events they participate in create massive amounts of soul energy.

However, this is not always the case. Some people are born with powerful souls, which only increase in power as they go through life. Others may grow powerful through long lives that were well lived, or through great trauma. There are a great number of factors that can intensify a soul and none of them are really a measure of a "good" life; just an eventful one. Still, for those who deal in souls, all souls have tangible relative value and the most powerful ones are the most highly prized.

## Death

While some beings are much longer lived than others, sooner or later everyone dies. When this happens, the being's soul becomes disentangled from their body and exists on the Astral plane. While in this state, it is invisible to the living (with some magical exceptions) and bound either to its remains or the site of its death, depending on the nature of how they died. Those who die peaceful deaths are usually bound to their remains while those who die traumatic deaths are usually bound to the place they died, but each soul is different.

The soul is incapable of interacting with the living in any way (with some magical exceptions), though it is fully aware of what is going on around it as well as of any other souls in the area. However without a body to ground it and gain new experiences, the soul has a distorted sense of time and space. They are locked in their former life for as long as their soul remains bound to this life.

## Last Rites

Existence in the land of the living is torture for a soul. They are forced to see the world around them, but never experience it. It is like having an itch you can never reach to scratch. This quickly breeds resentment in a soul, and a hatred for the living. Luckily for these souls, there is something that can be done about it: Last Rites.

Performing a funeral ceremony is the living's way of saying good bye to the dead, but it is also of vital importance to that person's soul. Once a proper funeral ceremony has been performed for the dead, a death spirit is summoned to sever a soul's ties to the living world and guide it to the next. These death spirits are also called by many names: shinigami, death gods, angels of death, and many others. Here, we will refer to them as reapers.

### Reapers

It is unclear where reapers come from or where they go when not working, but they perform the vital service of escorting the souls of the dead to the next life. What this means depends on the soul and the last rite performed on them. As mentioned before, each religion believes itself to be the sole authority on what happens to souls after death. However, the truth of the matter is that they are all correct and all incorrect.

While any last rite will bring forth a reaper, the type of reaper that appears depends on the beliefs the soul had in life. One who worshipped the Olympian gods, for example, would be escorted by a Charon reaper. The Charon reaper would then judge the soul's experiences and escort it to one of the Olympian planes of death such as the Asphodel Meadows (for souls with neither great good or evil done in life), Tartarus (for the wicked), or Elysium (for the good). Last rites performed on people of other faiths summon different reapers and are sorted according to their faiths. The exact nature of the last rite performed for the soul is irrelevant (though the soul itself might have a preference), what is important is that one is performed.

However, while reapers have full control of *where* the soul goes, they cannot force an unwilling soul to come with them. While most souls accept their fates and go willingly (at least eventually), if the soul is stubborn, there is nothing the reaper can do to force them to move on. This usually leads to the creation of undead.

There are a small minority of people who have no particular beliefs or actively choose to shun religion. When last rites are performed on these people, there is no death plane for them to go to. Reapers still are summoned and still make a judgement of the soul's actions in life. However, instead of going to a death plane, they are either reincarnated (if they were good), or banished to a void (if they were evil) which utterly destroys their souls. These reincarnated souls retain all of the energy they gained in their past life and are the source of those born with powerful souls.

### Death Planes

The nature of various death planes that souls move onto varies wildly. Some are paradises, meant to be a reward to those who lived well. Some are places of infinite torture, meant as punishment for a life of wickedness. Others are neither, merely a holding place for souls to occupy their time. Regardless of the nature of the plane itself, each plane is ruled by a god (or gods) who has absolute power over the souls in their domain.

The energy created by souls through their experiences in life sustains the god whose plain the soul dwells in. Some of the energy is used like food for the god. Other energy is used when the god uses their powers or provides powers for their followers. As the energy is used, the soul loses the experiences it had in life until it is stripped entirely of energy and reduced to a blank husk once again. At this point, the soul is reincarnated in a new body and begins life anew with no memories of their past. Since more powerful souls possess more energy and therefore take longer to drain off, good souls may have longer opportunities to enjoy their afterlife, while the exceptionally wicked must endure torturous punishment for much longer periods of time.

Souls that have not first had their energy stripped of them before reincarnation retain fragments of their past lives which can cause problems ranging from minor issues such as déjà vu to much more serious ones like split personalities. Thus souls are always carefully drained before reincarnation.

## Exceptions

Most souls go through this never ending cycle of being born, acquiring experiences, dying, being taken to the after life, having those experiences drained and then being reborn to start over again. This process is referred to as the Cycle of Rebirth. However, there are a few special cases that should be noted.

### Faithless

As mentioned before, those who do not possess any particular faith are either cast into a void, forever destroying their souls, or reincarnated. These reincarnated souls never have the opportunity to have their experiences stripped from them. Thus their new life begins with a soul full of experiences from one or more previous lives. These people are often have a hard time fitting in with others as they are constantly plagued with déjà vu and other issues of conflicting experiences. They see the world in a way that most others cannot and are often greatly empathic as they instinctively know how it feels to be someone other than themselves.

Having such a soul also brings a great innate mastery of magic. The greatest magic users in history often have powerful reincarnated souls.

### Undead

As mentioned before, a soul cannot be forced to move on, it must do so willingly. While most do, some do not and are forced to see the world of the living without ever being able to experience it. This creates a deep madness and loathing for the living and over time that hatred allows the soul to exert influence on the living world. How this manifests depends largely on the soul in question. Some become ghosts or other incorporeal undead. Some animate their old bodies and become various types of corporeal undead. Some even possess objects and are the source of many cursed items.

The tragedy of undead is that it is spiritual suicide. Their souls become trapped in their own hatred and if they are ever destroyed, the soul is just lost forever, unable to ever be reborn. Some choose to give up their hatred and move on once they have completed some unfinished business in the living world, but most are simply incapable of this and must be destroyed like rabid animals.

### Owned Souls

Some souls choose to give up their freedoms in exchange for something in life. Examples include warlocks who sell their souls for magical power, people who make deals with devils in exchange for their heart's desire, or many practitioners of dark magic. Once their souls have been granted to another being, last rites are meaningless to them. Upon death, a representative of the being who has claimed ownership upon their soul appears to take what is due. The soul gets no say in the matter and what happens to them depends on the whims of the being in question that holds ownership over them. They may be simply taken to a particular death plane as many gods send out immortals to gather souls into their death plane to gain power. Some are made into immortals, some are traded as currency to other similarly powerful beings, while others are simply drained away as sustenance. Those drained this way are not reincarnated like souls drained by the gods of death planes. They are instead destroyed entirely.

### Immortals

Gods have complete control over souls within their planes and sometimes they take a shining to a particular soul. Sometimes they simply need help to do whatever it is they need done. Whatever the reason, gods are able to sever souls from the Cycle of Rebirth and transform them into immortals. There are a great number of types of immortals such as demons, angels, genies, etc. All of these beings are granted eternal life and powers necessary to carry out their duties. They can be slain, but never die of natural causes. Granted their new form and great power, immortals see themselves as superior to mortals and often are condescending when dealing with them.

## Resurrection

For some souls, death is temporary. Luck, powerful magic and even the direct intervention of a god can potentially allow someone who is otherwise deceased to return to their bodies and live again. However, there are situations from which no amount of intervention can revive a deceased soul. Any form of resurrection will always fail upon the following conditions:

1. The soul is unwilling - Returning to life always requires the consent of the soul in question. Should a soul not desire to be resurrected, it cannot be.
2. The soul is unable - A soul cannot return to its body if it has already been reincarnated and thus is inhabiting a new body. It's link to the old body is forever destroyed at this point
3. The soul is owned - If the soul belongs to another, they no longer have any free will over what happens to them after death. The being who possesses their soul could choose to temporarily relinquish it, but given the value of a soul and the trouble to takes to acquire one, this is extremely unlikely.

Provided that none of the above three conditions apply, the soul is plucked from wherever it currently is and placed back within their body for a second chance at life.