Souls / 灵魂
What are souls and how do they work?
Everyone has a soul. It contains a person's entire identity: their self, their memories, their emotions. They are born with them and ideally should stay inside the person's body till death. The soul's color leaks into the person's eye and ears or horns, coloring them in as well. In the case of magicians, the soul color is also the color of their magic.
Souls come in three forms: solid, liquid, and gas.
Everyone is born with a perfectly spherical gas soul. The soul changes shape and form as the person grows (but the color never changes), and generally settles in place in their thirties.
Removing souls
A soul can be removed from a person. Soul extraction is a skill that can be learned and adopted by anyone, but it originated in Sylvandia.
Through a variety of techniques not limited to classic Sylvandian soul extraction (torture is a common example), your soul can come out of your mouth — commonly known as "barfing out1." Most books on this topic are banned in places like Bauhinia, Moreland, and Westavia as they're deemed too dangerous.
People with no souls aren't people. They're just a body. Their eyes are empty, though their ears, if they have it, would remain in color because pure-white ears look ugly. (It also serves as an indicator of the body's previous ownership.)
A body without a soul would usually die biologically within three days to a week, depending on the physique of the body.
A soul without a body will die under normal circumstances too, within the span of a couple of hours: gas souls would disperse, liquid would evaporate, and solid would just… wear down. However, if a soul is stored in a vacuum, it can live on indefinitely.
Normal death entails the simultaneous death of the body and the soul, which is what normally happens most of the time.
Consuming souls
A person can also consume souls. No matter the state, just chug it in your mouth and swallow it. No matter the shape, it's not going to scratch your throat.
If there already is a soul (or souls) inside you, the new soul has to merge in. If they aren't compatible enough, it might result in you barfing a soul out. No guarantees on which one would be the one getting out, though.
Compatibility is determined by various factors, like values, life experiences, and what the owners of the respective souls think of each other, but the most important one is its form. Shape is not a factor.
Typically, gas souls are the most compatible with other forms, while solid the least. It would be extremely hard to merge two solid souls together, but other factors, like the owners of the souls being really good friends with each other, may increase compatibility.
Related files
- Goose, an MSS officer who could extract souls through torture
- Moonbeam, a Sylvandian psychic specializing in classic soul extraction
- Cobalt, a Fantoni outlaw who learned soul extraction from Moonbeam