Introduction
When the world was new, the god of death created an Afterlife. This realm -- a place parallel to Ilisara, but untouchable and separated from it by the veil of death -- was where he pooled an energy force known now as "soul".
Soul energy is drawn to the combination of a mind and body. It tethers itself to living beings, and grows with them throughout life. Upon dying, a person's soul remains near their body for a brief period before dissolving back into the Afterlife.
Death is renown on Ilisara as a natural continuation from life. It is understood that an Afterlife exists, but its precise form is unknown to mortals. Resurrected mortals do not typically remember the Afterlife's specifics.
What Happens After Death
When living beings in Ilisara die, their souls travel to the Afterlife.
The Afterlife is a wondrous, supernatural place where time dilates and space has no meaning. It has different characteristics, depending on which god oversees it; the original Afterlife stewarded by Kerrigor was like a whole second Ilisara. After the events of Armageddon, Kerrigor perished and responsibility for the Afterlife fell into Remedia's hands. Remedia's Afterlife is a very different place.
Today, souls who travel to the Afterlife are greeted not by another world ... but a place for isolated introspection and rebirth.
The Afterlife is a vast and ever-shifting dimension of spirits and soul magic that defies mortal perceptions of reality. Time and distance hold no meaning in this intangible realm, and a day on the physical world can feel like decades in the Afterlife.
Mortals are barred from entering and exiting the Afterlife if they are still living. A few well-trained spiritual guides or shamans who specialize in soul magic may be able to temporarily peer into the Afterlife to speak to the souls there, but this is rare.
You Wake Up in Remedia's Afterlife, and...
At the moment of your death, you black out and become unaware of your surroundings in Ilisara. Your eyes open. You are standing, sitting, or lying in a field of red poppies that expands endlessly in every direction beneath a pale facsimile of the sun and moon.
You feel no hunger, thirst, or bodily sensations. You have time to ponder your life, think about your loved ones, and settle whatever internal debates and scores you had. Eventually, you will feel sleepy, until you lie down and your soul becomes one with the rest of the souls in the Afterlife. From there, parts of you may be reborn into new souls, but you are beyond resurrection. Your essence becomes a little drop of cosmic energy in an ocean of souls.
The means to acquire a resurrection, instead of being reborn with no memory or remnant of your former self, are covered in the lore article on resurrection.
Kerrigor's Afterlife (Pre-Armageddon)
If Remedia's Afterlife sounded a bit eerie, macabre, and peaceful all at once, that was certainly the intention. Remedia is the goddess of life. Death must exist for life to continue. After Kerrigor's death, she took on his role to ensure life keeps going -- but she is by no means the master of souls, memories, dreams, and dying that Kerrigor was.
The Afterlife was once Kerrigor's lucid dream. All who entered it could affect it to a minor extent. While Kerrigor was the Afterlife's overseer and could control it in its entirety, he generally left it to evolve on its own by the addition of its inhabitants' souls.
To Kerrigor, the Afterlife constituted of a place for souls to journey towards paradise. His Afterlife was split into three realms which souls could travel between. Somewhere in those realms (or between them) lay the perfect existence for every soul, but finding that place was not guaranteed. Every soul wandered the Afterlife searching for loved ones, meaning, fulfillment, and a place to eternally settle in peace.
Souls
Souls in Kerrigor's Afterlife manifested in a dreamform, which normally looked and behaved much as that individual's previous physical body might. Hence, for most creatures, moving through the Afterlife was achieved in the normal fashion, despite the realm's chiefly spiritual character. These rules do not apply to mages of sufficient skill or experience with soul magic, who are trained to work beyond physical reality. They might have been capable of abnormal movement in the Afterlife, such as flying, moving through solid objects, or otherwise shifting through the Afterlife's reality.
Landscape
There were three realms within Kerrigor's Afterlife. From some perspectives, the realms seemed to be divided by massive oceans; from others, a constellation of stars; from still other points, a field of shifting energies. Souls could travel between the realms with great effort by shaping a road, river, or some other surface to move across. This generally required the soul to find a way to belong in the realm it was attempting to enter.
The White Fields
The Grey Mountains
The Black Morass
Connection to the Living
Because Kerrigor's pledge was to look after the dead, he ensured that they held some connection to their loved ones who remained behind in life. When a living person remembered and honored the soul of a dead ancestor, friend, or other figure, that soul could feel their remembrance and love. This power worked similarly to a god's ability to hear the prayers from their followers, and was made possible (through great effort) by Kerrigor as a conduit for the wishes of Ilisara's souls.
Within the Afterlife, souls could share their thoughts, desires, feelings, and other personality characteristics with others. To do so, they simply had to touch another soul's dreamself. In this way, it was as if every single person shared a soulbond.
Coping with the Afterlife
Kerrigor's Afterlife was far from paradise. Many souls expected all of their woes and injustices to be righted, and for their worth to be recognized by some grand arbiter; but Kerrigor was a neutral god, not a judge. He placed some souls where he saw fit, but most began in the oceans between realms and drifted towards where they truly belonged. Few actually ended up where they thought they belonged. Ego and vanity run further than the typical Ilisaran believes, and the true "best" of mortals are few and far between. Suffering alone does not make a soul righteous.
Thus, there were three groups of souls:
1. Those who felt they belonged where they ended up, which was rare.
2. Those who felt they did not belong where they were put, and actively tried to traverse into other realms.
3. Those who were so disturbed that the Afterlife is constrained by limited resources and its own laws and injustices, that they sought to return to life at any cost.
Kerrigor's Purpose
The state of constant work from souls in Kerrigor's Afterlife wasn't wasted. Kerrigor harnessed the energy and work that the souls in the Afterlife put into their world in order to fuel the power of soul magic in both realms. Kerrigor secretly kept a ledger of the dead in each realm, noting the most worthy souls in his possession who produced the most energy.
The work of the souls in Kerrigor's Afterlife, their journeys to reincarnate, and the reincarnation of those who are forgotten created a cycle.
Kerrigor's death during Armageddon destroyed all of the knowledge, structure, and understanding of the Afterlife in Ilisara. Remedia has stepped in merely to keep the cycle turning; but there is space for a new God of Death to rise.
Comments