As humans disagree on matters of religion, so do they disagree on one of religion's common themes: what happens after death. Most believe that the departed briefly remain as ghosts before passing on to the afterlife where they dwell in perpetuity among the gods. Some, like the worshippers of Aijanu and Khemia Waha, believe that a paradise exists for the chosen and a hell exists for infidels. And some, like the monks of Lomphan, believe in a cycle of reincarnation.
Unusually for Rithera, on this matter the majority opinion is largely correct, but for reasons that are poorly understood. This theme file expands on the nature of the soul (defined in "help cosmology") to discuss the afterlife, undead, and the possibility of resurrection, topics that will be significant to the plot and some characters (like homunculi, further discussed in "help homunculus").
Death changed after the gods left. Prior to the Primordial War, while the gods were still experimenting with their creations, there was no afterlife. Although souls could endure leaving their bodies, becoming purely domain-aspected (or immaterial) aether without any elemental (or material) affinity, the presence of the gods eventually deconstructed souls into their components, the aether of each domain returning to its originator to be recycled into new souls. The consciousnesses of these beings were simply annihilated.
However, the departure of the gods accidentally created an afterlife. With the weakening of the domains' power, souls could endure separation from bodies indefinitely. But because of their balanced aetherial composition, the Gate of Purification exerts a sort of gravity on souls, drawing them toward it and passing them through where they arrive in the heavens -- as in, literally outer space -- and crystallize into new stars.
In theory, these stars are purified consciousnesses, intact versions of deceased individuals who, stripped of the capacity to create or destroy, exist in peace. In practice, it is impossible to know. Only someone with the power of a god could manage either of the two plausible methods of reaching the heavens -- 1) pass through a Gate and survive, or 2) create a new Gate with a titanic surge of aether -- so no one has been able to return a soul to the realm of the living. It is hypothetically possible, though no less difficult or divine than creating souls from scratch.
Not all souls depart upon death. While the Gate of Purification exerts a pull, that pull can be overcome in various ways, most commonly through a high concentration of aether or there being many perished bodies in one place, as in graveyards or battlefields. In such cases, souls will adhere to the closest thing to a functioning body as possible. When that is a corpse, the undead rise. Tragically, souls that become undead remain conscious as they were when living, but cannot properly control their decayed bodies or even fully sense their surroundings. Unable to exert their Will, these souls compulsively seek living bodies as new hosts, accidentally killing their victims and inevitably ruining the prospective host in the process. Freeing souls from this horrific pseudo-existence is a truly noble undertaking.
Because souls do not pass into the afterlife immediately, a more feasible ambition than resurrection would be containing them. That said, even the brilliant minds of Cosmopolis have not yet succeeded in isolating an individual soul without damaging it. But there does exist one promising prospect. A fallen star, purged in the flames of reentry, is the closest thing in Rithera to an elusive "fifth element": being made of soulstuff, it is the only material other than a living body that can serve as a receptacle for souls without distorting or damaging them. Fallen stars thus serve as the essential ingredient for homunculi, artificial bodies that are magically ensouled.