Thoughts on Death
In the Realm, death is absolute. When life ends, it ends entirely—there are no second chances, no return from the brink. All living beings are bound by mana, the current of existence that sustains flesh and thought alike. This mana is not simply energy but the root of identity, the quiet pulse of the soul.
When death claims a body, that current shatters. Mana disperses like mist, bleeding into the world until no trace remains. With its passing, so too goes the signature of self—the memories, the voice, the spark that once defined a being. There are no ghosts, no lingering shades; what some claim to see are spirits in borrowed masks, or clever illusions wrought by magics desperate to cheat inevitability.
There is no afterlife beyond this veil. No promised halls, no cycles of rebirth. The dead do not dream. They are gone, wholly and without echo. Countless kings and archmages have squandered ages seeking to defy this law, weaving rites of blood and power to drag the fallen from oblivion. All have failed. For death in the Realm is not a door, but a wall, unyielding and eternal.
This truth shapes every culture, every faith. To live is to hold your mana fiercely, for it is all you are—and when it fades, nothing remains but silence.
Most people and cultures bury or cremate their dead, keeping effigies or small shrines to remember their loved ones in place of their absence.
There are a couple isolated cultures who practice the tradition of donating their bodies after they pass to be taken and utilized by spirits, who in turn "recycle" their bodies for a time to serve the community in exchange for ancient pacts set in stone by the ancestors of these peoples. The bodies don't last permenently and the spirits live in this state only for as long as these "shifts" last.
Dragonkin see death as a final journey and frame it as such. their traditions are meaningful and solemn in nature, seeing dragonkin who are at the end of their life travelling and isolating themselves to perish out of sight of their homes.
Water effigies are common in Suna. The ashes or other items meant to represent th deceased are sealed and kept on their family's ships or even set adrift while out at sea, allowed to let them "journey the seas one more time."
Lizarfolk in Yorn traditionally cast "death masks" out of special clay when the individual turns into an adult. Many times lizardfolk bodies are not recovered from war or battle, and typically these masks serve as their remembrances. Special walls known as "Ancestor Walls" have these casted replicas mounted onto them, able to watch over their homes, as these walls are typically found on the sides of tall temples and other cultural places, not hidden away.
Noble houses in Astana keep crypts dedicated to their family lines. Several generations of bodies are sealed in coffins and buried in these mausoleums, and they are some of the most cherished structures to those families.
In Zul, ash holds a special symbolism. The ashes of a person even morseo. It's common in the underground for the ashes of the elders/leaders of dwarven houses to have their ashes or at least a portion of them added to their old forge when it is passed down to their successors. Goblins have a very distinct process for this. Keeping bodies in the warrens isnt ideal, so bodies need to be dealt with quickly. Special chemicals derived from mushrooms and the like create a solution that the bodies are dissolved down into, leaving just the particles of bone whilst their proteins, amino acids, and other organic matter dissolve into the liquid. The liquid is repurposed as a food to grow several important species of fungi in the warrens, whilst the bone powder is strained out and kept by the family the same way ashes are. The Dark elves tend to use a special preservation process to mummify their deceased, especially upper level nobles and the like, and keep their bodies in special coffins within Nihlsari Keep. It is a holdover from the wood elf rite of the same idea.
The beastfolk of Khiravi and other human populations in the southern ends of Eiri tend to create "cliff" or "tree burials," decorated and secured coffins containing the remains of the deceased are buried into the hollowed out portions of massive trees or placed suspended on the sides of cliff faces, overlooking their homes. These burials are both practically and spiritually important. These methods are favored over traditional burials by some mainly because it protects against graves being destroyed by the elements, and helps protect against thieves and animals. Being buried high in the trunk of a tree or on a cliff face puts the deceased higher in the sky and is said to allow their remains to "look out further" over their homes.
The Golden City has a massive and ever-expanding catacomb built underneath it. People from the wealthiest nobles to middling merchants work tirelessly for the chance to be buried in those halls. It's not uncommon for manual labor slaves, nomads, and bandits out in the sands to be buried where they died or the likes, leaving piles of scattered bones and bone fragments to show up not too infrequently, spotted by travellers.