Souls

Souls

Souls are the essence of a person—their will, memory, identity, and animating force. The body is merely flesh and bone; it is the soul that makes it move, think, and feel. Without a soul, a body may remain biologically alive, but it is empty—a husk with no one inside.

The soul is the self. It carries personality, thought, and history. It is shaped over a lifetime, accumulating subtle changes in color and resonance depending on one’s choices and experiences.

At birth, every soul begins as a faint, luminescent blue. Over time, this color shifts, deepens, or distorts—each soul becoming a unique reflection of the life it has lived. These colors are not moral indicators. A crimson soul is not evil. A pale gray one is not weak. Color is an impression, not judgment.

The Living

All living beings possess souls—humans, animals, plants, and even monsters. While most living souls are broadly categorized as light, there is still variation in purity, clarity, and structure. Some souls burn like fire, others shimmer like water, some pulse like stone under pressure. A soul’s nature can affect how it interacts with magic, perception, and even the spectral realm.

Mystics and corporeal casters have subtly different soul structures, shaped by their deeper attunement to the world's magical undercurrents. Their souls often resonate with unnatural clarity, making them more visible and more vulnerable in the spectral realm.

Soul Types

Souls are categorized by their condition, not their origin. The most common types are listed below:

Light Souls

The default state of a living soul. Pure, unscarred, and resonant. These are thought to be the original soul type shaped by the Architect of Life. Light souls are stable, capable of healing minor damage over time through rest, growth, or emotional catharsis.

Tainted Souls

Souls that have endured deep suffering—whether physical, emotional, or magical—develop bruises or cracks in their essence. These wounds do not immediately corrupt the soul but leave it vulnerable. Tainted souls may carry grief, trauma, guilt, or residual dark magic. Left unattended, these blemishes can worsen and spread.

Healing a tainted soul is possible through spiritual guidance, restorative magic, or meaningful emotional resolution. Time alone is often insufficient, especially if the trauma continues.

Corrupted Souls

When a tainted soul is pushed past its threshold, it twists into something unstable. Corruption is a deep-rooted distortion of identity and spirit, often irreversible without intervention. Corrupted souls are often volatile, unpredictable, aggressive, or numb. These souls are often left behind by reapers, leaving them to either be taken by an Ynue, or to become ghosts, more often, wraiths. What happens often depends on the reason their souls were corrupted.

Healing a corrupted soul is difficult. It requires advanced magical intervention. The Ynue Killian offers brute-force cleansing rituals, but these are destructive, akin to amputating a limb to stop an infection. More refined soul-menders do exist, but they are rare.

Dark Souls

A dark soul is no longer human. These are not corrupted souls—they are transformed. Twisted from their root by the will of an Ynue, these souls have been reshaped entirely. They carry an unnatural resonance, often cold or silent to normal soul-sight.

Dark souls are most often found in creatures made by the Ynue, for example, higher vampires, and certain types of werewolves. These souls cannot be healed, only destroyed. Even Killian cannot unmake what has been reforged by another Ynue.