Moirae's Mirror - The Ecology of the Spirit

Hello all!

This month for the Mirror, I've done a writeup on the process of the afterlife, and the features of spirits. Some of this has been scattered piecemeal throughout the game, but if you're looking for something of a collected highlights version of this lore, then look no further!

I hope you enjoy, and I'll be back next month with something new. :)

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Spirits arrive in the Underworld fundamentally equal, but not at all the same. Each of them passes, without memory of how, through from the mortal realm to the land of the dead, where they find themselves on the shore of the River of Fire. Many manage this on their own, but other need the aid of psychopomps such as Hermes.

For most, passing the first river is fundamentally simple; if they are truly dead mortals, than the fire of it not only does not burn, but parts for them readily, as does the water beneath it, giving them easy passage across a curiously-dry riverbed into the Underworld proper. Sometimes, such spirits may catch a glimpse of the fearsome, three-headed guard dog of Hades, Kerberos, but the great hound is readily able to distinguish mortal spirits from intruders, and the most terrifying thing they have to worry about from him is a good-natured bark.

Still, if there are any who falter here, the equally good-natured Pyriphlegethon usually finds them in short order, and ushers them across the river.

Whereupon, it is said, they find themselves along the banks of either the Acheron, the Kokytos, or most often the Styx, depending upon from where they entered the Underworld. Regardless of which river, there are docks lining the banks at regular intervals, easy to find for those deceased, as they will by instinct be pulled towards them.

There is often a queue at the docks, as the various ferrymen may carry only one passenger at a time, but if the spirit’s links to the mortal world have been properly severed by the extant funeral rites of their mortal location, culture, or heritage, there is nothing barring them from crossing immediately, and most will be ferried within a day or two.

If, however, the tethers tying the spirit to the mortal world are determined to not have been properly cut, the spirit must wait for them to decay naturally. Crossing any of the rivers with or without the aid of a ferryman will do this, but in a way that traumatizes the spirit, and may subsequently interfere with their ability to properly re-enter the cycle of life. Such instances are rare, especially since the Underworld came under the rule of Hades, whose methodical organization of this process from beginning to end included magical barriers along the banks of the rivers, that mortal souls still tethered to life may not pass.

Indeed, the care of such spirits is the Underworld’s first priority in its present form. However, some pieces of the process of death and rebirth are simply unavoidable. It is, for example, necessary to cleanse the spirit’s mind of its remaining ties to life, in the form of memory. This is something many find unpleasant and undesirable, but while much research has gone into methods of bypassing this requirement, none have been found. Inevitably, if a human soul passes to a new life with even fragmentary memory of its former one, it eventually becomes disquiet and fractured, pulled not only by the personality it develops in life but by scarcely-understandable figments of the past, and the result is torment of the existentially-dangerous kind. Such souls often return to the Underworld far sooner than they are meant to, and do so in need of much recuperation.

The removal of memory, then, is the function of the River of Oblivion. Those who drink regularly from her waters, as all spirits do, are left without memory of the most significant portions of their mortal lives, though at times, skills and similar sorts of memory remain. This results in a system whereby spirits, regardless of visual age, tend to reform themselves into communities within the Underworld much as communities exist in the mortal realm. It has been noted that in many cases, even the removal of memory does not serve as a complete severing of bonds between them, for at least sometimes, those who were close in life, and die near enough to one another, come to know each other once again in death.

For the most part, where a spirit will spend their temporary afterlife is clear enough: those who managed great feats of heroism, or the overcoming of major disadvantages in some way, or even simply those who suffered a great deal over the course of their latest mortal life, are afforded an afterlife in the Blesséd Isles, designed as reward or amelioration for their previous experiences—a way of ‘resetting’ the balance of trial and ease to neutrality. So, too, must some be punished in Tartarus, for excesses of the kind that have done damage to their very souls, which must once again be balanced.

For most souls, however, there is not so much of an imbalance that it requires drastic rectification, and these are shepherded to the Fields of Asphodel, the largest portion of the Underworld by far.

Fringe cases, those where what a soul needs is not obvious, are taken instead to the Judges, while they still have their memories. They are assigned a representative of sorts, a spirit who has studied the criteria of such judgements and can help argue on their behalf, while another argues for the worse of the possible outcomes. This process is typically completed within a few hours of the spirit being ferried over the rivers, and from there, they are moved onwards to the Lethe, unless their final destination is Tartarus, in which case the relief of oblivion does not occur until the term of punishment is finished.

One must know that for which one is being punished.

In terms of appearance, most spirits assume the general shape and form of their state just prior to death, in terms of age, gender presentation, and the like. Others, however, have forms that differ quite sharply from this, as the shape of a spirit is more or less synonymous with its true identity. The spirit of a woman forced by circumstance to appear and behave as a man to conform to cultural expectations will in the Underworld appear as she really is. For this reason as well, some spirits have mixed or androgynous appearances, or features, and this is generally considered quite unremarkable, as no one remembers life being any other way.

The typical spirit is mostly solid, though in places they may appear translucent. This generally occurs at the edges or extremities, particularly the feet, though that is not a universal rule. Despite this occasional appearance of wispiness, however, spirits in the Underworld are quite solid, and interact with objects and gravity as bodies do in the mortal realm.

Sometimes, a spirit in drastic need of balancing will have an appearance that diverges even further from this. ‘Stains’ of various sorts may mark them as in need of remediation in Tartarus, though not every spirit requiring such will have a visual indicator. Those that do usually manifest pale blotches, desaturations that interrupt their normal appearance, usually in an area that somehow corresponds to the corruption. A murderer may have unusually-pale hands, for example. The most unbalanced souls will have a different color in similar locations. An unrepentant serial killer, for example, may have red hands, or a blotch over their heart, or even just a crimson tint to their entire body. Such signs are best heeded when they appear, but their absence is not a sure way of telling where a soul needs to be, either. Those who do not realize or acknowledge the wrong they have done often appear without any such distinguishing features at all.

Spirits are capable of most everything mortals are capable of, and indeed, many instinctive habits carry over. They eat, drink, form relationships, practice trades, sing, dance, create, argue, and so on. Sustenance is not technically necessary for them, as they cannot ‘die’ in any meaningful sense of the word. However, the fact that they still have the instinct to eat, coupled with the fact that the same amount of food as a human needs keeps them in good condition, means that doing so is nevertheless essentially a necessity. If a spirit starves, it loses energy, becomes weak, and may endure a great deal of pain and trauma, something which is awful not only for the simple fact of it but also because it is likely to delay their return to life, as such suffering would demand a term of amelioration to bring the soul back into balance.

So, too, can spirits become injured, though injuries that would otherwise be deadly generally are not. There are a few exceptions, beings capable of ‘eating’ souls and in so doing permanently destroying them, but such instances are, in this age at least, vanishingly-rare.

The term of a spirit’s time in the Underworld is variable. For those in the Fields, it is usually a span exactly equivalent to the length of their previous mortal life. In the Blessed Isles and Tartarus, however, it is usually as long as is needed to rectify the soul’s imbalance, and any remaining difference between that and the previous life’s duration is spent after being moved to the Fields.

At the very end of this afterlife, the soul is reincarnated into mortal existence once again. The exact nature of this process is not clear, but it is something that only Hades himself can do. Even he does not choose the soul’s ultimate destination, nor does he have any jurisdiction over what happens to it after it leaves his custody. Such things, unknowable even to gods, are considered the exclusive provenance of Fate.