A creature’s life is dictated by the health and union of their soul, shadow, and spirit. At the center of their being is their spirit, which is the spark of free will and personality that defines who they are. Wrapped on either side are the soul and shadow, the astral and malstaric counterbalances of the spirit, which together give life and movement to the spirit they are bound to. While still critical to life, they do not define who the person is.
The Soul
The soul is made of pure positive energy from Aurus, the White Sun. A long, faint strand of it stretches all the way back to the sun. It was created by Aurus. Only Alarian creatures are energized with a soul.
The Shadow
The shadow is made of pure negative energy from Nydus, the Black Sun. A long, faint strand of it stretches all the way back to the sun. It was created by Nydus. Only Alarian creatures are energized with a shadow.
The Spirit
One's spirit is made of pure ezz, pulled from the swirling mass throughout the planes. Living things with both thought and emotion all have some spirit-like core consisting mainly of ezz. Life-like things from other planar stacks may not have emotion, and will be "powered" by something other than a soul and shadow. For example, some life on other planar stacks is powered with Aether.
The First Death and Lyzaria's Architecture
The three-strand death described above is not eternal — it is the present-day result of two distinct events separated by tens of millions of years.
Souls and shadows predate Ezz. When Alaria was first created it opened without psyic energy, and Celestia existed only as an unformed seed within Celest's sacrifice. There were no spirits yet; the Ezz that would power them had not yet flooded the planar stack. Yet death still existed, because souls and shadows still existed.
Lyzaria, the first titan, was the architect of mortality. In an act of radical sacrifice, she became the first being in Alaria to willingly die — and in doing so, she carved the channels that all later deaths flow through. Her soul spread across the Astral Sea, forming the substrate that every subsequent soul settles into. Her shadow became the first and most ancient presence in Malstaris. These grooves she cut into reality — the Dreaming of Lyzaria and the First Dark — were chosen acts, and they persist.
That original death had only two strands: soul to the Astral Plane, shadow to Malstaris. There was no spirit to thread a third path, and Celestia had not yet bloomed into a full plane. The dead were accounted for entirely by Aurus and Nydus.
The third strand came with the Ezz Rift, roughly 11.5 million years after Alaria's founding. When Melera's music cracked the planar stack and Ezz flooded in, Celest's seed bloomed into Celestia, and spirit-substance became possible for the first time. Death acquired its third arc: the spirit fading to Celestia, to persist only as long as the name is remembered. This strand was threaded through the framework Lyzaria had already built — her two channels remained; the Ezz Rift added a third alongside them.
The three-strand death mortals experience today is thus the product of two architects: Lyzaria, who carved the soul and shadow channels at the dawn of mortality, and the Ezz Rift, which added the spirit's path to Celestia after Ezz made spirit-life possible.
Astral & Malstaric Thread
Binding the soul and shadow to the spirit is a creature's astral and malstaric thread. These threads are not metaphors—they are literal strands of binding energy that run through the Ethereal and Nethereal planes respectively.
- Astral threads pass through the Ethereal Plane, connecting spirits (in the Material Plane) to souls (in the Astral Plane).
- Malstaric threads pass through the Nethereal Plane, connecting spirits to shadows (in Malstaris).
If these threads are broken, the creature dies, and their newly freed soul and shadow float up and sink down to the Astral Plane and Malstaris respectively, while their spirit fades to Celestia.
The Asymmetry of Death
The fates of soul, shadow, and spirit after death are fundamentally different:
Souls rise to the Astral Plane, where they persist for a time—sometimes centuries, sometimes millennia. Eventually, they drift back through to Astraeva, dissolving into Aurus's light to become raw essence once more. In time, they are drawn forth again as new souls for new lives. Souls cycle.
Shadows sink to Malstaris, where they persist for a time—particularly if they carry deep secrets. Eventually, they drift back through to Eindumor, dissolving into Nydus's darkness to become raw essence once more. In time, they are drawn forth again as new shadows for new lives. Shadows cycle.
Spirits fade to Celestia, where they persist only as long as their true name is remembered. When the last being who knew that name forgets it, the spirit ends. There is no Ezz reservoir, no cosmic return and renewal. The self—the personality, the free will, the you that made you distinct—simply ceases to exist. This is the true finality of death in Alaria.
This asymmetry matters. Your soul and shadow are borrowed cosmic essence—they were never truly "yours" to begin with, and they will go on to be part of countless other lives. But your spirit is you. When it is forgotten, you are gone. The universe continues with new souls and shadows drawn from the same sources, but the person you were will never exist again.
If the thread is not broken but still damaged, it can nevertheless have serious effects on the life of that being. It can make one weaker to effects that would dominate one's spirit, and having part of the thread break completely could cause your soul or shadow to leave completely, sapping one of most of their life and energy.
If a creature is missing its soul or shadow, its defenses against Deoric magic are drastically weakened, making it susceptible to death, mind control, or anything else the caster desires.
Thread Magic
Those who work with the threads directly access the overlay planes. In all three cases the operative source is Deoric — the titan command-language, applied to the thread-stuff of which souls and shadows are woven, is what actually commands the threads to mend, sever, or yield their vibrations; the Ethereal and Nethereal Planes are the overlays through which practitioners reach the threads, not a separate modality.
- Healers who mend astral threads work through the Ethereal Plane, which is why soul-healing magic often feels luminous and clarifying.
- Necromancers who sever or manipulate malstaric threads work through the Nethereal Plane, which is why death magic feels cold and invasive—it is literally reaching into the substrate that holds a person together.
- Diviners perceive the vibrations that significant events send through the vast web of threads. The echoes of the past and the nascent tensions of the future are both readable in the thread-substrate.
Displacement and the Stolen Life
The threads can be made to give up their owner. The cruelest working of all severs a living person's spirit from the soul and shadow it was born between and unmakes it—the true death, the self gone past remembering—while leaving the body, the soul, and the shadow whole and still bound to one another. Into that emptied but still-living vessel another spirit can be drawn and seated, threaded to the borrowed soul and shadow as though it had been born there.
This is the only road by which a spirit already fallen to Celestia can re-enter the living world without a body of its own kept waiting. A daemon, which is only such a spirit, cannot reclaim its own dissolved flesh; but it can be put into flesh taken from someone else, where there are still hands willing and able to work the rite. What is seated this way comes back mortal, not divine—housed in a borrowed body with a borrowed soul and shadow, it has no more reach across the boundary than the person it replaced, and it ages and dies on the same terms. The working ends one self to house another. It is sometimes suffered willingly, the last gift of a devotee to a dying god, and more often inflicted on someone given no say. Where the knowledge survives it is hoarded and hidden, and in most reckonings counted among the blackest things a person can do.
Beings In Between
Various names are given to the creatures with different combinations of soul, shadow, and spirit.