Reflections on the Soul

Inspiration

So much credit has to go to Arnold K (for his wonderful seven-soul concept) and semiurge (for the idea of metastatic souls) for their wonderful blog posts that inspired this reflection on the soul. Also, a shout out has to be given to Brandon Sanderson's Warbreaker for inspiring how animating things works in this system. My goal here is an adaptation of their ideas that maps each soul onto one of the core six attributes, an exploration of what happens in the cases of both absence and overabundance of a soul, and some of my own ideas on how souls might be interacted with and manipulated.

Souls of Substance

The lesser three souls are the souls of physical substance and reality. They are the underlying physics, chemistry, and biology that make up the world as it exists beyond the minds of thinking beings. The brains of lesser creatures serve as communication hubs for the coordination of the activities of the souls of substance, even in the absence of the experiential souls.

The First Soul, The Soul of Matter, The Mineral Soul

Associated Ability: Constitution 

Bodily Location: The Skeleton

The first soul governs substance, durability, and physical existence. This is the soul of matter and record of the interactions between it. All physical things have the first soul.

The first soul remembers the history of the body, and is spoken to with Speak with Dead.

Without the first soul, a being quickly ceases to have physical existence. Certain beings with particularly strong wills or unfinished business can persist even after the loss of the first soul, though only ever as an intangible remnant of what once was.

An overgrowth of the first soul results in crystallization of both the body and mind. At first, the benefits are abundant, granting supernatural durability and resilience. If the expansion of the first soul continues, this shortly becomes agonizing as flesh is replaced with bone, and eventually fully immobilizing as the ossification is complete. The effects on the mind are similar, as the first soul metastasizes and infiltrates the fourth through sixth souls it causes at first mere stubbornness before resulting in single minded focus on the completion of a lone fixation. The goal of a First Soul is subduction, the compartmentalization, and simplification of reality into standardized chunks which fit the restrictive paradigm of the metastatic being.

The Second Soul, The Soul of Potential, The Vegetable Soul

Associated Ability: Strength

Bodily Location: The Digestive System

The second soul governs growth, potential, and the complex web of interactions within a being which allow for life.  All living things have the second soul.

The second soul directs the growth and development of the body. It strengthens muscles with repeated use, breaks down food for energy, and heals wounds when they are opened. When life has run its course, the second soul breaks down the body, guiding its slow decline into oblivion.

Without the second soul, a body can not grow, nor can it decay. Undead lack the second soul in part or in full, and as such their hearts are stilled, their body driven by magical energies rather than metabolism, their wounds hang open, and they persist eternal.

An overgrowth of the second soul allows the body to grow in tandem with the soul into both the world without and the mind within. At first, wounds heal rapidly, exhaustion fades so as to make a tireless being. If the cancer continues, flesh forms new protrusions, new limbs bud, new eyes take shape, with the eventual decline of the body into an amorphous mass made one with its surroundings. The mind fares little better. The second soul cares not for the necessity or sufficiency of mental faculties. It prunes, grows redundancies, and warps iteratively that it might perfect the mind - heedless of the devastation it wreaks. The goal of a Second Soul is absorption, the consumption of reality until all reality is one with the body of the metastatic being.

The Third Soul, The Soul of Instinct, The Animal Soul

Associated Ability: Dexterity

Bodily Location: The Cardiovascular System

The third soul governs reflexes and instinct, the drive to feed, the drive to fight, to flee, to reproduce and to live. All creatures have the third soul.

The third soul drives the base behavior of animals. It instructs them to thrive, and grants them the cunning necessary to survive and spread their genetics.

Without the third soul, a being becomes dauntless. Its body knows no fear, it feels pain but does not run from it. Its body knows no passion, it knows need but does not crave it. The basic objectives of life hold no sway over one lacking a third soul, and the void is filled with dispassion.

An overgrowth of the third soul drives change and adaptation. At first, the third soul allows the body to engorge its muscles, harden its fingernails to claws, and reinforce its bones to withstand any blow. The senses become sharp and often respond before the conscious mind is even aware of a threat. The cancer begins when the third soul becomes fixated on a single aspect of survival. The body is specialized into a perfected tool, sculpted for a singular intent with extraneous functions discarded. The mind follows suit, first succumbing to instinctual responses, and then becoming entirely subject to the directives of the third soul. The goal of a Third Soul is survival, the propagation of its own existence at all costs.

The Experiential Souls

The three higher souls are the souls of qualia and subjective experience. They are present in all naturally occurring sapient beings, though artificial beings and beings born under the influence of magic or through other unnatural methods may lack one or more of the experiential souls in whole or in part.

The Fourth Soul, The Soul of Knowledge, The Scholar's Soul

Associated Ability: Wisdom

The fourth soul governs memory and serves as the record of a being's accumulated knowledge.

Without the fourth soul, a mind can not gain new knowledge, and can not access its memories of the past. A being lacking the fourth soul is perpetually stuck in the present, unable to access either the future or the past.

An overgrowth of the fourth soul drives acuity of recall and a youthful vigor. At first, growth of the fourth soul allows the body to resist the frailties of aging, and for the mind to more easily venture into the past, granting perfect memory. As the growth persists, this perfect recall becomes a tendency to linger in the past. As the growth becomes a cancer, it manifests in the body; aging and healing slowly grind to a halt, old wounds reopen and old injuries rear their heads once more. Then the urge to dwell on the past becomes a fixation, a steady regression until - like a child lost in dark forests - a singular flashback becomes an inescapable nightmare. A Fourth Soul is a danger to nobody except itself. Its goals are so lost in the past as to never again take action in the present.

The Fifth Soul, The Soul of Reason,  The Philosopher's Soul

Associated Ability: Intelligence

The fifth soul governs thought and planning, allowing a being to reason and act with rationality.

Without the fifth soul a mind becomes inflexible and mechanical, stagnant and unable to reason. It follows the most literal interpretation of its goals steadfastly, without capacity for innovation or adaptation to changing stimuli.

An overgrowth of the fifth soul grants genius and creativity. At first, learning becomes impossibly fast, and previously intractable problems fall away with hardly any effort. As the growth persists, it becomes visible in the body. It starts as a lengthening of the limbs and face and the subtle expansion of the skull before progressing with the growth of additional digits, and the flaking away of the skin of the hands and arms. When it metastasizes, the fifth soul's genius becomes megalomania, with plans and designs outpacing the ability and limitations of its victim to inevitably result in hubris. The goal of a Fifth Soul is the subjugation of its surroundings to its will, and its genius ensures that its existence is a calamitous danger.

The Sixth Soul, The Soul of Identity, The King's Soul

Associated Ability: Charisma

The sixth soul governs personality and dictates the desires, mannerisms, moods, perspectives, and characteristics of an individual.

Without the sixth soul a being becomes a blank slate. Their own desires and identity are erased, and those of another can easily be imposed. Even a slight reduction in the proportion of the sixth soul can dramatically reduce the ability of an individual to introspect and to understand others, while also rendering them substantially more vulnerable to influence.

An overgrowth of the sixth soul grants rampant charisma and force of personality. At first, this manifests as a magnetic personality and disproportionate influence. Uniquely among metastasis of the souls, cancers of the sixth soul have two primary stages. In the first stage, the rampant growth causes the individual to become a caricature of who they were before, their most distinctive traits both physical and mental exaggerated to a fault even as they become hyper aware of the surreal performance they now live out. In the second stage, the rampant growth amplifies the identity of its host beyond their own body. The Sixth Soul becomes magnetic, attracting unwitting individuals and subjugating their will to that of the Sixth Soul until its victims become hosts to broken-off slivers of the Sixth Soul. The identity of these victims is slowly encroached upon by that of the Sixth Soul until it is overwritten entirely, and then the cycle begins again, the Sixth Soul spreading like any other pernicious disease.

Equilibrium of the Souls

Under normal conditions, the souls exist in a carefully regulated balance, constrained to the proper regions of the body and the mind by the highest soul present in its role as marshal. Often, an individual will have one or more souls which are substantially more or less powerful than the others; a soldier might have enhanced second and third souls, while a scholar might have enhanced fourth and fifth souls. These imbalances only result in a diseased state when a given soul overgrows the capacity of the body and mind to contain it in the regions proper for its nature.

Diseases of the Souls

Beyond their absence or metastasis, many other disorders of the souls exist. The majority of diseases of the body act upon the second soul, interfering with its ability to direct the growth and metabolism of a living being. From the common cold to the most lethal of plagues, all serve as a distraction for the second soul, thus weakening the body as the soul's focus turns to an internal war against unseen invaders. Diseases of the mind are far more diverse in their targets. The vast majority interfere with the mind's connection to the three experiential souls, thus acting as an external thumb on the scales of its careful equilibrium. Other disorders of the mind act upon the third soul, that highest of the souls of substance, and drive maladaptive instinctual responses that overwhelm the directives of the experiential souls. Likewise, many curses are the result of an obstruction of one or more of the souls in whole or in part.

Artificial Souls and Their Manipulation

Arcane magic is capable of many great feats regarding souls, save but one; the creation of a new soul. Magic exists to manipulate the proportions of souls, to tear them from their shells, to construct new housings for them, and to invest a portion of a caster's souls into another entity. Constructs and golems are created, new species bred from disparate stock with naught save arcane assistance, even inanimate objects are granted some pale reflection of life at a wizard's beck and call, but the birth of new souls from nothingness remains ever outside the grasp of the arcane. That secret art remains the providence of the divine alone.

Despite this shortcoming existing as such a black mark upon the arcane arts, it is only known to a select few scholars. To the untrained eye, the careful investment of the caster's soul into an inanimate broom to clean a room, the meticulous construction of a golem from scraps of stolen souls, the puppetry of a corpse as an undead minion animated by the will of its necromancer, all are indistinguishable from a genuine act of creation.

The most basic forms of animations require a portion of the caster's fourth soul filled with memories of goals and instructions for achieving them. This soul fragment is invested into a prepared vessel which provides the desired combination of first, second, and third souls, thus creating an animated being subject to the will of the caster who built it. Without instruction, such invested entities are inflexible in their actions and adapt poorly to change.

A more advanced form of animation invests a portion of the caster's fifth soul in addition to the previous requirements. This results in the creation of an invested entity with the capacity to respond to new information in ways beyond mere instinct. Of course, this greater flexibility comes at greater cost to the caster, who is left with many holes in their soul.

Some of the greatest mages of history are rumored to have found a way to invest sufficient portions of the sixth soul to grant their creations an identity of their own, but these entities are found only as the subjects of myths and legends.

Mages who dabble in the soul arts run the risk of investing too much of their own beings into their creations, leaving the edges of their souls to fray before unraveling into countless threads as they are emptied out into unspeakable husks. To abate this risk, some mages turn to supplementing their own souls with those of others, though such practices are considered as evil as any other form of enslavement. In its most malignant forms, these mages become swollen with masses of souls turned cancerous far beyond the capacity of any one body or mind to contain.

The Issue of Identity

Many schools of thought exist surrounding the question of identity and the individual, though they generally fall under two umbrellas, or a less common third. The first posits that it is the individual sixth souls whose existence predates interaction, that the self can exist isolated in a vacuum, and that interactions between individuals thus give rise to society. The second inverts this dynamic, claiming that it is from these complicated networks of interactions between individuals that any given self arises. A third - though less popular - group takes the ideas of the second even further, choosing to believe that individual sixth souls are simply pieces of a greater, communal whole. The most radical of these theories posit that the infectious nature of Sixth Souls is a direct result of this (former or current, depending on your intellectual predilections) status as pieces of a united whole. Under this paradigm, such a disorder is simply a return to a more natural state as a step on the path towards the reunion of the collective unconscious.