Soul

The soul is the immaterial part of a creature -- the immortal spirit within. It gives rise to sapience, intellect, and thought, differentiating sentient forms of life, such as animals, from non-sentient forms of life, such as plants. Every mortal and immortal creature in the universe has a soul.
According to mortal scholars, the Soul is the animating force of the mind, while Life is the animating force of the body. As demonstrated by plants, life by itself is not enough to give rise to sentience. But for sentient creatures such as animals, it is life that binds a soul to its body. The only other force in the Universe capable of binding souls to matter is Undeath.
Souls are one of the six laws of creation which first shaped and arranged the universe at its creation. Souls are closely linked to the laws of Life and Matter -- together these three aspects define the properties of objects that fill the universe and the lifeforms that inhabit the geometry created by these objects.
Contents

The inviolability of souls

By the will of the Empyreal Gods, souls are inviolable. This means that no force in the universe can destroy a soul -- or somehow consume one -- thus making every creature that is born ultimately immortal. Through unholy magics, souls can be bound into physical objects even after death, but not even the most darkest forms of necromancy can stop a soul from existing.
Click to reveal forbidden eldritch lore, but steel your mind for a sanity check!

The Old Gods hold the power to absorb souls and even utterly annihilate them. How this is possible is unknown even to the gods of Amanor. But the Old Gods are alien entities from outside the universe, and they are not constrained by the laws of creation. Fortunately, they rarely if ever make appearances within the Universe, seemingly content to linger in their impossible dimensions. Unfortunately, they might have granted their powers to Loviatar, giving the Goddess of Evil an uncounterable advantage in her fight against the Empyreals.

Associated Progenitor Relic
Animus
Visualization / manifestation
Souls appears as ghosts -- semi-transparent, ethereal, wispy apparitions of dull light, colored in white, grey, or shades of pale cyan.
Localization
Universe

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LAWS OF CREATION
Life
Matter
Soul
Magic
Space
Time
ARTIFICIAL LAWS
Divinity
Afterlife
Undeath

The Cycle of Souls and its disruption by the Empyreal Gods

All souls come from the Living Infinite, and all souls must eventually return to it. This is known as the Cycle of Souls. However, the Empyreal Gods have artificially disrupted this cosmic mechanism, attempting to replace it entirely but managing only to postpone its effects.

Death and the afterlife

Shortly after death, the soul of a creature leaves its body as an ethereal apparition -- the less that remains of the body, the quicker this process. The soul detaches from its corporeal remains and merges with the Living Infinite -- or it would, if not for the meddling of the gods. Instead, souls enter the Afterlife, guided to their rightful destinations by Empyreal gods of death. It is by the power of the Animus, and the secrets gleaned from its usage, that the gods are able to postpone the re-entry of a soul into the Cycle of Souls. Afterlife is not eternal, however, and all souls are inevitably called to the Living Infinite from whatever afterlife the gods chose for them. This effect is known as the Diminishing.

The mortality of gods

Despite the great power of gods, not even they can entirely escape the Cycle of Souls. There is no afterlife for gods, who are drawn to the Living Infinite immediately after their corporeal forms perish. Thus death is a very real danger for the gods -- and many other cosmic entities besides.
Although gods can prevent the souls of creatures from entering the Cycle of Souls, they cannot do this to the souls of gods. This is because their powers over souls are limited. The more ancient and more powerful a soul is, the more difficult it is to stop its re-entry into the Cycle, whereas young souls are very easy to handle in comparison. Even the most junior deity of the Pantheon can take the souls of his most devout servants into afterlife, but not even Anthos, the God of the Afterlife himself and the wielder of the Animus, can save the soul of that junior deity from Diminishing into the Living Infinite should they be slain.

Creating living creatures with magic

Souls are not only inviolable but also unimitable; souls cannot be created with magic. All creatures that are born receive their souls from the Cycle of Souls. And every soul eventually returns to the Cycle.
Thus, not even the mightiest spellcaster can craft a spell or ritual to create a living being with a soul. There are a myriad spells that create life, ranging from transforming inanimate objects into animals to conjuring beasts and even dragons from thin air. Although definitely alive, creatures created by such spells are, in fact, soulless. Their minds are only crude facsimilies of true sapience -- simulacrums of souls, operating only with rudimentary levels of understanding, wisdom, and morality.
For most intelligent creatures with any kind of social skills, the difference between a soulless creature and a creature with a soul is easily detected; so jarring is the manner in which a soulless creature behaves and interacts with others.