The Moirae's Mirror - November

Hello all, and welcome, or welcome back, to the Moirae's Mirror! Last month, this little preview section talked about Erebus, the Underworld's repurposed deific domain that acts more or less like an AI program. 

This month, we're going to talk a little bit about souls! As you may have seen in the BIP, there's a section later in the chapter where the PC has the chance to shadow Charon at his work, more or less, and the conversation that results hints at or outright explains some important features of the Underworld and souls both mortal and immortal. 

So this month, we're going to take a look at this stuff in a bit more detail, assisted as before by some screenshots of the BIP. 

To begin with, Charon's boat carries people across the Styx in this particular version of the Underworld. The rivers have various purposes, and the first one that anyone passes is actually the Pyriphlegethon. But Pyri lets in anyone who is dead, so it isn't until the second "layer" of the Underworld that anyone who belongs in it might hit a snag. 

Now, Charon is only one of many ferrypersons in the Underworld; there are other people with similar jobs. He himself is something like the head of the ferrying department, rather than the only person moving ALL THOSE SOULS around. That said, he does shift work just like everyone in his department, largely because he wants to. 

You might be wondering what Styx herself does in this process, and the answer is... not a lot. She is of course in charge of the river itself, and the river nymphs that inhabit it, but aside from maintaining the integrity of the river, she has as little to do with the Underworld or its other inhabitants as possible. She much prefers her other job, as the gods' oath-taker, and largely keeps to herself until the chance arises to make a trip to Olympus. 

Anyway, here we have Charon remarking that he can't take a soul across the river without the proper fee. This is lifted right from mythology; a toll is required to pass the Styx, and it was traditional to bury the dead with this amount so they would have the fee with them when the time came. 

That means, then, that those who don't were not buried with the fee. This could be for any number of reasons, but in any case it's a little more complicated than the Underworld being bizarrely capitalistic!

So in order to kind of fit this notion of needing a "fee" into a system like the one I've built for FoA, it had to have a deeper meaning than the material value of the coins. Rather, the coins represent something: that proper funeral rites have been performed on a body, and that the soul is therefore no longer still in any way still "tethered" to that body. This conveniently does a few things:

1. It fits with a lot of myth-based views about why it is important to treat the dead a certain way, and jives with other myths about how undead come to be. 

2. It actually allows for people of non-Greek religions to be assumed to be in the Underworld. This location on the Styx might be where the Greeks are, hence the "fee," but at another entrance to the Underworld, the ferrypeople may only take those whose bodies have been treated some other way, e.g. burned, in accordance with the traditions of the surface world near that entrance.

3. It allows me to introduce a few important larger world elements: that there are mostly-incontrovertible laws of the universe, and that sometimes deific influence can subvert them (and that sometimes it can't!) This will be kind of an important element to play with later in the story/series. 

But the basic idea here is, the Underworld can only fully accept souls who have no remaining tie to life, and if that tie is not removed in the expected way, it can and must be allowed to decay over time. 

We get into the "gods are sometimes exceptions" bit here, and we also set up the fact that there is a way out! In order to prevent an infinitely-expanding Underworld, I have introduced a form of reincarnation into this universe, an operation which can only occur after a specified duration in the Underworld. Reincarnating souls is something that, at present, only Hades can do, and the fact that he has the power to do it is why he's the guy in charge of the place. It's very taxing however, and is in fact the most difficult of his duties.

How does a death deity bring people back to life? Well, it's not so much making them alive as pulling the death out of them! Over time in the Underworld, souls who do things like eat its food and bathe in its waters and generally inhabit it are saturated with Chthonic energy. Hades can pull it back out of the soul, and, being now nothing like its surroundings, he can cause it to repel—essentially yeeting the soul out of the Underworld to a specified destination. 

And that is, more or less, how the Underworld works! Next month, I think we'll be talking about its parts, and the different things souls might be doing or enduring while present, as well as why there's a specified time period at all. 

I hope you enjoyed the glimpse into the world here. Cheers y'all!