Death and the Anima

Where The Dead Go: The Well of Souls, by near-universal belief
Anima On The Continent: Roughly a million
Raised By: Necromasters, a discipline of the congruence schools
Nature: No intelligence. Treated as automatons, and used as labour
The Objection: The Dirt holds a reanimated body costs its owner the Well
Exception: Cryptum — an anima that wakes is no longer one

Almost everyone on Aropria believes the dead go to the Well of Souls. Almost everyone on Aropria also lives in a world where roughly a million corpses are currently at work.

Those two facts do not sit easily together, and how a given community reconciles them is one of the more revealing things about it.

What is believed

The Well of Souls is held to be whatever the arriving soul needs it to be — warm, or quiet, or a table of everyone you expected to see again. Its flexibility is why belief in it sits comfortably alongside nearly every other faith on the continent, and why those who follow it as a religion in its own right are only a fraction of those who believe in it.

Common death rituals across the continent honour that belief, and the manner of farewell changes accordingly.

What is done with the body

Practice varies, and one position is stated more sharply than any other.

The Dirt holds that a body must not be used after death. It is owed to the soil and should decompose naturally. Most of its followers believe that a believer who is reanimated will never reach the Well of Souls at all, and will be forced to roam instead.

That is the clearest articulation of an unease many people share without formalising. It is also, in a continent with a million working anima, an unusually expensive conviction.

Let the grass partake of me

Let the insects feast on me

Let my bones become dust

Let the soil consume me

What the anima are

An anima is anything humanoid, or close enough to it, moved through congruence to do work it does not choose. In practice that almost always means a raised body, because a raised body is what a necromaster makes — but the word is about what animates a thing and what it is for, not about what it is made of. A mechanism that moves under some other power is not an anima, whatever it looks like.

Anima are raised by necromasters, one of the physiologist disciplines of the congruence schools. They serve as a source of nearly indefinite labour: any arbitrary grunt role, any physical work done moderately well. They are too imprecise for anything requiring artisanship. They make decent combatants and useful shock troops.

A weak necromaster may raise one or two at a time. A powerful one may raise fifty, and may give them abilities beyond the ordinary.

They have no intelligence. They are treated as automatons, and used accordingly — manual labour, shock troops, the work nobody else will do. Public feeling about them is not strong in either direction, which is itself the point: to most people they are equipment.

What people think of it

Attitudes to necromasters are not what an outsider expects. The discipline is among the most sought-after of any congruence school, because indefinite labour that neither eats nor sleeps is difficult to argue with. There are regions uncomfortable around anima — and there is the Dirt, which is not uncomfortable but opposed — but the prevailing attitude across the continent is practical.

When one wakes up

Very rarely, an anima left to itself develops a spark of awareness and becomes Cryptum: a person, with a mind and a life of their own, inhabiting a body that was raised for labour.

A Cryptum is not an anima. The word stops applying at the moment of waking, and it stops applying completely — an anima is worked, and a Cryptum acts under their own power. What they were before is a fact about their history rather than about what they are.

It happens when the necromaster who raised it dies, or simply leaves it alone long enough. Most Cryptum report waking after several months of inaction; the earliest records are a handful of days.

Against roughly a million anima there are perhaps fifty thousand Cryptum. Public opinion runs about sixty-forty against them, and they are the only species with cities and nations actively hostile to them — which has a good deal to do with what they were before they woke, and with the horror stories about flesh-eating anima turning on their masters. Many of those stories have a real basis: they are usually accidents with fledgling Cryptum.