Welcome, welcome. Take your seats.
Now, I know you and I are not physically in the same space. Nor is there, in any likelihood, a chair that you would seat yourself in. It is just that, well… I was attempting to do a joke there. A mimicry. And now it’s already fallen flat.
Anyways, we may not have a classroom, but we do have dedicated times to learn, and these we must use, and use well. There is no sharper weapon than a well honed mind, especially one that is cradled in the skull of a demon ever loyal to the void.
And who better to learn from than myself? Well, I am not an expert in all subjects, but I am the be-all, end-all master when it comes to knowledge of humanity. And, as all you lot have been judged fit to join the ranks of the possessors, you must come to know humanity, too.
After all, how can you corrupt a thing that you don’t understand? Let me lay out an analogy that most of you will understand, since I know most of you are formerly of the torment squads; imagine you feel like you need a little bit of variety to your flock’s punishment, just so they don’t build up a tough skin when it comes to getting their fingernails ripped out. You might decide, hey, perhaps you should add a little poison to their diets, right? But what do you add to the well to properly poison a human sinner just enough to give them a stomach ache, without killing them and rendering them useless for a time? Should you use nightshade? Arsenic? Or perhaps just a little bit of rotten fruit?
Knowing the right answer can come from experience, or you can save yourself several days time of experimenting by contacting the older spirits in the Pit, yes? That several days more suffering added to the airs of Hell, bringing us just a tiny step forward to the end. Learning is wise. At almost all times. And it is especially wise when it comes to the possessor units. A wrong step, a misapprehension of local culture or broader human sensibilities… simply nodding your victim’s head when you meant to say no is often enough to grab a suspicious angel’s attention, and then what? Flaming sword, shattered carapace, death. It’s not a pleasant situation for anyone, save perhaps the angel, and they don’t count. And, to make it all the worse, we lose precious time and effort for the greater cause of doom. Slip ups are unacceptable.
Slip ups will happen. But they will happen less when you listen. So listen, and listen well.
Very well then. So today I will answer a question which has no doubt bugged you throughout most of your existence; what is a soul? And how can it be so valuable.
Well, to put things simply, a soul is the eternal bit of being that embodies the person it controls. It is the mind, the body, all the bits in between, and more. But it is not those physically. It is those things, but reflected in a mirror and traced in glowing hot charcoal. It is a thing best understood in metaphors, and never fully comprehensible to the individual being.
The classic conception of a soul is as a ghost, a dim holographic image of the person it was in life. And, certainly, that is what it seems like on the outside, and the outside is what we unfortunately must engage with. There is no better understanding a soul than that, although there have been hundreds of our kindred who have devoted entire centuries of their life to meditating on its mysteries. Maybe, just maybe, there is a better way of describing a soul that will be found in the future, and on that knowledge we all might be liberated from our pain. But otherwise…
There is another way to think of a soul. One that is better for our purposes. Inaccurate, still, but practicality is what we of the possessor class search for. A soul is the person with all of time folded upon it. So it is not just personality, body, and memory, but the all the physical and emotional effects that said creature has had and will have on the world, echoing through all of eternity.
That is why a soul is so powerful. A simple human, alive and sinless, is capable of destroying a mountain with hundreds of years of work. Corrupt the human, bring them into our claws, and then you not only have the decades of power they might ahve exerted on earth, but all the ripples of causality their existence will trigger on the material plane. Thus, each and every soul has the temporal power of several dozen stars, and perhaps more if you put some gumption into it.
The actual physics of this manipulation is complicated, and is, of course, covered in an entirely different course. Long story short, drawing power from a soul almost feels as natural as flexing your living muscles, at least when you are assuredly in possession of said soul. And, as you no doubt know, maintaining possession of a soul is even easier than that; the soul itself cannot manipulate the power it holds conceptually over space and time, and, thankfully, shows no ability of manipulating that potential in other souls either, leaving a sinner revolt a problem so small as to be akin to ripping the wings off a fly.
Easy. All of it easy. By merely holding a single person’s soul, we have temporal power akin to nothing else in creation, save for the heavens themselves. Unfortunately, we still need orders of magnitude more to solidify our own destruction.
How much power is that? Well, let’s say this; the latent, untapped energy in a single human soul at any time is enough to destroy a small satellite. And by satellite here I do mean an entire celestial body, such as a moon. That seems ridiculous, doesn’t it? Surely, such a catastrophic detonation would be able to end one’s life well and truly, no?
No. No, not at all. Well, it will end your life, that is for certain. But it will not, and this is important, harm your own soul. This is where the study of souls becomes truly fascinating. If power can be drawn from a soul, if it seems that the soul is so inextricably linked to the material world that it might give its controller the power of the classically conceived gods, then ought it not also suffer from the pains of the same material plane?
Well, it doesn’t. At least at all exhibitions of power we have attempted. And we have attempted grand projects indeed, not least of which was the annihilation of an entire star, the event humans have begun to name ‘Kepler’s Supernova’ in honor of the man who observed it, I think. Oh, if only humanity had an inkling of the power that truly infests this world…
Anyways, we had a whole slew of junior demons volunteer to be destroyed in that event, an event so catacylsmic, might I remind you, that it bends the curvature of space and time to this day. Sure enough, their physical forms were obliterated, instantly, mercifully. But their souls lingered. Not only lingered, but they managed to fnd their way back to the hatcheries even across such a gulf of distance that even light would take thousands of years to manage the journey.
This has lead most of us, the senior demons that is, to adjust our view of what the soul might be. Instead of a powerful reflection of the living world, it might, and here I stress the might, might be an opening, a wound that allows something from another world of definitions we cannot even begin to understand… it might be a portal to that place. Our essence, our minds, our memories, our sins, as we live, these things not only reverberate through the material world, but bring in, or ship away, some essence into that other world.
Oh, sorry. I fear I skipped ahead there. Yes. A soul is changed in some ways by how it proceeds through life. The soul of a dead baby is not worth even a hundredth as much as that of a centenarian, at least, that is how it is for our purposes. Those who have lived longer, who have seen more, thought more, loved more… these souls seem to universally be easier to draw power from than those who do not. This realization, of course, has created all sorts of wacky spin-off ideas. If the power of a captured soul correlates to its age lived and the amount of experiences it has had, why then should we not attempt to capture a demonic soul for purposes of torture extraction? Surely, if a human who has lived a hundred years and traveled the world is one of our best batteries, then surely one of our kindred, who has lived for hundreds of thousands of years and been to all the visible planes, why, they might give us power enough to destroy existence then and there?
One problem with this idea, is, of course, our souls’ immediate pursuit of the hatchery. No force we have managed to levy against this phenomena has been successful. And then, say, even if it was, would it not be better then to, say, destroy the demonic soul in transit? Or at the very least make certain that it is never able to reach its rebirth. No?
I see you’re getting bored. I’ve droned on about this subject for long enough, anyways. Essentially, the thoery of soul collection says that we do not know anything about the soul, and even if we did, we do not, and likely will never know enough. Does that make pursuing such knowledge pointless? Not even slightly. After all, stupid little advancements in theory can have potent ripple effects across the broader scope of hell. It is often only by theory that new practices are tried. And who knows if there are better ways we could be going about soul collection? Or self destruction? That is for us to find out.
