Rafflesiac

What is a soul?

There are many answers to this question, each as different from another as souls themselves. Some claim they are what give humans meaning and life, and ascend to a greater plane after the deaths of their mortal homes. Others believe that souls are inherent to nature, and reside in all of its expressions. To some, the soul is a vagary of the human mind desperately seeking permanence in a world that lacks it.

Then there are those who know more. The ones who have plumbed the depths of the soul, some much farther than others. The ones known as magi.

Magi speak of the soul as an offshoot of the Root, the swirl of Akasha from which all knowledge wells forth and to which all knowledge returns. To them, the soul is many things: the medium that bears the magic circuits their power flows through, the basis of their abilities and purpose, and the most personal hint of their greatest goal. Some families pursue the soul to its utmost, such as the Einzberns, a dynasty of magi hundreds of years old who created a ritual for the materialization of the soul, and the Tohsaka, a Japanese clan of magi who seek the Root to this day. For many magi, the soul is a matter of utmost concern for its connection to the Root.

In every group, however, there are exceptions; magi who studied themselves for decades, who risked death and fates worse than it for their own goals and reasons, and obtained the ultimate expression of their souls.

Less than ten people throughout the world’s history have manifested a reality marble.
What were their motives, their desires? Who were these people, who worked tirelessly for years to obtain a power outlawed by their peers and by the World?
In a ritual meant to materialize the soul, the fates of two such people will intertwine.

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The sky was black with smoke and ash. Flames burned in the wreckage below, pumping the acrid stench of burnt rubble and flesh upward in fresh columns of choking black. Fire hungrily lapped at charred and crumbling buildings collapsing into their own ash, at scorched earth rent with deep gashes, at blade after bloodstained blade jutting from the ruined earth, each one slowly fading to let fresh drops of blood splash to the ground, and at the hundreds of corpses slumped on the ground stained with their own sweat, waste, tears and blood.

In this hell, a lone bloodstained man faded away as a young girl entered the world.