Souls

A soul is the stable connection between a mortal body and Ūrkléan. It does not contain a person's memories, personality or knowledge; those belong to the living nervous system and its history. The soul makes the changing processes of a body belong to one persistent subject and connects that subject to the world-being.

Function

Mortal consciousness depends on a three-part coupling: Ūrkléan, soul and body. The biological nervous system supplies nearly all mental content and recursive processing. The soul supplies a persistent field boundary, while Ūrkléan stabilises it from the world side.

Through the same connection, malformed output from one of the cracks is drawn into flesh as burden. The body functions as replaceable filter material. Death returns the soul to Ūrkléan but leaves the stored burden in ordinary matter.

Death and identity

There is no conventional personal afterlife. A dead person's effects persist in descendants, institutions, memory and material history, but the soul itself does not preserve a complete individual mind. A functioning brain without a soul may retain reflexes or automatic processing but cannot sustain one integrated experiencer; a detached soul lacks the information capacity to recreate the former person.

Transfer and capture

Specialists can move a soul into a prepared soulless body, most often an Orcnea. The transfer does not move personality. The receiving body becomes independently conscious through its own nervous organisation and later experience.

Long-term capture in an object is possible but unstable and usually less useful than tuned Lodestone. Apparent speaking relics are generally copied memories or emotional echoes rather than imprisoned persons.

Disconnection

Burden overload weakens the body-facing connection. Distance from Uclea, as seen in the Iota Limit, weakens the world-facing connection. Both reduce integration. Symptoms begin with current-specific illness and can progress toward confusion, loss of initiative, fading ownership of memory and eventual collapse of conscious unity.