Dolmenwood Ponderings - On the Soul
As I gear up for my Dolmenwood campaign I’m pondering little bits of lore as I want to run it. These may be considered as doctrine or true by characters in setting, but doesn’t mean it is the Absolute Truth.
On Souls
The immortal creatures of fairy (including fairy and demi-fey kindred) do not have souls. Their essential spirit or life force is inherently bound to their material form. When a fairy dies they do not go on to everlasting reward in the heavens of the One True God, or the torments of the hells, they simply cease to exist. This binding of spirit and flesh is what fends off the ravages of age and disease for eternity. Demi-fey are no different, but their long exposure to the mortal realm weakens their essence and causes their bodies to eventually fail.
It is thought that in death fairies still experience a kind of consciousness or dream-like state, a waking nightmare as their flesh-essence decays until it can no longer cohere and fades away.
This lack of a soul is why fairies find Liturgic and the pealing of church bells unpleasant. It is said these things pull at the mortal soul, bringing it closer to god. For fairy-folk this feels as if one was trying to tug at their flesh from the inside.
Mortals are those who have had their spirits cloven from their physical bodies so that the soul could live in reward for faith to the church (or for faithless pagans to be punished for failure to convert). Conflicting accounts of the afterlife from resurrected pagans and worshippers of foreign gods are conveniently swept under the rug.
It is possible for a fairy to gain a mortal soul by performing a holy ritual — often in the course of a marriage to a mortal, though there are other ceremonies for conversion. As a consequence, the fairy becomes mortal themselves, aging and dying like any other, their soul promised to the afterlife.
So, too, are there stories of fairy-folk tricking mortals into losing their soul. Mortals eating food in the lands of fairy, or bewitched by fairy-folk into pagan marriage, among other things. Whether their soul is re-bound to flesh or whisked off to the hells is unknown, but warned of in equally dire measure by the church.
On Resurrection
Resurrection as granted by divine magic calls the soul back from whatever plane it resides in and binds it to regenerated flesh.
Elfs and other fairy characters (including player characters) cannot benefit from holy miracles of resurrection; there is no soul to re-bind to mortal flesh (for this reason there are no “naturally” occurring fairy ghosts. However, phantasmal undead of fairies can still be formed by magic, and the animation of their bodies is as trivial as any other).
The Great Fairy Rune of Unravel Death does work on the fey: it’s magic is more akin to time manipulation than the re-binding of souls, reverting the body and essence to a state before death. This work on mortals too — without recalling their soul. A mortal resurrected in this way is soul-less: their souls still residing in a plane of the afterlife, with all the consequences this implies.