jack

Q. What do we know about the afterlife?

For millennia, possibly millions of years, all anyone knew was that when humans died, they disappeared, and other animals didn't. This led to complicated funeral rites, and the general belief in a connection between having intelligence and having a soul, and many people choose to make an arbitrary definition of human according to that line: do you transcend, or do you not?

It's possible it served as an evolutionary advantage. "Hunt humans," it proclaims, "and you won't have any dinner." Which suggests intelligence was necessary, just as the development of most other human-only tricks, like spears, and language, are assumed to be derived from their development of intelligence.

Q. Where does the person go?

The greek civilisation was the first we know to have investigated, though only in Roman times do we know of reliable divinations. And we suspect the Egyptian and Chinese civilisations knew, a lot earlier, but we have no evidence. All placed much personal veneration on a succession of leaders or emperors.

Now we know simple divinations can pinpoint the exact place where someone died, and for some time afterwards let you see into death, and even converse briefly with the deceased. Much more questionable and dangerous experiments have rent doorways into the veil wide enough for passage out, and even passage back.

But the immediate details are no longer a mystery. In most traditionally Christian countries, you see the recently dead in a drifting white mist, the Veil Albicant, although the first veil is much the same in all places.

The deceased lingers there for a little while, hours or days, before moving. In the Veils, all direction is away from the world. It is until then that souls are occasionally recovered back into the world.

When can someone come back?

When a person's body is irretrievably damaged, it decays into the Veil Albicant. Sometimes this happens instantly -- witnesses of great falls have occasionally described someone as if "they went right through the ground". Sometimes, even if the heart is destroyed, it takes several minutes for the brain to shut down, at which time the body vanishes.

Occasionally a magician can pull an immediately-departed person back into the world. Normally the brain is so damaged they fade again immediately, but if they're sufficiently undamaged, occasionally they can be revived before that.

People have also theorised that the physical body is in some way repaired according to the person's self-expectations, in the same way that people that travel far into the veils seem to no longer be bound by a physical body at all. If that were right, it might mean someone in the veil for only a few minutes might have bled further, yet their brain might be very slightly less damaged than when they died.