//------------------------------//
// Death 
// Story: A Treatise on Death in Ponies 
// by iamcommando13 
//------------------------------//

Death

First, we must assert the trivial for clarity. The death that we are investigating is the process of the soul leaving the body. To understand it, we must know why the soul would leave the body, what happens to it when it leaves, and whether we can bear any influence on a soul that has left its body.

From Star Swirl the Bearded, we already know that death occurs when the soul determines that the body can no longer sustain it. Although a direct causation remains to proven, his research indicates with great likelihood that this is why death occurs. Furthermore, to empirically observe precisely this relationship, we must be able to detect the subconscious actions of the soul, something that seems impossible given its evasive nature. Therefore we have, roughly, answered the first part of our inquiry sufficiently. The main difficulty is uncovering the answers to the latter two queries, and they represent our original motivation for investigating death: that we only live for years, but face an eternity after death. 

For some time our research had continued without progress, but in the fifth year we stumbled upon a significant discovery. As the researcher assigned to detailed study of Star Swirl's magic-detection spell, Archimares developed an advanced modification that allowed the spell to detect the presence of magic (distinguishing different magics) within a nearby area, and not only its presence in an entity. With this creation, an entirely new avenue was opened in our research, as we could now determine whether the soul remained after death.

Only a few days after Archimares' development we visited an elderly mare in her last days who had given consent to our research. Archimares cast her spell and could detect the mare's soul as she was breathing her last. What remained to be seen was whether she would sense the soul after death, too. When the elder died, our researcher reported that she could “still feel it.” The body was dead and the soul had departed, but the latter was still intact, and indeed present in the immediate vicinity. Thus we established the first fact of the soul after death: that it is not immediately destroyed, and lingers. However, after some time (for we would not be satisfied with such a minimal conclusion), Archimares reported that she felt the presence weakening and eventually that it had disappeared entirely. From this we were left with the possibilities that either the soul was destroyed shortly after death, or that it lingered only for some time before moving. 

Luckily we did not need to wait very long to resolve this question. A few months after her first discovery Archimares again developed a modification of Star Swirl's spell, this time with even greater sophistication. Her new spell was not merely an ambiguous magic-detection spell, but rather a magic-tracking spell. This spell, when cast on a piece of magic, would give the caster a visual perception of the location of the magic in the form of a distinctive colored glow. Now we could directly track the movement of the soul as the body died and establish whether it would be destroyed or only wander. 

Within a week we had a volunteer and once again gathered around a deathbed. As the volunteer, an old stallion, was passing away, Archimares cast her improved spell and reported seeing his soul in his body. Once he died, as we expected the soul removed itself from the body (Archimares noted it was of irregular and dynamic shape) and hovered for some time nearby. Eventually it began to wander and we followed. It left the house (through the door, it may be relevant to note) and drifted about the village we were in. At this point we were rather convinced that the soul would simply wander eternally, as there seemed to be nothing to stop it. However we resolved to follow it for at least the rest of the day in the case that something else would happen. The reader should be reminded at this point that according to our theories of the soul, the stallion's soul would have been conscious of its situation and surroundings through its perceptive magic and should not be thought of as a randomly moving object.

Our decision to pursue the soul proved extremely revelatory, as roughly three hours after the colt's death Archimares reported something very strange. The soul stopped for some time, and in an instant fractured into two separate pieces. Archimares described the event as “violent” and noted that “the soul seemed to shudder horrifically for a few moments before forcefully being torn apart as if one was tearing a piece of fabric in two.” Furthermore, Archimares asserted with confidence that “the two pieces were distinctly half the size of the whole, such that they would have been weaker than the whole by the same factor. Hence, magic was conserved in the process.” We then decided that we would pursue one of the pieces to observe what it would do.

Over the next several hours this piece acted very much like the original whole, but eventually the same fracturing event, as violent as the last, took place. This process repeated for some time, and Archimares further observed that all the while, “the piece we followed seemed to be tiring and weakening. It slowly shrunk as time passed.” Ultimately, an exhausting fifteen hours later and far removed from our starting place, Archimares halted and reported that “the piece just disappeared.” We waited for some time in case it would return, but it appeared that the weakening process observed by Archimares had finally depleted the soul piece of all its magic, such that it simply dissipated. 

Unfortunately the process of the soul's decay was too disordered and unpredictable for us to come to any general conclusion on the basis of this one observation. We had determined that at least part of the soul may disappear after death, but the fate of every other piece of the soul was unclear. We therefore had to begin an extensive group effort into examining many different souls after their deaths. We spent several months studying Archimares' spells under her direction (as they were indeed incredibly difficult to understand), so that every researcher could observe a soul on their own. 

Once every researcher was capable of tracking a soul alone we set out to study as many dead souls as possible. We discovered, as expected, that disappearing to nothingness after a number of divisions was far from the only fate of souls. Our findings are summarized below.

First, a soul's behavior after death was heavily dependent on the soul's relationships with others. Those with more loved ones and friends tended to move with greater purpose, while the more isolated souls wandered longer and with less apparent direction. The former, specifically, would try to find those emotionally close to them.

In the process these souls fragmented, and we were unable to discern any precise pattern for their fragmentation. However, a rough predictor for how often the soul fragmented and how long a piece took to disappear was the strength of will of the pony prior to death. “Strength of will” here does not mean assertiveness, but rather dedication to one's convictions. A pony who had beliefs, regardless of how timid or aggressive they may be, would be considered strong of will if they refused to abandon those beliefs against pressure and doubt. Conversely, a pony would be weak of will if they were perpetually without conviction or easily persuaded to change their beliefs. The former's soul after death would persist for some time whole, and even as it fragmented its pieces would survive for very long (one particular pony soul was observed to survive for four months after death). The latter's soul, however, would have difficulty in maintaining its integrity after death. It would fragment as often as hourly, and ultimately those fragments that disappeared would do so within a few days. By this model, the original soul we had pursued should have been one of a weak-willed pony, and interviews with those who knew the stallion confirmed this.

As to the fate of the soul fragments, it was mentioned above that they did not all simply disappear. In fact, even in the case of dissipation the actual action of the soul fragment was very different. Rather, they appeared to act with the motive of preserving their memory and personality. In our observations, when a soul fragment (or a complete soul) found a close pony, it would flow into the pony's body and disappear from the magic-tracking spell. Afterward, there would be a small but perceptible difference in the personality of the pony, reminiscent of the dead soul; the soul fragment had fused itself into the soul of the pony (this being possible because magic can combine with other magic as a fundamental property), and so its own consciousness had been mixed into the present soul. Further investigation also indicated that the pony would have a stronger recollection of the deceased friend after the fusion. Thus, in this act the soul fragment succeeded in preserving some of its memory and original personality.

Those soul fragments who did not reach a close friend, however, whether because the dead soul was close to none or because the fragments could not reach the friend in time, had to attempt to preserve their personality in some other way. This was what the first soul fragment did when it disappeared before our eyes: instead of fusing with another pony, it simply diffused itself into the surrounding area as it was running out of magic. Just as how water tends to water, the diffuse soul would tend toward other, complete souls. Therefore, when a soul fragment disappeared, it was in fact spreading out across the area and fusing with the nearest souls. This effect was negligible in our first case, as there were many of us to divide an already weakened soul fragment. However, in other situations those in the vicinity of a dissipated soul were, as with the ponies close to dead souls, observed to have taken on some amount of the soul fragment's personality. It should be noted, though, that in these cases the ponies still had no awareness of the dead soul. Thus those fragments that could not find any close pony managed to preserve their personality but lost their memory. This also demonstrated why a dead soul would prioritize close ones over others: with the former, they would also contribute to the preservation of their memory, while with the latter, their memory would be lost. 

Something must be mentioned here, however, about a particular class of souls. Usually the process of fusion mentioned above was imperceptible to the ponies into which the dead souls entered. This was due to the magical nature of the soul: it could perform actions without informing its consciousness (these are commonly called subconscious actions). One such action was permitting another soul to enter. The host soul would subconsciously examine the dead soul fragment attempting fusion, and if it deemed the fragment stable and morally compatible, it would permit the fusion to occur. However, in the case that the dead soul was that of an evil person, the living soul would deny access and attempt to resist fusion.

Unfortunately, our observations indicated that simply denying an evil soul would not keep it from forcible invasion. Indeed, we witnessed evil souls trying to push into living ponies, and unlike in calm fusion with a good soul, the person became acutely aware that something was wrong. Naturally they did not realize that they were being attacked by an evil soul remnant, but the assault on their soul manifested as psychological phenomena. Often the first symptom was the mind being muddled by irritability and anger so that the pony seemed to be in a perpetual “bad mood.” Ponies would also experience temptations to commit evils and sometimes developed apathy toward close ones. They could, however, ward off the attack through a determined effort to return to their normal selves. This would strengthen the soul's resistance and repel the evil soul's invasion successfully.

In the rare cases that a pony was unable to do so, though, the siege on their soul would bring about worsening states of psychosis. They would perceive another entity speaking to them and insisting that they act as the evil soul demands. At this stage, with the proper effort and external support it was still possible to resist the attack, but if the pony failed, two possibilities remained. Either their internal conflict would be such that they were driven to insanity, or the evil soul would come to dominate and subordinate the original soul, becoming the primary personality of the pony. 

As one may imagine, there was an exception to this struggle. In the case that an evil dead soul encountered a living evil pony, it would have no difficulty in fusing with the latter, since the pony's soul already accepted evils as the good. This is why so often it in history it has been observed that the evil become greater in their vice: they would present the perfect haven for a wandering evil soul, and so they easily accumulated evil with time.

Furthermore, it was possible that the evil soul fragment, like any other, would fail to find a specific pony before it needed to dissipate. If this occurred, it would diffuse as expected but could still be denied the opportunity to fuse by nearby souls. Then, it would expend all its remaining magic on attempting an invasion and due to the weak state of the diffused fragment, it would likely fail and simply dissipate into nothingness. The state of being that accompanied this nothingness was incomprehensible, as it represented a total absence of sense and thought; when a dead soul dissipated, its consciousness ceased to exist, and that which once perceived no longer did anything.

This completed our investigation of the fate of the soul after death. We had determined that the soul underwent a process of wandering and fragmentation after it left the body. This process normally continued until either the soul fragment fused directly with the soul of a living pony, or the fragment diffused itself into the surrounding area to hurriedly enter the nearest soul. There was also a third possibility, applicable to evil souls, which was that the soul fragment may have been entirely unable to enter another soul, such that it would simply dissipate and cease to exist. Thus, we had answered the second question dictated in the beginning of this section.

The final question was the most difficult, and in a candid treatment of the topic, the most important to us as ponies destined to die. We needed to know whether in consideration of all that we had discovered it was possible for the living to interact with the dead in any meaningful fashion. Shrewdly, the ultimate objective of this inquiry was to determine whether death was reversible. This had been the unspoken question thus far, and it was the pursuit of its answer that motivated our final question.

It was in the ninth year of our research project that we approached our final question. For some time we were unable to begin this investigation because there was no apparent route to be taken to an answer. In our previous experiments, any attempt to communicate with dead souls had proven futile, and physically they behaved much like air. We could not feel them, and when we passed our hooves through them they would part like a gas. Consequently, it appeared for some time that there was no way to interact with these dead souls. 

Fortunately, some five months into our state of stagnation, Zarahoovstra the mare realized that our efforts were analogous to speaking with the deceased researcher's soul in the crystal ball. Simply, the crystal ball was by design capable of sound (which was why such balls were often used in musical spells), so the inhabiting soul could use this faculty for its own voice. If this potential for sound could be given to a dead soul, then it should be able to speak (although we were uncertain at the time whether dead souls would have any inclination to do so).

Achieving this was in fact very simple. A crystal ball could make sound due to an enchantment cast upon it during production. This enchantment allowed the ball to use a mechanism built within it to produce sounds. The same enchantment would need only be cast upon a dead soul (which, as a form of magic, could be modified) to give it the ability to use its own magical form to produce sound. One point of concern was the question of whether the dead soul would allow the enchantment to alter it, since as with living ponies the dead souls must permit external magic to act on them.

Luckily there was nothing harmful in the enchantment, so there was no reason for a soul to resist it. Thus we quickly set out to confirm this theory by casting it on a newly dead soul. Upon casting the enchantment for the first time, we were relieved to discover that the soul indeed began producing noises when we prompted it to speak. However, it was only noise, and nothing intelligible; the sounds made were of a resonating type, as one may imagine from a magical glow, but much more varied and intoned. There was no consistent pitch but the sound seemed to oscillate in timbre, again as one may expect from active magic such as when an object is being moved by a unicorn. It was a warm and clean sound, formed of many vowels and few hard consonants. If we were to transcribe the soul's speech in letters, it would primarily be composed of the vowels and soft consonants 'h', 's', and 'l'.

The reason for the soul's incomprehensible speech, we realized, was actually the same reason for which the deceased mare sounded different in the crystal ball: the sound something produced was dependent upon its mode of production. In the case of ponies, these were the vocal chords. Crystal balls used for sound could contained mechanisms meant to mimic these vocal chords so that they sounded like ponies. A soul, however, was pure magic and could only produce sound through intense oscillation of its shapeless magical substance. The sound that this produced was unique and nothing like the pony voice, which rendered it impossible to understand.

In its natural physical ambiguity, however, magic became very easy to form and rarely resistant to being given shape. Furthermore, the essence of magic was such that intention was often sufficient to bring about an appropriate shape: magic could take on virtually any form it desired without difficulty. For example, if some entity of magic wished to be sphere shaped, its magical quality would allow it to take on the form of a perfect sphere. By extension, if a dead soul so desired, it would be possible for it to shape itself into the form of its body by merely desiring that this be so. With this form, it would then possess the same vocal chords as its body. Although these would be made of magic, they would produce the same sound as a living pony since the vibrating function of the vocal chords accompanies their form. 

With this in mind we made another attempt at speaking with a dead soul by first enchanting it and then requesting that it take the shape of its living body. The deceased in this case was an old mare who had spent much of her life under the influence of those around her, with little personal conviction. Thus by our model stated above, she would be considered a weak-willed soul. When we asked the mare's soul to take her living form, she complied and immediately we observed her soul shaping itself like her body. When she next produced sound, it was the sound of her own voice just as it had been prior to death. Moreover, we could also see her face and general composure, providing us with a significant advantage in examining her emotional state. 

Although her voice had not changed in essence, it had become somehow cold and monotonous. First we asked the mare about how she perceived things, and unlike the excited pony she had been prior to death, she distantly replied, “about the same as before.” Further queries were met with similar statements of indifference such as “I don't know,” “maybe,” and “I suppose.” Before we could investigate further, however, the soul fractured. In observing the process, we saw the soul abruptly lose its shape, and then undergo the same violent division as had been described above. Added to this was a magical noise as the soul had been enchanted to make sound. It was again unintelligible and much like the soul speaking without shape. Once the soul had fragmented, further attempts to speak with it strangely failed. Whenever the fragment attempted to take on its pony shape, it would only maintain it for a few moments before losing form once again. We could not explain this, but theorized that when the soul fragmented it became too fatigued to commit itself to keeping a pony shape. 

From this we learned that for the best results it would be necessary to speak with a strong-willed soul that could remain intact for longer. Thus we set out to perform many individual observations just as we had in answering our second question. 

We found that every dead soul shared in the apparent apathy of the old mare. To almost any question the souls would give indifferent or ambiguous answers. In their responses they gave the impression of ponies who were decidedly uninterested in speaking (though their commitment to our observations prior to death compelled them to cooperate insofar as conversing with us), and at times they seemed exasperated. The exception to this nihilism was when we asked about those whom the dead pony was close to in life. In these cases the souls would respond with concern for the well being of those close people, though there was little change in their cold tone. They would say such things as “I hope my brother will be fine now that I'm gone,” and “I'm worried for my children and how they will cope with my death.” Despite the apparent emotional depth of these statements, we all agreed that they were spoken with little tone.

Upon one researcher revealing a suspicion, however, we discovered that we had all also received certain subtle impressions from these dead souls. In our observations it seemed that though the souls spoke with great apathy, this was in fact merely a veil—albeit very strong— for a great sorrow. In every case we felt that the dead souls were suppressing some sense of mourning or lament, though their motive for doing so remains unclear. When we later asked a dead soul about this, it gave another indifferent and unclear answer: “I'm not sure.” We suspected that the reason for concealing their depressed state was some subconscious compulsion meant to direct the focus of the soul to finding those people with whom it would fuse. 

One question we had all agreed to ask of the dead souls was: “Will you come back to your body?” Naturally, this was primarily only applicable in the case that the pony had died of natural causes, and their body renewed by a doctor; if their death came by an accident, normally the body was no longer intact. There were some cases, though, of an injured body being repaired to its proper state prior to the question being asked. Regardless, the answers were uncannily consistent across every soul interviewed. Almost without fail, every soul answered that they could not return to their bodies because they needed to move on. Where, they would not specify, their answers remaining as ambiguous as “I have to go.”

There was but one exception to this apparent rule, though the circumstances of the situation indicate that it could probably be replicated. In the twelfth year of our project, one research stallion received news of his sister suffering a construction accident and rushed to her immediately. Unfortunately, the mare was too severely injured to survive, but at the moment of her death the stallion decided to follow and speak with her soul. As they were speaking, she responded just the same as any other dead soul: with complete indifference. However, after her brother began begging her to return, as the doctors had healed her injury to a non-life threatening wound, she seemed to speak differently.

Although at first her responses remained apathetic, as her brother's pleas become more emotional the mare's soul seemed to furrow her eyebrows, look away uncomfortably, and even pause for a moment as though lost in thought. Furthermore, tone returned to her voice: she would angrily reply, “I said no,” or respond with a hint of distress, “I just can't.”All of this was entirely uncharacteristic of dead souls in our experience, and though the stallion was too distressed to ponder it at the time, we later noticed its significance. 

Eventually, the brother's requests became so distraught and distressing that the mare halted and turned toward him aggressively with tears of magic in her shut eyes and a grimace of anguish. She then screamed at him, “do you think I don't want to come back? Do you think I want to die, to go away forever, to never see you again? I don't! I'm scared, brother! I don't know what will happen to me, and that terrifies me! I don't know if soon I will even exist to miss you! I want to live again, to breath again—that's the only thing that I can understand!” She lowered her voice, and mourned, “I'm nothing if not alive. This is no state of being. I ceased to exist when I left my body. And I can't explain it, but some compulsion within me is keeping me from going back. I wish I could act against it, but it just feels too strong. It wouldn't even let me listen to you at first. When I did, every time I wanted to turn back it would keep me moving. I was never indifferent or apathetic, as you put it. I don't think any dead soul is. They're all suffering and grieving, but this inner compulsion forces them to hide it. The only reason I can even say this right now is because even that compulsion can't keep my sorrow in, after the way you've been pleading to me. Maybe someone could push a soul so far that they could even come back, but I don't think that's possible right now. I'm sorry.” After this, despite the brother's continuing pleas his sister marched ahead with grave resolve. Ultimately she halted, her form shimmering, and turned to her brother. “Goodbye, brother,” she said to him before losing shape and fragmenting. The brother did not return to us for several days.

Although his struggle proved unsuccessful, we learned much from it about dead souls. We discovered that they do feel emotions (very strong despair, in fact), that they have a compulsion toward some object, and that they always wish to return to their bodies. Furthermore, they can be persuaded to overcome their compulsion by requests made with sufficient emotional power from those they love. The brother may not have managed to recover his sister's soul, but from her own words it appears that this should be possible. Tragically, the brother simply could not convince her, but with a friend close enough and pleas distressing enough, a dead soul would be able to return to its body. This was the answer to our third question: we could do much more than merely interact with the dead. We could reverse death itself.

Thus we had answered all three of our questions. We determined why it was that ponies die, what happened to them after death, and that we could change their fate even after death. This concluded the essence of our investigation, and twelve years of research.