90 Million Hells (endless eternal moments to find peace with yourself)
I've always loved the concept of an afterlife in fiction, be it the landscapes of heaven and hell in Dante's Inferno or even the reasons around ghost hauntings. However, I had yet to create an afterlife for my fictional universes. Until now that is! Presenting: The 90 Million Hells.
First off, some backstory. In my worlds, a person's soul is a very real and very tangible thing. Furthermore, the soul is split up into four different fragments that hold different aspects of what makes a person them. I'm not going into what they are all here, but I will eventually. The body and the soul are codependent on each other, with the soul providing rhythm and life to the body, which in turn keeps the soul from falling apart.
So, when a person dies, their soul begins to fall apart, dissolving back into the orderless background radiation of the universe. This process of dissolution actually releases quite a lot of refined energy, which is a valuable resource to those who live between realities.
Thus, a world was created to harvest this energy from a soul before it faded away completely. Known as the Aluxea (al-oo-ex-ey) to the inhabitants of the Bedrock Plains, this world is a patchwork quilt of dreams, memories, and emotion.
Aluxea is made up of countless individual "hells", each of which are a single moment stretched into infinity. When a soul enters Aluxea, it is sent to a Hell specifically chosen for them. However, despite the name, the hells are usually quite peaceful. They are not designed to create torment, but rather to calm the soul as it breaks down. Each hell is optimized to foster peace in its inhabitants, to allow them the ability to move on and to comfort the troubled as they fade from this world.
The hells of Aluxea are as varied as imagination, with pretty much any possible place existing somwhere. The only main constraint of Aluxea is that, for an unknown reason, it refuses to imitate life. Any person you meet is a really soul. The grass underfoot once really lived. The birds chirping in the trees could be the same ones that you heard ariund your house. That said, memories are hazy due to the damage done to the soul as it travels to Aluxea.
Souls can technically be moved from Aluxea back into their home world, but without a body to stabilize them, the soul almost instantly loses its integrity and dissolves. There has been only one recorded instance of a soul being directly removed, being the soul of the Exectutioner taken and hosted by the Clock Watcher. Beings such as Reapers intercept the soul as it leaves and capture it before it ever gets to Aluxea.
Aluxea is not a place of punishment, nor is it a place of reward. It is a place of healing, making peace with oneself, and moving on. All souls go there, and all souls fade from existence once they have found peace.
-
I'm really happy with how this turned out. As I mentioned earlier, I love the concept of the afterlife, but I'm also not a big fan of it existing to punish OR reward people. I also wanted my version of the afterlife to blend fathomless stretches of time with a permanent ending for the dead. Thus my own version of Limbo was born; a single endless moment to become one with the universe itself.
I never mentioned why it's called the 90 Million Hells. Firstly it sounds cool. But from a lore point of view, 90 million is an estimation made by the Clock Watcher of how many hells are accessible by the Bedrock Planes. As for the Neitherstar, the number would probably be higher, just because of the difference in population.
You might also wonder why Aluxea was created if a soul will naturally dissolve (and thus release its energy), and furthermore why it is made to bring peace and unity instead of independence and energy. There are two main reasons.
First, the process of letting them dissolve slowly actually releases significantly more energy, as it allows for the soul to be almost "disgusted" as opposed to burning it away all in a flash. Second, the calmer tempo of the resulting energy is far easier to work with on larger scales, as well as adding in a natural end point for their support.
I drew a lot of inspiration for Aluxea from liminality. Not the backrooms. Stuff like a truck stop on the side of the highway as you drive past at night. The windows background Bliss. The neverending yet steadily concluding march of games like Yume Niki. It's meant to be a beautiful world where you would be content to exist there until you don't exist anymore.
I leave you with a question. What would your hell be like?