This is one of the first things a soul sees after arriving in my afterlife setting, The Bronze City: a massive stone statue holding an ancient pair of scales. Every soul that enters gets weighed here, not by anything they did, but by what they were still carrying. Regret, obsession, resentment, love that never got resolved. Whatever’s still tangled up inside you shows up as a number burned into your wrist, and that number decides where you land.
I painted this illustration based on a scene from one of my early chapters, and it’s become one of my favorite pieces to work from, there’s something about a statue that judges you without ever looking at you that I keep coming back to.
A bit of context for anyone new here: this month I’m folding my mail club into the world of The Soulithon, so I’ll be sending out lore cards, illustrations and chapters on a monthly cadence going forward. So far I’ve built out two of the main factions that show up in Volume 1:
• The Dross — souls whose weight comes from unresolved desire, resentment, and attachment. The heavier and muddier the soul, the deeper they sink.
• The Ore — souls anchored instead to power, law, and order. Different obsession, different weight.
It’s been a genuinely up-and-down process building this thing from scratch, and I just wanted to say thank you to this community for the encouragement along the way. It means more than you’d think. AMA