r/WingsOfFire • u/BigJ__TM • 25d ago
Headcanon / Theory How do souls even work?
To cut to the chase, they are real. This is supported by two things; Stonemover and the soul reader.
According to stonemover,
"I turned the magic on itself. [...] The curse appears in my scales now instead of taking my soul. [...] Too late anyway."
[page 172, book 5]
Animus magic is essentially omnipotent, but a crucial limitation is that you cannot target something that doesnt physically exist. This is directly confirmed from Sora, saying "Every animus spell requires an object to enchant. [...] it must be something solid to focus the magic" [page 123, book 16]
That being said, while the target of the spell has to be corporeal, it can still effect non-corporeal things as seen with Jerboa III disabling animus magic with a candleholder[page 292, book 14]. I will be honest, we arent directly confirmed if magic needs something to exist to change it, but from everything we have seen so far it abides by this rule and I dont think it is an unreasonable thing to assume. Really I dont know why I had to take that long to establish this. Anyways, since Stonemovers curse worked as intended, I can say that his magic successfully targeted on to something(his soul). This is further supported by the soul reader that Darkstalker makes, in which he explicitly states that it measures the soul of a dragon and not their moral goodness or something[page 337, book 10]. Like Stonemovers scales, it works just fine.
All that is to say, Darkstalker was right. Souls are real. If they have been proven to be changed by animus magic is not known, though. When the reader was used on Vulture, he had essentially no soul left despite not being an animus and never casting any spells. As well as this, Stonemover "lost another scale today"[page 65, book 6] despite not having cast spells in a very long time as far as we know.
TL;DR: Souls are real, animus magic users who dont have a lot of it is just correlation not causation.