Every living being who dies in The Enigma Drift is, at least initially, sent to the same place. At the moment of death, their personal spirit is sent to a realm known as The Haven. In The Haven, a spirit coexists with all other spirits who have died and are awaiting transference to whatever permanent afterlife they are destined for. The permanent afterlives are something to explore another time. For now, I want to talk about how the world of the living interacts with The Haven.
The magic required to bring someone back from the dead, although extremely difficult, is possible for high level mages to use. The catch is however, that only spirits that have yet to move on from The Haven can be brought back.
There is only one way to guarantee that a soul do not move on from The Haven. If a person who has died’s name is said out loud by a living being, that spirit will not leave The Haven for 1 day cycle. For many eras of the world, this mean that people who were still in the active memory of the living were the only ones who stayed in The Haven for any significant amount of time. As the eras passed though, the rules were figured out by the people of the living world. This has created 2 interesting results
An entire bureaucratic system involving reading out loud the names of those who have died has sprung up in every major society. Because people dont know what happens to spirits who leave The Haven, due to none of them having been resurrected to tell the tale, everyone who dies requests that their name be read out loud to prevent them from moving on. Every city or major municipality houses a singular, comically oversized magical book capable of recording an infinite tally of names. Small towns must travel to the nearest metropolitan hub to officially log their dead into these registries. Then, depending on the size of the book, one or many readers spend the entire day reading the names in a public square.
The Haven has since become a bustling civilization all its own. Due to the face that so many people are staying there indefinitely, They have had time to start cities with everything you could come to expect from a city of the living. A very wealthy individual could hire a wizard to kill them to allow themselves to visit The Haven, and then resurrect them when they were ready to come back.