Chapter Text
Souls are the very fuel of life as we know it. All who live in Lordran are familiar with souls, but what most call a “soul” is but the smallest unit of one, something which I personally like to call a “mote”.
When a human is born, they have the smallest wisp of a soul, worth a handful of motes. As they grow, their soul grows with them.
A soul is the human capacity to sense the world around it and to enact change upon it. A being with a stronger soul - with a greater quantity of motes - sees the world more sharply and can think more clearly.
When a being dies, its soul persists, eventually being taken by another being or scattered to the winds. Demons and undead purposefully kill other beings to take their souls for themselves.
It is possible, albeit not easy, to fashion motes into physical changes; these range from simply increasing physical strength or agility, to spending great quantities of motes making oneself larger, growing more limbs, or any other sort of bodily transformation. Many monsters and gods we take for inhuman are simply humans that changed themselves through soulcraft.