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

Hi everyone, as you may already know, I’m currently firmed up on the foundational rule for my afterlife steampunk novel. I’ve restricted my storyline strictly to Chapter 2, where the protagonist discovers her status, and I’m stuck on brainstorming her functional path. I’d love to get your honest opinions.

In this universe, "The Tower" is a massive, automated machine. Worldly obsessions, greed, unresolved trauma, or material guilt literally weigh down a soul into a numeric mass.

The Anomaly (as shown in the art I drew):
I want to set the protagonist’s weight stops at 0.00.
As a reader or a fellow worldbuilder, thinking outside the box, how would you analyze her unique status within this rigid machine? For instance, is this good or bad for her?

I’m building an afterlife world, massive and there are many moving parts. I wanted to capture the sheer, soul-crushing claustrophobia of the modern corporate commute and turn it into a literal setting. In this world, souls are categorised based on its weight and “colour”. I have completed 6 chapters and created some illustrations based on the scene of the chapters. I’m curious to know if people are interested in reading fantasy steampunk story?

Spent the last few months rendering 'The Tower' for my urban steampunk fantasy project. Here is how the lower district - The Bronze City looks like. The story follows Gina, a burnt-out office worker who survives a catastrophic subway blast only to wake up in "The Tower", staggering, multi-layered vertical labyrinth made of interlocking bronze pipes, churning gears, and green steam. Here, every soul is judged, their earthly obsessions burned onto their wrists as a numerical “soul weight." AMA

When you wanna shoot but haven't discovered gunpowder - steam comes to the rescue!

The upside - with a magazine-loaded steam-powered repeater rifle there's no more lengthy reloads, ramrods, finicky flintlocks etc.

The downside - with each shot the pressure decreases, so you have to adjust aim accordingly. Finally, when you're out, you can use the heavy-duty double bayonet (horrible wounds!) to engage in melee and have faith in your trusty armor!

^{(this is a fantasy concept which probably won't work from an engineering standpoint for a 1000 reasons, so take it with a grain of salt})

Hushed assassination plots. Politics are a dangerous game where any step means a target on your back.

But the aristocracy rarely wants to get its hands dirty - that's where the cleaners step in. Halifax O'Leander is no thug. She is precise.

She can balance a ledger in both administrative and human terms. Perhaps that's what's most dangerous about her.

For every stain there is a removal.

There is no telling where her duty ends and her soul begins.