Quote Originally Posted by Cilia View Post
Individual souls may not consciously possess the memory of all their lives, but souls themselves do not cease to exist through natural processes.
We have conflicting stories as to what happens to a soul when it passes into the Lifestream. Characters in the game pretty bluntly state that souls dissolve into the Lifestream. I don't remember exactly when this is, but I believe it was back in ARR when Moenbryda joined the storyline. They were talking about Ascian souls, and how they avoid that particular fate - and then moved on to how to subject them to it, using the White Auracite.

Things may also have been different in the time of the Ancients. When they summoned Zodiark, they "rewrote the laws of the universe". Who knows what this did to the Lifestream? Additionally, there was the "new life" they created (and eventually tried to cannibalize) in order to restore vitality to the world. The souls of the New Life may work differently from the souls of the Ancients.

That's my current working theory, at any rate - that most souls, being descendants of the New Life, dissolve in the Lifestream, but the fragments of the Ancients' souls do not. And even the souls that would normally dissolve sometimes hang around in various ways, as ghosts, or Pixies, or Dotharl reincarnations, or whatever - the dissolution is not a hard-and-fast rule.