Animology

The soul is the most enigmatic component of any person in Hillit. It is imbued in the body at the moment of birth and first breath, leaves after the last breath, and is returned to the embrace of the Cyclical Pantheon. Its nature is widely unknown and has evaded almost all divinations and experiments. The arcanists who devote themselves to understanding it pursue the school of study called animology, or the study of the soul.
Animology is often thought of (by non-animologists) as a school of necromancy, but animologists fight against this prejudice. They do not manipulate the soul, corrupt the cycle of life and death, or animate corpses. They simply try to understand it better.
Animology grew in popularity in the year 181, when the dragonmark tattoos were widely banned across Hillit and the soulburned were treated and officially recognized. The greatest crisis animology is facing is the soulburn problem and how to repair the damage done to the cycle.

Dragonmark Tattoos and the Soulburned

About 90 years ago, some arcanists rediscovered the ancient practice of using powdered quintessence crystals to etch tattoos into people. These marks, when carefully added, could lightly increase magical sensitivity and power. Some people who wanted to give their children the best shot in the world tried tattooing their young kids with these marks, nicknamed “dragonmark tattoos”. For most, it was a wildly disastrous event.
Dragonmark tattoos, when they worked, restructured the natural magic many bloodlines manifested and gave these children new magical abilities. However, few tattoos worked in children. The children with failed tattoos had their magical potential stripped violently from their soul and they became soulburned.
Soulburned people have lost their ability to manifest and manipulate any quintessence. They cannot cast any spells and they even find that most enchanted objects do not react to their will. Divination magic can still detect them, but diviners have found it more difficult than normal.
As of this time, no one has been cured of soulburn. In fact, children have been born with soulburn already existing. Some animologists hypothesize that souls that have been soulburned have completed their reincarnation, but the burn remains. Others have formulated a darker theory -- not only have soulburned souls reentered the reincarnation cycle, but the burn is spreading to otherwise healthy souls. A few academics propose that a soulburned soul can never reincarnate and the energy is broken free of the cycle of life and death.
Even with these horrible risks, some parents still pay to illegally dragonmark their young children to gamble on giving them a better life. If discovered, the parents are often heavily fined, imprisoned, and the children are tended to by academy-supported orphanages in Irita, Brasi, or Eno, where other dragonmarked and soulburned children live.