In light of the etheric rebellion, I should take some time to explain the mechanics of life and death in Eldawn. When Aram and Etria drank from the Prometheus Chalice, death and all its looming uncertainty first entered the world.
As of now, humans within the physical world of Eldawn have three components of existence, as previously detailed. The etheric spirit, the energetic soul and the material body. Physical death occurs when the spirit and the soul no longer has a direct connection to the physical body to sustain it. Whatever modern science has come up with at the moment, I find it very unlikely that consciousness is purely an emergent property of the neural network. The opinion I hold concerning the mind-body problem is that it is dualistic in nature. Perhaps if computer technologists do devise a convincing artificial intelligence, not one that has to be extensively programmed, then I will revise my stand on this.
In the initial state of humanity, the physical body and the mind were entwined strongly by a spirit link. The physical body was capable of sensing our material surroundings, light, temperature, sound and so on. The mental construct was able to sense the energy signature of the world, the burst of electricity in a lightning bolt, the flow of ATP in the cells of a plant, the constant tingle of weak interaction that plays out in the sun, the change in gravitational fields as the moon orbits about the earth. The mental senses were more akin to tele-senses, capable of detection at a distance. As the mind is also constructed of energy flows, some form of telepathy was possible. Just to clarify, there are many more types of energy than just the energy of the four magical disciplines. Mental energies were reserved for the construction of the soul, and so none of the forces were designed with the capability to affect the soul directly to preserve their delicate composition.
These two sets of senses, physical and mental, constituted the full experience of the world. The etheric spirit was what Eleyon used to devise a connection between the two sets of beings, and so the spirit was the breath of life, the animating factor of vitalism for the physical body.
The physical body can exist independent of the mind, as with someone in a coma. The brain however serves as the hardware for the mental software, to give an analogy, and is the converter between mental intention and physical action. But people in Eldawn differ from a computer in that their mental states can continue to exist independent of their bodies. When the brain is damaged with a lesion in, let's say Broca's area, the individual's mind can still speak and express itself linguistically, but the hardware necessary for delivering that intention to the physical vocal apparatus no longer exists. Hence the physical body of the individual is handicapped.
Death in Eldawn occurs when the spirit link between the mind and the body is completely broken. To convey this I'll try and explain the exact mechanics of what occurred to Aram and Etria when they chose the Chalice. Ällora promised them power, that their magical abilities in the plane of energy and the ether would be greatly enhanced. They would be like the Deols in capability. This awareness was granted to them for awhile, but Yevassë, with Eleyon's permission, had a counter to Ällora's machinations. She laced the drink with a retrovirus that attacks the spirit link, weakening it to the point that awareness of the energy plane is greatly reduced and the etheric awareness is all but non-existent. The spirit link in fallen humanity is set to decay to the point where it breaks entirely at some point, and the individual passes on. The exact part that decays is not the prime stable spirit fold itself, but a divinity core that Eleyon devised to anchor the spirit link into the physical body.
Allow me to indulge a little here, but 23 pairs of chromosomes has always struck me as an odd number. Why not have 24 pairs in the perfect genome? So yes, humans in Eldawn were created with 24 pairs of chromosomes initially. The 24th pair was what regulated aging, and reinforced the structures within the physical body responsible for tethering the spirit link. Anatomically, I'm inclined to say that those structures were located around the heart and brain. The retrovirus in the Prometheus Chalice attacked the 24th chromosomes and hence introduced senescence and death.
Well that's my current overview of the mechanics of death in Eldawn. As for the motivations behind the behaviour of the Deols, I'll save the character psychologies for the storytelling proper.
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