Soul Thief

"Once there was a time when the soul was captured in pieces of paper."
Ona said to her class. "The people believed that they could hold on
to emotions by taking these snapshots of time, but…"

The hands shot up in the anthropology class. Bright faces filled with
speculations about how a dead society acted or believed. It was one
of the benefits of being an intellectual in the present empire. You
were allowed to create whole societal belief systems with the barest of
facts.

"Jace!"

"They only found out that it shortened their life span while stealing
their soul."

This is one of the women in my writer group's drabble. A drabble is when we're given a subject and you have to write a bit about it in exactly 100 words- no more, no less. I never do them; I hold a firm belief that enough cannot be said in just 100 words. But this is the second time I've been proven wrong. This one really made me think. Thoughts in comment form, anyone? In any case, I still refuse to even try to do them myself.