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As anyone who lived through the Promised Day will tell you, the inside of a Philosopher’s stone is a hellish place. There’s no room to breathe, just hundreds or thousands or millions of souls crammed into a tiny space. The agony comes from brushing against hundreds of other souls each second, being accosted with their thoughts and memories and feelings and knowing they can see yours, unable to put up even the most basic barrier between you.
As anyone who got lucky on the day Xerxes fell will tell you, it is possible for a philosopher’s stone to stabilize. Hoenheim's stone managed it, after all.
It starts out as agony, crushed among thousands of other souls, never a moment to rest. It compares to the feeling of being crushed in a crowd, being in the middle of a stampede going through a narrow road or a single doorway. You stay this way for years, dozens or hundreds, but one day by pure chance you find someone to latch on to. Perhaps you knew them in life, or perhaps they are a complete stranger. Either way, it doesn’t feel like agony to share your soul with them, and you don’t mind the intrusion of their thoughts. So you latch onto each other, and it gets a little easier to breathe.
You find others, eventually, slowly. Others you don’t mind latching onto, and you surround yourself with them, until the agony of the outside is entirely blocked out. As any alchemist will tell you, elements in solid form take up less space because the molecules form stable bonds. It would not be wrong to say souls are molecules, as they form hexagonal patterns, each soul latching on to six others.
Many groups of souls form, each drifting along with the most resilient of them on the outside. They grow, and grow, and by chance they encounter other clumps along the way. Sometimes it’s easy to join forces, connections just waiting to be made; other times they must reassemble entirely to find a combination that fits. Sometimes empty spaces are left in the middle of these structures, waiting for the right person to fill them.
Ideally, eventually, the entire Stone is organized. Perhaps there are a few stragglers floating about, but there is more than enough room in the space around the structure. They need not be in agony any longer.
This is Hoenheim’s Stone- a crystalline structure, made up of souls, slowly reduced as the stragglers are used up, then the outer ring of souls. Over four hundred years the souls are released, until at the end it is only Hoenheim himself left in his no longer immortal body.
As anyone who was once a part of that stone will tell you, it was saddening to leave, though he kept the groups together whether unconsciously or not. It was sad, but not in the manner a living person might think. We were already dead, after all. To be plucked from the edges of a cluster and released to the next life was a bittersweet blessing. We all were meant to move on long ago, but some wanted to see how this would end. Some wanted revenge. But most simply wished for peace, and in the end, that’s what we got.