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The day that Laudna died was the day the string began to rot. She had learnt from an early age about the red string of fate, the one thing that links you to your soulmate no matter what. She had heard how vibrant the string was, the brightest kind of red that only the roses in her mothers garden could compare to, or so her mother said.
Laudna's string was not bright nor vibrant, it wasn't fully desaturated either, a slight hue was there, warm and full of promise. She was told that this was a sign that the one she was tied to wasn't born yet, something that she started to find rather odd the older she got.
There was a point in her life when it was simply best to not mention her string, the people around her started to pity her and she would have none of that. A few brave ones would even joke around that she would be an old woman before her soulmate was born, but she didn't pay them any mind. There were, after all, much more important things to worry about within the walls of Whitestone.
They came for her during the night, gagged her and tied her up as the blood seeped through her parents bed sheets. Bodies later collected so as not to waste blood, but for Laudna the tears would not stop and her scream of pain and grief that echoed the empty street were only quieted by the noose that hung from one of the branches of the suntree.
They did not give her the mercy of a quick death, slow and painful, unable to catch her breath as the rope cut off her airways, she hung there alone at first. But then a bear got hung next to her, then a man with black hair and pale skin, a woman with blond hair dyed by blood, a tall muscular man, a child dressed in purple clothes and a man covered in red paint. She suffered, as did they all hanging from the suntree.
But none of the others woke up with lungs filled with dirt, none other dug their way out of their own graves and no others were there to comfort Laudna as she gasped for breath, coughing and choking on the very dirt that had been her grave. It took her a while to gather herself before she noticed, but eventually she saw what once had been a pale red string had now started to rot, black ichor hanging from it as it went further beyond, somewhere she could not see nor reach. The rot and ichor however, would cling to her like a blanket. She dragged herself away from her grave, away from her home and away from Whitestone, leaving the woman she was behind in the grave that she had woken up in. Leaving a piece of herself here, leaving herself hollow, empty and alone.
Imogen didn’t realise that there was anything strange about her string until the day when the other children in the nearby village were discussing their red threads. They described them as vibrant, brilliant red and that when they go to try to touch it the string radiates heat. When she returned home to the farm with her mother she didn’t say much, she knew that there was something strange with her soulmate string now but before that day she didn’t know. She didn’t know that the dull, hollow almost lifeless string that radiated a cool cold temperature was strange. She asked her mother that evening about it, never really felt the need to ask her before but for once her mother seemingly did not have an answer. “When a soulmate dies the string just ends a few centimeters from the hand. It still floats there and is still red but it’s no longer warm and not as vibrant as it was when your soulmate was alive. Maybe this just means that your soulmate is a little special?”
She would think about what her mother said for years to come, what she had was special, something that she had never heard anyone else describe when they spoke of their red string. Ever since the red storm with crackling purple thunder had taken over the peaceful landscape of her farm and her dreams, the cold, hollow string had brought her constant migraines some relief. Every night when the migraines was still there, after a day surrounded by people she would put her hand as close to her head as she could just to let the cool temperature of the soulmate string comfort her, if only a little.
The day that they met, one with a string that had once rotten before her eyes, but suddenly one day suddenly glowed brighter, not a vibrant red as the roses in her family’s garden but a muted red that had not been there before. One with a string that had given her comfort during the nights when the nightmares were the worst and the voice shouting for her to run caused her head to hurt even more than before. Their strings sought each other out and when they finally saw each other they knew who the other person on the other side of their stringer was.
Laudna saw a young woman, warm, alive and not afraid. Someone who could help her return her mind from the clutches of insanity after spending so many years alone with no one else but herself and a dead rat.
Imogen saw a strange woman, wild eyes and an even wilder smile, but what she felt and heard was a calm she hadn’t experienced from another person's mind in so long. A comfort beyond the coolness from the thread alone, before her was someone who gave her no headaches nor pain.
Together, they were no longer alone, one with another person they could talk with that wasn’t a dead rat with a raven skull attached to it, no matter how charming Pâté could be. The other finally had someone who didn’t cause them to want to curl up in pain, someone whose mind was a soothing cool balm against the constant pressure and drilling from the minds of the crowds. Now neither of them would have to be alone again, and together they had a world to wander and see, hand in hand.