The bond between souls.
I believe that two souls can be bound, in exceptional circumstances, in a time of shared loss and trauma. If the souls chose the right path and if they stand together.
All good beliefs need a story, a story that tells, in its way, what the belief means. Our story begins, as so many do, with a dream, a vision and perhaps a memory.
In my vision I see a warrior standing in the predawn, atop a hill.
Behind him a small village, round houses and pens for horses and pigs. A few families live there, had lived there for 10s or hundreds of years in harmony with the forest surrounding them.
In front of him, camped in military order, small fires burning, the might of the invading army. Swords and Armor catching the pre-dawn light. Hundreds of them trained, powerful and inevitable.
The warrior knows that today the army will rise and attack, destroying the village and all its people. He knows that he cannot stop it. That his death is as inevitable as the rising sun. But he is resolved, he will stand. He will stand against the tide and, alone if he must, fall.
As he stands, feeling the dawn chill, he senses another. Beside him a woman, hair as black as a ravens wings, stands. Her hand on her sword hilt. Nothing is said but a look exchanged. She too is resolved. She will stand, with him, and face the inevitable.
and in that inevitability they die together, but their souls joined, entangled and through many lives to come they are destined to find each other, to stand together life after life, to bind themselves together in thought and love through many turns of the wheel.
But if trauma can bind two souls then I believe that it can, if one of the souls chose a different path, be broken. As a trauma, an event that challenges existence can bind so it can break. A tie that bound souls through many lives can be broken and the souls cast adrift in the vastness of existence.