Instagram Story part 1

After the magic war, a notice went out that too many of the soldiers’ souls had been lost and no search party would be organized to retrieve them. She sat beside her husband, his mind numb and body hardly alive. It was hard, one mind keeping two bodies alive, but her situation wasn’t special in any way. More than half of the soldiers that fought had their souls cast out of them, while their loved ones hid away. Not her, though. She watched the fight that took her husband right inside her village.

She saw her husband take the hit and the smokey essence of blue and orange that shot out of him. It spiraled in the air amidst her tearful screaming, until it magnetized to a green plant, one that wasn’t there before. After the battle, she quickly worked to retrieve his body, and once he was safe, she set out to find that plant.

It was like a tube, a single leaf, wrapping around itself in a Fibonacci sequence up about a foot from the ground. A brown thread spiraled downward, into the leafy tube. There were two others around it, one with two brown threads.

Her husband knew magic that others didn’t. Many of the lost souls were likely evaporated into the air, impossible to retrieve anyway, but not her husband. His body, his mind, it all might seem like another case to simply put to rest, but she knew his soul was still alive, stuck somehow inside this plant.

She worked diligently to keep the plant alive, even after the official and unofficial search parties for lost souls gave up. The other plants relied on her care as well. No one helped her, some pitied her, and others plotted to get rid of the plants so she would stop acting crazy. Those days were the hardest. But her husband’s soul was in there, and someday, someone would come to help her retrieve it.

She brushed her hand over the side of her husband’s face, which stared unresponsively at her shoulder.

Someday.