Promise Bonds
Strings can be knotted together, so they won't lose each other. Knots can slowly unravel, or they can burst open like shoelaces and trip you up. But nothing hurts like when the knot is forcefully cut.
Promise bonds are a part of Elemental life that has existed since the beginning, though the ability to exactly see that a person has a promise bond came later. In the most basic terms, a promise bond is simply "strings" of the Golden energy that acts as the source of an Elementals consciousness, merging together with the strands of another Elemental. This isn't visible to the fast majority, as one needs to be able to see and sense Golden energy first. If one could, they'd simply see a weaving gold strand flowing from one person to another. Once the bond is made, it is impossible to see where one begins and the other ends.
What actually prompts the promise bond to be created between people has been debated over history. The most commonly accepted reason, even in modern day, is the same criteria that the promise rings use, as was decided by Queen Emersyn. In Emersyn's vision, the promise bond was created when two people felt true romantic love for each other, and that they were each others "soul mates". As such, when a promise bond is created that meets these criteria, a gold ring appears on the ring finger of the Elemental's right hand. Seems pretty straight forward, of course, and Emersyn certainly thought so.
Many would like to believe that promise bonds are forever, but unfortunately (or fortunately) they are not. People sometimes fall in love with a lie of a person, or simply over time turn incompatible. If this occurs, the bond forge between the two begins to slip away. The further the people involved get from true love, the more separate the two strands become again, before the strands split and the ex-lovers go their separate ways. This doesn't have to be a slow process, but it is often when the situation is not toxic. The promise rings reflect this process, changing from a brilliant gold, to silver, to bronze, and finally corroding until they fall off. In the worst cases, the ring may simply change straight to corroded, breaking off piece by piece. The process of falling out of love is not physically painful, and while people may mourn their now finished relationship, most come to see that it wasn't meant to be.
Physical pain usually comes from when the bond is cut, usually by the death of one of those involved. When this occurs, those left behind are considered to be suffering from Shattered Sickness. It shouldn't be surprising that there is a cost to loving someone so deeply as to intertwine your own life force with them. A gift such as knowing when someone loves you, to always be able to feel the slight tug of your love towards them, is not something gifted freely. It is the hope of every Elemental that they will never have to pay the cost, but it is rarely the reality. Shattered sickness provides a very crucial reason to know who you are promised to, their death will take something of you with them.
It also means that the wonderful promise rings are lacking in this regard. Queen Emersyn was often clouded by her own ideals of exactly what counted as true love. But ideals do not usually reflect the real world. While rare, people are capable of having true love for multiple people at a time. This was acknowledged by Queen Madison Lovette, who wrote a large criticism to Emersyn's accepted definition, but her words were largely ignored by all but the Fires. This is likely because, despite it still being rare, multiple promise bonds occur more among the Fires than any of the other Elementals. Still, Madison's definition was much closer to reality.
Madison removed the limit that true love must be romantic. Friendly promise bonds, like multiple promise bonds, remain rare in the population but exist regardless. She fully acknowledged the existence of multiple bonds, and advocated that the promise rings be adjusted to reflect that. This was never done, but Madison would later take it into her own hands to create a simple spell that causes rings for every promise bond a person has. Unlike Emersyn's system, each of these rings is unique, usually reflecting important moments to the person who wears them. Madison herself had 12 promise bonds, with a ring on every finger, thumb, and both her big toes. Unfortunately for those that do have multiple bonds, Madison's spell is written in a royal book, which was never made available to the public and has fallen into obscurity, along with the rest of the research she did on promise bonds.
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