Title: Mahri
Email: nhhm@iup.edu

Story: Somewhere, in a place where things don’t have to make as much sense as they do here, there was a large continent. The entire east cost of the continent was separated from the rest by a huge mountain chain. The settlement of Shan-Mar that lived east of the mountains believed that they were the only people around, and they were happy that way.

Since they lived so close to the ocean, these people relied heavily upon the water as a source of life and they worshipped a water god.

In this village, there was once a very powerful and very beautiful young woman called Shar studying to become a priestess of the water god. Priestesses, once fully trained and in tune with god, had the ability to control water to a certain degree. Shar had been studying and training almost all her life to become a priestess. When she was 19 years old, the village leader’s son fell in love with Shar. Priestesses are not supposed to be married, and the leader’s son tried over and over again to get Shar to marry him. Eventually he succeeded in getting Shar to give up her attempt at becoming a priestess and she married him.

The result of their marriage was one child. A girl with curly red hair which they named Mahri. All through Mahri’s life, her parents pressured her into things that she did not want to do. Shar expected her daughter to study and train just as hard as she did to become a priestess. Shar constantly pushed Mahri to learn more and more. Mahri’s father and grandfather expected her to be a perfect little princess (she was technically the village’s equivalent to a princess.) All Mahri wanted to do was play with the other children in the village.

When Mahri was seven years old, her mother became very sick. None of the village healers could do anything for Shar. In Shar’s final minutes in life, she called her daughter in to see her. “Mahri,” she said, “Promise me that you’ll become a priestess. It’s all I’ve ever wanted for you. Promise me.”

“Okay, momma,” Mahri said, not thinking about the consequences, only hoping that maybe if she agreed her mother wouldn’t me sick anymore.

Mahri’s promise was in vain. Shar died less than an hour after Mahri made her promise.

From that day on, Mahri tried her best to become a priestess. She was haunted by her mother’s dying words. Whenever she complained or tried to skip out on her lessons, she felt incredibly guilty and anxious. She struggled to learn and succeed in becoming a priestess, but with her father’s agenda for her to become the tribe’s leader after he and his father died, Mahri almost crumpled under all the pressure.

And she eventually did crumple. Unfortunately for her and everyone else in the village, it was on the day that she was to perform her final test before becoming a priestess. She was supposed to control a wave from the sea to soar above the village and then slowly fall like rain. As Mahri performed the ceremony, her focus waned. She thought of her mother, and why she had never finished becoming a priestess, and how stupid it was that she pushed her desires on her daughter. Mahri didn’t notice, but the wave had become a small tsunami. It pounded upon the village and destroyed all of the buildings and killed over a quarter of the villagers- including some of Mahri’s closest friends and her father.

Mahri was astonished by what happened, and she didn’t even come to full realization of it until her grandfather and the village elders had sent her into exile. She spent almost a year lurking around the village, watching people as they went through their daily routines, until she got tired of it.

She learned to hunt, fish (the things she learned as a priestess really helped in this area), build fires and shelters, and everything else she needed to survive.

She spent two years in the wild before she inadvertently wandered into the mountains that separated the relatively small area that her ex-village was located in from the rest of the huge continent. Mahri didn’t know it, but she was luckily climbing through the mildest part of the mountain chain. One day (after she realized that she was actually in the mountains and decided to keep going in order to see what was on the other side) a terrible thunderstorm broke open in the skies above her and she could barely see a few feet in front of her. She tried using what she had learned in her studies to become a priestess to help her control the rain and at least keep it away from her for a bit, but it had been such a long time that she had tried such a large task that she was unsuccessful. But by some miracle, she was able to discover a cave where she decided to wait out the storm.

She had been relaxing in the cave for only a few seconds before she heard a voice call out from further back in the cave: “What are you doing here?”

Mahri nearly jumped out of her skin when she heard this. It had been nearly a year since she had heard anyone besides herself speak, and almost 3 years since anyone had spoken to her. She was too shocked to say anything, and the owner of the unknown voice repeated himself: “This is my house- get out!”

“There’s a storm,” she said meekly, after finally finding her voice.

“Fine,” came a huffy response. He was silent for a while, but then- “So what are you doing way out here?”

“I got kicked out of my village.”

“Really?!” Before Mahri knew it, the cave dweller had scampered over to sit right in front of her. “Me too!” Now that he was right beside her, Mahri could see that he was a few years younger than her and that he looked – and smelled! – like he had been out in the wilderness a lot longer than she. “My dad was the king of all Cherya, but then he died and his brother tried to take over, but he couldn’t ‘cause I was supposed to, so he kicked me out. Well, he didn’t really kick me out, but he tried to have me killed so I ran away.” The two of them spent at least an hour trying to figure out where the other was from, and eventually, they both realized that they were from the opposite side of the mountains.

In the morning, when the storm finally stopped, Mahri left the cave and continued on her way. She hadn’t been traveling for more than ten minutes before she realized that Torous (that was the prince’s name) was following her. After that, she let him travel with her. He was strange company, but he knew how to get around better than Mahri. The two traveled around for months, and then one day Torous said, “Mahri, I like you.”

“Well, that’s good since we’re traveling together.”

“Can we get married?”

Mahri looked at him with surprise before nonchalantly saying, “Yes.”

It was almost a year after that day before they finally did get married. They had returned to the capital of Cherya after Mahri had consistently pestered Torous about getting married and taking his rightful place as king. On a nice, early autumn morning, Torous and Mahri got married in the capital’s temple, and in the evening of the same day, they were crowned king and queen in the same temple. Torous and Mahri (well, mostly Mahri) had assembled a group to help them take Torous’s uncle out of power. Almost everyone in the group had readily joined upon finding out that the rightful king was still alive.

Mahri had been a little surprised when she found out that Torous was really a prince. She loved him, but that didn’t mean that she didn’t think he was a little loopy with his story about being royalty.

After Torous’s uncle was gone, and he and Mahri were crowned king and queen, things were happy. Mahri ended up handling most of the politics, as Torous was very much a kid at heart. But there was not a single day in the rest of her life that she did not have a little regret about not becoming a priestess for her mother.

Comments: I'm more of a writer than an artist, but I think with this the art is better than my usual and the writing is worse than my usual ^_^; But I had fun doing this.