A Story of Forever

Part 5

Mamon and Naia were together. And they gave each other strength. They gave all the Yemars around them strength. They helped them however they could.

Naia was one with the healing herbs. They were her Yemarian element. And that meant that she was a great healer. She secretly, in the dark of the night, prepared healing potions for the Yemars who were sick. She used her words and her kindness to sooth their minds and hearts as much as they could be soothed. She picked up their broken pieces and she helped them hold themselves together. Everyone was much grateful for her.

Mamon was one with fire. That meant they were one with the way a campfire or hearth brought everyone together to share stories. And they were one with the way fire hungered, always, never satisfied. They were one with the way fire destroyed the old in order to usher in new growth.

All the Yemars together used their cunning and their cleverness and their trickery to fool the Uzras, to protect each other, and to win little tiny victories against the Uzras. The Yemars used their trickery to gain an upper hand against the Uzras, the only upper hand they had. And they used their lies to keep themselves and each other safe. They kept their hearts secret from the Uzras. And everything important they concealed.

One day the Uzras were thinking of how to fortify their lands against any war the Yemars may start. And they got it in their heads to build a Great Wall between the lands where most of the Yemars lived and toiled and the lands where most of the Uzras lived and luxuriated.

In order to build that wall, they needed to dam a great river. Mamon and Naia and two more Yemars named Caliom and Eren made their way in secret through the cover of the night to the river. There they saw how vast and powerful and beautiful the river was. And there they saw how it was a piece of Puri still alive.

They mourned greatly for the river, for when it was dammed that piece of Puri the Great Parent would be dead. But they knew that Puri would still live on elsewhere. And they vowed to make a piece of the river live on as well.

They gathered in a circle and conducted their magic. Using their magic they lifted a ball of good, clean water from the river. In the ball the water rushed and flowed as if it was in a river itself. And the four comrades secreted it away deep in the bedrock of the earth, where no-one would ever find it. Not until the day where the river could be free again and that piece of water could join the rest of its kindred in the river.

The sun shone and surveyors from the Uzras came upon the forest brush where the four Yemars were standing. Karkion demanded to know what they were doing there, so far away from their work. Mamon answered that they were here to bid goodbye to the river before it was damned up forever.

Karkion was enraged, and demanded that the four rebels be punished.

And so they were. In the meantime Wolver grew stronger and more powerful. In the meantime Hari grew more and more, longer and longer. In the meantime Mamon grieved for their children.

After the punishment, there was a great feast to prepare for. The Uzra man Spirug had captured for himself a concubine. She was a beautiful Yemarian girl named Arder. And she was to be initiated and that required great ceremony.

Filla and Naia were the ones who were to prepare Arder for the initiation ceremony. The three young women were together in the preparation room. And they talked.

Arder held great sadness in her heart for her homeland and her family and her community. She held a great longing within herself to go back home and be with her people again. She held a great hatred for Spirug. But this she could not tell to anyone. She only voiced it to Filla and Naia, in that private room, away from Ryan's sight.