Mirri’s Tale (A Rath and Storm Short Story)
Hello, all. Welcome back to the anthology mini-review series for Rath and Storm.
This part of the review will cover the final story in the anthology, “Mirri’s Tale”. Please see the review series introduction if you’d like an overview of how this anthology is being handled. Otherwise, let’s fly.
STATS
Title: “Mirri’s Tale”
Anthology: Rath and Storm
Author(s): Liz Holliday
Genre: Epic Fantasy
First Printing: July 1998
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast LLC
SPOILER WARNING
Mild, unmarked spoilers for “Mirri’s Tale” will be provided throughout this review. Heavy spoilers will be confined to clearly labeled sections. I will keep the first paragraph of any given section spoiler-free.
Heavy, unmarked spoilers will be provided for the framing device of Rath and Storm as well as for all short stories that preceded this one within the anthology.
Throughout this review, I will also be providing heavy spoilers for events at other points within within MTG canon, including events that occur during the Artifacts Cycle. While I will be steering clear of details that would spoil the progression of this book specifically, there is a strong chance that you will figure out certain spoilers if you pay attention to these bits of lore. I’ll confine the heavy spoilers that are relevant to this book into clearly marked sections.
STORY (HEAVY SPOILERS)
The story details Mirri the cat warrior’s showdown with Crovax as vampirism takes hold of him, while flashing back to a defining moment in Mirri’s and Gerrard’s relationship years earlier.
In the present timeline, Mirri wakes up during the events of “The Weatherlight’s Tale”, still injured from the events of “Crovax’s Tale”. Crovax is in her room, and he attempts to drain her blood and convert her into a vampire under his thrall. Mirri fights him off and then hunts him through the ship, recognizing him as a threat to the whole crew.
The flashback details the era when Mirri and Gerrard were students of Multani the Maro-Sorcerer (something exposited about in the earliest interlude chapters). We learn that Mirri has unrequited romantic feelings for Gerrard. When Mirri and Gerrard are sent on a diplomatic mission by Multani to a tribe of cat folk, Mirrir is courted by a warrior of this tribe. Events escalate until Gerrard and this warrior and prepared to draw blades on each other. To defuse the tension, Mirri agrees to participate in the tribe’s spirit quest. The result of this quest is that Mirri chooses to remain with Gerrard, despite knowing full well that he will not reciprocate her feelings.
The story ends in the present timeline. Mirri and Crovax’s fight causes them to fall from the Weatherlight’s deck and into the Gardens. Mirri accidentally drinks Crovax’s blood when she tries to disable him with a bite. Seeing that Gerrard has not yet boarded the Weatherlight, she is tempted by Crovax’s offer to embrace the vampirism and either claim Gerrard as her own thrall or kill him. Mirri instead rejects the offer and waves Gerrard off when he sees her and tries to rescue her. The story ends with Gerrard boarding the Weatherlight, abandoning Mirri so that the rest of the crew can escape.
RATING: 9 / 10 (Stand-Alone); 4 / 10 (Anthology)
This is a frustrating story because of how it is misused by the anthology.
“Mirri’s Tale” is a powerful character study in isolation. Even with Mirri’s romantic feelings towards Gerrard coming out of nowhere, Holliday did a wonderful job of establishing not only the attraction but the intense conflict it caused Mirri. Thus, when Mirri chooses to refuse rescue (effectively sacrificing herself), and the story ends on the line, “Go with my love,” it is a powerful moment.
However, much like how Goodwin shot Grinthy: A Goblin’s Tale in the food by insisting in the novella’s foreword that we should view the story through a thematic lens that it simply couldn’t withstand, Rath and Storm mangled this story by telling the audience that we should see this as a moment for GERRARD. This story is meant to be the climactic final showdown of this epic series of tales, the one that teaches Gerrard the meaning of heroism, and it goes off like a wet firecracker, because this is not Gerrard’s story. A wonderful story about personal sacrifice is devalued by insisting to the audience that it’s actually someone else’s sacrifice.
ANALYSIS
Unrequitted Love & Meaningful Sacrifice
The whole romantic drama with Mirri and Gerrard isn’t remarkable on the face of it. The anthology has barely explored the pair’s dynamic. I think the only time we actually saw them working alongside each other was in “Tahngarth’s Tale” (eight stories and even more interlude chapters back), and while the dynamic was brought up in “Hanna’s Tale”, the focus there was really on Mirri’s dynamic with Hanna, with Gerrard merely being a variable that affected the relationship between the pair.
This is what makes Holliday’s character work in this story so impressive. She doesn’t simply make this story about Mirri pining after Gerrard. This is Mirri being offered two paths in life - settling for a secure life among her own people, or following Gerrard with the knowledge that he’s never return her feelings - and having to choose which path she can live with. As an added kicker to this, the spirit quest delivers a prophecy that Gerrard will die at Mirri’s hands if she continues to travel with him.
All of this pays off when Crovax offers Mirri the power to take what she wants. His power was already pouring into her body. It would have been so easy for her to claim Gerrard. Even after she rejects Crovax’s offer, Gerrard was fully prepared to rescue her. Mirri imploring him to leave without her was an active character decision.
Taken all together, I feel that “Mirri’s Tale” is the best story (in isolation) out of the whole anthology. Even “Ertai’s Tale”, which dabbled in similar character work, didn’t go into nearly as much nuance. This should have been a slam dunk to end the anthology.
Stolen Valor
… but … we can’t view this story in isolation. We have to accept it as part of the wider epic. It’s the final, definitive moment of a tale built up by the stories that came before and all of the exposition delivered in the interlude chapters. And those interlude chapters explicitly state, both before and after “Mirri’s Tale”, that this is the moment that GERRARD learned the true meaning of heroism.
That is not at all earned.
The first problem here is that we are not in Gerrard’s POV in the buildup to the sacrifice. We are not experiencing his thought processes as he makes the decision to abandon Mirri. We aren’t seeing him grapple with the decision to sacrifice one friend to save all the others. At most, we have his dialogue in the flashback, describing how he feels about Mirri, but that just confirms that Mirri is not the center of his universe. It’s proof that this sacrifice isn’t nearly as big for him as it is for Mirri.
Second, we are not in Gerrard POV after the sacrifice. We are merely Told what this moment means to him in the interlude chapters. We’re not getting to experience the impact this has on him, which would have retroactively delivered the necessary development.
It’s possible that the idea is that Mirri’s example taught Gerrard this lesson. If so, the results are weak. Way back in “Gerrard’s Tale”, it was made clear that Gerrard would set aside his personal feelings to fulfill his obligations to his friends. This is a lesson that he does not need to learn. Yes, it’s awful to fail in his obligation to save Mirri, but he has an entire ship filled with other friends, so the decision is obvious in light of his pre-existing characterization. If anything, Mirri waving him off absolves him of the need to make the hard choice that would cause him to develop as a character.
I cannot emphasize enough that all of this is only an option because the anthology itself insists that we rip away Mirri’s moment of truth and hand it to Gerrard. The story works just fine if it is about Mirri’s sacrifice. Trying to make it about Gerrard learning the true meaning of heroism is an unforced error that spawns all of these problems.
THROUGH THE PORTAL
And with that, at long last, we have reached the end of the Rath and Storm anthology. It’s had its ups and downs. Thank you all for joining me on this adventure.
On Saturday, we’ll wrap this review series up with a final retrospective. This will include a rating for the book as a whole. I’ll then provide me thoughts on a few odds and ends that I didn’t cover in either the introduction or any of the individual stories.
Thank you all for stopping by. Please remember to subscribe and share if you enjoyed what you read here. Take care, everyone, and have a good week.