Mlezi: 'Nurse' (Swahili)
Shiya: 'Abandon' (Zulu)
(mm-lez-ee-SHEE-uh)

Age: Simba's (Mohatu's father) generation
Pride Affiliation: Ndona Pride (birth), Kaskazini Pride (choice)

Father: Unknown
Mother: Unknown

Brothers: None
Sisters: None

Mate: None
Cubs: None
Adopted Cubs: Teseka

Likes: Looking after cubs, sunning herself
Dislikes: Lions who are cruel to cubs

Personality: Mlezi-Shiya may seem very shy and quiet, but that's because she has lost so many cubs to the Illness that claimed Teseka. She used to be very cheeful and bubbly before this happened, but those days are over.

Bio:

Mlezi was born under the rule of Empress-Queen Nusu, grandmother of Mohatu. Her mother was a lowly pridesister and her father was a rogue. She knew there was nothing special for her in life, but she was okay with that.

When she is a young adolescent, she rescues a group of cubs near the border. She takes them back, and Empress-Queen Nusu suggests that Mlezi care for them. She is overjoyed at this, and agrees. She becomes close to the cubs, closer than a mother to them.

And her heart is wrenched in two when they are claimed by the Illness.

They were scarcely adolescents, and Mlezi is but a young lioness. She spends three days in the cave, not eating, not drinking, just screaming to herself. How could this happen? How?

On the fourth day, she leaves the Pridelands. She can still smell their sweet scents, still hear their voices in the wind. The Pridelands gives her too many painful memories, and so she leaves it all behind, taking the new name Mlezi-Shiya, or just Shiya.

She comes to the Northlands, where the High Priest allows her to stay. He even offers her the job of cub-sitting, but she instantly refuses.

It is when she is old and almost withered when a young lioness brings a sick cub forth. He bears the symptoms of the Illness, and Shiya is horrified when the new High Priest, Mchungaji, gives her the cub and exiles her to a secluded cave, where none are going to catch the Illness.

Shiya teaches the boy all she knows about healing and religion, and sometimes hunting, for that is all she is good for. Her old body is done in, and she can do little now.

She dies in her sleep after Teseka recieves the title 'Monk in the Dark', rewarded for his skills in healing. It is in the Stars where she is reunited with her lost cubs, free to play with them forever in the afterlife.

Relation to TLK: Lived in the Pridelands, and is adoptive mother of Mohatu's brother-in-law

Bases: Namacub95