Closed Starter : @fitzjxmes
It was not made to hunt men.
It had not always been twisted into the shape of a bear. There had been a time before, when it had been cradled close and had life breathed into it by a mother it would never know again.
It was not made to hunt men.
It had been made to wage a war that had ended before anything held the shape and breath of humanity. Its defeat had brought it to the form it occupied now and the space that it was trapped within. It felt the draw to go back to the water, to slip down into the depth and seek out the one who first breathed it to life with fang and claw... but it was bound now. There were claims made to it, spears that were invisible to the eyes of even those who had crafted them sunk deep into its flesh and preventing it from going down into the deep.
Sometimes, it would act like the bear it had been shaped into -- grabbing hold of the seals and squealing beluga that emerged from the depths of the water like grasping fingers. Eating them did not sate its hunger, nor its need to get back to the one that created it. Even if they, too, had been shaped by her.
The people who called the North home, who carved echoes of its form into the bone amulets they carried, knew it for the shape of death that it was. They avoided the lands that it walked on. There was no need to go there, to walk where the ice snapped throughout the night and sang its name. There were few left in the world who knew how to talk to it in that language of silence and cold. Those that could, could walk alongside it. They understood it to be another aspect of their world. That it could give just as easily as it could take.
These men lacked any understanding of the world they found themselves in and so they had unknowingly called it to them. Initially, it had watched. Their ships were a forest, different trees pulled down and shaped around them -- masts standing like the tallest of them. Metal had been pulled from the Earth and bent to their will. Coal burned in the bellies of the things, pushing them forward through the ice until it finally closed its fist around them. It watched them move back and forth between their ships and the gravel shore, dark figures silhouetted against the snow.
It followed them, whenever they slipped through the fingers of the ice. There was the possibility they would not remain, that they would move on from this place. It stood with the people that bound it beyond the confines of its shape, kept it from delving further into the world of spirits, and watched. It watched. It waited.
It smelled the blood of death and heard the indignity of the man they pushed down into the ice as if his life had been as meaningless as the death they gave him. Every touch upon his body had felt like a touch upon its own, a pull at the invisible barb under its skin that bound it to the man.
Now, it was following them as they abandoned their ships. It was not alone as it wandered in spirit in their wake. Death and madness stalked beside it, though the men were just as oblivious to their inevitability as they were to it. They spoke to the men in the spaces between their thoughts, making themselves known in languages that every living thing understood. They were coming. They were inevitable. One just didn't know when and where.
The men were setting up a camp for themselves when it again shaped its name around itself and settled into the skin that walked the same world they did. It stretched itself within that skin, neck extending up towards the sky as it closed its eyes. It felt good, to stretch muscle and bone beneath that skin.
Back in its skin, it breathed in the cold air and let out a sound like the ice cracking against itself. There was a small group of men, stood aside from the others, that were closest to it as it pushed itself up onto its legs.
It was not a beast. It was not a man, either... but it could walk like them.
