Kara jolted awake to the sound of keening—that uniquely human wail that signaled deep mourning. The sun had barely crested the eastern mountains, casting long shadows across the village center where a commotion had drawn nearly everyone from their lodges.

She blinked, disoriented momentarily as her massive body tensed. Rising to her full height, she scanned the gathering crowd, something cold and unfamiliar settling in her chest as fragmentary observations registered in rapid succession.

Kenai and Denahi had returned from what must have been an early morning hunt. Their clothing was torn, soaked through with river water and streaked with mud. Both brothers bore minor wounds—scratches and bruises suggesting a desperate struggle. But it was what Kara didn't see that caused her dorsal plates to bristle with alarm.

Sitka was not with them.

The scent of death clung to the brothers like a shroud, unmistakable to Kara's heightened senses. Not their death—they still breathed, still moved, though Kenai had fallen to his knees in the center of the village, his face contorted in anguish. It was the residual echo of another's passing that haunted them.

The village parted as Kentanka approached the brothers with measured steps, her ceremonial garb donned hastily, speaking to the urgency that had called her forth. Her face was a mask of ritual solemnity, but Kara detected the subtle tremor in her hands as she reached for the items Denahi held out to her.

Sitka's ceremonial horned headdress—the one he wore during important council meetings and sacred ceremonies—passed from Denahi's shaking hands to Kentanka's steady ones. Following it was his personal totem, the carved eagle that had guided his path since his coming-of-age ceremony decades earlier.

These items should never have been separated from him while he lived.

The reality settled over Kara like a physical weight. Sitka—her first human friend, the brother who had advocated for her acceptance when she was nothing more than a frightened hatchling, the peacemaker who had bridged her world with theirs—was gone.

A sound unlike any the village had ever heard from her escaped Kara's throat, a mournful resonance that carried through the ground itself, causing ripples to form in water vessels throughout the camp. It was neither human grief nor animal distress, but something primal and ancient—the lamentation of a guardian who had failed to protect one of her own.

She moved forward with deliberate steps, each footfall leaving imprints in the soil that would remain for days. The villagers instinctively backed away, their grief momentarily overshadowed by primal awareness of a predator's focused intent. Only the brothers remained in her path as she approached the center of the gathering.

Kara lowered her massive head until she was eye-level with Kenai, who remained kneeling, broken by grief. Their gazes locked—amber reptilian eyes meeting tear-filled human ones—a silent communication forged through years of shared meals, adventures, and trust.

"Who did this?" she asked, her voice unnaturally controlled, barely above a whisper yet somehow audible to everyone present. The question vibrated through the ground beneath them, resonant with restrained fury and devastation.

Kenai opened his mouth, but no sound emerged. His hands trembled as they clutched a torn fragment of Sitka's ceremonial robe, knuckles white with tension. Whatever he had witnessed had rendered him speechless—a man known for his passionate speeches and quick retorts, now silent in the face of unimaginable loss.

"A bear," Denahi answered instead, stepping forward. Unlike his younger brother's raw anguish, Denahi's grief had already crystallized into something harder, sharper. His face was a mask of barely contained rage, eyes reflecting the cold calculation of vengeance taking root. "A mother bear with cubs. At the glacier."

Kara's pupils contracted to thin vertical slits as understanding dawned with horrific clarity. Images flashed through her mind with cruel precision—Maple's wounded shoulder, the missing claw, the spear she had removed just yesterday. The trap that Sitka had promised to address with the council at first light.

A trap that had triggered a sequence of events ending with his death.

She drew back suddenly, as if physically struck. Her massive jaws clenched, the sound of grinding scales audible in the unnatural silence that had fallen over the village. Her dorsal plates, which had been dimly glowing with her agitation, now darkened completely—as if the light within her had been extinguished.

Kara's eyes closed, shutting out the visual reality of a world suddenly, irrevocably altered. Her chest expanded as she drew in a breath that seemed to pull the very air from around them. When it released, it was not as a simple roar but as something more profound—a vocalization that transcended mere animal sound.

It began low, a subsonic rumble that vibrated through the earth beneath their feet, rattling cookware in lodges and sending sleeping birds panicking into flight from distant trees. Then it built, climbing in pitch and power until it erupted skyward—a column of sound that seemed to physically pierce the morning sky. It was the cry of ancient kings of a forgotten age, the lamentation of a species that had witnessed the birth and death of entire worlds, now condensed into one creature's grief.

The village elders later would say it changed the weather itself—that clouds gathered in response to her call, that distant thunder answered her across the valleys. For several heartbeats, nothing existed in their world but Kara's mourning, a sound that would haunt their dreams for years to come—the sound of a guardian queen facing the impossible contradiction of her dual loyalties.

As the last echoes faded across the mountains, Kara opened her eyes. Something had changed within them—a hardness, a resolve that had not been there before. Without another sound, she turned away from the village and began walking toward the forest edge.

"Where are you going?" Kentanka called after her, still clutching Sitka's ceremonial items to her chest.

Kara paused but did not turn back. "To find the truth," she answered, her voice hollow yet determined. "Before vengeance claims more lives than have already been lost."

SCENEBREAK

The glacier loomed ahead, a massive wall of ancient ice that reflected the midday sun with blinding intensity. Kara moved with grim purpose, each footfall deliberate as she scanned the rocky terrain for signs of passage. It didn't take her long to find what she sought—the distinctive five-toed prints of a large grizzly, deeper on one side where Maple favored her wounded paw.

The tracks told a story as clear as spoken words to Kara's experienced eyes. Here, the mother bear had moved cautiously. There, she had broken into a desperate run. Blood speckled the snow in places—some Maple's, some unmistakably human. The chaotic pattern of disturbed snow and scattered stones spoke of a violent confrontation, one that had ended in Sitka's fall from the upper ridges.

Kara closed her eyes briefly, piecing together the likely sequence of events. The trap. Maple's injury. Sitka and his brothers tracking the wounded bear, perhaps to finish the hunt, perhaps—knowing Sitka—to ensure no cubs were left motherless. A cornered mother, desperate to protect her young, fighting with the ferocity that only maternal instinct could fuel.

A tragedy born of misunderstanding and fear, not malice.

She continued following the trail, which led away from the glacier toward a dense thicket of evergreens. The tracks became erratic, suggesting Maple had been moving quickly, possibly carrying something. Kara's sense of foreboding deepened as she pushed through the dense foliage, branches snapping under her massive form.

The scent hit her first—the unmistakable copper tang of fresh blood mingled with the musk of young bear. She emerged into a small clearing and stopped abruptly, her breath catching in her throat.

Tiny Imra lay motionless on a bed of pine needles, her small body curled as if in sleep, but the unnatural angle of her neck told a different story. The cinnamon streak on her face—so distinctive, so full of character just yesterday—now seemed to emphasize the emptiness where life had been. No rise and fall of breath, no flutter of dreaming eyelids.

Kara lowered her massive body to the ground beside the cub, her movements gentle despite her size. She bowed her head until her snout nearly touched the small form, a gesture of reverence for the fallen innocent. Her dorsal plates dimmed to near-darkness, an unconscious expression of mourning.

The young bear's death had not been caused by natural predation—there were no tooth marks, no signs of feeding. Instead, a single wound marked her small body, a puncture too clean, too deliberate to be anything but human-made. A hunter's arrow, or perhaps a spear point.

Kara's mind raced with grim logical progression. If Imra was here, killed in what appeared to be retaliation for Sitka's death, then where was Koda? Where was Maple? The clearing held no sign of the mother bear or her surviving cub, but the disturbed earth and broken branches suggested a hasty departure.

She raised her head, nostrils flaring as she scented the air. They couldn't have gone far—not with Maple injured and carrying Koda. Somewhere in these woods, a mother bear was running for her life, protecting her last cub from human vengeance.

And somewhere, perhaps, humans were hunting with hearts hardened by fresh grief.

A race against time had begun.

SCENEBREAK

The search led Kara to a precipitous ridge overlooking the valley. Dark clouds had gathered across the sky, casting the landscape in somber shadows as if nature itself mourned the unfolding tragedy. Thunder rumbled in the distance, carrying with it the promise of an approaching storm.

She found Maple on a narrow outcropping of stone, her massive body sprawled awkwardly where she had fallen—or been driven. The mother bear lay motionless, her once-powerful form now still, her fur ruffled by the strengthening wind. The ground beneath her was stained dark with blood, still seeping from multiple wounds that spoke of a brutal final confrontation.

Kara's throat tightened at the sight, a complex grief welling within her. Another life lost to the escalating cycle of vengeance and misunderstanding. She approached slowly, the weight of dual failure pressing down upon her—she had been unable to protect either her human friend or the bear she had tried to help.

But as she drew nearer, her attention was captured by movement nearby—another bear, smaller than Maple, cowering against the rockface. The creature was disoriented, stumbling on unfamiliar limbs, making sounds of distress that seemed oddly articulated for a bear.

Something about the eyes made Kara pause. She leaned closer, pupils dilating as she studied the frightened animal.

Those eyes—she knew those eyes. The shape, the particular shade of brown, the intelligence and emotion they conveyed. They didn't belong to a bear.

"Kenai?" she whispered, the name carrying on the rising wind.

The bear flinched at the sound, head swiveling toward her with a very human expression of shock and recognition. A strangled sound emerged from his throat—not a growl or roar, but something trapped between animal vocalization and human speech.

Kara's dorsal plates flared with sudden luminescence, casting an ethereal blue glow across the bizarre tableau. Her mind raced to make sense of what her senses told her was impossible—and yet, undeniable. The bear before her was Kenai. Not Kenai hunting a bear, not Kenai killed by a bear, but Kenai transformed into the very creature he had pursued with such hatred.

The Great Spirits had intervened. There could be no other explanation for such a profound transmutation. In all her years among humans, Kara had witnessed their spiritual practices, had respected the powers they revered without fully comprehending them. Now, undeniable evidence of those powers stood before her, trembling on four paws where a man had once stood on two legs.

Her gaze moved from the transformed Kenai to Maple's still form and back again, the full weight of cosmic judgment settling upon her. This was no random occurrence—it was a deliberate lesson, a forced perspective shift, a spiritual sentence passed down for vengeance taken without understanding.

Lightning split the sky above them, momentarily illuminating the three figures on the cliff edge—a dead mother, a transformed hunter, and an ancient guardian caught between worlds—each representing a different aspect of the balance that had been irrevocably broken.