Behavin (prime)/The Great Bear

YOU SAID TO WAIT UNTIL YOU WERE DRUNK AND ASK YOU AGAIN

My childhood was really great right up until it ended.

WHAT HAPPENED TO HER?

Who, Donna or my mother?

DONNA

Donna died.

WHAT ABOUT YOUR MOTHER?

She died right before Donna.

HOW DID DONNA DIE?

Ask me when I'm drunk.

YOU'RE ABOUT READY TO PASS OUT NOW, BEH

Donna died saving Bella.

I DONT UNDERSTAND. HOW DID YOUR MOTHER DIE?

A Great Bear killed her.

OH MY, THAT MUST HAVE BEEN HORRIBLE!

What happened after that was horrible.

WHAT HAPPENED AFTER THAT?

Donna and I played on that big Great Bear shrine at the high camp...we wern't supposed to but the hunters didn't care...we were taught to respect the bear, but we don't worship it like some of the clans do. We understand the bear's place. Most of us. Bella didn't.

WHAT DID BELLA THINK?

Bella didn't think anything.

I'M CONFUSED

Maybe it's because I don't want to talk about this.

THE OTHER DAY, YOU SAID YOUR OLDER SISTER BELLA WAS COMING. WAS DONNA OLDER OR YOUNGER THAN YOU?

I thought I told you...

Remember when I told you about our beliefs about names? I don't like saying her name because it makes me want to kill her, okay?

WHAT ABOUT...

Okay, shut up. You keep pestering me about my childhood...I'll tell you. I grew up with my mother and my older sister. Donna was my idol. She was 10 feet taller than me and 600 pounds heavier in my 12 year old mind. She could do anything...she had farsight and the naming gift. She knew magic and she even learned Higher Vision when she was only 12. She was going to be a very important seer for our band.

We explored our mountains together, learning to hunt and fight the small beasts. We would create quests for ourselves, and spend our summer nights camping far from home. We found some veil iron one time, and we saw the shadow dragon once. One night we shared a camp with a young elven songstress who introduced us to the light of Oleani, and Donna and I embraced her wholeheartedly.

I only saw Bella a couple of times. I didn't know it at the time...I was just a young girl. The first time, an older boy was teasing me. I lost my temper and slapped him. The next moment, I was lying on the ground stunned and so were a couple other teachers and kids. Bella was on top of the poor boy, screaming in rage, trying to kill him with her bare hands. She almost did. It took a lot of Kindred to hold her down...even at that age she was the biggest woman in the band and bigger than some of the men. She was still growing. That was a couple of years before mom...

The Great Bear took my mother and killed her. It came down the mountain in the night and walked through our village to my mother's house. Our whole band was in the village and there was mass panic. Donna took me downstairs and we hid in the kitchen. The Great Bear knocked in a wall above us and grabbed my mother in it's jaws. Donna dragged me out as our house collapsed.

We ran to the front of our destroyed house to see the Great Bear climbing back up the mountain holding our mother. Bella came out then, and I could feel it...it felt like someone stepped on my spirit. She screamed an unholy scream and took off after the bear...I tried to follow but she was far faster than me and I couldn't keep up.

When I woke up that morning, I had a mother, a sister, and a home. Then I had none.

The next day a hunter came to our camp and asked if a seer could come look at what they'd found. It was the remains of an old woman and a strange vault carved into the stone.

The whole clan showed up to take care of me. They searched for my sister but the trail ran through a forbidden area of the mountains. They rebuilt the first floor of my house and planted a big garden for me.

Donna and I had built a rather elaborate little shrine to Oleani on an outcropping that looked over a small valley that, in the spring, was bursting with beautiful wildflowers. I went up there every morning to watch the sunrise and watch for Donna. For months. It was bitterly cold and I saw the blood in the snow first, then I saw her. She was enormous...larger than any Kindred I've ever seen. She was covered in bearskins from bears of all kinds and they were soaked in blood and gore. She was carrying our mother's body.

Donna fell then, in the dirt and the snow of the field that has beautiful flowers in the spring. I held her, the stench and gore was overwhelming, but I held my sister and she died. I took my mother's body and ran back to the village to get help...Donna was too big for me to move myself. We brought her back and put her in her own bed. I fed her for several days as she regained her strength. One morning I found her in the garden, sitting on a bench. She had stripped the bark from a tree trunk and lashed a claidmore to it and she was sharpening the blade. She looked up at me and it was cold and I could not see Donna in her eyes anymore and I knew she was gone.

In the days that followed, Bella obsessed over that bladestaff, carving it, practicing with it, hunting with it. She became troublesome in the village, and after several fights in which she seriously injured some Kindred, she was banished from the village for two years. Gossip, rumors, stories of her fighting with other bands and clans of Kindred in the high mountains, with many of them calling her Donna...it was too much for me.