Bear

How it fights

A brute fights the way a falling tree fights. Once it is coming the only question is where you are standing. It gives ground grudgingly and takes it back all at once, and it hits hard enough that a mistake is not a setback but the end of the conversation. There is no clever way through one. There is only whether you can take what it gives for as long as it takes to give more back.

Field notes

A bear's country is a set of trees rubbed bare at the height of its shoulder and a scatter of turned stones and torn logs where it has been at the grubs. It is placid when fed and quick when startled, and the two look alike from a distance. It stands to see, not to threaten; the threat is when it drops. In the cold months one holes up and the hole is warm and smells of it, and a watcher who finds the hole leaves.

Where it is met

Met in the Rolling Sand Sea, The Heart of Winter and The Frozen Court, by travellers of levels 15 to 30.

What it leaves

Worth hunting for the reinforcement and hardening it leaves behind, when it leaves anything.

The roll

Under this kind stand five of the least sort, eleven of the common sort, seven tough, seven elite, two champion and one worldboss, and one named: Nardan, the Fang of a beast-lord's range, besides one that lead without a name.