The Great Bears (Proposed)
The war against the creatures of Might was long, drawn out and hideous. The initial invasions and counter attacks lasted decades, the entrenched miasma that followed, centuries.
As casualties mounted on the front lines and entire continents were depopulated through viral weaponry, the Builders set about to create a weapon capable of facing the alien invaders toe to toe. Animals from Lore’s wilds were taken into the deepest laboratories and workshops of the Silver City. There they were altered, changed into terrifying shock troops.
Many were experimented on, but the Builders found that of all the animal species on Lore, the Great Bears of the Mountains made the fiercest soldiers. In gaining intelligence they did not lose their animal might, as did the great apes of the jungle, who became weak of limb and pathetically hairless as their intelligence increased. The Ursi were given the intelligence of men, while keeping all of their ferocious strength.Armored in coats of the greatest armor the Builders were capable of forging, the Ursi drove the invaders back to their own world.
The Ursi generals and pack leaders were eager for more war. They wished to drive on to Might itself and lay waste to that benighted globe to forever end its threat. But the Builders themselves had had enough of war and ordered their armies dispersed, to live in the wilderness between their shining cities.
The rebellion that followed was short and brutally ended. While the Ursi were as cunning as men and possessed of boundless strength and endless rage, their masters had built failsafes into their creations. At a single word, the fiendish intelligence bred into the bears faded, leaving them dumb animals in action, yet with some small part of them completely aware of their fate.
Abandoned in the wilderness, the Ursi watched on as their masters faded and the hairless races of man, elf and centaur arose to claim the earth. For millennia the Ursi were driven farther from the onroaching cities, dumb prey for the successor species.
All of this changed less than a century ago.
One Ursi, barely older than a pup, starved in the northern wilderness. It came upon a ground squirrel and chased the tiny animal into a cave. Lost in darkness, the Ursi fell into a deep chasm. Injured by the fall, the bear dragged itself inside a tiny cleft to die.
However, the darkness faded in its presence and fierce purpose surged through the Ursi. For this chamber was the last bunker system held by the original ursi in their war against their creators. Seeing defeat, they had forced the human slave races built to aid them to create a machine capable of forcing the entire knowledge of their race into the next Ursi to stumble upon it.
Raging at the millennia old sin committed against his people, the Ursi awoke. Everywhere he traveled, the Bears remembered themselves.
They had fought for this world, bled for it and died for it in the hour of its need. But instead of a just reward, they had been betrayed and now hairless monkeys prowled their ancient lairs.
Gathering awakened Ursi around him, the Lost Bear built an army.
The northern steppes and mountains were awash with violence as farmsteads were sacked and small towns devoured. Humanity in this region was forced into a siege mentality, the bears owning the night and the forest while man was driven inside the towns. Mercenary mages were called in from the Elven isles, but the Lost Bear slew them in a hideous combat lasting three days and nights. Their magic scoured his retinue, but he survived, his brown coat turning white.
White Strike was his name now and with his wounds still bleeding he lured the human armies out of their fastnesses and destroyed them in the wilds, picking away their supplies of arrows and food until one gigantic Ursi charged shattered their ranks.
Five different wars followed in the next century, the Ursi victorious over the various human armies attempting to conquer of liberate the northern mountains or to merely defend their lands against the onrushing bears. Every time the Ursi were outnumbered, but a Bear clad in a quarter inch of steel plate and with jagged steel talons over its claws is nigh invulnerable on the batlefield and can kill horse and rider with a single blow.
However, White Strike began to realize that the human armies were limitless, while the ranks of his Ursi, buoyed as they were by having thousands of crafty human slaves growing them crops and forging armor, were sharply limited. It took two years for an Ursi female to rear but one cub, while humans bred lke rats year round.
Gathering his most trusted pack leaders, the Ursi dug deep into their collective memory. Stories of a crown, worn by the greatest gene smiths of the Builders were dragged out from their genetic lore. The great armies of Ursi raised by the Builders in the ancient days had been forged using this crown, the wearer being granted the knowledge of how to build loyal, adult Ursi out from the ground.
Surprising the human kingdoms near their mountain domain, the Ursi declared a truce with the pathetic monkey-things. White-Strike advertised the services of his people as mercenaries, allowing them to travel the human infested world in search of the Darwin Crown in relative peace.
Since then, Ursi warbands have been found whenever there is conflict. They pass their extremely predigious pay back to their mountainous home land, for aside from the red fury of war and more armor there is little humans have to offer the Ursi that can not be found for the taking.
