Defenders on the Hunt

Once upon a time, in a land a little too nearby for comfort, there lived a wizard who saw flesh as a gateway to greater power. In his search for dangerous lost knowlege, he seized control of a small town in a lonely corner of the world and bent its resources toward his experiments. The people became his servants, too terrified to resist his power lest they vanish into his lair and never emerge.

For decades the plundered wealth of the town funded the wizard's research. He learned to twist the bodies of living creatures, learned to graft them together like fruit trees, to manipulate their growth and shape their forms to serve his ends. When the land near the town was barren of life he forced the townsfolk into labour to pay for more exotic specimens to be brought in, and all the while the land was filling up with his discarded experiments, roving monstrosities hostile to anyone but the wizard himself.

And after all those years of fear and suffering, after the entire countryside had been stripped of life and with the area's magic warped dangerously by his depredations, the wizard made his final triumph. Skydogs, he called them. A breedable hybrid species, powerful and fleet of wing, that would serve as his guards and shock troops. As his masterstroke, he gave them intelligence enough to understand complex orders and carry out plans without his supervision. To secure their loyalty, each newborn pup would form a permanent phychic link with the first member of another species they came in contact with. In this way, the wizard thought, he could bind them to his loyal guards and carry out his plans without sharing power with any other schemers like himself.

But the wizard had made a mistake, for his guards secretly hated and feared him as much as any other townsfolk. They gladly accepted the bond with these powerful new creatures, and they encouraged the wizard to bring in others and teach them how to care for the skydogs. When he had taught them what they needed, his prisoners and his creations united to destroy him.

Now the townsfolk are back in control of their own destinies. With the skydogs fast becoming a central part of their community, they seek to rebuild and reconnect to the lands beyond their ravaged borders. But first the wizard's wandering experiments must be hunted down, before they spread to threaten the wider world.

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This is an idea I've had kicking around in my head for a while, and is the backstory for the couple other pieces of these characters I've done. Finally had a notion for a piece to go along with the explaination.