Eridium

Eridium is manic and easily distracted by new things: namely new wounds to suture, new bones to examine, and new birds to study (he has a fixation on avian anatomy). When he speaks, he leaves few breaths between his thoughts; when combined with his unfortunate habit of thinking out loud, he becomes a rather difficult dragon to converse with. It's easy for him to lose himself in excitement and push himself - or his patient - too far.

It began with an accident.

As a child of the Tangled Wood, Eridium often played with other Shadow dragons. His favorite game was hide and seek; he liked watching the birds, you see, and did his best to use their wisdom to his advantage, wedging himself into small underground nests, or climbing into the canopy of the Wood when he couldn't yet fly. On one such occasion, he endeavored to follow a small bird into the upper reaches of a tree choked by the forest's signature brambles, and he fell before he reached the top.

It was quite a distance for a hatchling to fall, but he survived. He spent many weeks recovering, unable to move; he regained the use of his limbs, but his ability to feel pain never returned. He was young enough that, aside from the fall, he hadn't ever really experienced it properly. He became fascinated by injuries and dragons' reactions to them -- how they cried out when stricken or cut, and how he felt nothing when the same befell him.

As he grew, so did his thirst for knowledge. Why did dragons behave in the ways they did, and why wasn't he the same? He studied dragon anatomy fervently, looking for answers, driven
by a desire to see what was going on underneath the surface... which, of course, led to his... experiments. On animals first, until one of his clanmates got a thorn stuck deep inside their tail when Eridium was on a gathering mission with them, trapping them in bramble. He couldn't deny the glee and fascination he felt as he worked out how to free them, guiding the thorn out of their scales and getting hands-on experience with a living dragon's biology in the process.

He struck out to become a surgeon then, eager to cut into his fellow dragons in a way that was mostly agreeable to all parties involved. His studies took him all over Sornieth, eventually finding his way to the Stormwarden clan in the Shifting Expanse. There he met Glitch, an ambitious Guardian who wanted to make use of Eridium's talents.

He could tend to the injured, of course - but more importantly, Glitch wanted him on the cutting where dragon meets machine, finding ways to augment dragons with technology to make them stronger. It was a dream come true for Eridium - a job where he could slice into as many subjects as he pleased. Glitch provided the bodies, and Eridium was too distracted by his excitement to ask questions - not that he'd have cared to ask them if he'd remembered.