“There are plagues of the body… plagues of the mind, plagues that you fear will take your family, your friends, your kin. None are like mine. None will strike more subtly and none will cause an uproar of grief quite like this.” Ixchel murmured as he approached the clan’s helm. Nobody but the arcane energies of the coiling shadows was close enough to hear the enchanted whispers.

When he approached the new clan to call it home and make it his own, nobody could have envisioned the heartache they were welcoming in their midst. The illness that befell their most loyal or most weary companions was a crescendo of pain and contusions. It began with a haze, a dizziness that they paid no close attention to until it transformed into relentless fevers. The familiars felt their skin burn, blister, the insides of their eyelids felt cold and distant. They whined and sought refuge with their keepers but no matter the herbs or incantations, nothing could give them peace.

Ixchel could only wonder why his new family was so distraught. To him, what he brought to their doorstep was second nature. Was breathing ever so different? Did parents not look at their hatchlings with pride the same way he looked over his curse? Ixchel knew his own parents would show affection towards his proclivity but they were elsewhere, still by the stump, still looking over the same nest that hugged him tenderly and whispered the incantation that brought him here.

The clan’s best efforts could not stop it from happening. By the day, more and more familiars caught the mysterious disease. Some turned to their former ways, casting doubt on the idea that the Beastclans could ever be tamed. Others withered away with the families that had taken them in. Some, but not many, took to the wilderness to find a few brief moments of peace before the great unknown.

The Guardian saw in the curse what many couldn’t. The plague was his source of life, of being, the tendril that kept him connected with his past - broken egg shells long since crushed in a stump, two dragons offering to the world their eggs and dark prophecies.