Hyder

When Beastmaster Bismuth leaves the Alchemy Ponds, bags clinking with the glass vials of valuable ingredients he claimed for the "health" of some animal, Hyder does not make a face. He does not disdainfully side-eye the other dragon, nor does he wrinkle his painted face in disgust.

No, such base reactions are beneath him. Hyder simply focuses on straightening up his workspace. Everything has a place. While he doesn't obsess over placement like other alchemists may, tidiness allows him to check at a glance that nothing has gone....creatively missing.

Perhaps even in the claws of a Beastmaster?

Bah. Hyder holds back a shiver at the memory of Beastmaster training, such as he started at the behest of his....parents. They were by far the greatest waste of his time, seconded only by a select few rogue offspring who failed to perform to their designed standards. (Perhaps that wasn't accurate - after all, his first mate had influenced them. That particular confounding variable had been accounted for with the second mate he took.)

Those accursed classes had done one thing Hyder allowed himself to be thankful for....specifically, Principles of Beastclan Development. A simple chicken egg had unlocked the paths he now wandered. Something so basic!

The most common method to intuitively teach avian embryonic development was thus: windowing chicken eggs.

Upon location of the yolk, turning the egg upon one side allowed a student to open the eggshell and reclose it without perturbing the embryo's growth - delicate work, prying away the tiny fragment of a shell and peering in day after day.

Hyder remembers, with what he could call fondness, watching the cells cleave and multiply. The lopsided growth, stretching the sphere of the zygote into an oblong shape. Slowly, so slowly, it had almost formed a weak, lumpy, and venious chick.

His professor informed the class that windowing eggs allowed for molecular perturbations of several types. Protein-coated beads could be inserted, or a set of steady claws would allow for even DNA manipulation. It required small dragons, a fine attention to detail, and perfect control over one's Breath to prevent magical contamination of the experiment.

The invasive introduction of outside factors, so totally controlling the fate of a life before they even made their first decision, captivated Hyder. And, well....since the professor warned the class about magical contamination so strictly, they gave Hyder a perfect roadmap to do exactly that.

He reached out with then-untrained magic, felt the fluttering beat of the chick's developing heart. In the miniscule egg cradled in his perfectly steady claws, Hyder watched as its veins pulsed. Slowly, slowly....

Laying threads of his magic along those red tracks was painstaking, but the effort of it excited Hyder like no lesson had ever done so before. Perfectly mapping the developing circulatory system, he allowed his magic to match the beat of the chick's heart.

Slowly....then slower.......

He could scarcely dare to breathe, eyes wide as he tried to memorize every facet of this moment. Of course, he had no idea he would have many, many more chances in the future. He had no idea what he was doing at all, only that it made his heart race.

With one final vicious effort, Hyder held the flow of his magic perfectly still - and he felt, down to his soul, as the chick's heart stopped.

---

He had finished that class with a barely passing grade - "magical instability" preventing him from successfully raising more hardshell eggs. Hyder's professors thought him an eager, well-behaved student with an unfortunate inability to reign in his ambiant Breath. He knew this because they felt the need to verbalize this fact to him every time he found a new way to adjust the embryos he was given.

Home again, he brought his parents joy to see their apathetic son try so hard to raise all manner of beasts. He had clearly found a passion in the Beastmaster role! They feared that his inability to raise a bird from the egg would crush this new and wonderful change, and did everything they could to encourage his hobbies.

Eventually, though, their fears came true. Animal eggs weren't enough. Desperate to keep their son the way he was, engaged in conversations with them about his trials, they suggested that he should try raising....his very own family.

After all, if he got so much joy from trying to raise beasts, it would only be natural for him to love raising a hatchling. Right?