Aeshker's Hound

Body

The backward joint takes the whole weight of the animal at every stride. That is the ordinary arithmetic of this class, which is that whichever side carries the extra load wears through in the first third of a life, run at speed in a small animal: the hip above the joint seizes by the fourth year without the drug.

Fast on a straight and hopeless on a turn, which is the shape of an animal built round one limb that cannot be spared.

Harvest

They are sold, quietly, in the same markets that move wart-scrape and void elixir, and they do not live long away from the drug that keeps their hip from seizing. Whoever holds the drug holds the hound. The animal is not the trade. The jar is the trade, and it is not included.

Regard

Nothing else has domesticated an Abomination of Chaos except the Shrakur, who chain them in Bahr-Gar and throw their own children against them. Aeshker did something else, which is that the line breeds true enough to be sold two centuries after the mage stopped existing, and nobody has repeated it. Whatever was done was not written down, or was not left where anyone could find it.

The loyalty is real and it is worth being exact about what it is. A creature in constant structural pain attaches itself to whatever reduces the pain. That is the whole mechanism, and the markets know it and price accordingly.