The animal life of Tanis is known for frequently falling into a ruthless black market of exotic beasts that spans throughout the world. Of these unfortunate creatures, there is no species that fears poaching more than the Eversprite Hound. These dogs, which resemble over-sized coyotes with thick fur, are native to the forests and known for spawning fey creatures known as eversprites in their stomachs. Since these fey ultimately transform into pups once they reach three years of age, eversprites were once considered the natural offspring of the hound until modern researchers discovered live-birthed pups resulting from natural breeding.
In truth, eversprites have a symbiotic relationship with the canine that hosts them, in that each cluster of sprites seeks shelter inside the animal while using their magic to protect the animal from the magic of others. When stricken with a spell, the eversprites retreat into the dog with a trace of the magic that they were attacked with. Doing so causes their color to change to one that corresponds with the magic they absorbed and applies the same color to the dog's fur. In their new forms, both the hound and the sprites within develop a powerful resistance to the magic that was previously absorbed.
It is these qualities that make eversprites valuable to scientists and magic-users alike. Since an eversprite is only known to come into the world through the hound's body, the hounds are frequently targeted by poachers. Though the sprites can be vicious in protecting the animal, the dog itself lacks a natural sense of aggression. That was true of a certain eversprite hound that has come to be known as Bear, a dog who was large even for his breed. Given his unnatural strength and his propensity for flight when faced with danger, he managed to avoid capture after many attempts.
But Bear's frequent escapes had consequences that he could never understand. As he eluded more and more seasoned poachers, he developed a reputation that only invited more to try to capture him. He gained the name Bear for the ursine silhouette he was said to cast to the hunters who trailed him to the darkest parts of the forest. His capture seemed like an inevitability by the time a group of hunters smuggled some creatures of their own to the Tanisian side of the border for the attempt that would finally succeed.
Bear was alerted to imminent danger on that faithful morning by the silent padding of several sets of feet. The sheer number of footfalls gave him a sense of being surrounded. He had only just decided on a direction in which to flee when he felt a set of fangs sink into his tail. He tried to escape, but he found himself trapped in the grip of a Restan ridgewolf. He stared meaningfully into the fellow canid's eyes for a moment before finding himself surrounded by three other wolves. No matter what Bear could have done, there was no way to escape the small pack. The poachers cautiously approached after the wolves had him surrounded, brandishing nets and snares. He could feel the eversprites fighting to spring from his mouth to defend him, but he held him back, knowing that he could not do anything to protect them this time.
The eversprites and their host were carted into Resta by their captors and put on display in Resta City. There he saw fear and cruelty in the eyes of every human who looked at him. This inspired Bear's first aggressive move. Learning from the ridgewolves who snared him, he began to bite into the bars of his cage. He nearly escaped from between the bent rods of steel that confined him before he was tranquilized. Fearing that he couldn't be trusted inside a large city, the poachers took him back on the road to the estate of a collector of exotic animals.
But this expedition would spell doom for the poachers, whose caravan found their gruesome deaths at the hands of a roving band of maulans while traveling Flora Field. After the butchering of the humans who held him, Bear found himself trapped between these three of these fey monsters and the back of his cage. The maulans ripped out the bars, savagely savoring the prospect of devouring the traumatized hound. But once the bars were clear, the eversprites sprang from Bear's mouth for the first time that month and swarmed angrily around the maulans. The momentarily distraction allowed Bear to escape the cage into the flowers that surrounded the road.
What followed was Bear's final formative tragedy. In the confusion of the fight between fey, one of the eversprites found itself poisoned with the toxin that all maulans secrete in their spiked tails. As Bear ran away, the eversprites hid inside him once again, but this time, he felt himself sickened by their presence. He stopped in his tracks and coughed up the entire contents of his stomach. With this, his entire cluster of eversprites came out, dying in a pool of the acidic toxin, their skin tainted black. Desperate for water, Bear stumbled toward the pond located in the center of Flora Field. In the water, he saw his reflection, which showed that his fur had turned black; the final effects of his eversprites.
The maulans found Bear as he tried to drain the pool in his extreme thirst. He had no time to mourn the sprites that they killed, so he instead growled as the ridgewolves taught him and charged. He sank his teeth into the neck of the nearest creature, which he was fortunate to discover is a maulan's weak spot. But in his fury, he failed to notice that a second maulan had stabbed the nape of his neck with a tail spike. That should have been enough to kill anything else, but the eversprite magic seemed to have made him immune to the toxin. The confusion with what must have been their first failure to kill someone with their tails, gave them all the distraction they needed to fall to Bear's wrath.
Leaving all of his tormentors behind, finally free, Bear stumbled aimlessly through the many types of flowers that inhabited this patch of the eastern prairies. He seemed ill without his eversprites, a condition which aroused the pity of the local floral sprites. They nursed him to health and were rewarded for their efforts with the hound's loyalty. To this day, Bear the black eversprite hound wanders through the home of the floral sprites, protecting its fey and plant life with a ferocity not seen in others of his species. He is particularly aggressive toward humans with just two exceptions.
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