Volkenhunde

Volkenhunde
Artist's rendition of a Folk Dog

Volkenhunde, or Folk Dogs, were engineered to help settlers cope with the untamed wilds of early Hiera. They mixed the best traits of two of humanity’s earliest animal companions, birds-of-prey and canines. Volkenhunde were used to assist in hunting and defense, and to navigate safely through storms where even advanced technology flagged and failed. This early success led them to become deeply woven into Hieran culture, persisting to the modern day. The expense and skill required to rear and keep volkenhunde has rendered them almost exclusive to the nobility.

Biology

A hatched volkenhund will imprint on its primary handler within the first year, serving thereafter with a fierce intelligence and unerring loyalty. They have exceedingly good senses, their sight and smell being of particular note. There is supposition that early gene meddling led them to become functional chemical sniffers, and to see deep into the electromagnetic spectrum. They have decent hearing, but not nearly as polished as their other senses. Their blood is largely isothermic, slow to lose heat, allowing them to operate in cold extremes for extended duration with little discomfort. With precise care and chemical treatments their claws and beaks can be honed to an edge like a monoblade. This is largely done for show and novelty among the nobility, though unmodified they are still sharp enough to tear into dense wyrm hide.

Volkenhunde have been created in almost every combination of raptor and canine possible, though only about sixteen specific strains remain in prominence. The husky and the snowy owl, the greyhound and the falcon, the osprey and the wolf, the harpy eagle and the great dane, and the kestrel and the terrier are some of the most popular. The largest of these species can grow to be the size of a war horse, though larger and more muscular bodies tend to mean shorter lives prone to greater injury.

In Hieran Society

Raising volkenhunde is often seen as a status symbol among the peerage, with famed lineages able to allegedly trace their origins back to the founding of the planet. There is even an archaic idiom that stems from this, derived not from physical attributes but a bit of black humour. “With volken precision” or “keen as folk” refers to the fact that many nobles kept hard copies of breeding records where in-depth technical data was lost during the Scream. The saying roughly means ‘by the foresight of idiots,’ or ‘fortuitous happenings born from absurd circumstance.’

Besides trophy breeding, some volkenhunde are kept as rescue animals in remote and treacherous regions. There are a variety of ‘wild’ or at least free-running packs of folk dogs ‘native’ to mountain ranges on three different continents. The Eisenkrone de Zähne region is known for its pale blue-tinged strain called the Vinterregn flock. The city of Thronderhauer is famed for the prevalent volkenhunde motif in its carved marble architecture. As one of the alleged original sites of landfall, it claims the first folk dogs were created here.

A brief program of specially selected hounds was used during the War Against the Artificials, known as the Jaegerhundenen. Reports of these ornicanthids successfully detecting synthetics is considered anecdotal at best without the decryption of many classified records. That the program was decommissioned may be answer in and of itself. Still, there is a certain militant prestige in owning one of these rare Dogs of War.

A charming Hieran fable tells of how two children were lost in the mountains, about to be eaten by an ice wyrm, when their pet volkenhund found them, fought it off, and then led them back home. An older version of the tale has the volkenhund belonging to the children’s lord. The hound led the noble to the runaway serf children and gobbled them up, thereby seeing the laws of the land upheld. The moral in either tale is that it is good and right to stay home and remain dutiful. This legendary volkenhund, called Fafnir, remains a popular figure in children’s entertainment. A stuffed version of the hound is often a traditional gift during various holidays; an early reminder to the young.