Hapistiers
This article is a Work In Progress and will be finished soon.
The country of Dhalmain is well known for its impressive history of creature husbandry, being the only nation to have successfully created selectively-breed variants of alzufhars.
On par with this feat was the semi-domestication of hapists, a flying, aggressive simple creature which can easily reach a wingspan of 1.70m and sports a jaw full of sharp teeth with a strong bite, a spine-covered head and strong talons.
Hapists are a very delicate species to work with, and as such their training and professional use stays as a very niche trade, that can, however, be tracked back to many centuries to families that passed down the knowledge by using them as hunting creatures for catching small game and sometimes helping with bigger prey, in place of the more widespread use of hunting lyraiks.
However, the impressive fighting abilities of these creatures gave birth to a small, unusual branch of the Dhalmanite military: The Hapistiers, people that train between one and three hapists from birth and fight alongside them, using the aggressive creatures to distract and hurt their opponents.
In the wild, hapists usually form small family groups as social creatures, so they are naturally inclined to protect and help the trainer that raised them. This will, however, not work with anyone else, so hapistiers need to invest years on raising their fighting companions before being able to take them to battle.
Hapistiers have been an effective and powerful part of the Dhalmanite military, as, besides the hapists' ferocity, they take any other army by surprise and put at a disadvantage both melee soldiers that find themselves being attacked on two sides at the same time, and archers that cannot move fast enough to hit them before the trained beasts snatch the bows from their hands.
Type
Infantry
Overall training Level
Professional
Assumed Veterancy
Trained
Used by
Aw I really like the bond between the hapists and their trainers. <3