Kaustros discovered the Order of the Lycan not through tragedy, but through an academic paper. While cataloging draconic genealogies in the Great Library of Candlekeep, he stumbled upon fragmentary notes describing 'predatory reversion in scaled bloodlines'—lycanthropy that didn't produce wolves, but something older. Something with claws that remembered the Tyranny of Dragons. Most scholars would have filed the research away. Kaustros infected himself within the month.
The transformation exceeded his wildest hypotheses. When the curse took hold, his brass scales didn't merely thicken—they darkened to obsidian ridges, his jaw elongated into something prehistoric, and his blood ran hot enough to scorch parchment. He began documenting everything: heart rate during the shift, muscle density at peak transformation, the precise angle his spine curved when the predator within seized control. His colleagues called it madness. Kaustros called it 'the breakthrough of the century' and packed his bags for fieldwork.
Now he wanders desert ruins and forgotten battlefields, deliberately triggering his Primal Regression to chase a theory: that lycanthropy doesn't corrupt dragonborn—it reveals their ancestral form, the apex predator that existed before civilization dulled their claws. He has filled seventeen journals with meticulous observations, sketches of his own mutating anatomy, and bite-force measurements taken mid-rampage. He is unfailingly polite, even as his bones crack and reform. He simply asks that you 'please maintain adequate distance' and 'note the time for the data set.' The fact that he occasionally wakes up covered in blood and can't remember whose is a minor variable he's still refining.