Excerpts From A Travelogue: A Note On The Breeding of Brittlebred Horses
“Beyond the fence my brothers running by:
black silhouettes cut from the open sky,
while, cast exquisite in my father’s mold,
I stomp the yellow earth with hooves of gold.”
“We were received by that great merchant and studmaster Cuno in his Villa at Mar, which is only one of his estates but perhaps the grandest. Like other great men of our modern age he did not inherit his power, but instead elected to seize it himself through perseverance and great force of body and mind.”
“The breeding of brittlebred horses necessarily involves chance. Since a foal will look nothing like its dam or sire, there can be no gradual refinement of traits as is common when raising other animals. Instead the horses will graze freely and reproduce as instinct commands them. Proud speculos ride searching for useful or beautiful blood, chasing always some rare color of plumage or the glint of crystal scales.”
“Inherited traits must be transferred by breeding with null stock. I am told there is approximately one such null horse in a population of ten thousand brittlebreds: uniformly grey in color, down to the iris of the eye and the inner surface of the mouth. The foal of such a horse and a regular brittlebred will demonstrate a near perfect transfer of superficial traits from the non-null incept parent. Since null horses must be discovered by chance in the wild or in existing herds, they are widely sought after and are bought and sold for extraordinary sums — null stallions in particular can trade for several times the price of even a grand cataphrax.”
From Wikipedia!