The Hounds were originally created by magical genetic manipulation of other living creatures in order to bring life to the gas giants of their creators home system, an F5V star several thousand light years away from Earth. Unlike humans their creators had, at an early stage in their development, balanced God and the Devil, gaining power from both. Thus their civilisation was always balanced on a knife-edge between good and evil.
The creatures were created to be able to survive in almost any hostile environment and as such needed only electricity (absorbed from the frequent lightening in a gas giants atmosphere, or any other available source) or sunlight (converted into energy by wing-like solar panels) to survive. They could fly by means of their innate magic (although their wings are necessary for this they are not aerodynamic structures) had a powerful electrical attack and were imbued with an overwhelming desire to reproduce. This they did by ingesting any type of organic chemical, from oil to plastics to living thing to each other, and converting it into incredibly tough eggs which would hatch into copies of themselves. In order to increase their chances of survival the creatures formed family nest groups to aid in hunting and egg-laying. They were able to recognise others of their nest group with an electrical field sense and reacted violently to anything not of their nest invading its territory.
Unfortunately for their creators the creatures tipped the balance their society lived in towards evil and they managed to escape from the laboratories where they were being created while they were still being developed. Despite their creators best efforts to destroy them they had built too well and the creatures reached their creators home-world. Within decades they had over-run it and were its only surviving life-form in the entire solar system.
Over the next million years or so the constant conflicts between nests stimulated intelligence as a survival trait, and taught the creatures how to harness their own innate magic to perform true magic, first through isolated magical individuals then later with whole nests possessing magical powers. However their intelligence was always shaped by the magic they used, and directed and subverted towards the constant goal of reproduction, making them all totally loyal to their nest and hostile to anything outside of it - they cannot see anything but another of their race as intelligent and anything other than a hound of their own nest as friendly.
As a feature to help ensure the safety of the nest, all Hounds are genetically programmed to disintegrate to useless dust upon death, and also to die within hours of being captured (after which they disintegrate).
Eventually the creatures developed technology, a combination of magic and 'normal' technology which humanity has come to call occultech, and with it they spread out, colonising their home solar system. As time went by the remaining nests, four large ones and about twenty small ones, also developed the ability to use magic to re-structure themselves into various specialised castes.
Because the Hounds are much most intrinsically adept at magic than Humanity, their magic is hugely complex compared to Human magic, using shades and subtleties of meaning, function and purpose which are incomprehensible to the few humans with knowledge of magic in any but the most vague terms. A single Hound rune is a gestalt which can combine concepts a Human mage could only express in a whole series of (often mutually contradictory) runes. These can be dangerous for a human mind to perceive. Hound writing works in a similar gestalt manner, and can have similarly bad effects on the human mind.
Those very few humans who can use magic simply use it raw and undifferentiated ('blind mans magic'). Hound magic is far more 'specific' and targetted, making it more powerful in its chosen area, but weaker elsewhere - further away from the devil (or god) magic becomes more diverse in this way. Biological components tap and switch this energy better than un-living parts. However, the type, shape and arrangement of magical components is not all there is to Hound devices - there are higher order effects due to the arrangement of, and interaction between, the magical components. Hounds are vastly better at exploiting these effects than human mages.
Then one of the smaller nests used their magical abilities to develop a Faster Than Light (FTL) drive and vanished en masse to colonise other stars. Other nests also developed the FTL drive within years, and large scale conflict ensued when nests encountered one another in other star systems.
This led to nest ships dispersing very widely to avoid other nests. In several cases these dispersal fleets encountered other intelligent life forms, each time destroying them utterly as a potential threat. In 2080 a Hound scout from a long-range dispersal fleet happened across the C-Jammer in the Vega system. This was one of the most technologically advanced artefacts the Hounds had seen and was obviously a potential threat. It was destroyed as standard procedure dictated but attempts to trace its origin failed, due to the probes indirect route to Vega. Then in 2104 the Hounds encountered the Bright Ranger probe at Sigma Draconis. It too was destroyed. Over the next fifty years they encountered and destroyed most of the other Earth-launched starprobes and 2230 the Earth had been located. The Earth's high level of technology and the presence of superhumans caused the Hounds to be more cautious than usual, but after years of scouting in 2241 they launched an attack on the Chilean Empire...
Since they took over Jupiter and its moons, the Hounds have adapted them for their own purposes. Most are simply habitats or manufacturing facilities, but Europa has been inscribed with runes on a planetary scale to form a vast magical warding, protecting the entire Jupiter system and all the Hounds within it, dissipating, directing and channelling away energies dangerous to the Hounds.
Go to the Hound Statistics Page.