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Captain K.P. Hob was a creature made for battle and service. His arms were powerful and far-reaching, his fingers flecked at each tip with claws like daggers, and cords of loyalty thick as chains flexed in the line of muscle stretching up from his clavicle. On the battlefield, the Captain was prolific but restrained. He did the job he had been built for well, but nothing more than that. He had his niche and stayed within it. The world was balanced.
A species in one region can, upon transfer to a new one, become invasive, its biology unexpectedly well-suited to an environment that was not prepared for it. The Goblin King, loving an experiment as much as any scientist, if not for the same reasons, plucked Captain Hob out of his native environment and dropped him at the Bloom. He could never have known what would happen when his subject met the Master of Ceremonies. Could never have guessed they would meet to begin with. Two species that were never meant to know each other: a wild animal and a house pet. Anyone's guess which was which.
Parallel evolution, it would someday be called in the human world. The way one thing can come to be so similar to another without either having seen the other before. The way the mirrored contours of two lands could shape them just so. Hob had never known a creature like Delloso de la Rue, but when he embraced them, they realized it was the first time anyone had ever been able to wrap their arms all the way around them, and at the same time he realized it was the first time anyone had failed to flinch away from his touch. Realizing this, something deep inside Hob, a muscle or a bone or another beast entirely, turned outward and flexed.
While not designed for love, Knickolas was perfect for it. His body could do nothing but, once given a taste. At night he woke to find himself gnawing at the verdant leaves of the hedge maze, shredding the soft wood in the forest in his claws, swarming his tongue over the fallen petals of large, black flowers. Love, he would come to find, was visceral and consumptive. Serendipitously, he had been born with very sharp teeth.