Clifford the Big Red Axehound?

[+robardin he/him]

Upon seeing a billboard for the new live-action movie of Clifford the Big Red Dog the other day, I couldn't help but think to myself, "Man, to get that big without heart failure, Clifford must have a gemheart."

Then I wondered, are chasmfiends "giant versions" of smaller Rosharan creatures that developed a gemheart to get large, or the other way around? Which came first in their development or evolution? Does the gemheart coalesce inside the creature (like how we grow teeth in our skulls), or does the creature have to ingest some kind of gem seed early in their development (like an oyster forming a pearl around a grain of sand)?

Like, if you raised an axehound the right way, "gemhearting" it at a particular stage, could it grow to Clifford size?

[Olmund]

My guess would be that gemheart development begins in the larval stage and that the gemheart is formed through biological processes which extract the necessary minerals from dirt and force them into a crystalline structure. It's possible that they need to find and ingest a seed gemstone to begin the process, but either way I don't think you could take a distant relative (like an axehound) without a gemheart, add a gemheart seed, then see it reap benefits unless there happens to be a type of spren that is naturally attracted to the creature -- the process of growing the gemheart is something that was probably acquired over a long time via natural selection.

[Letryx13]

I don't know if I have any good ideas on how to answer this question, but I absolutely love how you titled and phrased it.