The Ember Stag is a deer of the scarred highlands of the Ember Crown, and its antlers burn from the inside.
Appearance
An Ember Stag is the size of a great red deer, tall and long-legged, with a shaggy, matted coat of dark ash-brown that grays at the throat and mane. Its antlers are the heaviest part of it: a wide, many-tined crown of black, burned-looking bone, split by fine cracks that glow orange from within. The glow is brightest at the tips, which smoke faintly in cold air, as if they had just been pulled from a forge. Its eyes are dark and calm.
They are most often seen in herds crossing the glass fields at red dusk, a slow line of glowing antlers moving between steaming pools and black shards of volcanic glass, with rivers of molten light in the valleys behind them and the broken towers and bridges of old engineering stations on the skyline.
Behaviour
Ember Stags graze the thin grass around warm springs and old engineering stations, and they follow heat the way other deer follow water. In hard winters they gather near frontier towns to stand on warm ground, and where the herds go, the Cinder Wolves that hunt them follow.
Origin and frontier custom
Like the Cinder Wolves, Ember Stags are said to descend from ordinary deer that wandered into the fused valleys after the War of the Burned Constellations and were slowly changed by the ground they lived on. Whether the heat in their antlers comes from the war's scars in the land or from something older burning under the mountains, nobody can say.
Frontier towns gather shed antlers and burn them for warmth. One antler gives heat for a single night, and its smoke smells of hot metal. Hunting a stag during the rut is held to be bad luck, because the glow of its antlers is said to be the only light some lost travelers ever had to follow home.
In legend the Ember Stag is the opposite of the Thornhart of the Eilvaren forests: one stag grown from living wood, the other from burned stone.