Cinder Wolves are the hunters of the Ember Crown: wolves changed over generations by the scarred ground left behind by the War of the Burned Constellations.
Appearance
A Cinder Wolf is larger and leaner than a northern gray wolf, long-legged and deep-chested, with a heavy ruff and a full brush of a tail. Its coat is soot-black, shading to ash-gray at the muzzle and flanks, rough and dull like fur that was singed and grew back. Along the shoulders, ribs and haunches, thin cracks of orange-red light run beneath the skin like seams in cooling lava. At rest they dim to a dull ember; when the wolf hunts, they brighten. Its eyes are amber, steady and intelligent, and it moves low to the ground, head down, testing every step.
Travelers usually see one alone on a skyline, or a loose line of shapes crossing the black-and-red glass fields at dusk, with ash drifting and a smoking cone on the horizon.
Behaviour
Cinder Wolves are highly intelligent pack hunters. They test defenses again and again, and they remember individuals. Their howls break concentration and can make weak resonance artifacts hum or crack. Their main prey is the Ember Stag, altered by the same ground.
Origin
Ember Crown herders say the first Cinder Wolves appeared in the winters after the war, when ordinary packs moved into the fused valleys to feed on what the fighting had left. Pups born there carried faint seams of light, and within a few generations the packs had become a different kind of animal. Their bodies seem to store heat and a trace of resonance from the scarred land, which is why their glow brightens with effort and fades in cold country. Cinder Wolves taken far from the Ember Crown grow dull and sickly within a season.
A hard neighbor
Frontier towns treat them as a hard neighbor rather than a curse. A pack that has learned a town's walls will test them every winter, but it also drives off ash revenants and keeps the stag herds moving. Attempts to trap and breed Cinder Wolves as watch-beasts have always failed, because the wolves remember every handler who ever hurt them. There are those in the wild country who insist they are wounded animals, not demons, and who keep remote feeding grounds to draw the packs away from settlements. Along the edges of the scarred ranges, people report hybrids with ordinary gray wolves.