A Thornhart looks like a gigantic red deer crossed with an ancient tree. It is beautiful, usually calm, and among the most dangerous things in the old forests of Eilvaran.
Appearance
An old Thornhart stands nearly twice the height of a horse at the shoulder. Its rough russet coat thickens into a shaggy mane at the throat and chest, and on its neck and shoulders patches of bark and moss grow through the fur, as if the animal were slowly turning into a tree. Its antlers are the size of a young oak's crown: a vast, spreading tangle of living wood, gnarled and thorned, hung with moss and lichen and covered in small white blossoms. Fungi grow on them and birds nest in them; one old Thornhart was said to have carried a finch's nest through three springs. Its eyes are dark and gentle, and it holds its head high and very still.
It is usually seen by moonlight in the silver-barked forests of Eilvaran, among pale, moss-furred trunks, ferns and white wildflowers, near streams and waterfalls veiled in mist.
Behaviour
A Thornhart is peaceful until a sacred grove, a calf or a bonded keeper is threatened. Then it becomes lethal. A charging Thornhart can force roots up through the soil, turning open ground into a wall of twisted timber, and a wounded one can change a meadow into a thicket of rising roots in a single rush.
What the Eilvaren believe
The Eilvaren call it "the forest's answer to kings." Their tellers say each Thornhart is bound to one grove for its whole life, a life that can outlast a dynasty, and that its antlers grow from the same root-memory as the grove's trees. When a Thornhart dies, its antlers are planted in the earth, and some of them take root.
Hunting one is unthinkable among the Eilvaren and foolish everywhere else. Keepers who bond with a Thornhart walk beside it for years and are buried at the foot of its grove when they die. Some Eilvaren call Thornharts the children of Eida, the First Hart; others call that a pretty lie, and the argument has never been settled.
Rootwalkers often share ground with Thornharts, and gloam lynxes and silver moth swarms haunt the same forests. In legend its opposite is the Ember Stag of the burned highlands: one stag grown from living wood, the other from burned stone.