Cinder wolf
Cinder wolves are charred creatures that look at home in the burnt and desolate wilderness of the Cinderlands. They are pack hunters willing to attack anything they can feed on, including local Shoanti, who hunt the wolves to keep their numbers from growing too great. Cinder wolves are normally at their most numerous before the annual firestorms that sweep the Cinderlands.1
Appearance
Cinder wolves are massive lupines whose skin appears to have been burned to a crisp. They typically have no fur, exposing their scabbed and blistered flesh. All the soft parts of a cinder wolf's skin are easily burnt away by their own body heat, making their ears charred nubs and leaving their mouths constant, lipless snarls.1
Habitat and ecology
Scholars believe that cinder wolves originally come from the cross breeding of Kodar wolves and hellhounds. Infernal flames burn within the cinder wolf. Despite generations of breeding, however, the hellhound's infernal blood does not mix well with that of regular wolves. The cinder wolf must consume many times its own weight in food each week to keep its infernal flames fed, and stay near sources of heat to prevent its burning skin from cooling and painfully cracking.1
Cinder wolf fetuses do not develop their resistance to fire until late in the pregnancy, and so all suffer burns whilst still in the womb and many do not survive.1
Cinder wolves reside exclusively in the Cinderlands as it is uniquely suited to their needs, and tend to lair near one of the region's unique heat-exuding features like gas fields or cinder cones. Cinder wolves have to be cautious as, despite their infernal nature, they are only resistant to fire and not immune to it. This means the region's most deadly hazards, emberstorms, are just as deadly to cinder wolves as they are to the rest of the Cinderlands' inhabitants.1
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 . “Bestiary” in A History of Ashes, 84–85. Paizo Inc., 2008