Elmark

The Elmark is a sentient herd creature most closely associated with Noxus. Unlike beasts that survive only in the wild, elmarks are domesticated: people raise them and keep them together in managed herds, where they graze on plants as strict herbivores. Elmarks are driven in great numbers. A single herd can run to hundreds of head, with three hundred sighted grazing across open grassland at once, worked not by riders but by drake hounds that circle and bray to keep the animals moving while human herders walk among them on foot. Because the animals are so seldom found without their keepers, the presence of a grazing elmark herd is a reliable sign that people, often a larger convoy, are close at hand. For all their calm at pasture, elmarks are savage under pressure. When one feels cornered or endangered, it turns violent and bloodthirsty, and a herd that looked manageable can become dangerous the instant its members sense a threat. Their reputation runs so deep that even elmarks measure other predators against it: when hunters entered the forest of the Green Father, Ivern, the elmarks declared the intruders more bloodthirsty than elmarks themselves. Elmarks are thorny-bodied, and they are not confined to Noxian pastureland. They also range through the wild forests Ivern wanders, where the Green Father grew fond enough of them to embrace the thorny creatures in spite of their spines. Beyond these appearances, the precise habitat elmarks favor has not been recorded.