Shagyak

The shagyak is a large hoofed mammal native to Noxus, most often found in the forests of the Aulderwood. An adult can carry up to eight tusk-like horns, shimmering and pearlescent, and bears a thick hump of muscle at the base of its neck. It is a grazing herbivore, feeding in open glades on its favorite grasses along with soft mulderberries and scullygrass, and it announces itself with a distinctive shriek. Those horns make the shagyak a target for hunters. Upriver and in the cities, a set of pearlescent tusks can earn a fortune, sold as the base for backwater remedies. Poachers prize potency, and by their reckoning the tusks are strongest when taken while the animal still lives: an arrow driven into the neck hump keeps the blood flowing as the horns are hewn away. Such a kill leaves the beast dead in the grass, its eight tusks stripped from its skull. The Aulderwood falls under the watch of Ivern the Green Father, who counts the shagyak among the creatures he protects. When a hunting crew, the one-eyed Niko, the wealthy Eddo with his whalebone bow, and the young Risbell, killed and mutilated one of the beasts for its horns, Ivern shed a sappy tear and ringed the corpse with a circle of daisies before setting out to stop them. He raised sudden walls of scullygrass to hide a second grazing shagyak from their arrows and, with his stone-and-moss companion Daisy, drove the hunters from the wood.