A hunting quarrel. Silver for ceremony. Hawthorn because it grew nearby.

Habsburg Military Frontier inventories of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries distinguish a third-issue bolt: silver-content head, hawthorn shaft, reserved for operational contexts the regimental clerks do not name. The head is a piercing bodkin, cast or brazed, with an axial channel that can be field-loaded with fresh allium paste. The shaft is Crataegus, denser than yew, and the doctrine is that it must enter the wound far enough for the wood itself to contact tissue. Three mechanisms on one projectile: galvanic silver, allicin in the channel, hawthorn biochemistry in the shaft.

Stand-off destruction grade. Applied, in the older Carpathian and Alpine traditions, to a target already compromised — sun, running water, a first blade — from a defensive position. The tessellated thoracic plate is the structural problem this bolt was designed to solve. The sergeant-at-arms at the Templar confiscation tested a related cluster-bolt on a wooden target and remarked that it would be useful against fast-moving prey. He was not wrong about the prey.