A wooden stake through the heart. Always the heart. Always wood.
Wood dense enough to breach the plated chest, carrying its own chemistry. Always last, never the first move.
Hawthorn stake
Armoury · Tessellated thoraxPlate · CUSTOS · Hawthorn stake · theoretical reconstruction
heartwood, wedge below about thirty degrees, long enough to cross the tessellated thorax and reach pericardial tissue. Density, grain, and a flavonoid bolus in one piece of wood. Always the heart, always wood — half a specification, remembered as a rule.
Crataegus monogyna, primary; rowan, ash, and blackthorn as secondary European species. Air-dry density approximately 0.88 grams per cubic centimetre, interlocking grain, modulus of rupture among the highest of native hardwoods. The mechanical specification is a penetrating wedge sharpened below about thirty degrees, long enough to traverse the tessellated thoracic plate and reach pericardial tissue. Hawthorn heartwood also carries oligomeric proanthocyanidins and quercetin-class flavonoids: a local enzymatic bolus against the same iron-sulphur cluster enzymes that and silver attack. The stake is therefore two preparations in one piece of wood.
It is a destruction preparation, never a first step. The traditions are unanimous: sun, allicin, silver, or running water first; the wedge last, into a target already compromised. Applied to it is the wrong anatomy. The shifted thorax is not a cuirass of micro-plates. Late-tradition conflation of the two hunts is how hunters died with the right wood in the wrong chest.
App. B ·
Hunters in Theory