A wooden stake through the heart. Always the heart. Always wood.

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 allicin 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 LCAN 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.