The Astral Card's symbol still burned across his irises — twelve constellation points in their ring, the infinity loops in their rotation, the six-pointed star at the center — and through that symbol, through the Hollow Star operating at its maximum output in the immediate aftermath of the chain breaking, he looked at the centipede with a clarity that restructured what he saw into something beyond visual perception.
The chitin plates resolved into their molecular geometry — the crystalline lattice of the material, the precise arrangement of its calcium compounds, the stress propagation lines running through its internal structure in response to Aldric's gravitational load. He could see the fractures he and Marlowe had forced in the upper left quadrant, their geometry now completely legible, the propagation of the damage visible as dark lines extending through the chitin's internal lattice from the original impact points.
He could see through the armor.
Not the way light sees through translucent material — the way perception sees through everything when it is operating at a frequency that does not require opacity to constitute an obstacle. The layers of chitin resolved and then became irrelevant and then were simply not a limiting factor in what the Hollow Star could reach, and what the Hollow Star reached through them was —
The heart.
It occupied a space deep within the centipede's thoracic region, surrounded by the dense bone casing that had made their approach to it so costly — the vault of accumulated calcium deposits built up over years of consumption, layered and reinforced until the cardiac structure it enclosed was as protected as anything biological could make it. But the bone casing was not opaque to the Hollow Star at this output. The casing resolved into its own molecular geometry, and through it —
The heart itself.
It was wrong in every register that the Hollow Star could receive wrongness.
A human heart, at its most fundamental level, carries the frequency of the person it belongs to — the Lunar Ichor circulating through it in the specific pattern of that individual's Sigil, warm and particular and entirely their own. The heart before him carried something that had once been that and had been something else for a very long time. The tissue was dark — not the dark of shadow but the dark of corruption at the cellular level, ichor that had curdled past its original frequency into something that pulsed with the sluggish, arrhythmic rhythm of a system operating on the residual momentum of what it had consumed rather than the living energy of what it genuinely was.
Inside the heart, at its center — visible through the cardiac muscle and the surrounding tissue and the biological architecture of the organ itself, preserved within the corruption the way a fossil is preserved within stone — the Astral Card.
What remained of it.
It had been broken long before this night — fractured at some earlier point in the history of whoever this Howling had once been, the Sigil lines across its surface cracked and dark, the geometry that had once constituted a person's identity dissolved into components that could no longer constitute a whole. But the corruption had preserved it. Had kept it in its broken state, circulating the corrupted ichor through and around it as though the fractured card were still functional, using its residual frequency as the organizing principle for the Howling's continued existence the way a broken compass is still used for navigation by someone who has nothing better.
The card's original form was barely recoverable through the fractures.
Barely — but legible to the Hollow Star at maximum output. Beneath the cracked surface, beneath the corruption that had stained everything it touched with its deep arterial red, the ghost of a sigil. Echo Ichor. The specific frequency of someone who had once carried the same Divine Ichor as Marlowe Nox Crestfall, whose Lunar Sigil had fused with the Echo card and formed something that had then been shattered, and whose body had transformed into the thing currently held immobile before him by the force of a man who had not expected to find something like this in a forest on a misclassified Class I assignment.
Binding chains wrapped the broken card inside the heart.
Thinner than the chains binding his own card — degraded by the corruption, their links partially dissolved, their restraining function compromised by the same ichor that had preserved the card's existence. They were failing. Had been failing for a long time. The corruption did not maintain things. It consumed them, and these chains were no exception, and the fact that they were still present at all suggested they had once been significantly more substantial than what remained of them.
Clyde saw the gap between two plates of the bone casing — the fracture point he and Marlowe had already identified, the structural weakness in the vault's upper left quadrant.
It was the only viable path to the heart.
He understood this with the absolute, geometric clarity of a perception operating at maximum output — not as a tactical assessment but as a simple physical fact, the way a fact is simple when you can see all of its constituent elements simultaneously. The fracture ran diagonally across two adjacent plates, and at the deepest point of the fracture the gap between the plates was sufficient — barely sufficient, precisely sufficient — for a blade of Hollow Edge's dimensions to reach the cardiac structure beyond.
His eyes were still blazing amethyst.
The Astral Card's symbol burned across his irises.
He drew Hollow Edge.