The bog-iron body was a significant improvement, but it was a passive shell. It lacked a core, a source of power. His thoughts turned to a legend he had once studied: the Sky-Fallen Star, a meteorite of pure, magnetic iron that had crashed in the Dragon's Tooth Mountains generations ago. It was said to be a conduit of raw, celestial power, anathema to the ordered magic of the world. His journey north was through a harsh, unforgiving landscape of scree and biting wind.
*He was a black iron scar moving across the grey stone. The energy of the star called to him long before he saw the crater—a discordant, screaming hum in the back of his mind that set his new metallic body thrumming. The crater itself was a wound in the mountain. At its center lay the meteorite, a pitted, black mass that was less a rock and more a solidified scream of cosmic violence.
The air around it crackled. To approach it was agony; the chaotic energy raked against his structured soul like claws on a slate. For three days and nights, Kaelen sat at the crater's edge, his mind a fortress against the psychic onslaught. He could not dominate this power; it was the essence of the formless void.
He had to convince it. He began the most delicate work of his existence, projecting the ghost of his tessellations onto the star-iron's surface. He inched his will forward, creating a bridge of interlocking hexagons of pure order, a pattern so beautiful and stable that the chaos momentarily stilled to observe it. It was a battle of philosophies.
The star screamed of infinite possibility; Kaelen whispered of perfect structure. Slowly, painfully, a tiny portion of the meteorite's surface began to change, its chaotic hum shifting to a deep, resonant thrum in harmony with his own will.
With a final, monumental effort of concentration, he reached out with his bog-iron hand and pried a fist-sized chunk from the main mass. Holding it was like holding a captive star. Power, vast and cold, flooded his limbs. His mica eyes blazed with a new, silver light, and the geometric patterns etched into his bog-iron shell glowed with the same fierce luminescence.
He placed the star-heart into the hollow of his chest, where it settled with a final, definitive click. He was no longer just the Tessellated Dead. He was the Iron Tessellate, reborn and empowered. The journey back to his observatory was not a shuffle, but a swift, purposeful stride. The game was about to change.