Xaviers!

Sean meditated in his workshop hovering ever so slightly above the ground as he did so. The runes inscribed on his skin glowed dully, some of the runes were still crisp, but quite a few were marred or broken in some way. The whole room seemed to hum with energy though nothing in particular was happening.

((Open))

After a while, a soft knock sounds on his door.

Visitors?

Sean was a little surprised. People usually stayed away from the place where electronics acted funny.

"Come in?" Sean said uncertainly as he stood up and turned to face the door.

The door opens and Wanda steps through. "I'm not disturbing you too much, am I?"

"Uh. No, not all," Sean said, "Just people don't stop by very often, so....would you like some tea?"

The space was as it had always been. It had a certain air of disorganized chaos. There were piles of notes, books open with slips of paper to mark locations, diagrams o workbenches. Projects in various stages of completion in various work areas.

"No, I'm fine. I never got a chance to thank you for your part in rescuing me from the vampires."

"You're welcome," Sean smiled. "Couldnt very well stand by and do nothing, but I think the others deserve more thanks than me."

"How have you been since then?"

"Whole, mostly," she says, "There's some pieces missing according to some people, but I'm not going to let that stop me from moving forward."

"Well, mostly whole sounds better than the dark queen thing you had going on at the vampire hive," Sean said as he went about making himself some tea.

"Some of that is a little hazy. I remember some bits and pieces, but not all of it. Which is probably for the best." She reaches into a pocket and pulls out a small journal, "I did have some questions though." She flips the journal open to a page with some runic designs sketched on it. "Have you ever seen anything like this before?"

"I'll try to keep my answers as not cryptic as possible," Sean joked as he examined the runes in the journal. "Where did you see these?"

"In a dream in a cave under the earth. They were on the walls of the cave in growing vines. I got there by going down a refuse chute that a dwarf was tossing cut up rabbit parts down. It was a really strange dream and not the first strange dream I've had."

"I'm staring to think strange dreams is part of the bargain when it comes to being involved with magic," Sean said knowingly as he considered Wanda's story. He moved to grab a couple books from a bookshelf and placed them on his workbench. He opened one of them and began slowly paging through it. "Did the dwarf or anyone else in the dream say anything?"

"My German's a bit rusty, but something like this..."

"Heute hack ich, morgen bau ich,
übermorgen hat der König seinen Prinz.
Ach, wie gut, dass niemand weiß,
dass ich Rumpelstilzchen heiß!"

"There were voices in the cave as well. They mentioned the Chamber of Guf and the Tree of Life. I'm familiar with the latter. Still researching the former."

"Grimm fairy tales and Jewish mysticism?" Sean asked sounding confused. "That's... That's quite the dream."

"Exactly. It goes right along with the other dream I had." She proceeds to explain the dream. "That one was about as nightmarish as the other one. Something's going on."

"That's ominous," Sean said, "I don't know about blank decrees, but there is a spell called the Key of Nebuchadnezzar."

Sean paused for a moment.

"I feel like we need a board, pictures, and load of colored string to start sorting out this... prophesy for lack of a better word. We might need help as well, possibly be able to negotiate for some information from Erica or maybe there's something in her library we can use."

Wanda blinks, "Erica Carlisle? I saw something in the news about her. The police are looking for her. Missing person case or something."

"That's not good," Sean said realizing he should check the news more often. "Something that could remove her is serious."

"I've only seen her in passing at the Raven's Crest. She introduced herself once. Sam said something about working things out with her once."

"She's an... interesting and very capable person," Sean said, "Lived since humans were scrabbling in dirt from my understanding and has accumulated quite a library and is supposedly quite the adept. If something took her it's for a reason and with you having prophetic dreams this situation is making me nervous."

"I don't know that they're prophetic, but there's a certain power to them," she says, pointing to one of the runes in her journal. "This one helped me kill a draugr that tried to kill me over Christmas break."

"How did you use the... Wait, you fought a Draugr? Where?" Sean asked.

"Not too far from an old cabin in Sweden that my grandmother loaned me. It... well, its presence made me sort of sick and I trailed it down without knowing what it was."

"That makes sense I suppose, historically I mean," Sean said, "You killed the Draugr with this rune? That's amazing, and that must mean you've got a bit of talent for magic then as well, aye?"

"Sort of. The rune seemed to weaken it and then a lightning bolt did the rest. Was out cold after I used it. Isolde describes it as being 'awake', which I would assume means I have some talent. It's kind of new."

The runes aren't anything Sean is immediately familiar with, but from looking through his books he can piece some of it together. They're runes of warding, of a sort. Not your usual repelling kind of magic but rather obfuscating in a way that seem to ring in tune with a deeper level of reality. Almost like the opposite of what he did when he invoked the spell from the Dwarf's page, but not in an antagonistic way. More like a lock corresponding to his key. As much as he'd written Hannah into existence, these runes once wrote something out of it in order to protect and hide it away. What Wanda had used them for was almost more of a side-effect, a fraction of it that weakened the Draugr enough to be wiped out by a lightning bolt.

Sean jotted down a couple notes as he looked through the book and pieced together what he thought might be the runes function. It was all a bit... of guesswork in some ways.

"Awake is probably as good a way to put it as any," Sean said as he pieced together the functions of the rune, "Some like to call it the opening of your third eye or mind to the winds or threads of magic. The ability to perceive the weave of magical energy in world around you, so you can tap into it."

Sean paused for a moment realizing he was about to start rambling.

"This rune is interesting. It appears to be a form of ward, but not in the most traditional sense because most wards are more like shields. Instead this working pulls something out of our plane of existence or reality, so that something doesn't affect it. Quite a bloody well impressive ward really."

"That area of the cave did seem to be concerned with making use of what dwarf was throwing away. Like some sort of magical recycling."

"Recycling?" Sean asked. "Maybe it has to do with the Chamber of Guf? Recycling souls of dead animals?"

"I suppose that's possible. He was chopping one of the feet off the rabbit and discarding the rest. The rest ended up in that cave."

"Seems a bit... wasteful might be the foot itself is important," Sean said thinking he tried paging through his books again looking for references to the Chamber of Guf.

It's a concept in Kabbalah and hermetic practices, the idea of a metaphysical urn or container that contains souls. Often interpreted as the origin or well from which people born into the world are drawn, some mentions of it being part of a cycle of reincarnation somehow or a 'generic' term for an afterlife in which souls are gathered. More... 'informed' sources refer to it in a similar capacity although no one seems to be able to agree on whether or not it's a plane of existence, object or astral manifestation, some comparing it to more metaphorical things like the Box of Pandora.

"Ah, right the Chamber of Guf is a gathering place of souls, perhaps to be recycled and reborn," Sean said, "It might or might not be a plane of existence, or an actual physical object. Depends on your position on which old people claiming to be wizards or experts on magic and the occult are more... correct than others. There's also a lovely little bit where somebody uses writings by Judah Loew ben Bezalel to draw parallels between the Chamber of Guf and Pandora's Box, which would make it quite lovely for somebody to get their grubby paws on."

“So accessing it could either open the door to all evil or cutting open the golden goose. All depending on who’s right. Wonderful.”

"Welcome to the wonderful world of wizardry," Sean smiled. "Provided opening it didn't end the world you could probably use the Chamber as a magical batter and dominate the Earth using phenomenal cosmic power. You would have to not care about using souls as spell components though."

"That seems like a thing one should care about," Wanda says, inspecting the books without touching them. "My roommate has two older books on her shelf that remind me of these. I'll have to ask her about them."

"You should bring them here and we can see if they're the genuine article or not," Sean said, "Which would make them rather like finding diamonds in a pile of hay and just as valuable."

Sean paused for a moment.

"You can read any of the books, just don't take them out of the workshop. I can also clear you some space here. Kind of took the whole room over since there weren't really any other people interested or talented at this... sort of thing."

"Interested, yes. Talented remains to be seen," Wanda says, "I appreciate the offer and I accept. Isolde will probably think us working together is funny or something."

"Using the rune shows you have some amount of talent," Sean shrugged. "Isolde will probably want to stand guard. She doesn't exactly think terribly highly of wizards."