Xaviers!

At one of the points Sean has engrossed himself in research, he hears a rapping on the doorframe of his workshop.

Sean puts down a partially finished project of some kind and looks over towards the door.

"Please come in," Sean said taking off his gloves though he'd forgotten to take off his loupes for some reason.

"You. Wizard boy," Isolde says, regarding him.

"Can I pry you away from the mysteries of the seven veils to pick your brain?"

Isolde Schwarz wrote:"You. Wizard boy," Isolde says, regarding him.

"Can I pry you away from the mysteries of the seven veils to pick your brain?"

"Sean is fine, Wizard boy sounds so formal," Sean said wryly but he stood up from his chair. "What exactly do you need?"

"Someone lured me off-campus to try to kill me. I'd like to have an idea what he's up to."

She holds up her phone in one hand.

"I have pictures."

"Tried to kill you with magic?" Sean asked wondering why things in his life escalated so quickly, oh right, magic. Sean moved towards an empty works pace and gestured for Isolde to join him.

"I'm not sure on that front, so we'll mark it under 'tried to kill me with an improvised explosive and a half-pound of sharpened shards of silver."

"How much do you know about what Wanda is?"

"That would hurt," Sean said, "As for Wanda I'm going to guess that I know far less than I should."

"She's in tune with things." Hannah's voice chimes in out of nowhere, at least from Isolde's point of view. Her voice has a strange ethereal edge to it that seems to pierce right through Isolde and touch on some very old wounds, mired in melancholy.

Isolde tenses, her eyes going golden as they dart about.

"...you didn't tell me we had a guest, Sean."

"Hannah try not to scare our guest as she capable of tearing off my arms and beating me to a pulp with them," Sean said with a smile to hide the anxiety of Isolde's suddenly golden eyes. "She's less a guest and more a resident really."

Sean paused.

"She's in tune with things? Everything or a specific... thing?"

"She's one of the Children of Earth. That's why there was so much fuss to try and get her."

"Sorry, usually people don't hear me..." she says a bit dejectedly though her voice sounds just as melancholic to her. It reminds her of things lost, things she never had or never would have.

"Good thing I'm not 'people' then..."

"And I forget that you can't always tell the difference, Hannah," Sean said apologetically looking over at Hannah before looking back at Isolde. "Are werewolves not people? Sorry, academic question or perhaps a philosophical one?"

Sean paused for a moment.

"Right, is Somebody trying to hurt Wanda then? Or is this more of a personal thing?"

"The man who was killed in that recent wild dog attack was another of the Children. His wife was his protector. Failing him just... broke her."

"And we found their house covered in these inside," she says, passing the phone to him to see the photos.

Sean took the phone from Isolde gingerly and began swiping through the photos.

"I take it those were werewolf attacks?" Sean asked as he looked at the symbols.

"I'm reasonably certain, yes."

Some of the symbols in the pictures were obviously Norse in derivation, but not inherently magical at least according to his knowledge. Some of the symbols looked like they were crudely carved valknut with their three interlocking triangles.

More interesting was the pictures of the wooden chest. The symbols on it were in a completely different style. Less runic and more reminiscent of thorny vines, they encircled the box, becoming especially pronounced along the edges where the box opened. They reminded him of some of the things he'd looked at in Wanda's notes, though the thorns made it more reminiscent of a crown-of-thorns plant. It was hard to glean magic from camera pictures, but these looked as if they had intent, unlike the Norse runes which had more in common with graffiti in their placement.

"Somebody is into Norse mythology," Sean said he examined the runes. "I don't recognize these though..."

Sean gestured and several books came over to him from different shelves in the workshop. They opened and he began looking through them to see if there was anything similar in his relatively small library.

"Did you bring the box back?"

"It fell apart as part of the trap, but I could get you one of the panels."

The vine-symbols bore some resemblance to some Celtic knotwork, but that wasn't terribly damning or conclusive. Some of the patterns would seem to indicate some sort of warding or maybe obfuscation. Those two principles could be similar. Whatever it was, the working was complex and the box didn't seem to be the whole piece with the roots of the vines trailing off as if they were connected to some other working.

"That would help," Sean said, "The best I can say right now is that the spell could have been intended perhaps to hide or ward the box based on similarities between this and Celtic knotwork based workings. I ate to say it, but my library just isn't extensive enough to find a match. Maybe in another hundred years or so."

"Do you think there was a sacrifice?"

"One of the Children rarely falls without a reason."

"Hard to say," Sean said, "But if the children are so important then you wouldn't want to waste a valuable reagent or all the time tracking them down, fighting their guardians, and then performing a working. Or at least I wouldn't."

Sean paused for a moment and looked back through the photos again.

"We could visit the place you found the box and examine it, but the piece of the box might tell us something."

A short time later, Isolde returns with a cloth bag containing several splintered pieces of wood, including one that is somewhat more intact than the others.

She sets it on the table, regarding Sean.

"I do hope you won't think of making 'fetching' a habit with me."

"I quite like my arms in their sockets," Sean said wryly before slowly emptying the contents of the bag onto a mostly empty work space. He grabbed a pair of gloves as he sifted through the pieces to see if this was going to be a puzzle worth trying to reassemble or not. "Unless you're looking for work, aye."

The pieces of the box were easy enough to assemble. There was still residual magic in the wood indicating that it had been a working at one point in time, but had expended whatever magic had been worked into it. The thorny vine patterns were still there and seemed to be the source of the magical feel. Beyond the vine carvings, the box looked like it had once been a weathered and well-loved piece of mantle or table decoration.

Narrator wrote:The pieces of the box were easy enough to assemble. There was still residual magic in the wood indicating that it had been a working at one point in time, but had expended whatever magic had been worked into it. The thorny vine patterns were still there and seemed to be the source of the magical feel. Beyond the vine carvings, the box looked like it had once been a weathered and well-loved piece of mantle or table decoration.

Sean began drawing a spell circle around the box. He looked at a chart pinned to a wall before drawing runes at seemingly random points around the circle. He then drew an irregular five-sided shape connecting the runes to complete the circle.

"Let's see if we can see what you're about," Sean said grabbing what looked appeared to be a hazelnut with an eye carved into it. Sean placed the nut on one of the runes and began chanting. The eye carved into the hazelnut began to glow brighter as the spell progressed. As the spell reached it's climaxthe nut was devoured by the spell leaving only the glowing eye, which expanded across the whole spell circle. The scrying spell would hopefully give them a bit more about where this box came from and who'd placed it there.

The residual magic on the box resisted the spell briefly, but it didn't really have the energy necessary to do so and gave way. Looking for where the box was from pulled up an image of the box sitting on a chest at the foot of a queen-size bed from what looked like a rustic house. Isolde could easily identify it as the bedroom of the house that the couple had lived in. In that place, it had no carvings, just a well-used piece of additional furniture. Looking more closely at who had placed it there, he got images of a pair of hands carving the patterns into the box with a quick, practiced manner. The hands were not old or scarred in any obvious way. The back of the left hand had a tattoo of thorny vines that seemed to run up the arm and out of the spell's sight. Some words were said over the box, black-green light filtering down over the box from the left hand and the scrying spell began to flicker fitfully before it gave out as the original working obscured that period of the box's history.

Sean let the spell fail as the working on the box obfuscated whatever came next in the sequence of events.

"Do you recognize that tattoo at all?" Sean asked Isolde while he considered the best next step in his investigation.

"It's not who I'm thinking did this. So that means he had help."

Sean stared at the box for another moment before waving a hand over it causing the spell circle to vanish. He looked at another chart before walking over to some shelves.

"Who do you think did this?" Sean asked as he grabbed a knife, chalk, a vial of something, and a piece of wood.

"I'm fairly certain this is a man who might as well be my son."

"Your son?" Sean asked stopping his reagent collection to look at Isolde. "He's in the business of trying to bring about cataclysms then?"

"He's... ambitious. And he has a few fairly novel religious notions."

"Novel how?" Sean asked.

"He thinks he's úlfhéðnar, one of Odin's holy warriors."

Sean mulled what Isolde said while gathering the last of the reagents he needed for his next spell.

"Is he the type to go on a crusade in order to fulfill some kind of Norse prophecy?" Sean asked walking back over to a table.

"I think when I knew him he was a little too attached to earthly pleasures to run the risk of losing a meal ticket."

"There might be power in this for him, but I don't know if he's far enough gone that he'd be dealing in cataclysms."