Disclaimer is in chapter 1.

By the middle of summer, now with a months' worth of goof off days under their belt, Xander, Willow, and Jessie, were finding themselves a little tired of theme parks and the like. Xander had been disappointed to learn that Willow and Jessie had begun drifting apart, as Willow spent more of her time studying and Jessie began to hang around Jonathan and his friends.

Unfortunately there didn't seem to be much that he could do about that, so Xander focused as much he could own spending time with both his friends while he was home. That meant study time and projects with Willow, but for Jessie a different tack was needed.

Thus while his afternoons were spent in pursuit of academia, his evenings, more often than not, were ironically spent in pursuit of evil wizards, dragons, and monsters of a mythical menagerie.

"Yes! A natural 20!"

Jessie's crowing echoed through the room as he pumped his arms in the air.

The game had progressed, with the players delving deeper and deeper into the dungeons designed by Warren, the groups' game master. From Xander's point of view, it was actually rather comical to the point where he was having trouble hiding snickers when they were attacked by giant rats, spiders, and the like.

Having gone down into actual dungeons, and faced monsters a good deal more dangerous, there was a surreal aspect to the whole thing.

Still, as Jessie's fireball torched their enemies Xander leaned back and thought about the difference between the magic in the books, and the magic in his life. The fireball spell was one example, in school books the closest he'd come to was the incendio. That spell, however, operated in a different fashion. For one thing it didn't waste energy blazing across the intervening space between the caster and the target, rather it lit the target on fire directly.

Xander did suspect however, that there were plenty of spells in the wizarding world just as wasteful, and just a spectacular.

When the session that ended Xander hung around with the others and read through some of the sourcebooks.

"How much these cost?" He asked glancing over at Jonathan.

"Some of them are pricey," Jonathan admitted.

"Why?" Warren asked with a sly smile, "hooked?"

Xander shrugged, "could be. It's interesting reading at least."

Jonathan nodded enthusiastically, "I love reading through them for fun."

"How many of them are about magic and spells and stuff?" Xander asked.

"For Dungeons & Dragons?" Jonathan asked in return.

Xander thought about it for a moment then just shrugged, "or any game."

"Tons."

Xander raised an eyebrow, looking over curiously, "yeah?"

The whole group nodded furiously.

"Oh yeah," Jonathan spoke up first, "just in DND there has to be more than a dozen."

Warren, who had worn the same scowl almost the entire time Xander known them, rolled his eyes as he spoke up. "What are you just asking the magic? There's lots of cool stuff in these books."

Xander shrugged again, "just like magic I guess."

"For really cool magic," Warren suggested after a moment, "checkout Shadowrun."

"Oh yeah, what's in that?"

"Technomancy."

Xander leaned forward, his expression interested, "sounds cool."

That seemed to be the key phrase that set the whole group off, then suddenly each of them were throwing him recommendations from their favorite games. Xander wasn't sure that any of that would be useful, but he hadn't lied about them being interesting reading, and if you got any good ideas out of it well then it would be worth the price of the books.

Before too long, however, the discussion deteriorated into it heated debate about the relative merits of one game versus the others. Xander mostly tuned them out at that point, and only peripherally entered the discussion as he spent most of the rest of the evening reading through various magic sourcebooks.

Of course while Xander considered most of the time spent with any of his friends to be enjoyable, and thus arguably playtime, his time with his uncle was most certainly not.

The workouts this summer were a great deal more strenuous, leaving him in serious aching pain at the end of his days. The early weeks were particularly bad, which forced Xander to vow not to slacken off so much the following year.

It wasn't that he didn't enjoy the time so much, of course. If he hated it, he simply would not have done it. Even with enjoyment however, it was still damn hard work. By the middle of the summer though, Sam had begun to introduce him to basic sparring, as a lead-in to fulfilling his promise concerning the proper usage of fighting knife.

What that really meant, however, was that in addition to aches and pains Xander now had black and blue bruises to show off to the world.

What really kept them coming back however, were the discussions with Robert, and the stories he related.

The discussion of the day had begun while Xander was wrapping up his cooldown routine, and Sam was heading for a cold beer. What had begun with Robert pulling out some of the flaws in Xander's defense tactics and quickly moved on to a discussion of magical versus mundane defenses.

"Wards!" Robert scoffed, shaking his head. "Some of the most worthless things around."

Xander frowned, "people seem to trust them?"

Robert laughed, "that's what makes them worthless."

Seeing that Xander was still confused, Robert went on. "Wards are flighty things, you see. They work good enough within their limitations, but most people use them don't bother to learn about them. Your school, Hogwarts right? I expect you've heard of the fidelius, given how famous it is over there now?"

Xander nodded, the fidelius was indeed the most famous defense Ward he knew about.

"That's a funny one," Robert said with a crooked smile. "It can hide a location from any searcher, so perfectly that no magic, and no technology so far, has ever been able to penetrate it. Right?"

"I guess so."

"Bullshit."

Xander flinched slightly at the flat tone Robert delivered the curse in.

"How many folk you think can cast that spell?"

Xander shrugged, "dunno."

Robert chuckled dryly, "on the whole planet, only one man. Leastwise, only one man who admit to it. That's what makes that spell so strong, it's never really been tested. At least not in recorded history."

Xander blinked, thinking he heard something in Robert's tone. "Recorded history?"

"Yes boy. That one was a lost spell, until the Evans girl managed to piece it back together from old artifacts. At least that's the public story, or the semipublic story I suppose."

Xander perked up, eyes widening. "Evans girl?"

Robert nodded, "the one who married Potter, the mother of the boy-who-lived. The point is, that Ward is only secure through obscurity. The more common a ward is, the less secure it is. Do some research, kid, you'll find the most powerful wards of the world are all ancient magic. They're all based on formulas that no one remembers, and no one could possibly recast today. Your school, the major banking centers of Europe, various ministries, they're all the same. They are ancient wards that are only maintained today, never cast."

Xander thought about that for a moment, then a slow realization came to him. "It's not just wards, this is?"

Robert smiled slowly, "what do you think?"

"I think..." Xander said slowly, "I think the magical world is buried in secrets. Wand makers don't seem to ever tell anyone how to do the job. Now you say this about wards, what about other areas?"

"Good, boy. Very good." Robert said with a smile, "that's exactly the point. Secrets are powerful, magical secrets doubly so. A ward is like a lock, the problem is the key to the lock is the one thing that every wizard on the planet carries."

"A wand." Xander said, his eyes opening wide.

"Bang on." Robert said with a grin, "so what good is a lock if everyone holds the key? Of course in this case the locks are really combination based, so that's where obscurity comes in. Never use a ward out of a book if you really intend to protect something, you may as well just hand it over to whoever wants it instead."

It made sense, Xander had to admit, and it matched with the things she was seeing when he explored or researched the wizarding world. Secrets, hidden formulas, ancient magic, they were everywhere. Why were the best protected places always protected by long forgotten words that were, today, merely recharged by their caretakers?

"Those old magics, they had come from somewhere..." Xander said softly.

Robert nodded in agreement, "oh yes. Oh yes, they certainly came from somewhere. There was this time, during the war, when I let my cavalry unit over a ridge. We just crested it when we all felt a tingling down our spines. Most of my boys, they were non-magical, didn't know what it was. I knew, I felt it before, just not that strong. It was a chain collapse of multiple ward fields, the most powerful I've ever felt. My men, our horses, they all panicked. Standard my unit, but I was transfixed. Ahead of me, there were these two mountains side by side, and as I watched they jumped apart."

Robert fixed Xander with a piercing stare, "you don't know what it's like to see two huge mountains actually jumped apart. I found myself staring into a fertile valley that wasn't there a minute earlier. This valley, held hundreds of hectares of ground, probably a good chunk of the state it was in. Until that day, however, it never existed on the map. Think on that a moment, and not how many other slabs of land have been parceled up and forgotten by the wizarding world."

Xander swallowed as he thought about it and wondered who or what cultures have developed spells like the fidelius. What if that was a common ward once in the distant past? How much of the earth was hidden from men, from wizards, from them all?

"Staggering thought, isn't it?" Robert asked with a knowing smile. "I've thought a lot about it myself, since that day. It's humbling to realize that it's just possible that the world we live in is only a small fraction of the world we should have inherited."

Conversations with Robert always left Xander with something to ponder. The old man, approaching his second Centennial, had a way with words and the way with people. He also had a way of planting seeds with his words, then it is invariably took root and began to push their way through Xander's thinking.

Secrets.

It was the opposite of how he been brought up to think, Xander realized. You learned from shared information, you built on what other people know, that was how things were done. Airplanes, television, computers. These things couldn't exist on their own.

People stood upon the shoulders of giants to accomplish these things.

Was it really possible that the magical world was so different?

He didn't know.

But Xander knew that he would have to find out.