Balthazar didn't say goodbye to Spencer on the way out, and the man let him pass without comment. He didn't rush through the rain to the waiting car. He didn't quite remember even getting down there, but there he was sitting with hands gripped white-knuckled to the steering wheel.

His mind was churning over, almost too quickly for him to grasp at the fleeting thoughts. He put the vehicle into gear and moved off. Two streets away, he was starting to realise this was a bad idea. The roads were wet and he wasn't thinking clearly. He pulled the Phantom into a side street and turned off the engine. The growl of the engine died away to be replaced by the roar of the rain.

Balthazar stared out the windshield, the alleyway obscured by the rivulets of rain running down the glass. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest. Spencer was right; he had seen death a hundred times before. Had he seen so much that it had lost its meaning?

"Did… did you lose a kid?"

Percy's words came back to him. No, but everyone in the whole damn world were kids to him. And they all passed away in a heartbeat. Maybe he didn't have any right to waste any one else's time. This was his quest. It had already devoured more time than he was ever supposed to have possessed.

Maybe he had to do this alone. Maybe that was safer. He'd trudged through time alone. It couldn't be that much harder. But if he was having a mid-life crisis, if he had to go through all that time again? His hands had started to shake. Would his mind handle it? There was only so much space in a human mind, there was only so much it could remember. Even with his time-map which seemed to be keeping things in order. But he was losing it. Was his mind simply unable to cope with the time he'd already endured, and that was why it was falling apart?

And a thousand years more? What then?

"She's not immortal. You might be, and you could live forever if that Grimhold stays shut, but not the rest of us, Blake!"

A statement of probabilities destined to come true the prophecy might be, but what if that premise was false? What if the prophecy relied on the probabilities coming true, and was not necessarily a given?

That could mean he truly could never find the Prime Merlinian.

If he never found the Prime Merlinian, how long would the spell Merlin had cast upon him last? Would he truly live forever?

Veronica would remain trapped in the Grimhold. She would still exist, as would he, but he could never see her again. And if her prison was bad enough as it was, it would be even worse if she could never escape it. He couldn't do that to her.

Balthazar gripped the steering wheel even tighter, but even this could not stop the shake that was spreading from his hands and down his arms. If the probabilities didn't align, say if mankind wiped itself out in another Great War, there most certainly would not be a Prime Merlinian. It was too easy for the probabilities to be tossed completely out of alignment, and he wondered why he had never seen this before.

He couldn't leave Veronica trapped.

If mankind wiped himself out, then, maybe, just maybe, he could crack open the Grimhold and release those Morganian's and Morgana herself. But that wouldn't free Veronica. Morgana would rule her body, and that would perhaps be worse than trapping her in the timeless void of the Grimhold.

He couldn't let her out. Not without the Prime Merlinian, who might never exist.

Balthazar could not get Veronica out of his mind, and a part of him didn't want to. At the same time that he could see her in his mind's eye as if she were right in front of him, he knew the likelihood was that he never would. A shudder ran through his whole body and he drew in a sob.

How many thousands of years would it take for him to forget her? It would be the last part of his mind to go, but it was still a human mind, not designed to last forever, and it would steadily overload and unravel with the passage of time. And he would spend the rest of his infinite existence alone. He couldn't. The shake took over his whole body and the man flopped forward against the steering wheel, gripping onto it as he fell apart.

Balthazar didn't know how much time had passed when he finally lifted his head. It was still raining and the sky was dark. He drew steady breaths and tried to settle his thudding heart. This was somewhat more successful than his previous attempts to calm down. The dam had finally broken, but Balthazar was under no disillusionment that his problems were over.

His mind had cleared enough for him to realise that living forever alone was not a forgone conclusion. But he had momentarily lost it, and that perhaps meant the last century or so had taken more of a toll than he realised. He wasn't losing it but he might well be teetering on the edge. He needed a break.

The Phantom started up with a low growl and Balthazar made his way back, slowly, to the shop. He would take a break, he decided. Maybe just a decade or two. The chances of him missing something were slim; the greater danger was that he'd fall further into the insecurity and madness that had briefly got the better of him, and then all would be lost. It was only when he reached the shop's front door and stepped out of the car that he realised he had intended to return the vehicle.

Balthazar turned back to the machine and let a hand rest on its bonnet. The metal was warm and when he concentrated he could feel the currents of magical energy running through it. The energy in an object would, over time, begin to resemble the energy of its owner. Already, the energy flow through the car was beginning to mirror his own, though perhaps it was less turbulent. It normally did not happen so quickly. But then, it had been witness to perhaps his most vulnerable moment in hundreds of year.

Balthazar contemplated what he was to do with the Phantom again, but then simply let out a sigh as his shoulders slumped. "I can't take you back, beautiful. You were there when I needed you."

He just needed a break. That was all. Then, once he was back on track he would begin his search in earnest once more.

All told, Balthazar's 'short break' ended up lasting a little over sixty years. It wasn't like he really noticed that it had taken longer than he had planned. The whole point of the exercise was that by the end of it he wasn't in danger of destroying everything he had worked for.

He didn't quite stop thinking of Veronica, he had his moments. He ended up burying the necklace he had intended to give her all those years ago in the basement of the shop. At least there it could not weigh on him. The Grimhold too, he locked away from his sight.

The calming techniques he had learnt all those years ago still would not quite work. Not consistently. Balthazar quickly learnt that perhaps he was just taking this whole thing too seriously. One day, he took a stroll down to one of the nearby parks. He had it in mind that perhaps the tendency of this generation of mankind to dismiss magic so easily might make the rigid rules he'd kept himself to over the years could be relaxed. A child's ball suddenly taking on a mind of its own and persistently escaping its young owner was not blamed on magic or ghosts, but on the wind, if anything. Similar pursuits could easily provide hours of entertainment, and they were a good distraction.

The Phantom he could not let go of, even as cars evolved and took on new shapes and it began to stick out more and more. This didn't bother him much either, and previously though he had tried to ensure his dress matched the current period, this did not seem such a priority either.

The most this ever seemed to be noticed was sometime in '76, when a couple of young men in a flash new muscle car pulled up beside him and inquired as to whether he'd be interested in a drag race, provided his own vehicle was capable of movement. The few seconds before the light had turned green had been enough for Balthazar to surreptitiously alter the other vehicle's engine. Just slightly. The muscle car had made a very sad sounding splutter and gone nowhere, much to the surprise of its occupants.

Balthazar knew that his long life had altered him and he would never be the same. But he did not have to let it rip him apart. Even if the only solution he seemed to settle on meant he would not consider himself just that little bit crazy. But a little bit was better than completely.

Even as these pursuits brought back some of his sanity, his failure to find the Prime Merlinian still weighed heavily upon him. A thousand years left you tired. And even after sixty years he found himself watching the children at play in the parks with a heavy heart, a part of his mind watching intently for any hint of magical ability, the other part expecting nothing.

So it was when that young boy walked into his shop around the turn of the century that Balthazar did not worry about what a test of Merlin's dragon ring would do to his own mood. He could handle the failure, though he knew it would weigh on him. But not enough to render a test worthless.

And that was when the dragon ring finally came alive and chose its new bearer.