A/N: Just three more chapters to go on this one. So grateful for all the wi-fi. ;)


Although Balthazar had lived for thirteen hundred years he had never really figured out what determined who was a sorcerer and who wasn't. To his comfort the rest of the magical community didn't know either. He knew, as did they, that if your parents, even if it was just one of them, were sorcerers, then you would most likely be a sorcerer.

Horvath's parents had both been sorcerers, his mother to a lesser extent to than his father. He had been an obvious choice to look for an apprentice in. Morgana had also been the daughter of a sorcerer and his bride. Again, the choice to see if she had any talent was obvious. The same was true of Merlin; a sorcerer for a father and a non-sorcerer for a mother.

However, Veronica's parents hadn't been sorcerers. They had been in awe and, to some extent, terrified of their daughter's sudden power. Whenever she visited home it had been hard to reconnect with them. Ruth, her sister, had been close to her, but only because she had essentially grown up around a sister who had become a sorcerer. Her parents had grown up with a child who had displayed her power eventually. Veronica's home visits became increasingly infrequent towards the end of her apprenticeship.

It had pained her to drift away from her family but it was something that was happening whether she wanted it to or not. Her family was simply not equipped to deal with someone who could do magic. To his knowledge she hadn't had a sorcerer on either side of her family in the past hundred years. He had done a good deal of research on her family when he had found Dave, so he knew what he was talking about. And it sounded as though Dave had been her only sorcerer descendant.

Balthazar himself was not of sorcerous descent. His family had always been farmers. If there had ever been a sorcerer in his line, his prideful father would have never stopped talking about him. His brothers had never shown the talent, nor had his sisters. Merlin had come back and checked on that, like he did with all of the families of his apprentices. He was pretty sure, although he had never looked, that none of his brother's descendants became sorcerers. It was something that he could feel in his bones.

So how was a sorcerer decided? What genes or birth decided that a certain person could do magic? How was a sorcerer, or sorceress as the case may be, discovered if they had no magical ancestry? Given that the ratio of sorcerers to the non-magicals was very low he knew it couldn't be easy to just randomly find these people.

He had only come up with one word; fate. Veronica had first proposed the theory to him that nothing really decided it. Some people became sorcerers and some didn't. It was just part of a big plan somewhere. Balthazar had accepted the theory because he didn't have a better one. Not to mention that he held any words of Veronica in high-esteem. It was understandable when he remembered that he only had words, a painted image, and a necklace never given left of Veronica.

In his longer nights Balthazar had come up with some theories of his own when it came to sorcerers. He believed that not everyone who could become a sorcerer did become a sorcerer. After all, being a sorcerer was only a small part about ability. The rest of it was training, good training.

He figured that the chances of a sorcerer randomly showing a statue that would become a ring to a random person were low. Sorcerers only did that when they were searching for an apprentice. Sorcerers generally took two or three apprentices in their lifetimes. The really ambitious ones took four or five. Balthazar had decided to take one and one alone. That apprentice had turned out to be Dave.

This was not normal, yet neither had the way that Merlin taken apprentices been normal. No one took apprentices all at once. Balthazar didn't know how it had been done before Merlin had been murdered by Morgana and Horvath. Maybe sorcerers had taken six apprentices at one time before Merlin's betrayal and death. It would have been a lesson well-learned by the community if that was the reason why apprentices were taken individually.

So he thought it was realistic to think that there were potential sorcerers out there who would never be scouted. He also thought it was realistic to suppose that generations of uncounted talent had lived and died never reaching their full potential. It was a crying shame, it really was, but sorcerers couldn't be everywhere at once.

When the theory came to him he started to wonder what those potential sorcerers did with their lives. Did they become famous? Did they lead normal lives? That night it had nearly driven him mad. On normal nights he had trouble sleeping. That night though he felt like he was never going to sleep again.

In the end Balthazar decided that these potential sorcerers couldn't have lived normal lives. They had the ability to use the entirety of their brains. How could they possibly go and lead normal lives with that ability? Even if they didn't know how to use magic their brain power was ten times that of any normal human. That was why Dave got Physics the way he did. It just seemed to click in his mind.

No. Balthazar didn't think anyone with those kinds of abilities had it in them to be normal. They would all be incredibly special. They had it in them to move worlds and change the way things worked. Maybe they would become politicians or those who ran off to Kenya and participated in the Peace Corps. He had the feeling that there were more unscouted sorcerers than there were sorcerers. And perhaps the world was better place for it.

So it came as no great surprise to Balthazar when Dave beat all of his competitors and took the top prize at the Science Fair for his district. Sorcerer or no Dave had the makings of greatness in him. He had the ability, at the age of fifteen, to wow judges and create electric spectacles of greatness.

And when Dave had finished with his presentation he had looked over at Balthazar. The look had been yearning for approval. When he saw that look it terrified him. Yet, he had to smile and nod at him. Because he knew that Dave was going to be the Prime Merlinian. He knew that he had found him. And he knew, despite the misgivings that he had been feeling for years, he had done a good job training him. And he had the sneaking suspicion that Dave held his opinion in respect. He wasn't sure how he felt about that though.