Thomas and Lirenna held hands tightly as they watched their son being strapped into the testing chair.

     An attendant, a young man with sandy brown hair, wrapped a strip of soft cloth around the boy's wrist to protect it from the hard leather strap that would hold it in place on the arm of the large, solid looking wooden chair. Having done one wrist he then did the other, and then he knelt down to strap his ankles against the chair's legs, adjusting the hem of the boy's long, white robes so that they hid his bare feet before rising. The agony of the test sometimes made prospective wizards soil themselves, so Derrin wore nothing under the robe, which was split up the back like a hospital gown. Its billowing floor length hem, together with a shallow depression in the floor under the chair, were designed to protect the applicant from shame and embarrassment.

     Derrin flattened his palms against the arms of the chair and tried to slide his hands out from under the straps. Thomas saw the muscles under his robes tensing and bunching as he gave several experimental tugs, but he succeeded only in sliding his hands back and forth by half an inch, the straps sliding with them so that he was held as securely as ever. Finally the boy gave up and made an effort to appear casual and relaxed, as if he could get up and walk away any time he chose, which, of course, he could. He only had to say the word and he would be released. He could take the test another time. Derrin remained silent, but his chest rose and fell with his rapid, frightened breathing and his eyes flitted nervously around the room, jumping from one person to the next and lingering longest on his parents, standing close in front of him.

     "It'll all be over in a couple of minutes," promised Lirenna, bending over with her hands on his shoulders to kiss him on the forehead. She let her lips linger there for a time, letting him feel the depth of her love for him and smelling the fragrance of his hair. Then she pulled back to look at him and brushed a lock of hair out of his eyes. "Are you sure you want to do this?"

     "I want to be a wizard." replied the boy. "If I've got to do this to be a wizard, then I'll do it."

     Thomas’s chest swelled with pride and a lump rose in his throat. He took one of his son's hands and squeezed it. "It'll soon be over," he promised, stroking the boy's fingers, "and then you'll never have to do anything like this ever again. Not ever!"

     Derrin grinned nervously and Thomas squeezed his hand harder, hating how impossible it was to raise it from the arm of the chair. He remembered his own test, so many years before. He remembered the agony of it. That his son should have to share that agony was hateful to him, but he knew the wisdom of it. If Derrin lacked the potential to be a wizard, better to find out now rather than after he'd gone through years of hard and potentially dangerous training. That way, he could be given the much safer, but still superb, education that the University gave the non-wizard children of its wizards.

     Jamus Banacus, the elderly wizard who would be performing the actual test, allowed the anxious parents a minute or two with their child before moving in with the headpiece, a hemisphere of metal straps with a padding of soft leather to which the attendant had added several layers of soft cloth so that it fitted the young boy's head. Thomas and Lirenna moved aside to make way for him as he gently fitted the buckle under Derrin's chin and gave it a couple of gentle tugs to make sure it would stay in place during the convulsions of the agony.

     "The headpiece contains about ten times as much magic as is required for an average low level spell," he said conversationally as he made small adjustments to the padding. "You and I routinely absorb several times as much magic force into our bodies every day with no discomfort at all. Almost without even knowing we're doing it, but for his young body, unaccustomed to the experience, it will be very painful. We'll give him sixty seconds to expel the magic from his body, to prove he has the latent ability to manipulate and control it. If he hasn't managed to do it in that time, the headpiece will withdraw it by itself, ending his ordeal, but of course that would mean that he can never become a wizard."

     Thomas and Lirenna nodded, even though they already knew all this from when they'd undergone the test themselves. Thomas remembered the weight of the headpiece, the awful sensation of pressure as something strange and foreign entered his body. The desperate need to be rid of it any way he could. He felt Lirenna shudder beside him and knew that she was reliving the same memory.

     Finally, Jamus produced a leather strap, thick in the middle and thin at the ends, and crouched down to look the boy in the eyes. "This is to go in your mouth," he explained. "It's to stop you biting your tongue. Do you understand?" Derrin nodded and obediently opened his mouth, allowing the wizard to place it between his teeth, and Jamus buckled the ends behind his head.

     Thomas tried to force his tense body to relax, telling himself that, although painful, the test was perfectly safe. In the entire history of the University, only one student had ever died during the test, and he had had a heart condition.

     A heart condition. Thomas’s whole body suddenly broke out in a cold sweat of fear as those words went through his head. A heart condition. A boy with a heart condition had died in that chair. So what? he demanded. One boy in two thousand years! That's pretty good odds! And Derry doesn't have a genetic predisposition towards heart disease. He gave a sudden jerk of pure terror that made Lirenna stare at him in alarm. A genetic predisposition towards heart disease? I don't even know what those words mean! I must have heard them somewhere, but where? Where?

     "Tom," cried Lirenna softly. "Tom, you're hurting me."

     Thomas snapped out of it and realised he'd been squeezing Lirenna's hand with all his strength. "Sorry," he said, relaxing his grip. "Just worried, that's all."

     "Of course you are," agreed the demi shae sympathetically. "So am I. Just remember that you're stronger than me. Okay?"

     Thomas couldn't help but grin as he nodded his agreement, but the strange words continued to circle around in his head, taunting him with a vague, formless fear that he could neither define nor understand.

     "Okay, I think we're ready now," said Jamus, stepping back from the boy in the testing chair. "Young man, this is your last chance to pull out. It won't mean failure. You can take the test any time you want, maybe when you're older. Just nod your head and I'll undo all those buckles and let you out of there."

     Derrin made inarticulate but emphatic sounding noises and shook his head violently. A thin line of dribble ran down his chin. "So you're sure you want to go through with this?" The boy nodded, equally emphatically. The wizard turned to the boy's parents. "And you? Are you happy for us to go ahead with this?"

     "Just get it over with," said Lirenna with feeling. "Do it, so we can take him out of that terrible chair!"

     "Okay," said Jamus, laying his hands on the headpiece. "Here we go. On the count of three. One, two, three..."

     He spoke a word, and the boy convulsed in the chair as every muscle in his body went into spasm at once. The wizard stepped back to stand beside Lirenna, who was now squeezing Thomas’s hand as hard as he had squeezed hers, surprising him with the strength that fear and anxiety gave her. He hardly noticed, though, as his full attention was given to the suffering of his son, writhing and contorting in the chair.

     The boy's suffering proved to be surprisingly short lived, though. Hardly had his ordeal begun than there was a flash of light on his chest and something bright and luminous flashed past Thomas’s ear, hitting the wall behind him with a shower of sparks. The room's other occupants stood paralysed with shock as Derrin's head flopped forward onto his chest, panting with exhaustion, his sweat dampened hair falling over his eyes, and then Lirenna dashed forward, taking his head in her hands and gently lifting it up. His eyes were closed, but she was relieved to find that he seemed to be alright; his breathing regular, his pulse strong and steady. She reached behind his head to remove the mouthpiece, and then she was gently pulled aside by Jamus, anxious to carry out his own examination.

     "What happened?" demanded Thomas, trying to come forward as well and being held back by the attendants. "Is he alright?"

     "I think so," replied Jamus. "Jack, go get a cleric. Just to be on the safe side," he added, trying to be reassuring. "He just looks tired to me."

     "But what...Oh Gods!" Thomas's eye had fallen on the front of Derrin's robes where a hole the size of a man's fist had been burned, the edges still smouldering gently. He took hold of the hole, ripped it wider to bare his chest, and was relieved to find no mark or blemish on the smooth, white skin. He looked around, and his eyes widened when he saw a large scorched patch on the wall behind him. The scorched patch on the wall, the hole in his robes and the boy's heart formed a perfectly straight line.

     "What in the name of the Gods happened?" he demanded.

     "It's too early to be completely sure," replied the old wizard as Lirenna frantically unfastened the straps on Derrin's wrists and ankles. "We'll have to do tests and..."

     "Too early to be completely sure?" said Thomas. "So you do have some idea! Tell me! Tell me what happened!"

     Jamus nodded, understanding his anxiety. "This has happened before. There are several documented accounts in the archives, although I personally have only seen it happen once before and that was over thirty years ago when I was the assistant. Old Hebbler, my predecessor, was in charge that day. The test is to see whether the subject can expel the magic force that has been placed in his body, you see. It usually takes several seconds, but what your son and the others did was not just expel it but throw it out with tremendous force! It demonstrates a control over the magic force possessed by only one wizard in ten thousand, and all the others it's happened to have gone on to become some of the greatest wizards of all time."

     Thomas stared in astonishment, and Lirenna paused in the act of undoing the fourth and last buckle. At that moment the attendant returned, accompanied by an elderly, greybearded cleric. The cleric gently removed the boy's robes, ran his eyes up and down his body looking for burns and injuries, found none but prayed over him anyway, just to be on the safe side. They then carried him into the next room, laid him out on the padded couch, and Thomas draped the robes across him as a makeshift blanket. The boy was beginning to stir, his eyes fluttering open and his arms moving weakly. "That..." he began, pausing to cough and swallow. "That hurt."

     Thomas and Lirenna gave cries of relief and took a hand each, squeezing it gently and stroking his forehead. "I suggest we take him back to his room," said the cleric. "He'll be fine as soon as he gets a little rest."

     Thomas nodded, and the old wizard teleported them all over to the pre-apprentice dormitory. They put the boy to bed, Lirenna kissed him on the forehead again, and then they filed back out into the corridor, moving quietly in case any of the other students were asleep in their rooms. It's in the nature of wizardry that some lessons could only be taught at night, and so all apprentices spent several weeks of the year sleeping during the daytime, either preparing for or recovering from their lessons.

     Before Jamus could disappear, though, Thomas grabbed him by the elbow and steered him into an alcove. "You said you had another student who did the same thing as Derry," he prompted.

     "Yes, that's right," replied the old wizard. "Hugo Malachov. A brilliant student, but became a bit of a renegade. Annoyed the proctors by inventing dozens of new spells without University sanction, many of which were eventually approved anyway and are still used by wizards all over the continent today."

     "Never heard of him," said Thomas apologetically.

     "Hugo Malachov was his real name," explained Jamus. "As his power grew, though, he adopted a professional name, in common with a great many of the greatest and best wizards. He's known to most of the world today as Malefactos the Great."