The World's Start

Heath

Heath had that same nightmare again, the one about his mother.

In the dream, the woman was very ill, looking worse than she did the last time Heath had visited her. This part made sense, he always reasoned once awake, because he knew it himself that seeing his mother grow more ill was one of his worse fears.

But other parts, he could never make sense of.

Every night it went like this. Heath's mother, Gabrielle, had dark circles around her eyes and a pale face . When she saw Heath running towards her, she smiled at him as if he was still a child. Then, she always looked out of the window of their trailer park and pointed at the sun. There was only one sun in the dream, the way it used to be in the island when Heath was young.

"Look at the sun, Heathcliff," his mother chided him, gently, but also stubbornly. Heath barely recalled her voice because she hadn't been there for him growing up, but in the dream the sound of it was clear and crips and it always sounded the same. 

It wasn't his mother's fault, anyway, that she couldn't raise him. It was just the way things went after his father died and Gabrielle's parents decided to disown her and chase her away from her home.

"I am looking, mother," Heath always replied, trying to keep his voice soft and unassuming. Gabrielle acted weird sometimes, but Heath would never tell her. "I am looking."

And then Gabrielle scrunched her dark eyebrows, the same distinctive, slightly arched eyebrows as her son, though hers were thinner. 

"What time is it, Heathcliff?" she always asked, in the dream.

And Heath, without looking at the digital clock they kept in the trailer, always knew what time it was. And the reply was always the same. "Three and thirty-three. PM."

And then, a terrible feeling seized Heath's body and he felt like he was falling, like those dreams where you're standing on the edge of a cliff, you lose your balance and you can't find a way up anymore.

And this was when the nightmare always ended.

As he woke up, Heath decided to go to the mirror to wash his face. His hair was streaked in pale pink, and he realized the brute force of the dream had made him act out in his sleep and unleash part of his magic. He secretely hoped he'd done something mild, like turning his bedsheets pink. It had happened before.

One look around the room confirmed that, instead, Heath had accidentally broken with his mind a vase that had been gifted to him by Norma the year before. The plant that used to be there was now lying sadly on the floor.

After he magically fixed the vase, and used a little power to make the plant look glowing again, Heath felt better. He knew he had to be careful. He couldn't indulge in the feeling, and risk using more. Every time he used more, he would always feel worse hours later. But for now the amount was just right: like a bandaid for the soul, a numbing sensation different from any other.

Trying to look happy --- it wasn't hard to, at least chemically happy, after his magical fix --- he strolled into the canteen to eat breakfast with the other students.

"Mister Corrigan," Professor Tenney barked at him. "You're late. And please make it a habit to cover your hair. I found I eat better and keep the food in my stomach with more ease when I don't see your pink hair in the morning."

Heath was the first Laoch with partly pink hair, but only the most malicious people made comments about it. The others knew that what the common people knew of magic was not enough to pry --- it was clear the color had something to do with the Laoch's powers, though no one knew it was meant to signify when Heath's magic drained him.