Heath stood in a blank void before a white gate, made in the simplest shape. Two upright pillars of ivory towered above him, adorned in subtle swirls and decorative dotting, and held up a third pillar across. He wanted so desperately to pass through.
 
But he feared the reflection beneath his feet. The floor, as if made of glass, showed an image of a black gate, opposite to the one he sought. 
 
In another dimension, across the reflection, the black gate reminded him of his weakness.

 
Once in a blue moon, a man finds he can see through people's eyes. Walk in their shoes for a day. Live as they live, and feel as they feel. 
This sort of power is beyond empathy; it is empowering people through becoming them. They are the living embodiments of good-luck charms. What better form of luck is there than having someone in your mind watching over you, proving you are protected by another's presence- proving you have the ability to improve? Who wouldn't kill to have someone like that in their lives?

 

Some would call this ability to look through others' eyes a blessing. Heath saw nothing ‘blessed' in the phenomenon, outside of gaining the ability to understand others, if only for a moment. 

 

 

Heath blinked. He was no longer in the void; he was sitting atop a stone in a small pond. The reeds and cattails on the shore brushed the coarse stones peeking out of the sultry blue waters.

"Why won't you answer me, Heath?" Lance yelled at him, his voice trembling sourly. 

 

Heath said nothing, but picked up the tattered paper resting in his lap.

Lance scowled. "We're a team, and you have a job to do- whether or not you were responsible for the goblin's wife. I, for one, couldn't care less."

 

Heath wondered how a person so jovial could walk off the loss of a life, and could conceive no other answer aside from it being impossible. He concluded Lance could not be the person he recalled, but something else. Something beyond him.

 

The reeds tickled Lance's legs as they shuffled uncomfortably in the wind.

 

"These promotions, I mean- Four in a month? We never could have gotten them if it weren't for you! We need you.. to get back to your senses." Lance swallowed.
"I need you," he murmured, quieting his anger as it cooled to sheepishness.

 

Heath had looked, once, through Lance's eyes, felt Lance's delight as he pushed the mileage of his elaborate vehicle beyond acceptable speeds. He remembered Lance's manic smile, eyes widened as his gorgeous hair spun around in the wind, as if it were being spun into cotton candy. 

 

He liked Lance, as one loves the thrill of the wind singing past their ears, as he enjoyed the thrill of speed, and the exhilaration of motion. Lance was energy, drive, and the best kind of mischief- and Heath was the calm counterbalance, there to chuckle at his antics. When he was in the mood for it. When Lance was himself.

 

"My paper's all wet," Heath murmured coldly, holding the damp surface in his tired hands.
He picked up the quill, strewn across the stone next to him, drenched in ink, and began to write:
 
 
 
The Queen Andromeda
 
Half-buried in the earth under her own weight, and bitterly gnawing onto the dry grass, a giant had looked hungrily at the tiny boy, quivering as he barely held onto a knife.

Heath paused, glancing at the murky stones below.

 

Heath thought of the goblin child, whom he delivered to its distressed father draped in banana tree leaves. He had held the baby at the front door, shocked that he had been allowed to hold something so delicate and important. The goblin man glowered at the sight of him. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"I recognize you," The goblin man had seethed.

 

"I know." Heath replied with the resignation that came with many sleepless nights.

 

"You killed my wife," The goblin had raised his arms, the beginning motion signifying an attack.

 

I deserve this, but I am afraid, Heath had thought. 

 

 

 

 

"Hold your place," Lance had hissed, cutting the air between them with a well-placed blade. The goblin man refrained and obediently returned his arms to his sides, staring bewildered, almost pleadingly, at Lance. The Knight of Andromeda's guard split their worlds in two; he was the law, and he would hold them in their proper places. 
"The Queen's decree was firm: none shall harm the Seer Heath."

 

 

A sense of guilty hunger gnawed through his broiling, loathsome guts.
 
 
 
"What are you writing, Heath?" Lance slowly walked up to the edge of the pond, peering over Heath's large shoulder. He craned his neck to try to read.

 

Heath watched the ink blot in a miserly manner on the page. Seeing as he could not seem to cleanly form the words on his mind, he drew the gates that recurred in his mind, and began to speak instead.

 

"I wish I could pass through the white gate," Heath said bluntly, staring at the reeds and glancing at the water beneath him. Lance blinked.
"I reach for it- but I refrain from touching it. I am not worthy of it. I see the black gate beneath, and know I am impure. Thus I shall do nothing to cross, for I must atone."

 

"What gates?" Lance bit his tongue, knowing the question was stupid, that Heath would not answer. But the ease with which Heath could see through people was not a power bestowed upon him, and he wanted to see somehow.

 

"Heath?" Lance asked again.

 

He had no memory of eating the man's wife; he only recalled the taste of carrots. But the world claimed he had done so, and he would not defy the world, not when it had given him power.
 
"I wish I could atone." Heath murmured.

 

He began to weep.