A Cold Start
In a small country there was a small village, in that village there stood a small house, and in that small house there lived a big family with many problems. The father, Karn, was a convicted criminal on the run from the law, but foolishly hiding in his own home. The mother, Jessie, was a duality, a loving and nurturing mother one day, a stone-cold heartless drunk the next. The oldest son, Stefan, was following in his father’s footsteps. The three oldest girls, Sonet and Clarity, were two foul-mouthed, fist-talking, women you did not want to cross. The middle one, Naieve, the third girl, was as intelligent as she was sinister. The twin boys, Kit and Kat, cleverly nicknamed KitKat, were two dark souls with an appetite for torture. The youngest boy, Kyai, was the odd duck in the family. A happy and joyful boy with an aptitude for reading, and a strong sense of justice, and the youngest of the family was the fourth girl, Kresti, a girl who always copied her big brother Kyai. This family of ten, the Coldhearts, would become the center of their little village, Zelz, and later, the entire world.
In the small town of Zelz, on the ‘MayorVonAuker’-street, District B number 89; Kyai, at only two-and-a-half years old, was preparing for his first day of school. The young boy was a prodigy, but unfortunately for the boy, his family did not care for that, and the town did not care for the boy’s family. Which meant they did not care for the boy. On his first day, the boy was bullied for his name and his long curly white hair. When Kyai came home crying, his mother immediately, and roughly, cut off all of the boy’s hair. On his second day the boy was bullied for his new hairdo. This would spark a common practice in the boy’s life. He would, unwillingly and unknowingly, paint a target on his own back through his own strange behaviour. Because not only was he Kyai Coldheart, son of Karn Coldheart, a well-known criminal; he was also a strange boy on top of it all. Always with his nose in a book, or drawing imaginary things, speaking out-of-turn and being a “little know-it-all”, people would call him. “You’re too smart for your own good”, they would shout at him, angrily. The boy never understood this. Everyone seemed to say it as a warning, or even an insult. But the boy saw no downsides to being intelligent. “How can you be “too smart” for your own good?”, he’d ask them. “You’ll get it when you’re older”, some would reply. Others would simply call him “a nosy little shit”, and scare him off. By Christmas-time, in his first year of school, Kyai was already fed-up with the lacking educational system, as well as the lack of humanity in the people he would come across. Having become the only person of interest for both bullies and faculty alike, the boy became more and more withdrawn. By the end of Kyai’s first year of school, the extroverted happy boy had become an introverted shadow of his former self, but that would only be the start of the young boy’s misery.