The world, for Kael, was defined by the color gray. It began at age four, a cold, irreversible erosion. The sickness took his parents, leaving behind a silence so vast it swallowed the sound of his own breathing. He clung only to a fading, sunlit memory: his mother's amber eyes, a momentary warmth against the sudden, chilling absence of their love.
He was deposited at the St. Jude's Orphanage—a cathedral of institutional sorrow, where tall, echoing ceilings amplified the perpetual scent of weak cabbage soup and the low, defeated hum of grief.
Nine years melted together in a slow-motion blur. Kael learned the silence of loss—not the quiet of peace, but the quiet of neglect. He became a master of invisibility. The caregivers, stretched thin and brittle, treated him like an administrative error. He didn't fear the dark; his deepest terror was the cold, certain knowledge that if he simply ceased to exist, no one would notice until the bed count was taken the following morning. He was a ghost blending into the pale, chipped plaster walls.
When he was thirteen, the quiet routine was shattered by a brutal economic decree. St. Jude's was "economically unviable." The doors were bolted, the staff dispersed with cynical haste. Kael, along with the few other survivors, was simply handed a meager, canvas bag containing three threadbare items and pushed out onto a cobbled street that felt vast, indifferent, and impossibly noisy.
"Go on then, Sparrow,"
The headmistress, a woman whose face was a road map of exhaustion, muttered, not meeting his eyes. "Freedom awaits."
But freedom was just another word for abandonment.