Herold's Story

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When you are born, you get thrown into a world. This world is a world of trees and hills, of rivers, mountains, sunny fields and rainy nights. And people, laughing and angry, smiling and sad. Around all of this, there is the society, which essentially is just people.

In this world there was a young boy, a kid, old enough to understand that not all people are very friendly. A kid who knew how it feels like to get beaten up, who were smart enough to see that the person getting picked on at school each and every day, didn't want for that to happen, it just happened...

This kid's name was Herold. He grew up in a small apartment along with his two parents and his younger, mentally handicapped sister Abby. In Herold's eyes there really wasn't anything wrong with her though, they played together, went to school together – they did most things together. The only thing Herold noticed about her, was a timidness, a girl who watched rather than played, who listened rather than spoke... He loved his sister more than anything or anyone in the world, and the day the authorities took her away for foster care, it broke his heart.

Both their parents worked as actors, and the evenings he would spend in his small room, with the door locked - as they had their friends over on late evenings, were too many to count. Yet school waited for him the next morning, as he pulled himself out of bed and into the kitchen, full of wine stains and broken glass...

Indeed, life was tough for Herold, but no one ever heard him complain. He still felt blessed to be living and breathing, he looked away from all the miseries and focused on the beautiful things. And so he carried on, and struggled his way through education, which he didn't like... He didn't like the teachers, or at least not their ways of teaching. The food was awful, the lecture rooms were too small and too cold, the literature was dull and uninspiring... He felt as if the entire educational system was plagued by some sort of boredom, a box where you were free to learn whatever the system wanted you to learn.

Something he learned by himself, though, was to never count on other people, and ever since he learned to never do that, he would avoid any form of team effort. He kept his feelings bottled up inside, and a sphere of deep neglect soon surrounded him. He probably wasn't even aware that he was shutting himself out, it was just who he became. So when a person would try to annoy him, or get to him in any other way – he would just convert that anger and rage inside of him, into a calm and quiet stove... Outwardly, all you would see was a guy, with his head slightly tilted towards the floor, taking in whatever words was thrown at him, and just feeding it to the calm inferno...

Otherwise he was a pretty regular person, no more and no less special than anyone else. He had plenty of friends, and many people enjoyed being around him. Although they did notice how his attitude got worse over the years... A girlfriend he met in his early twenties actually broke up with him because of it, apparently he didn't allow her to get through to him... Herold was of course deeply hurt by this, but he took also that emotion, and threw it on to the stove – and as anyone would have guessed, he showed up for work the next morning as if nothing had happened.

At this time Herold worked as a journalist, a job he had gotten after doing some help writing for illiterates, mostly old priests and retired seafarers – people with an urge to tell their stories that just never learned how to mediate it. And one of these days he got noticed for his efforts, and was hired by a small news bureau called "Freedom Watch", specialized in revealing 'corruption and misconduct in public affairs'. He liked this job, it gave him a chance to ventilate. What better way to earn a living, than to expose the crooks within his own government? It quickly became one of the more successful investigative news bureaus of the nation, and much thanks to him actually. He had learned how to turn his inner flame into a source of energy, and with resolute determination he set out to dig up those missing pieces of the puzzle, which just tend to get lost... He learned how to recognize the patterns, see the things that didn't add up, and sense the stench of manipulation and lies from miles away – attributes he would soon discover to be both burden and blessing...

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