Kozelian was an utter piece of scum living in the Underhive.
He had grown up in the Underhive. He had no parents, because as a baby, he had come down through an enormous pipe along with the enormous piles of rubbish.
He was a scavenger through and through.
The White Rebar had taken them in. The gang had assigned an old man to look after the baby, an old man called Old Rotten Tooth.
Old Rotten Tooth had found Kozelian's name on a discarded package. He thought it sounded good, so Kozelian became Kozelian.
With poor Kozelian on his back, Old Rotten Tooth had clambered all over the Underhive's mountains of rubbish. As he grew up, the skeletal boy learned to quickly identify anything valuable in a piece of scrap. What made him happiest was finding a little food among the rubbish dumped from above.
His happiest moment had probably been the day he turned thirteen. Apparently, that day was something called "Emperor's Ascension Day." Kozelian had no idea who the Emperor was. Perhaps he was a very powerful Hive City boss.
That day, heaps of half-eaten food had come tumbling down the pipes, sending the Underhive's scavengers scrambling for it. Using his small, skinny body to his advantage, Kozelian had snatched half an energy bar for Old Rotten Tooth. The old man and the boy took turns biting into it until it was gone.
On days when dumping rubbish was forbidden, Kozelian could only idly sift through the discarded junk. There were some books he liked among it, with plenty of illustrations.
Kozelian loved reading. No one had taught him to read, so he studied the words one by one. With the help of all those illustrations and his remarkable talent, he had become one of the few people