Zayden's parents were children of the migration, born and raised in South Africa though their roots only took within Johannesburg when they coupled together. Thato was adopted into a family in his early years and Anmari was the second generation within Africa; all they had ever known was homeland, not heritage, though their families had done what they could to keep language alive. A mother full of anecdotes and a father full of songs was good enough as grounding for both Zayden and Lesedi. Hard working parents and diligent children, that was the simplicity of what their lives were meant to be.

The problem was that Zayden always saw things differently. Fairytales and daydreams rode around in his head for more hours than there were daylight. It made him strange, but in a community full of people just trying to get by, strange was a bit more than kids were ready to deal with. It wasn't that Zayden lacked friends — he just didn't know how to maintain them. He could bounce into any conversation and hang out but by the time the day was done, so was what seemed like a one off friendship. It would have concerned Anmari or Thato if they had been able to pay attention but they both worked too hard to notice. He got his studies handled and he went to bed with ease, so there wasn't more to question.

It was only when Thato came home a few hours early from the fields to find Zayden in a brawl that it began to matter. The fight was broken up, boys dismissed as Zayden kept trying to swing his young arms. Thato talked him down, brought him home and cleaned him off before Anmari showed up. He told his son that he wasn't proud, really, but he wasn't angry; a man, he warned, had to know when to fight and when to simply walk away was all. You could get yours in other ways. You could become more than them. It was the lesson that stuck with Zayden the most as the years rattled on, long after Thato's death.

Zayden was only 12 when the accident ruined the farm Thato worked on. A machine toppled over and killed; everything that came after was the product of accident and greed and Zayden doesn't honestly remember most of it. The mind of a child only takes what it wants after all and he didn't quite understand the nature of funeral, life insurance and money as a whole. All he knew was pain and anger, especially when Anmari began to lose her patience from having to work two jobs just to keep their home as their own.

A stroke of imagination hit the boy again and he chose to run. It'd be easier, anyway, for her to work for just her and Lesedi; she wouldn't need Zayden around for anything at all. He packed a bag and snuck from home to run west, ending up somewhere in Merafong a week later where the gold was mined. He could get work that way, he figured; he was close enough to finishing his education that no one should have cared. But instead, things changed. While Anmari was trying to beg police to search for her son, the others were busy hunting down the hyenas that had been spotted on a few cow farms. Both came to a head when Zayden heard the prowling from the grass and looked into the dark to see the blood dripping from their jowls.

By the time police arrived, Zayden had already been changed. His hands were dripping blood but unflenching, unbroken; no marks could be found even later at the hospital, though the boy remembered being attacked. He couldn't recall the rest. Not easily. Because the creatures had found him and made him something more — he had become nature when they bit, and the richness of the land had filled him with a healing that bound wings into his bones and kept him from pain. It had been Zayden's touch that calmed the creatures, and Zayden's touch that had kept the pride of wandering lions from making moves on the blood in the area. The police had been able to get the animals back to captivity with only a few wildstock lost and that, that was a miracle.

Anmari didn't quite see it that way. After launching into a tirade against her son as she held him to her chest, she took him home right away. But Zayden was different, changed; she finally noticed how few friends he'd held onto, finally took notice of a lot of things. And Zayden began to notice back. The headaches were frequent when he tried to look too deep but it didn't stop him from stealing understanding. Of their finances, of their failures, of how many months before they would fall apart. So he, like his sister, began to work. Part time jobs, things that didn't amount to very much. Zayden even landed a job working where his father had before his death, one that held him down until his last year of education.

Zayden's graduating class was what changed his life forever, truly. On an off idea about how people could cherish fleeting things more because that was the nature of people, he was ridiculed; no one would care about something that came and went, because they wanted memories to last. But Zayden thought otherwise and the voice of his father came to him when the students began to laugh. You can just become better. That night he went home after work, to an old computer he'd bought for better studying. He'd been working with the Safe Haven well enough to understand that he could possibly do anything but it didn't always work right; as he began to program and code his head began to hurt for working on things he only vaguely understood. Frustrated, he rubbed at his scalp and wanted a way to understand it better, easier. In a moment's time, Shawn was there explaining himself. Shawns were the energy of understanding, the reasoning behind reality. Not really a name, a thing, or a person; they just were, made into a shape with a title because Zayden wanted it to be so.

He would have preferred a beautiful girl but, he made due, working with Shawn and asking questions that didn't ache his head so much and only tired his limbs out. In a week, Snapchat! was coded; in a month, it was launched, just to prove a point. He never expected it would become what it did. He never bothered to look.

It honestly would have been enough to just prove his classmates wrong. Getting to move his family to America was amazing, though; as the money began to come in, it became more and more astounding. Homes for his family, dreams, even helping Lesedi launch her clothing label over in France. Things were, well, amazing and beyond. Zayden began to branch out into different things, in proving himself more. Buying up companies, like that which had tried to cripple his family after his father's death, and a beer company he enjoyed the taste of, he made measures of himself to be more than just a kid who'd made a fun application. And life, it began to fold into neatness toward destiny.

Even after the woman he thought of forward with began to change and life fell apart on its own, Zayden accepted the nature of it; he moved himself to New York with the only friend he'd held onto, who got that there wasn't always being there for things to matter, and started himself over on his own. As grown, as single, as happy with where he understood all his possibilities to be able to grow.