i took a very long time thinking about this one!!

Some necessary background context: His Shard had a calamity similar to the War of the Magi some time before Kolin was born, and it made the practice of black and white magic similarly forbidden- but unlike on the Source, where these schools of magic ended up drifting further apart post-war, the surviving mages on his shard chose survival in numbers, and survivors from both sides of the conflict came together in a very few select towns that they founded themselves, where magic could be freely explored while working together to hide it from the outside world. This was, for his shard, the birth of Red magic- the collective effort of mages of all sorts pooling their knowledge to prevent any sort of conflict coming up again between magical strains.

His town was one of these mage towns! As all of these settlements were completely self-sustaining, farming was a major occupation, and thus his family were farmers. He himself briefly lived that life, enjoying shepherding and finding peace in being out in the fields with flocks of livestock and air to fill with whatever he felt like playing (as a Shard, his was particularly musical). But he was never really that close to his family- they were busy, and his town tended towards communal child rearing. Everyone was close, but nobody was necessarily someone he considered family.

That changed when his Echo awoke, and he joined up with the town's crystal caravan! That meant meeting Quun, who would become his best friend, and everyone else on the caravan team- some who came from home, and some who joined up later with nowhere else to go. While his parents may not have ever been that close to him, THESE people were family. These were the people that taught him survival tactics, songs from across their world, poetry, haggling, and everything in between, and were the people that he- through emerging natural charisma and a keen mind for leadership- ended up rallying into his own little flock.

Quun deserves special mention, as the closest of them all. They were a yuke, a kind of person made entirely of magic that coalesces into physical form around a skeleton of enchanted armor- essentially, magic learning to be a person. Quun never REALLY got the "person behavior" part down, with perpetually floppy limbs, imbalanced strides, a tendency to fall over while running and a complete inability to speak. To the outsider, it made Quun endearing or unsettling, but often hard to relate to- but Kolin was able to figure out communicating with them via writing, and learned this way that they were a poet- their journal entries flowing like lyrics. To this day, many of his songs are based on Quun's writing, and he has a perpetual soft spot for the socially unusual or poetically minded sorts, which really explains Olyzas a lot ngl

(He got Quun back later, after Endwalker! the rest of his companions are time-stopped or dead, alas, but he's made his new family and protects them even more ferociously than his last.)