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Jester isn’t prepared for the question when it comes.
“I mean, how did you end up with that name in the first place?”
Caduceus’s voice is gentle, his smile kind, and yet the question throws Jester just a little bit. Her thoughts have been a swirl of chaos since last night, since the Traveler had told he was an arch-fey who had never meant to become a god, that he needed her help instead of the other way around. She wants to help, she always wants to help everybody, but there’s so much to process and she’s been given no time. She should be grateful that the topic has changed for the moment.
“Well…” Jester crosses her arms. “I thought it sounded cool.” The bubble and fizz are gone from her words, leaving them feeling flat. “I thought jesters were people that made people laugh.” She likes Caduceus’s definition too, about how jesters trick people into seeing the truth. It feels like a contradiction, like irony, and Jester has always loved those things.
“You chose your name?” Nott sounds surprised, and Jester doesn’t know why, not when Nott has another name for herself, the one she feels belongs with her old body, her first one.
“Well yeah.”
“Your mother didn’t name you?” Fjord sounds less surprised and more curious, but then Fjord is always curious.
“Well, she did,” Jester tells him. “But she told me that I’d get to chose my own name.” Momma had told her that when she was still very small. Some tieflings stayed with the names they were born with, and some had Infernal names that spoke of their heritage, and some chose names based on a virtue they aspired to. Sometimes a tiefling would change their names several times over the course of their life to better reflect the person that they were. Jester hadn’t thought this was strange at all, but with the way her friends are looking at her, now she’s not so sure.
“What was your name before this?”
Jester doesn’t know why Nott’s question bothers her, makes her shoulders hunch a little in defense before she straightens them out. It shouldn’t matter what her name was before, because it’s not hers anymore. It’s just a name. By that logic, it shouldn’t upset her to say it, shouldn’t make her eyes prickle thinking about it. She doesn’t know why she’s upset. Maybe it’s because she’s already overwhelmed by everything that’s been happening over the past few days. Weeks. Months.
Jester sniffles, swiping her sleeve across her face in a quick gesture that she hopes no one will see for what it is. “Genevieve,” she says quietly.
“Genevieve?” Beau’s laughter is loud, and it doesn’t make Jester smile like it usually does. She hangs her head instead, hiding her sad expression behind her hair. She feels like she’s being laughed at.
She doesn’t mean it like that, Jester tells herself quickly. You know she doesn’t. She’s heard Beau talk about her own name, how it had been forced upon her by her father, and wonders if Beau knows she could just change it if she wanted to. Maybe she doesn’t think she can, maybe she’s holding onto a name she hates out of stubbornness and spite, determined to make it her own. And that’s fine, if that’s what Beau wants, but for a moment she wonders if Beau is jealous of her. She pushes that thought aside, pushes it down and away, only to have it replaced by another one, a sudden, deep ache.
“I like Jester, okay?” The words come out more angry than she means them to, and she desperately tries to soften her tone so no one will be upset at her. “I’m Jester. Call me Jester.”
She misses Molly. Molly understood about names, about the old names that stayed with you but weren’t you anymore. He would have seen that she was upset, would have twined his tail with hers and whispered something in Infernal to make her laugh, would have distracted the group’s attention away from her for a moment so she could compose herself.
She pushes that thought down deep as the conversation turns back around to other things, because otherwise she’s going to cry.
————
Caduceus is afraid.
That’s not a new feeling for him. Fear and responsibility had kept him in the Blooming Grove, just as fear and faith had finally pushed him to leave it. He’s had plenty of other emotions during his travels, joy and wonder, delight at learning new things, but there has always been fear there as well, an emotion burrowed as deep into his bones as worms into soil.
The pool has come into view now, the water clear and beautiful, fish swimming beneath the surface and insects skating along the surface. It’s beautiful, and he can appreciate that beauty even as fear quickens his breath. Some of his family is here, the Wildmother had told him so in the language of breezes. What will he say to them? What will they say to him? Will they be proud that he’s made it this far? Will they be disappointed that he took so long? Will they approve of his friends? His choices?
He doesn’t think too much about the statues at first. Everyone has their hobbies, and maybe the Stone family makes things from stone the same way the Dust family had worked metal in their forge, the way that his family had made tea from the gardens that grew from corpses. It’s when he realizes that the only living animals are the ones in the pool and not the ones surrounding it, that’s when the fear starts to make his fur rise even as his ears flatten. His smile stays in place, because that’s one thing his siblings taught him with their pranks, was how to smile even when you’re scared.
Some of the statues are people. People outfitted for adventuring, expressions stern or surprised or frightened. His hand tightens on his staff, the wood creaking under his meager strength when he sees four people that he recognizes. Four statues.
Why haven’t you tried to contact your family? He doesn’t remember which of his friends had asked him that. Beau maybe, or Fjord, both curious and quick to question. He had given them an answer, something about faith he thinks, about how trying to contact them would have been a breach of that faith. It was the same thing he had told himself in the years since they had left, an idea he had come up with to comfort himself as the lonely seasons had turned into lonely years. None of his family had tried to reach out to him because they had faith that he was fine. It was only right that he honor that trust, that faith in him, by doing the same.
Caduceus stares at his family (not all of them, thank the Wildmother not all of them, not his brothers, not Clarabelle) and wonders how long they’ve been here, if the silence he had taken for faith had just been the silence of flesh turned to stone.
“We have to be very careful,” Caduceus says, and his voice is a whisper of a thing, barely audible over the panicked sound of his own heartbeat. “This is— these are my people.”
His people. His mother and his aunt, faces frozen in fear. His father, his stone arms embracing Calliope, trying to pull her up from the ground. Calliope’s mouth is open, and Caduceus wonders if she screamed before she fell. He doesn’t think she did. Calliope was more of an angry shouter than a frightened screamer, though maybe that anger was like his smile, a response to fear.
There’s a noise from the edge of the trees and Caduceus looks up to see a creature the likes of which he has never seen before, something like a bull covered in metal plates, green smoke billowing around it, streaming from its nostrils. He watches the creature begin to charge, and thinks about what will happen if that green smoke touches him, touches his friends.
Caduceus is angry.
That’s not a new feeling for him, but it is a rare one. He’s angry at this creature for taking his family from him. He’s angry because he’s used up some of his magical resources during the fight before this one, a fight that could have been avoided if anyone had listened to him when he had asked them to leave the strange wax cocoons alone. If his friends had just listened, if Caduceus had just been more insistent. What if his friends get petrified and he doesn’t have the magic to save them? What if the bodies of his petrified family get broken in the fight? What if the worst happens and it’s all his fault?
Caduceus shoves his feelings aside as he has countless times before, to be dealt with later or dealt with never, and prepares to fight.