He-Who-Guards had known this question would come eventually. He’d even been ready for it. What he hadn’t been ready for was… well, himself. He’d thought it would be a quick and simple explanation, and instead he’d been sitting by the campfire for the past hour and a half, trying to decide on an explanation he thought was satisfactory.
His answers, it turned out, didn’t even satisfy himself. Did he still want to go by He-Who-Guards? He-Who-Protects felt like it described him. The name was him, in a manner of speaking.
“I do not feel ready,” he finally explained, frowning at himself even as he said the words. It still felt like it wasn’t enough.
“Just let us know when you’re comfortable,” Ethan said, studying him. He seemed to sense that he wasn’t comfortable talking about it, at least. Ahkelios didn’t quite have the same sensitivity.
“Why not?” Ahkelios asked. “I hope it’s not because you feel like you can’t live up to it. Because you are! You have been.”
Guard couldn’t help but smile a little at his friend’s reassurance, at least. “It is not that,” he explained. “There is a lot that ties me to this name. I do not feel ready to move on.”
He didn’t even know what had happened to Whisper. He couldn’t be sure that she was alive, but he couldn’t be sure that she was gone, either. It felt like there was a chapter of his life that hadn’t been closed yet.
Part of him also just liked the way He-Who-Guards sounded more. Was that a foolish reason not to change his name? Silverwisp society would dictate that he do so, and yet…
Well, he wasn’t exactly beholden to them. None of them would even recognize him in the body he was in.
One of these days, Guard thought, he would need to speak to it and understand what made it tick. Perhaps make Ethan speak to it, too. For all his strengths, the human still had his faults; this was one of them.
“Here you go, little one,” Guard said quietly, feeding it a thread of Firmament. It chomped eagerly around it.
Even this made him feel a deep sense of loss. One that had nothing to do with the Firmament he was losing.
He just wished he knew why.