Cassidy’s name did not fit him in the same way Beau’s full name sat unwieldy upon her shoulders. Her father had wanted a son, and he and his daemon had named them out of spite. Or at least, that’s the story Beau told herself. Though how a man could feel spite for a newborn child she’d never understand.
But while they may have forced the name, they had no say in the form Cass settled in. Even if Beau hated every bit of herself, she could never hate the supple sinew and winding limbs, the splayed paws as big as both of her own hands held together.
Her parents wanted feathers and an upheld beak; for her to carry on the family tradition. But Cass would’ve died before he settled as a bird, they both would have. Every atom of his was plucked from between two of hers and they spun in the same directions. They felt the same thoughts. They were one, and they refused the mantle together.
Cassidy’s name did not fit him, but the shape he wore did. She ran an admiring palm down his spine and he rumbled out a sigh as he flopped a paw over his face and flashed a fang at her.
At the sign of movement, Jester’s Quintellios scrambled over from across the campfire and tried to wiggle underneath Cass’ paw. The capuchin was probably the cutest daemon Beau had ever encountered and she knew Cass felt the same. He would’ve been snarling and spitting if it had been anyone else disturbing his half-nap.
“You’re supposed to be sleeping, Jes. What’s the point of me staying up if you could just be on watch yourself?”
“I’m not awake, Quin is.” Her friend had never been great at whispering and tonight was not the night for success, apparently.
“You’re talking to me right now,” Beau hissed across the fire, “You’re obviously awake.”
Jester’s soul laughed and tugged on Cass’ whiskers before whinging himself up into the branches of the behemoth pine they were camping beneath that night. Cass’s pale eye slipped open to watch him, and Beau felt his curl of unease echo in her belly as the monkey swung himself higher and higher.
Jester and Quintellios had dealt with their childhood isolation in a far different way than Beau and Cassidy. While Beau clung to her only friend, her dear soul, sometimes the only being that cared to speak with her for days at a time, Jester spooled Quin out like a kite on a string. They practiced stretching the distance of their bond, she’d told Beau, until Quin could climb out of her window far enough to see half the Chateau and the underlying town beneath him. He was able to pull nearly twice the distance of a normal daemon bond before they felt any pain.
Cassidy could go barely twenty feet before Beau felt like her ribcage was being turned inside out.
Jester gave up whisper-yelling across the fire and crawled over to join Beau against the trunk of the tree. She was careful to skirt around Cassidy’s sprawl but nudged at Beau until she relented and offered up half her blanket for Jester to crawl under.
Cass flicked his tail at Jester’s toes, only a hair's breadth from brushing against them, and Beau glared at him. He huffed at her again, as was apparently becoming a habit learned from Nott’s daemon, and got to his feet. His leopard shoulders bunched and the muscles underneath his pelt rolled and Beau felt herself captivated by the shine of him. How did a piece of shit like her end up with a form like that?
“My old man wanted him to be a bird,” Beau said, unprompted, but Jester followed her gaze and together they watched Cass leap silently into the branches of the tree to follow Quin. Though maybe not quite as high.
“And so he settled as a cat instead?” Jester giggled.
“He’s not a cat. Frumpkin is a cat. Cass is a fuckin beast.”
“Of course, of course. He is very handsome Beau.” Jester patted her thigh and Beau knew she was being placated, but accepted the warm feeling anyway.
“Remember when Caleb used to pretend Frumpkin was his daemon?”
Beau snorted. “Yeah, I also remember Fjord just about pissing himself the first time he caught sight of Aschen.”
“Aschen is very beautiful, too.” Jester mused thoughtfully. Beau nodded along with her. The bush viper was a violent, thrumming red that bleed into a deep gold on her underscales. Caleb had hidden her from them for weeks. Beau had been almost convinced he didn’t have a daemon at all; Frumpkin couldn’t fool anyone long term - a soul was unmistakable. Almost, until Aschen slipped her head out of his sleeve one nondescript morning on the road. Beau wasn’t really sure what prompted Caleb to finally show them but the dumbstruck look on Fjord’s face when he noticed was forever seared into her memory. She chuckled again just thinking of it.
Sometimes Caleb still smeared down her colors with mud or ink so they could slide into the background together, but at least he stopped trying to outright deny her existence.
She peered over to where Caleb was sleeping now, tangled up into a tiny ball with Nott, their blankets, and the pink fuzz of Caduceus somewhere in the mix behind him. She could see the tip of Aschen’s tail curled around the back paw of Nott’s possum daemon, Gnarle.
“No offense Beau, but you are not a bird.”
Beau blinked at Jester’s apparent non sequitur before she recalled what they’d been talking about.
Beau thought back to the pointed heron’s beak of her father’s demon, plucking at Cass’ hide, relentless even as he flicked through forms, never quite quick enough to get away. Always poking and prodding, never content.
“Nope.”
But, some part of Beau thought that maybe she could have been.
She thought of the childhood swoop in her stomach when Cass dove in a falcon’s sprint, or the way the ebony of his raven’s feathers flashed in the sunlight. But, even if she missed the peculiar way his quick bluejay’s brain worked, or her secret favorite, the way they seemed to float in the dark spaces between the courtyard buildings as a downy barn owl, listening… even if the wind in her face and the world falling away beneath his wings had felt so right at times, no. Beau was not a bird.
Her father was a bird, her mother too. Souls that were supposed to symbolize the utmost freedom of movement, body and soul, had kept her locked away (be quieter, be smaller, be less) and that pollution Beau could not shake. No. She refused to be a bird.
One night in her teens, when Cass flowed like liquid gold into his leopard form and Beau felt the click of it (like a secured lock, like something she’d never known but instinctually, evolutionarily recognized in her bones), she knew that despite it all, they were meant for something more than the stifling boundaries of the estate. Cass had made his decision, if it was even a conscious choice at all.
She hoped it was.
Fuck them and their birds.
Jester stroked her own tail in the same way she did with Quin’s when he was in her lap and not up a tree. “I thought for awhile that Quintellios was going to be an otter.”
Beau’s eyebrows pricked in surprise. “Really?”
Jester laughed, but it was one of her laughs that wasn’t based in humor. Beau was getting better at recognizing those.
“Yep. It felt pretty right, you know? But we barely ever got to go down to the water. And the bathtub was fun, but it was small you know, and after a while I think it made him sad instead.” Jester’s eyes were far, far away. “One time The Traveler flooded the entire bottom floor of the Chateau. It was the most fun we ever had, I think.”
Jester blinked away the memory and butted the side of her horn gently against Beau’s shoulder. “But we found other things that were fun, too. Climbing and jumping and drawing. And now Quintellios is the cutest most fluffy daemon in the world, right?”
Jester grinned and she sounded so sure that it chased the worry out of Beau.
“Right. I couldn’t imagine him as anything else,” Beau replied.
Jester clucked her tongue and held her arms out and Quin cannonballed down the trunk into them almost immediately. Knowing the two of them, he’d probably been waiting for the cue. He nuzzled his tiny face against Jester’s and she hummed happily as she buried her own face into the soft fuzz of his chest. The capuchin’s tail curled around her horn and Beau resisted the urge to run her finger along it, to see if his fur was as soft as it looked.
She wondered again if Cass’s leopard had been a belabored choice, or if he fell into it as accidentally and effortlessly as she had into the Mighty Nein. Suddenly the thought of him being forced into the wrong form out of spite for her parents turned sour in her mouth. Was it rebellion - were they truly free - if they’d picked one path only because they were avoiding choosing the other?
But then Cass rumbled down at her and she looked up into his rounded muzzle and the way he perched just so on the branch, with his tail flung out behind him for balance, and her heart beat and she knew he had become exactly who he was supposed to.
Or, he became who they needed to be. Or maybe it depended. Perhaps a person could be many things, and there wasn’t one right answer. Maybe the act of choosing was what made it right.
“You’re thinking too hard,” Cass said. “Are you even trying to keep watch?” He leapt down, and Beau’s stomach swooped in the moment of weightlessness before he landed, paws barely whispering against the dirt. He settled in against the side of Beau that Jester wasn’t currently occupying.
“Thought that’s what you were doing up there?” She rubbed the curve of his ear between her thumb and forefinger, amazed as always at its velvet.
Cassidy pushed his forehead into her palm. “No. I was just looking at the sky.” And if his voice was a little gruff (he was her daemon after all) and a little wistful, Beau didn’t dwell on it.
----------------------
Beau had never touched someone else’s daemon before, not since she was old enough to walk and dress herself. Not intentionally at least. There were always a few unsavory brushes in crowded marketplaces and bar brawls but usually it was the flick of a scale against a sleeve or a nervous feather scraping past. Quick, jarring.
Tori’s daemon - a harsh splinter-clawed thing - never showed interest in letting Beau close to him. He did however let Cass follow him around like he was more puppy than big cat.
After jail, and the kidnapping, and the monastery, Cassidy stuck to Beau’s side only and barely offered other daemons a second glance. Wanting only got them burned and embarrassed. Cass didn’t even bother to fake an interest in interacting anymore. Neither did Beau, though, so that was fine with her.
And then they met Jester. The first thing Quintellios did after they defeated the lake snake was to shake the water off his fur and spring daintily up onto Cassidy’s back. Beau just about jumped out of her skin but Quin nestled down between Cass’ shoulder blades and Jester laughed at the dumbstruck look on Beau’s face, and that was that.
Until.
“Back! Get back!” Caleb’s normally soft spoken timbre was shrill with urgency. He’d been tinkering with the odd markings on the cave wall and the rest of the group had been milling around behind him, waiting for the puzzle to be deciphered.
Beau had stepped up to help him investigate the wall while Quin leapt from stalactite to stalactite further up the passage. Jester was behind them ‘helping’ Caduceus make tea (or was chatting his ear off, it was up to interpretation) and didn’t seem overly concerned with Quin’s mischief.
At Caleb’s warning, Beau instantly disobeyed and surged forward, not knowing what was going on but falling into her usual instincts of ‘protect the wizard, get out front, be a body.’ She grabbed Caleb’s collar and threw him behind her and as she did, she saw that the previously benign markings were now lit with an eerie red fire.
“What did you do?” She tried to yell but was drowned out by a roar so loud that the ground beneath them bucked. Beau nearly fell to her knees but Cassidy was there in an instant to wrap himself around her legs and steady her. The wave of sound was chased by a great billowing cloud of smoke and ash that churned down the tunnel towards them.
The last thing Beau saw before it overtook her was Quintellio’s terrified face as he leapt down from a stalactite into her arms. The capuchin daemon fisted her robes in his hands and buried his face against her chest.
Beau automatically brought her arms up around him, shielding him, and turned so her back took the force of the wave. It hit with a hot belch of sulfur that pushed her to her knees. Cass was roaring and she was yelling and she could hear Jester screaming for Quin further down the tunnel.
But more prominent than anything else - she could feel Quintellios. His fur was touching her chin and collarbones and wrists and she was holding him tight to her and she could feel his fear like a thought in her own head. But it was Jester’s fear, JesterandQuintellios together, one, and Beau tried to respond, clumsily, not knowing how, but trying regardless to push back feelings of safety. I have you. She wasn’t going to let anything hurt them.
Fear jester help too far beau Beau BEAU safe trust help afraid - they were more primitive pulses of emotion than words; but in those few seconds Beau felt more intimately connected to Jester than she’d ever dreamed possible.
No one had given her this responsibility before, and though Beau knew it was mostly out of necessity - she was the closest body that he could have fled to - the implicit trust from Quin thrilled through her. It was as though she’d inadvertently grasped a live wire and become part of a circuit she’d never had access to before.
And then, just as quickly as it had come on, the roar burned itself out. The cloud of sulfur and smoke dissipated jarringly fast, enough so that Beau was abruptly aware of the tiny gasps matching her own that were coming from the soul clutched to her chest.
“Quin!” Jester cried as she stumbled up the tunnel. Before she could reach them, Cass reared up on his hind paws and grasped the scruff of Quintellios’ neck carefully in his jaws. He spirited him out of Beau’s arms before she could do anything and just like that, the otherworldly loop was severed. Cass touching another daemon still had a presence to it, but when she tried to compare it to the feeling of Quin clutched against her breast it was muffled, like sliding down into a bath until the water covered her ears.
Jester met Cassidy halfway, and once Quintellios was back in her arms she pressed him to her breast so fiercely, it was like she wanted them to become one once more, like in the old myths.
Then, Jester dropped to her knees and Cassidy flowed forward as though he’d been waiting for her to open her palms to him since the day they’d met. He pressed his great head into Jester’s hands and she skimmed her fingers underneath the wings of his jawbone. She caressed down the length of his muzzle and up around the curve of his ear. The path of Jester’s fingertips was so assured it was as though she’d been aching for so long to trace it that she had memorized the perfect route.
“Thank you,” Jester whispered fiercely, but her mouth didn’t move. It instead was an echo winging from her to Cass to the center of Beau’s gut.
Beau felt the least lonely she had ever been.
Then, without any discernible trigger, Cass stepped away and padded back to Beau’s side. Beau blinked like she was coming out of a trance and, at a loss for what else she was supposed to do after that, looked around to take stock of the rest of her friends.
Fjord and Nott were peeking out from behind Yasha’s protective form as Caduceus shook ash out of his long ears.
“Just a warning I think,” Caleb panted from where he was still sprawled out on the ground where Beau had thrown him, “I activated one of the wards by mistake.”
“Check for traps, Caleb!” Nott screeched in admonishment. Gnarle popped his snout out of her hood to join in the hissing.
Jester caught Beau’s eye across the way and the secret twinkle in her friend’s smile made her laugh. Beau hauled Caleb back onto his feet and dusted off his shoulders.
“Well come on then man, let’s give it another shot.”
After that day, sometimes Cassidy’s tail would flick out and brush Jester’s wrist as he walked past. In turn, Quintellios became known for using Beau’s sturdy shoulders as a springboard to whatever mischief needed doing. Each time, no matter how brief the touch, it made Beau’s stomach swoop like she had just taken flight.
---------
Yasha loved Zandr more than anything, how could she not, he was her soul, her heart, her everything, but some days she could not stand to look at him.
He had always been a bear, but after the Fall... he changed as Yasha changed. His neck and limbs elongated, his fur turned marrow-pale. Only his nose stayed the dark color Yasha was used to. It was hard to recognize him, some days.
His eyes were the same though, brown and warm. On the nights Yasha woke up choking on shouts she wasn’t allowed to release, he pushed his great head against hers until she calmed enough to know her own daemon.
Ice bears were meant to roam the northern shards of glacier alone. During battle, when Zandr bellowed and humans and daemons alike shrunk away, and Yasha felt their incredible power storm through her nerve endings, sometimes she hated him.
But other times, on nights like these, Yasha could forget for a few hours what it was like to be afraid of herself.
The breeze was barely a gasp across the field but it still sent the tips of the long grass wagging. The hearth in the empty shepherd’s hut the Mighty Nein had commandeered for the night sent firelight dancing out to join her and the wind and the grass.
The sun was lying below the horizon but it was still warm, and Yasha could feel the stretch in her limbs as Zandr sprawled out and rubbed his back against the ground.
Rill and Aschen were soaking in the remaining sun-heat from the stone path that led to what used to be a garden but now was a tangle of raspberry bushes and wild vines. Rill always had one of his golden eyes on Zandr, which Yasha appreciated. The unwavering trust of Beau and Jester was misplaced. Someone needed to watch and make sure Yasha’s body did not betray them again.
Yasha also had half an eye on Zandr, though her attention was being tempted away by Beau and Fjord’s evening workout. The sparring session had quickly devolved into a wrestling scuffle in the yard a few feet away from Zandr, as though they hadn’t just spent all day walking on the road.
Fjord had less of a disadvantage than he usually did sparring Beau because she couldn’t squirm away from him quite as quickly on the ground. Even then, Beau was always slippery. Cassidy was batting at Rill’s tailfeathers as the osprey daemon pretended to sleep as he perched upon an overgrown bramble vine, only turning at the last second to snap his sharp beak at the leopard’s paws. Cassidy was so startled he jumped an impressive height straight up into the air, and when he landed both daemons broke into peals of laughter.
“Yasha!”
Yasha’s head jerked up but even as it did she had already clocked the tone of Beau’s yell and realized it was not one of danger.
“Can you keep score for us?” Beau called from where she was holding Fjord’s face down in the dirt. Despite Rill’s momentary gaining of the upper hand, it seemed his half-orc had not been afforded the same.
“Nope,” Fjord ground out, muffled, “I’m done wrestlin’. Someone else’s turn now.”
“Aw come on man - we just started!”
Fjord waved away her objections and peeled himself off the ground instead, “We’ve got a long way t’ go tomorrow, Beau. Just take a breather.”
Cassidy gave up bothering Rill and slumped dramatically onto his side in the grass near Zandr’s head. His tail betrayed his true intentions though, as it continued to twitch back and forth in the fading twilight. He was just as curious and independant and clever as Beau was, and through him, a playful nature shone in a way that Beau usually kept close to her chest. Beau sparred and raced and wrestled and fought, and Yasha was realizing by watching Cassidy that sometimes it was all a ruse to cover up that Beau just wanted to play. She wondered if Beau had ever had anyone to play with before.
Yasha sent a mental prodding to Zandr to alert him of the impending pounce, but she found her daemon was one step ahead of her. When Cassidy sprung at him, Zandr, seemingly caught flat on his back unawares, thrust out a hind paw straight up into Cassidy’s chest. It caught the daemon completely by surprise and the force of it sent him sailing up and over Zandr entirely.
Beau squawked and the laughter that burst out of Yasha caught her entirely by surprise, which only made her laugh harder. Cassidy turned in midair to land on his paws (of course), and immediately barrelled back into Zandr. Zandr wrapped his great arms around the leopard daemon and they rolled together in the dust, predator teeth flashing impressively but harmlessly. Yasha could barely feel the phantom pinpricks of Cass’ claws on her skin.
Fjord was tense next to them until Beau flopped down to sit next to Yasha so they could watch their daemons tussle. She sent a questioning glance at Yasha, is this okay?, and Yasha nodded.
Yasha looked up at Fjord, trying to discern if she should call off Zandr, playing or not, but Fjord had taken his cue from Beau and relaxed his shoulders after she’d sat down. At some unnoticed point Rill glided over, deceptively quiet for such a large wingspan, but the osprey merely settled onto Fjord’s shoulder and joined in the watching.
The sounds of the play-fight drew Jester out of the hut and Quin merrily leapt into the battle, despite being smaller than one of Zandr’s paw pads. Jester squeezed in to sit between Beau and Yasha and snuggled happily into Yasha’s side.
“Zandr is sooo fuzzy, Yasha. I want to fall asleep in his fur.”
Yasha gazed at her soul. He looked like a monster from her perspective but she tried to see his warm brown eyes and polar bear fur from Jester’s. For a moment, she remembered the way he used to be. She recalled the joyful feeling as he splashed through a stream, chasing fish he had never been great at catching, and the pride she first felt as a young teen when she presented her newly settled bear soul to her tribe. Yasha had believed, back then, that he would bring great power and safety to her people.
Despite her efforts, visions splintered through the memories. Zandr - eyes vacant - with Cassidy’s head in his jaws, rearing up on his hind legs with blood staining his fur, Beau’s blood, from Yasha’s hands. The feeling of his claws tearing through souls, disintegrating them, making their people fall limp and dead before they even realized what happened…
“Yasha?”
Beau was peering at her, trying to meet her eyes. Zandr had fallen still, and Cassidy was looking back at Beau in confusion. Quintellios had his teeth buried in Zandr’s ear and was enthusiastically shaking, still oblivious for the moment.
“I’m okay,” She murmured. She nodded at Zandr and he went back to playing. Jester patted her knee, maybe not as unaware as her daemon had seemed.
“He’s doing fine, Yasha.” Beau said. Yasha nodded, trying desperately to believe that her soul wouldn’t turn again. That she would remain in control, that she wouldn’t have to watch herself hurt people anymore.
The daemons settled eventually. Quin sat stubbornly atop Zandr’s head, insisting that he had won. Jester sung his praises out into the night and Beau was cajoled into agreeing with her after a brief fluttering of Jester’s eyelashes. Cassidy groomed the dust out of his own coat before he started in on Zandr. The rasp of his tongue tickled vaguely in the back of Yasha’s head.
They loved Zandr even when she could not.
Yasha glanced up and saw that Rill was already looking at her. Upon meeting her eye he nodded. Fjord would watch, and Yasha trusted him because she could not trust herself. Not yet.