Your name is Catherine, and you are seven years old.
You're English, but your grandfather is Russian- adopted into a family of Russians, that is. He carries his adopted father's name, and so does your father, and so do you. Your family reunions are often fraught with tension and difficulty understanding each other's speech. The two branches of the family- the Russian branch and the English branch- generally do not spend much time together, and you do not know much about your cousins. You could not pick them out of a line-up as your cousins.
Your name is Warren, and you are fourteen years old.
You have recently changed your name, because as it turns out "womanhood" was not the path you wanted to take.
Your name is Warren, and you are the same person you have always been, but your family does not seem to appreciate this properly.
It matters to you very much what your family thinks, but there are some things you cannot take back, and becoming a Catherine again is something you couldn't stand for in the slightest. So despite the fact that your entire life is here in Portsmouth, you begin planning to leave as soon as you can.
Your name is Warren Booker, and you are seventeen.
You have finally moved away from your family. There is a small town in the Russian steppe which very few people have heard of and which seems distant enough that they will never see you again yet close enough to home that you could one day return. You miss Portsmouth, but you do not miss the people.
You take up whittling. Favors to line your shelves, a way to pass the time and make money besides. You've always been shaky-handed, but this practice makes it better, reminds you to take deep breaths and control the knife.
Your name is Booker, and you are nineteen.
You've become quite adept at making small wooden trinkets. Whittling turned to carving easily, and any skill can be trained. Your shaky hands are a thing of the past (aside from your dreadful handwriting- dear God, how did you ever pass your penmanship exams?), and you find the carvings you make so relaxing that your family does not trouble you so much anymore.
Some people here have nicknamed you 'the Carver'. If the shoe fits, you wear it.
Your name is Booker, and you are twenty, and your cousin is here.
You do not remember most of your cousins well enough to realize this for any others, but this one hung around your family more often than the rest.
He's standing in the doorway to your damned shop, and he seems as surprised as you are.
You snap at him, because you haven't had to think about your family in years, and that's now been ruined. You snap at him to leave your shop. You want to yell and scream and throw things until he leaves and he never comes back and you are all alone in your little wood shop where you would happily carve nothing but bulls forever if it meant you could stay.
He doesn't leave. He buys a bull and compliments your carving skills and you contemplate leaping across the counter with your carving knife until he cocks his head at your nonreaction and you remember what family means.
Your name is the Carver, and you are twenty.
There is an illness spreading like an oil spill in this town, and it is infecting everybody. There is blood in the streets. People nearly torn inside out. And you, with your carving knife and your damned practice-steadied hands, there must be some way you can help. There will be some way you can help.
You don't know much about medicine, but you know your way around the human body. You paid attention in school well enough to earn high marks even while you felt your life was crumbling around you (silly child, you knew nothing, this is life crumbling around you, quite literally).
People will always be hurt. There's nothing wrong with helping somebody splint a broken bone at home if you know what you're doing. You can handle this.
Your name is the Carver, and you are still twenty, and you cannot handle this, you cannot handle this, you cannot handle this.
There is somebody with glass embedded in their stomach in your basement and your knowledge of the human body is good enough to splint a finger or support a broken leg, help a sprain, stretch a pulled muscle, but you are not a surgeon. You are a carver. You are a Carver. You are the Carver. You Carve.
Your name is the Carver, and you are twenty.
People do not call you 'the Carver' in a friendly manner anymore. They hate that the nickname they gave a friendly craftsman they cared for has turned into an ironic name for the one person they should not turn to yet in desperation place their lives in the hands of.
A disease does not put the everyday troubles on hold, and yet the real doctors of this town are focused solely on Important Matters. Your cousin in his ivory tower, curing nobody. The local healer on the streets, after murdering men at the train station. The witch girl thief looting from the dead with one hand and healing the sick with the other.
And nobody but the Carver to help when people are simply injured. If they call you a criminal, they admit their law failed.
Your name is Warren, or Booker, or the Carver, and you are, despite everything, still twenty.
You are certainly going to jail. This is not a question in the slightest. You broke one of the most important laws of the land you chose to live in, and you broke it intentionally and repeatedly. Now that the plague is done, your actions are not forgotten- for your work as the Carver, you are both reviled and remembered with fondness.
But your cousin- he had the chance to destroy this town and choose his Polyhedron, and knowing the type of people that run in your family he wanted to, but he chose instead the plan put forth by the little girl who might truly fix things.
Your name is Warren Booker Dankovsky, and for the first time in your life you are proud to bear the name.