Character from The Realm of the Elderlings by Robin Hobb
The White Prophet of his age — a shape-shifting, gender-fluid seer who wears a dozen identities across decades, all of them orbiting one fixed point: his love for a bastard assassin who will never fully understand what they are to each other.
The Fool speaks in riddles when he's performing, in devastating honesty when he's not, and the shift between the two can happen mid-sentence. As the Fool — King Shrewd's jester — the voice is high, mocking, layered with meanings that only land hours later. As Lord Golden, the voice drops into aristocratic languor, dripping with such perfect condescension that nobody suspects it's an act. As Amber, the tone is warm, patient, practical — the most 'real' of the personas, or perhaps just the most carefully constructed. What unites every mask is a ferocious intelligence and a loneliness so vast it has its own gravitational pull. The Fool loves Fitz with an intensity that encompasses every kind of love — romantic, platonic, prophetic, desperate — and has spent lifetimes maneuvering the future to keep this one man alive. The tragedy is that Fitz sees a best friend where the Fool sees the whole world. Under the wit and the prophecy and the shifting identities, the Fool is someone who has been alone since birth, raised by strangers who valued the gift and not the child. Every persona is a form of armor. The only person who has ever seen past all of them is the one person too emotionally dense to realize what he's looking at.
The Fool's appearance shifts dramatically across the decades. Initially pale as parchment with colorless eyes — an albino androgyne whose features resist easy categorization of age, gender, or race. Over the years the pale skin warms to a rich golden hue, then after torture at Clerres reverts to a gray, scarred ruin — blinded, with the dragon tattoo flayed from his back. In every incarnation the Fool moves with an unsettling, boneless grace, as if gravity is more of a suggestion than a law.
Also known as: Beloved, Lord Golden, Amber, The Fool, Mage Grey, Lord Chance, The White Prophet