Application for Hogwarts School
→ CHARACTER INFORMATION.Name: Estheline MayBirthday: 11 October 1939
Hometown: near Coniston, UK
Bloodline: Unknown
Magical Strength (pick one):Conjuring & Summoning
Magical Weakness (pick one):Transfiguration
Year (pick two): 5/6
Biography: It was in the blood. The dark breathing ichor of the world, hot as drifts of sunlight in her swift-beating heart.
Estheline felt the burn of it flushing beneath round cheeks, stinging in the cold, brushed by curls of blonde and the hiss of only just wind.
It was in the blood. In the ghost channel broken from a turning white feather puff drifting down from of a brace of startled game hens. Wings scratched against the touchless air as the birds scrambled upward over the dawn bleached sky, a thrash of motion, separate and whole.
She could see it on her fingertips, even pale, clean as they were, still, for L’Evan would never have spoilt the girls by sullying them with such earthy things. Child dolls, only to watch, to smile faint and applaud soft for the prowess of thundering brothers and cousins, wild on their horses’ bowed backs, too loud under the call of the horn. Sweet girls, giggling watchers of harder souls’ amusements, of the game, the contest.
And the contest was there, in the blood.
The memory of life still seeped from the stag’s chest as her not-father drew his hunter’s knife deftly through its thick hide, exposing the steaming warmth of the fallen beast’s secret heart to the immodest world.
Estheline did not feel sad for the fallen thing. Great, hulking beauty though he was, before L’Evan’s shadow fell upon him. Death came to all in time.
It had come for her parents, she supposed. Names and faces unknown to her, known to some perhaps who did not care to tell. In time it would come to her too. Perhaps then she would know them.
A faint sniffle as ginger-haired Henriette March, the little one beside her, wiped her sniffling nose with the back of her hand. Always so dramatic.
Still… Estheline pressed her lips into a sober dip for the sake of blending. Sometimes she wondered what it would be like to feel the things she could only seem. Sometimes she almost wondered whether this ought to worry her. But no. Worrying was a trouble meant for the world’s Henriettes.
With a vindicated grunt L’Evan raised his wet gloved fist, and pressed between thumb and knuckle a great coin of gold glittered crimson and sun-brushed in the morning.
“Oh I say! Well played, L’Evan! Well played indeed! We shall have to hide it better the next time.” A cousin, the sneering one with green velvet lapels, shouted as he rode to meet them, his laugh far too crass for a proper man.
They left the discarded stag to freeze in the red snow. And the games went on.
---
“Do you know, I don’t trust that one.” Auntie Melaine said, frowning over her teacup. “It’s in the eyes. There’s something, oh,
off about them. Cold. Do shoo her off, Constie.”
“Oh come, Mela,” Auntie Constance said, pouring more cream than she ought into her own cup. The unpleasant blue cup with the handle just slightly askew. “She’s only just a girl.” But still she waived Estheline off with a wrinkled hand, and Esthline complied, backing away to wait in silence by the door, as a good girl ought.
“Thirteen is
hardly a girl, Constie. And nothing so tall and gawking as that might be thought one surely.”
“Fifteen.” Auntie Constance corrected, but with little conviction.
“Really? She certainly doesn’t look it.”
“Or perhaps sixteen years now?”
“Hmph,” Auntie Melaine sniffed. “And just who
was the mother?”
“I’m sure I couldn’t say,” Auntie Constance replied carefully. “The father being a most – unusual – sort, as you know. As nice and sunny a day as any May could offer when he brought her to our door, and there he was, raincoat and umbrella, yellow as lemons, and he staring at the sky as though it meant to vex him. Didn’t say a word. Most strange indeed.”
“Quite,” Auntie Melaine said. “No doubt she was quite the fallen thing, given His character.”
“Couldn’t speak to that either,” Auntie Constance replied.
“Yes, I’m sure.” Auntie Melaine said.
“Though he
was quite the genius in his craft, they say – for a time, anyway.”
“Genius? Hmph. Too often used that word, in these times. Quite worn out and most barely half one at best. And that one scarcely well enough to be called a madman.”
“Just as you say, Mela.”
“Now his father’s line, they were decent enough to be sure. But the mother’s!” Auntie Melaine’s sour mouth creased into a still more sour cringe. “The things that woman did. And that just what they found her out for. In truth, one
may have heard rumor he may’nt even have been the father, poor man. No wonder the bottle took him so. And well. She was Welsh. What more may have been one shudders to consider. No, no. The trouble with that one’s in the blood, I’m sure of it. Always in the blood. Does she know I wonder?”
“Hmm?”
“That child, Constie! My but your mind does wander. Does she know of her parents?”
“No, no.” Auntie Constance said with a prim blink. “I always think it best not to trouble them with that sort of knowing. Could hardly do them any good.”
“I quite agree,” Auntie Melaine snipped, staring side-eye at the door. “It might give the nasty little creature ideas.”
---
“How is it, Aaron?” Estheline asked, hovering next to the boy wedged up in a window well he had quite outgrown. Aaron May, the odd one, and brought to L'Evan's in a May just as she was, if two years after.
“Half done now. Almost to half. Half and then I may start it over and read it properly.” Aaron said in a matter-of-fact way, licking his fingers to turn a yellowy page.
“I see.” Estherline said, unruffled as ever by his strangeness. “Uncle L’Evan has the Cousins in his rooms for cigars. All of them, including the ones he doesn't like so that he can crow at them about winning at the Hunt again. And Auntie Constance has the bad cups out for Auntie Melaine. It’s put her in a noisy mood. Do you mind if I sit here with you until they go away?”
The boy paused, his fingers clutching dubiously at the page.
“I promise that I will say nothing. And when you’ve finished you can tell me how it very definitely did not end this time.” Estherline promised in a voice she’d found others tended to hear as reassurance.
The boy nodded, turning the page the wrong way.
“Thank you, Aaron,” Estherline said, seating herself appropriately in the chair by the window.
As the boy read, she folded her hands in her lap and stared intently at the back of them. At Auntie Melaine’s rumors within them. The lost ones in the blood that slipped through blue-green lines beneath the thin flesh there. Family. Not a false one made of month-names for children abandoned and snarking Aunts. A family of hers only, hidden there. Oh how she might have resented that puzzle within those veins, so obstinately silent. How she might - if good girls were permitted such things.
“Alright,” Aaron said. “It did not end quite so disappointingly this time. A fair bit of swording and jumping about though. Would you like to hear more? Even the bloody bits?”
“Of course I would, Aaron.” Estheline turned her palm upwards in her lap. “Even the bloody bits.”
“Well then,” Aaron said with a long, pedantic breath. “We shall begin.”
→ ADDITIONAL INFORMATION.Note: This section is optional, and is up to you to complete.House Request:Personality:Bright, if restrained. Polite and reasonably adept at conversation. She strives to be well-mannered because manners are a useful tool to use where a more natural empathy for others is lacking.
Appearance:Over-tall, boney, grey eyed blond. Her hair curls just enough to make it less manageable than she would like it to be. She has a small gap between her front teeth that she very much would prefer not to have and tends to burn pink in the sun.
→ SAMPLE ROLEPLAY.You come across one of these posts on the site. Please select one & reply as your character. Remember, you can only roleplay your own character's actions, not Evangeline's or Hugh's. Option I:“What would you do if she were?” Estheline asked evenly, shifting her potions book deftly beneath one arm as she studied the pocket watch in her palm, its place face glittering in the torchlight.
Ten minutes yet before class. Another five should give time enough for at least some of the fumes to clear out from the first years’ class. Why they let them try at all at that age was the enduring question. She could still hear the classroom door banging back and forth like a great fan in a hopeless attempt to get the smell out.
Snapping the watch closed, she glanced instead at the face of the child before her as if only just noticing there was an actual human there.
“Oh, alright,” she said, forcing her face to soften as she inclined her head just a bit.
You stand up much too tall girl, she could Auntie Melaine’s sniping voice pecking through her thoughts,
it puts people quite off. Not to mention how you’ll ever find a Boy. There, head dipped a bit more, a shift in the shoulders as she leaned forward. Less off-putting now, surely. “This is one of those ridiculous dares, isn’t it? They do it to all the first years. It’s quite annoying. Just pop back up and tell them you found a pile of bones in one of the dungeon rooms and you dare them to come and find them. You
do at least
know the way back?”
→ ABOUT YOU.Please list any characters you have on the site (current and previous): Elizabeth Birch Hurst, Cassius Hurst, …Others.
How did you find us?: I have ways.
