FULL NAME | Freya Brynhilde Sterling, "Nan" to her family DATE of BIRTH | December 21st, 2009 PLACE of BIRTH | Glasgow, Scotland AGE | 12 POSITION | 1st Year Ravenclaw ZODIAC | Sagittarius • Gemini • Scorpio HEIGHT | 146 cm EYES | Slate grey HAIR | Chestnut brown STYLE | Prim, luxurious, tailored VOICE | Rich and warm, resonating SMELL | Wood smoke, cold wind, cedar, roses FACE | Moya Palk PET | Skaði | egyptian mau
• WHAT you SEE •
Reducio
Freya’s mass of lustrous chestnut waves is usually the first thing people see, though she makes a genuine effort to keep it from seeming too unruly. Even plaited neatly or piled atop her head in a bun, its presence is considerable, and if it weren’t for the hair, you’d probably miss the wisp of a girl.
As for the rest of her - standing at 146 cm, her height may seem proportionate to her age but while she still has a few centimeters to go, she will be lucky to reach 158 as she comes from a family of rather diminutive women. Lean and agile, Freya makes up for her stature with a poise that comes from a formative childhood dodging raucous elder brothers, surly kneazle claws, and her mother’s eternal quest to find any sign of Seer-blood premature greys in her hair.
Freya has an impish, open face with kind features which seem to settle naturally into an air of pensive contemplation, as if she is sizing even the littlest details up and filing them away for Merlin knows what - in fact, this is exactly what she's doing. It earned her the nickname "Nan" in her family, as even from infancy she had the bearing of an all-seeing old grandmother. Her indefatiguable array of cinnamon freckles stand up to even the depths of Scottish winters, giving her milky-pale complexion more credit than it is due. Her eyes are a mercurial grey-blue and unnervingly observant.
Freya takes pride in her appearance and inherited her mother's discerning eye for quality. She chooses elegant, neatly tailored clothing and favours rich, soft fabrics in muted colours. There's nary an ostentatious bone in her body, though, and Freya would never spare a second thought to getting her hands or her pretty skirts dirty in pursuit of satisfying her curiosity.
One particular exception harasses Freya's innate tidyness, and that is her perpetually ink-stained fingers. She is a tireless archivist of the world around her, the kind that keeps quill and ink by her bedside and always has a notebook at hand. She's ceased being fussed about it, especially since her divination abilities began emerging and noting things down, even seemingly innocuous ones, has become of far more import than stained fingertips.
• WHAT you GET •
Reducio
Freya is a vibrant girl who seems to balance her inherited inclinations towards the world unseen with a firmly grounded sense of herself. She is highly perceptive and was raised by her mother and grandmother to have unshakeable trust in her own intuition, whether the family gift graced her or not. That said, she’s eleven, and some flights of fancy ought not be entertained as anything more than that - a fact she has her brothers to thank for the seemingly bottomless well of ways they find to remind her not to let her ego get the better of her.
While she can be by turns intense and distracted, Freya is a warm and deeply curious person who genuinely takes pleasure in exposing herself to new viewpoints and perspectives. She does have a habit of being guarded around new people, as she skews towards easy suspicion of people who seem too eager to get to know her. Her grandmother warned her often that there are people who might easily take advantage of her talents. As such, Freya guards her physical and emotional energy dilligently, and has no problem speaking up when she needs time to herself.
• WHERE the HEART IS •
Reducio
When Freydis Sterling finally pushed her daughter out into the world, the tiny, pale creature wailed with a fury that made the merciless December blizzard outside sound tame as a lamb against the tall windows, and the languid pride of kneazles lounging through the manor raise their heads with sleepy interest. Beyond the burnished gold doors of this room, the world was unchanged by the birth and went on shivering it it’s wintery sleep. To the woman who had just battled the endless, aching hours of a challenging delivery, and her mother who had midwifed the child, her arrival heralded nothing short of a miracle. She was wild relief, hope, tradition, and the very weight of history, all at once in the fretting, indignant form of the tiniest body either of them had ever seen.
Freydis was the only daughter of Valfreskja, you see, and Valfreskja was the only daughter of Freyskala… and on it had gone, snaking back through history and time to the storied völvas of the North. The Seer blood that had carried on through their long line, though its power had waned and waxed over the year was, until this night, on the precipice of an unremarkable end. Freydis had already brought three fine sons into the world, but no male child of their line had ever done more than have a hunch about something here and there. When the third was barely more than a week born, Freydis’ Sight visited her a vision of herself heavy with child again. She roused from it knowing with awful certainty that she would have no more children after the next, and there was nary a hint that it wasn’t another boy. Months and months passed in which Freydis and Valfreskja tried every method of divination they knew, every ceremony and invocation, and the growing child’s form remained hidden to them. Clear answers were rarely if ever found through divination, and the nature of the Sight wasn’t going to change for one little baby.
So, with nothing less than history on her little shoulders, Freya came into the world on the winter solstice.
Freya’s mother had married Hamish Sterling, himself the eldest son of an old pureblood family, a scant handful of years after they graduated Hogwarts together. He had moved up through the Ministry quickly in diplomatic relations and made a very comfortable life for his wife and young sons while Freydis worked with her mother maintaining their family’s ancestral pride of kneazles. Kneazles of this line are highly sought-after, rarely made available, and command considerable prices from those who know their storied history. (Valfreskja maintains to this day the bloodline stretches back alongside her own all the way to the fabled cats that pulled the goddess Freyja’s chariot, Bygul and Trjegul. No one really believes that’s true, least of all the kneazles themselves. They’re not posh.) Freya loves the creatures dearly, and plans to take her place in the centuries-old family tradition when she has completed her schooling.
Not long after the birth of their third boy, Hamish inherited his family’s manor outside Glasgow as his parents wished to retire to their Highlands home away from the society life of the city’s wizarding community. It was this privileged world that Freya was born into, and she was raised wanting for nothing, the jewel of her family’s crown.
While everyone waited and watched and dared not hope for the first signs of her Seer heritage to make themselves known, Freya grew into a self-possessed little girl who navigated the business of growing up with disconcerting ease. She seemed to narrowly avoid the usual bumps and bruises childhood, or else got away scott-free with the most innocuous of scrapes.
For their part, her eldest two brothers Torvin and Halvard handled the fuss with good grace and the easy humour their parents both shared. Einar, the youngest, did not. With scarcely more than a year between them, he staunchly believed that Freya’s arrival had robbed him of his mother’s attentions and made it his mission to cause his sister as much strife as possible. His efforts were largely futile, which only served to make him dislike her even more.
Of note is the morning of Freya's 6th birthday, when Einar was on a particularly nasty streak and snuck into her room to spoil her party dress with smears of chocolate. When Freya woke to find him defacing her lovely dress, she threw aside her bedsheets with such angry force that Einar himself was sent whirling right out the door into the hall along with the ruined dress. Einar landed on his arse, and the dress landed on his head. That is how their mother found him, and in chiding him soundly for his mischief, no one paid any mind to the small matter of how he'd ended up in the hallway at all. Meanwhile, across the Scottish Highlands, the pages of an ancient book flipped open and an encnated quill roused itself to scribble down her name.
The fact that, as the years went on, Freya went about ignoring Einar for his trouble was torture for Einar, and for a period of a few years before he left for Hogwarts there were daily (unsuccessful) attempts at making war until the elder brothers finally stepped in and brokered a shaky peace treaty.
For her part, Freya preferred to direct her energy to things she could control, like learning all about the family kneazle business, voraciously studying the theortical aspects of rune lore, and hounding her grandmother for every scrap of her knowledge about divination that had been passed down through the generations to her eager mind. Her tutors found her perfectly sufficient in most of the areas they taught, but if it had nothing to do with divination, she paid it only so much attention as was necessary to get by. As her age rose to double-digits and the faraway someday of attending Hogwarts became more of an impending reality, she began to realize that attitude wouldn’t serve her very well when she got there and endeavored a more concerted effort towards studies outside of her beloved subject.
As with the potential of her inherited abilities, there had been countless small coincidences and innocuous happenings over the years which might have been evidence of magic, but might not, so the summer of her 11th year was something of an unpleasant waiting game to see if a letter would arrive inviting her to Hogwarts. Despite her firm belief that it was only a matter of time, Freya was shocked to find herself crying actual tears of relief when the family owl glided in one morning over breakfast and dropped the long-awaited envelope directly over her porridge bowl. She just so happened to be reaching up to push an unruly handful of hair out of her face (and her porridge, ugh) and seemingly plucked the letter out of thin air.
By the time she had the seal pushed open and had read her name over at least a dozen times, the tears were gone, she had dodged at least three attempts by Einar to snatch it from her, and the boisterous chaos of breakfast in the Sterling home resumed, moving on to whatever was next in the day. But it was her grandmother’s knowing wink across the table that told her everything she possibly needed to know – that this path was hers, and she’d never been more ready to walk it.
the scent of perfume on my wrist
it hasn't always been like this
sometimes it is too easy to forget
the time before the ambergris
• THE WAND •
Wand image property of @WindermereWandshop
• THE FAMILIAR •
Skaði is a yearling Egyptian Mau. Named after the fierce, proud Norse goddess of winter, she is small and lithe with wide, moon-grey eyes that, like Freya's, don't seem to miss a thing. Her coat is a foggy swirl of snow-white and coal-black swirls and spots. A discreet, stealthy creature, Skaði prefers to perch on Freya's shoulder, peeking out from behind her mistress' waterfall of hair.
• EPHEMERA • black rabbit-fur pouch containing her great-grandmother's runes,
which are engraved upon small polished moonstones
• AMORTENTIA • tba
• ERISED • tba
• BOGGART vs. PATRONUS • not this year...
Last edited by Freya Sterling on 4 Mar 2022, 18:22, edited 20 times in total.
