Simza Aksamit Durmstrang

Simza is imposingly tall and lanky for a 12 year old, with a dancer's build and self-assured grace in motion. She is pale and delicate-looking, with classical features and soft aventurine-green eyes. Her copper hair is kept long, well down to her waist, and always fastidiously smoothed and arranged. With full lips, sharp cheekbones, and a strong, aquiline nose anchoring her features, Simza looks every inch the part of the austere, haughty ballerina she was raised to be.

Hailing from an unrelentingly strict and regimented home life, Simza is unsurprisingly an incredibly controlling perfectionist. Details matter immensely to the girl, and she will push herself oftentimes beyond reasonable measure to do whatever it is she's doing to the absolute best of her ability. And if her best isn't good enough, she'll try harder. She is painfully harsh upon herself, preferring to be her own worst critic before anyone else can. The only upside to that particular trait is that she's surprisingly unbothered by the opinions of others, unless those people are important figures in her life.

Solemn and aloof, no one who knows her would rightly call Simza approachable, but life outside the gilded cage of her pureblooded family's grip has, at least, made the girl curious as to what else life has to offer and she is slowly thawing. Joining the quidditch team was her first, tentative act of rebellion against the tightly controlled existence her parents have insisted upon since she could remember. There is, Simza is discovering, a fierceness of spirit inside herself that longs to make a mark on the world greater than simply being a beautiful ornament within it.

Simza was born to Zoya and Tytus Aksemit, for seemingly no other purpose than to be a perfect amalgamation of each of their own life ambitions. Zoya, a prima ballerina, and Tytus, a noted composer, were themselves the merging of two very old, very influential Polish wizarding bloodlines. While undeniably accomplished in their own rights, the Aksemits were aligned that any issue of theirs would nothing less than a walking paragon of good breeding and credit to their family name. From the moment she was educatable, Simza was pressed to be excellent. Manners, diction, appearance, opinions... there was no aspect of Simza's life which was not a day-in-day-out performance of accomplishment. She was taught by the finest private tutors in everything from art history, hunting, and philosophy to world politics and foreign languages.

It was an early, childish display of playful naivete that set Simza on the path that would define her from the time she could barely walk to the year she began attending Durmstrang. Freshly turned four, Simza was in the front row of a performance of her mother's newest ballet with her father, who unreasonably expected his child to be a paragon of manners and self-composure, even at her young age. Instead, as Zoya appeared onstage and began her dance, Simza slid from her chair before Tytus could stop her and ran to the railing, copying her mother's routine from the audience with a surprising measure of competency amidst all the clumsy joy of childhood.

Later, after the sound scolding she recieved from her father for her misbehavior, Zoya took Simza straight to the practice room in their manor that had been heretofore strictly off-limits to the girl and began training her in the foundations of ballet without any further discussion about it. It was Simza's first experience with the duality of something she had taken simple, girlish pleasure in turning into joyless toil, but certainly not her last. Ballet became Simza's life, lived at the unyielding, exacting word of her mother.

Unsurprisingly, Zoya's discipline became Simza's, and she began a relentless pursuit of perfection as if it had been her own in the first place. As the years passed, and Simza's talent began overtaking even Zoya's own, she found her own sort of secret joy in knowing that once she left for Durmstrang, she would only dance on her own terms, for the sheer joy of it. While Zoya and Tytus have little say over their daughter's schedule at school, she is still expected to be flawless in every other aspect of her life.

Simza's first instance of magic was at 7 years old, and she has never been allowed to forget it. Hours into a gruelling day of training with her mother, Simza was both physically and emotionally exhausted. At yet another demand from Zoya that she try the grand jeté again, that her legs weren't turned out enough, her back wasn't straight enough, Simza turned on her mother and let her boiling anger out in a shriek that knocked her mother backwards into the barre and left a sudden shock of bright white hair streaking through Zoya's perfect auburn tresses which mercifully faded back to normal a day later. Still, Zoya was furious, completely disregarding that the first instance of magic ought to be a celebratory event, and punished Simza by making her perform her entire routine from start to finish over again until it was, in Zoya's estimation, perfect.