Appearance

Elspeth is rather small for her age. She has to look up to meet the eyes of most of her peers.

Elspeth has long, brown hair that reaches her lower back. It's rather unruly, so she likes to have her aunt braid it when she can, but that isn't always an option, so sometimes she just lets it hang free. It isn't curly, but it is usually quite messy. Her mom tried to introduce a muggle straightener once, which Elspeth liked, but then she was disappointed to learn that the electronic straightener wouldn't function much around magic, so it was a rare luxury. On occasion, she likes to put flowers or feathers in her hair. It makes her feel pretty.

Her eyes are a soft gray-blue, always looking thoughtful. Her eyes move far more quickly than her mouth does, as she tries to observe everything possible around her. Her innate curiosity causes them to almost sparkle whenever there's something new around.

She wears different clothes around the inn depending on her mood, ranging from leggings and sweaters to skirts and t-shirts. She does have a few casual robes that magical children might wear at home to emulate their parents, but she doesn't wear them very much. She thinks they're too garish. The only constant in her clothing choices is the unintentional use of mismatched socks. She almost never remembers to match her socks properly.

Personality

Elspeth is very quiet. Not because she has nothing to say, but because speaking to ghosts and having to be quiet while she listened to them so that muggle guests wouldn't see her talking to herself and suspect anything has led to her being a very thoughtful and pensive girl before speaking.

Even though she never speaks without thinking, the most common word in Elspeth's vocabulary is 'why.' When her mom tells her to sprinkle sage into the poultice she's mixing, Elspeth wants to understand the purpose of the sage. When her aunt insists upon the importance of understanding older magics that aren't necessarily taught in school, Elspeth asks why they matter so much. When the war hero ghost within the castle Elspeth lives in tells her the importance of refusing to let an insult pass without confrontation, Elspeth wants to understand his reasoning.

She always asks why.

Hearing so many different opinions from muggles, her magical family, and even the ghosts, Elspeth tends to be a rather empathetic girl. She listens to the opinions and feelings of others, feeling genuine care for them. From the arrogant muggle bragging to his friends about house easily he could afford to stay at the Wynnstone Inn to the mean old woman who yelled at Elspeth, calling her a creep for sitting quietly in the Inn's dining hall during supper, Elspeth never lets their behavior bother her. She puts herself in their shoes and tries to understand, of course, why they act the way they do instead of blaming them.

Even with the importance she places on listening to other people and learning about them, Elspeth herself is quite a closed book. She rarely opens up about her own insecurities or any facts about her beyond the surface level ones. She doesn't talk about how she wishes her mom and aunt would tell her more about her dad. She doesn't talk about her insecurities in her abilities to perform magic. She doesn't talk about any of it to other people. She tends to turn the conversations away from herself, acting as a sort of social 'mirror.'

History and Background

Maeve Wynn was a Squib, living in a small, coastal Welsh town for all her life. Since she was incapable of magic, it was no surprise that she would fall in love with a muggle. Someone as incapable of magic as she was. Someone who wouldn't make her feel that tiny twinge of jealousy she felt when her sister came round.

Emyr was a kind man. A man with dreams. Maeve spent many nights that winter watching the waves hit the coast as he told her all about his bold plans for the future. He would be a doctor, curing the world one patient at a time. It was easy to fall in love with such a kindhearted man.

The pregnancy was a surprise. Maeve couldn't possibly ruin Emyr's lofty dreams with a surprise pregnancy. They weren't even twenty, for God's sake, so she did the only thing she could think of. She wrote a letter to her sister and they left together, leaving Emyr behind.

The Wynnstone Inn is well known in muggle circles. Muggles see the website and its shiny promises of the 'Most Paranormal Experience in the UK!' and book rooms, fancying themselves paranormal investigators.

The cost of staying at the inn included the cost of the room, a communal dinner on the night of check in, and a communal breakfast the following morning with the other guests and the Wynn family. Lunch and snacks were available upon request, and Elspeth's mom especially loved providing herbal tea to the guests. The dining hall had a large number of tables, so there was plenty of room to match the number of sleeping chambers they had available. Some people stayed only a night at a time, while others stayed weeks upon weeks at a time.

The Inn itself wasn't an ordinary inn, obviously. Originally, many centuries ago, the Wynnstone castle, going by a different name at the time, obviously, was a smaller lord's castle used as an outpost in various border skirmishes with other local lords. Years passed, and the castle traded hands many times until eventually a wizard who was down on his luck sold the castle for far below its value, a mere pittance of galleons.

Elspeth's mom and aunt were the ones to buy it, relocating the three of them from Wales to Scotland.

When they arrived, Elspeth was but a baby, unable to form a single word just yet. It quickly became apparent that the castle, build long before the International Statute of Secrecy, had housed muggles and magical people alike, evident by the old tomes, charmed to only be legible by those with magic of their own, and the very common presence of ghosts.

While muggles couldn't see the ghosts, not really, beyond the secondary feeling of their effects on the environment, Elspeth and her witch aunt could see them quite clearly. To the baby Elspeth, they were just transparent, silvery-blue people. She babbled at them and, as she grew up, talked to them like she would talk to the other guests in the castle-turned-inn.

Back to that topic, the sisters juggled caring for Elspeth and cleaning and restoring the castle to a more pristine state. They left the rustic, lived in atmosphere, but cleaned the cobwebs and fixed the broken support beams and windows. It was quickly becoming apparent that maintaining the castle properly would be a lot of work, and expensive to boot, so to come out even for the galleons they'd spent, they decided to convert the castle into an Inn.

Maeve Wynn, Elspeth's mom, is a squib, but she dabbles in herbal remedies and the like. She mostly interacts with the muggle guests within the inn. She denies vehemently the fact that she preys upon muggle tourists with her old folk remedies, since a lot of the ingredients are actually used to treat the things she claims they treat, but without magic of her own, she can't actually make magical potions or poultices, so the effectiveness is a shadow of what it could be. Still, even though she's a squib, Maeve never shies from teaching Elspeth her own opinions on magic: that, even for muggles, magic exists in the form of stories, of songs sang through the generations. She insists that it's a subtle magic, but a magic nonetheless.

Nessa Wynn, Elspeth's aunt, is a witch, and she is stubbornly and apologetically strange. She carries her wand in her sleeve at all times, keeping backup wands she purchased during her career with the Ministry hidden throughout the inn. It isn't due to paranoia, though. She just tends to clumsily misplace her wand on occasion. She has an education in magic that all Hogwarts students have, of course, but she has a remarkable appreciation for older forms of magic over the modernized spells and incantations: she especially loves runes and magical vows or pacts.

Elspeth grew up within the Wynnstone Inn conversing with ghosts on a daily basis. The muggle guests that came to the inn only say a quiet girl sitting in the corner and reading her books, but the truth was that she was pretending to read while listening to ghosts' stories. She had a deep fascination for the stories of the ghosts that lived in the castle. Some, like the librarian, taught her history of the local area, while others, like the ghost who claimed to have been a war hero under the lord who originally built the castle, told her stories of great battles and loves lost.

When she wasn't speaking with ghosts, Elspeth liked to explore the castle. It was a smaller castle, of course, but even so there were hidden passages and blocked off staircases to the upper battlements that her aunt liked to pretend she didn't know Elspeth was using. When the adults weren't working, and Elspeth wasn't exploring or talking to ghosts, Elspeth did receive an education. The good thing about the castle was that many of the oldest books were intact, and educating Elspeth on basics of literature, maths, and even science was quite easy in such a place.

First Instance of Magic

At six years old, Elspeth was exploring the grounds surrounding Wynnstone castle with her aunt. Atop the nearby river, there was a large rock the pair liked to sit on and braid each other's hair or toss stones into the river, but today was an especially rainy day, so it was a recipe for disaster.

Nessa was walking at a slow, casual pace behind Elspeth, watching the child burn her energy as she ran toward the river.

"Careful, little doxy!" Nessa called over the rain.

Elspeth turned to hear her aunt better, and her foot hit the slippery moss of one of the rocks she was running on. In an instant, she was tumbling down toward the river. Nessa sprinted as fast as she could toward the accident, her wand at the ready, but she needn't have bothered.

When she got to the cliffside, about a twelve-food drop to the river, Elspeth appeared to be floating there. On further inspection, she wasn't quite floating, but had somehow accidentally rendered herself weightless. Caught in a breeze like a feather, Elspeth wafted up onto the cliffside, where her aunt quickly caught her.

Year One

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Year Two

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Year Three

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Year Four

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Year Five

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Year Six

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Year Seven

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