Approved Gryffindors

[Adrian Hollows]

Approved Gryffindors:

Ashlyn Swallow G5

[Adrian Hollows]

Name: Ashlyn Swallow
House: Gryffindor
Blood: Pureblood
Age: 15
Year: Fifth
Wand: 11 inches, phoenix feather, cherry wood.

Appearance ( a description of what your character looks like.): Ashlyn has shoulder-length straight blonde hair, often left down because she can’t be bothered to do more than brush it in the mornings. Her eyes are pale blue, sometimes criticized as being a ‘washy’ colour. At a little above average height for her age, she at least doesn’t have to wear heels all the time as some of her friends prefer to.

Biography (Include information about the characters history, family, personality and hobbies):
Ashlyn’s parents had never really wanted any children at all. They were both hard-working business people who put what they wanted first. Neither Lindsay nor Stephen Swallow were ready for a baby. She was an inconvenience, a waste of time, and she knew it from a young age. Until she was three, Ashlyn had been passed around from aunts to grandmothers to distant cousins during the years while her parents worked tirelessly. Then, Uncle James, the eldest brother of her mother, stepped in and offered to raise her until she had to go to Hogwarts.

The seven years of her life that Ashlyn lived with her uncle was when she felt most secure, and they helped to form her into the person she is today. James Ellison was a musician and he played lots of different instruments, but his favourites were always the violin and the piano. He had started teaching Ashlyn how to play the piano after her fifth birthday and he found that the best compliment he could give her was telling her how proud he was. James hadn’t particularly wanted to take his niece in to his home and his life, but he had seen the way she was treated by his little sister and her husband. It wasn’t right and, if they weren’t careful, Ashlyn would grow into an unloved, rebellious woman. Despite his misgivings about the plan, he soon started to enjoy the sight of an eager face lingering by his piano and, later, his violin.

For her sixth birthday, James took her to meet the craftsman who had made his violin. When she realised what her uncle had planned, Ashlyn immediately got to work with childish enthusiasm, talking to the craftsman animatedly as the three of them designed her first violin. It was the first time she had ever been so talkative to anyone she didn’t know. She took to the instrument eagerly, although she didn’t seem very talented at the start. But, as James always reminded her, she had skill somewhere in her fingers because it ran in the family.

James’ death devastated her ten year old self, especially because there was no one she could possibly blame for taking her only father-figure away from her. “It was simply his time to go,” the healer comforted her gently. After that, Ashlyn withdrew into herself. For once, her parents had taken a few days off work, perhaps thinking to help their daughter through her pain and unhappiness, but she simply ignore them, staring out of the window with one hand on the violin that had been James’ last present to her. It was to have been for her eleventh birthday in a few months, more fitting to her than the one she had received on her sixth birthday, as the letter accompanying it informed her.

Hogwarts was a place to escape to after her beloved uncles death and to recover from the pain of losing the only person who had actually wanted her. Ashlyn isn’t a fool, she’s always known that her parents didn’t want her and, rather than be depressed over being unloved and unwanted, she focused her energy on getting to an arrangement which would suit them all. Her parents agreed and an official contract was drawn up between them. If Ashlyn got into Gryffindor, just as her parents and their families had, then she could live by herself during the summer, in the house that James had left for her. The Sorting Hat wasn’t happy with the idea, claiming that, contract or no contract, Gryffindor wasn’t the right place for her and that, if she wouldn’t accept Slytherin, would she at least accept Ravenclaw since it was closer to her true nature. However, if there is one thing Ashlyn knows even better than her music it’s how to be stubborn and, once again, she got her own way.

The Hat was right, Ashlyn admitted after a few days in her common room. Gryffindors weren’t her type of people at all but she both could and would learn to tolerate them for seven years. Now fifteen, she’s grown into a pretty young woman, looking a lot like her mother much to her displeasure, but Ashlyn refuses the offers of the boys who want to take her out on a date. She doesn’t trust people and she especially doesn’t trust the idea of relationships. Leave her alone with her violin and her piano; keep away if you have any ideas of romance. Ashlyn simply isn’t interested, her childish dreams of fairytale endings and ‘happily ever afters’ died when James did.