╰ °✧ that’s SYBILL TRELAWNEY and SHE seems to look a lot like ANYA CHALOTRA. according to ministry files, the HALFBLOOD used to attend HOGWARTS and be in SLYTHERIN. now, they’re 24 and is A FORTUNE TELLER. a family photo with multiple faces torn off, the glowing amber eyes of a black cat in a dark room, piles of dusty books never touched by the hands which bought them, the constant half-decay of everything even the air in your lungs, fingerprints leaving stains on the smoothness of a crystal ball are the best way to describe them. it doesn’t say in their file, but word around the street is that they’re NEUTRAL.
( tw: memory loss. )
Cassandra Trelawney was a seer whose reputation preceded her no matter where she travelled. Her gift was unparalleled and gave an eminence to the family name that she was certain that would never be tarnished. Four generations later and Sybill Trelawney was born to a melancholic mother and a seemingly permanently exasperated father.
She and her twin brother were still learning to walk, holding hands, when her father left. There was no grand argument, no pleading ultimatum, he was just there one day and gone the next. It was hard to tell if Sybill was affected by it, it was hard to tell if anything affected her.
The only connection to the sight and the Trelawney name was her two young children, yet Sara Trelawney became Sabrina Trelawney. She became a floating mystic, with a strong connection to the other side where her dearly departed husband resided. It was a tissue of lies, created for the sole benefit of keeping herself alive. She had no gift herself, being a muggle and not exactly interested or intune with the magic that had been her husband’s and was now her children’s. What she did know, was how to exploit it.
Sybill’s childhood seemed like a game at the time, but as she got older she realised it for what it was. Her mother, holding seances in a room that was closed off the rest of the time, her children using magic they barely knew how to control to affect the room around them. It was great fun to her, giggling with her brother as another old woman cried to see her dead husband. She didn’t truly understand the gravity of death; for her it was how the family spent their days and made their living. It was how she and her brother got praise from a mother who was absent at the best of times, the two of them determined to stick together through thick and thin.
The stories of her great-great-grandmother’s gift slowly faded from her mind as she rationalised the things she was seeing under her mother’s wing. She saw how easy it was to trick people, how foolish they seemed and how lucrative a small lie could be. By the time she was eleven and ready to go to school, she knew more about being a con-artist than she did about her own magic.
When she arrived at Hogwarts, with half of the things on her supply list missing, Sybill was sorted into Slytherin house and was promptly underwhelmed by everything there was to see in the school. Self aware as she was, she knew she would never fit in with the high and mighty purebloods at the school, especially not with holes in her robes and doodles in her textbooks. So she kept to herself, more than happy with the company she found there.
Her independence from her peers didn’t lend her any help with her school work though, pushing along at the middle of all her classes. She never outright failed, but she never did any more than exactly what she had to do to pass. She was happy with being average.
The reliance that her mother had on her children, had built her entire enterprise on was damaged in a way that never really recovered when she found out that neither of her ‘talented’ kids were allowed to perform magic outside of school. Her relationship with her mother crumbled in an afternoon and whilst her brother attempted year after year to fix the breach, Sybill never truly respected her mother again.
Years apart, in different houses and in different classes began to push the siblings apart, especially as he returned home for holidays and Sybill remained at the castle.
By the time of her sixth year, the ties between her and her brother were almost non existent and when their mother died that spring, Sybill almost felt free. Freedom, at least in a sense, came in an argument with her brother that was unlike Sybill had ever experienced. She had been used to living on a plateau of ambivalence, but their argument was the most heated of her life. Her lack of involvement in anything to do with their mother’s funeral or sorting out her possessions was the last straw for her brother and although they spent another year at school together, Sybill didn’t see him again.
When she graduated, her mediocre grades lent themselves to her getting employed in mediocre professions. Anything where she couldn’t be paid enough to make it seem worth her while, but jobs with enough responsibility that he got fired again and again and again. On her last few knuts, she found herself in a pub, desperate to buy just one more drink before they shut for the night. In a moment of desperation and vague learned skills from when seances hadn’t kept them going, she offered the barkeeper a palm reading in exchange for a drink.
The simple idea sparked a flame, a reminder that as a child she had been able to keep the con up - why wouldn’t she be able to as an adult? Her first job was there, in the same pub. She got a room and food, in exchange for being a permanent fixture in the pub to give members of the public palm readings and eventually, crystal ball seeings. It all seemed so terribly simple to her. People didn’t want someone who could tell them the truth about their future, they wanted someone who could give them vague, hopeful statements of a potential future and Sybill was more than ready to do whatever it took to keep herself alive.
The seat in the pub eventually became a shop in Knockturn Alley, one she could have all to herself. She decorated it with the sort of tat she remembered the old muggle ladies going crazy for at her mother’s house, trinkets that seemed mystical and incense burning in holders that she found on stall. For the first time, Sybill had what she truly felt was a home and her isolated nature had allowed her to make sure that no-one would remember her from school, or remember how the gift she was now professing had never before seen the light.
Sybill did her best to ignore the war - if she had learnt anything from her particular life experience, it was that if she kept herself quiet enough, low enough in her seat, the shifting winds of change would barely ever ruffle her hair. She felt quite safe in her shop in Knockturn Alley. Until a few weeks ago.
It was something that she shouldn’t have even noticed, but there was an absence of a memory that felt wrong to her in a way she didn’t have the words to name. Her first true prophecy was made, but Sybill remained none the wiser.
In the days and weeks after the black spot in her memory, Sybill’s paranoia- previously only a gentle whisper in the back of her head - has become a loud roar that she’s found it harder and harder to ignore.
Convinced that she is being followed, she’s taken to shutting up shop and opening at strange times of the day, going to places she’s never been before. The nervous energy she feels herself shrouded in is nothing like the ambivalence with which she normally greets everything else and beyond freaking her out, it’s started to affect her business.
The vaguely hopeful prophecies she used to give are becoming darker by the day as she worries about her own safety. She keeps going though, knowing that the con is the only thing she’s good at and that in the darkest of times, people are replying more and more heavily on heralds of the future. Still, she cannot shake the feeling of importance of that black spot in her memory, nor the feeling that someone is watching her. She’s sure she could be fine, if only she could remember what she’s forgotten.
