The Heiress of Slytherin

How the Ivy Grows

The Stone family was, in a word, odd. Athemar Stone was proud and tall, and left everyone who met him with the impression that he was a highly intelligent man with refined tastes, a natural born sense of dignity and class, and an unshakable self-assuredness that left his acquaintances with a feeling of jealous awe.

Most of these impressions were accurate; Athemar was indeed incredibly smart, and his predisposition towards luxury lent him much more grace than he likely deserved in his upper-class social circles. The last impression however, was decidedly wrong.

It is often the case with people, that the ones who seem the most intimidating, self-satisfied and assured, are the ones who are the most deeply insecure. Athemar was not in the least bit the exception to this rule, and he spent a great deal more of his time wishing to be perceived as impressive, than he did striving to actually be so.

He was not a cruel man persay, but he was decidedly cold, and many people who had been friends with him for the greater part of their life, when asked, could not recall a single instance in which they had seen him smile nor heard him laugh in all the time they'd known him.

His wife, Kyria Stone, was his equal in every sense on the surface. She was a fiercely beautiful woman, with flashing eyes and midnight black hair, and she held so much power in her gaze that on the rare occasion that people happened to make eye contact with her, the feeling was somewhat akin to the unpleasant sensation one experiences when dreaming that they have woken up in a public place entirely naked.

She rarely spoke in public settings, choosing instead to stand solemnly beside her husband, letting her eyes roam about the room with a look of mild distaste hidden among the ribbons of blues and greens. Athemar evidently thought he must have looked quite impressive with such a wife on his arm, but everyone who saw them could quite agree that he was more her ornament that she his.

Upon a first glance, one may assume that Kyria was a cold, cruel person, but in reality this was far from the truth. Her husband, obsessed with impressions that he was, was as proud of his wife's beauty as he was ashamed of who she truly was.

Kyria Stone was a siren. She had been cast out of her colony in shame and disgusted outrage when they learned that she was pregnant with a child, and that the father was a wizard. It had been in a moment of impulsive rage and defiance that she had seduced the Athemar, neither caring who the other was, her only focus on challenging her mother on something which she now thought back to sadly, as being quite ridiculously small in the span of things.

Had she not been the daughter of the chieftess, it is likely she would have been torn to shreds by friends and family, but instead she left with only her life, alone and afraid, with just Athemar to look to for safety and hope for her child.

As a man whose interests lay as far away from romance as humanly possible, but who desired an heir, for more reasons than he cared to, or could, admit, he found the situation entirely agreeable to his interests and married the heartbroken siren as rapidly as he could, forgoing the pomp and circumstance his pride would've liked, in favor of keeping her identity and lack of high-class relations as private as possible.

It was their child that revealed Kyria's most tenderly beautiful nature. A daughter in whom the siren took the utmost pride. In her she saw her own complex eyes swirling back at her, her own flashing temperament, her own sharp features and proud stance. In a world where she was surrounded by people who were not allowed to know who she truly was, her daughter, the last remaining connection to her colony, was the dearest thing in her entire world.

Medusa Ivy Stone was just as devoted to her mother as her mother was to her, and the two were inseparable from each other. Athemar had been the one to name her Medusa, his own private concession of a secret he held, which nobody else was privy to. Kyria had chosen the middle name Ivy.