Accepted! ~Elle

Your Nickname: Ash / Satyr
Have you read and do you agree to the Code of Conduct?: Yes
How did you find us and decide to write with us? Friend
If you have written other characters here: Yes
If Yes, list them all: Philomenes Kecklepenny, Tae-song Toko.
Is this a Primary or Secondary Character?: Primary

Full Character Name: Josiah Azuka Inkwood
Character Birthday & Age: October 3rd, 1967; thirty-nine at death, forty-one presently.
City & Country of Birth: London, England.
Blood Purity: Pureblood
Alma Mater: Hogwarts; Gryffindor Alumni.


Type of Creature: Vampire
Are they Registered with the Ministry of Magic?: No
Are they considered a 'Dark' Creature?: Yes


Wand: 11.5 inches, holly, phoenix feather core; very rigid, with a twisted shaft. Not that he can use it anymore, obviously.

Physical Description:

Josiah has always been handsome, in youth as well in age. He was still remarkably fit upon entering his forties, thanks to his profession. Unlike most of his kind, his skin is dark brown opposed to candle wax white. His face is fleshed out high cheek bones and a strong jaw, in addition to a wide full mouth. A pair of unnaturally white fangs perch on his lower lip. Every tooth in his mouth has been clearly made for cutting.

His eyes are flat black -- kind of like a shark’s, shiny and blank. The pupils are blown out wide, to accommodate his acute nocturnal vision. In his right eye, a blown blood vessel made a deep red ring around his iris. Josiah’s hair, once worn in long elegantly manicured braids, has been shorn down to the scalp. A dark scruff of beard lurks around his jaw and throat. A thick white scar, deep puncture wounds, ghost the skin on his jugular. If one were to see him shirtless, another knotted scar arcs upward from his right hip to his left ribs.

Though the effect on his body are minimal, Josiah still has the occasional cigarette. It’s more of a human prop, than anything else. He often wears wide brimmed hats to shade his strange face, and tinted glasses to shield his sensitive eyes.


Personality Description:

On the surface Josiah is charm itself, like something from a bygone age when fine manners and courtly gestures were worth something. He was raised in that antique way the old roots pureblood families have, all etiquette and penmanship, piano and fencing. These motions feel even more detached from him now than they ever had in life.

To call his lack of emotion distressing over-estimates his range of feeling. He does worry over this frigid distance, but in that far off gnawing way that will surely fade from him in time. This, too, is cause for alarm. He knows what should be feeling, it is simply that he can’t. The loss of his job, his children, his family, his wife…even two years since his death, little lingers there besides cold shock.

Josiah still likes being around people, though. It makes him feel faintly more normal, when he can imitate the expressions and reactions of humans. He’s gotten rather skilled at feigning emotion, but something in his smile still reads strange. Too stiff, maybe, or too slow in coming. Whatever the case, in spite of his charisma, most people are unnerved by his mere presence.


History:

Josiah Inkwood. The boy was some kind of dream, really. If you’re in Hogwarts now and say that name to your mum, her eyes might go all lovey-soft for second, remembering what he was. Then a sad little simper might tweak her lips, remembering what he is now.

Josie was the first son of two pureblood lines entwined. The Zabinis, spread from England to Italy, and the Inkwoods, an old American pureblood house based out of Louisiana, their highest branches reaching across to the water to the Afmadi of Jamaica. They can trace their blood line back to Azuka Afmadi, younger brother to the patriarch Amadi Afmadi himself, deep in the early 1800s.

Josie’s father, Isaac Inkwood, was instructed at the Red Rocks Academy in Arizona. Shortly after his graduation, he went to the south of France with the family on holiday. While exploring the vineyards of Bordeaux, he met Giada Zabini. He never went back to New Orleans.

They married, they moved to London, they had a child. The boy grew fast, with a handful of siblings in tow, but one thing was agreed among all the family: mummy and daddy loved their Josiah best.  Josie grew, he went to Hogwarts, and was sorted into Gryffindor much to his parents’ delight.

Wealthy, pureblood, handsome, athletic. With those words, in those years, the first image that sprang to mind was a dark mark brandishing, nasty, elitist bastard. Josiah was none of this. There was a quiet majesty about the boy, which he wore with grace. Prefect his fifth year. Quidditch Captain his sixth. Head Boy by seventh. It’s enough to make your teeth rot.

He knew he was the Inkwood prince in an old world of kings, and was sure of his importance. Josiah felt no need to exert this power over others. It simply was. There was King Solomon level of silent brilliance in him, yet there was also warmth and humility to temper that brilliance. For this, he collected friends easily from every house and status. Among these many blossomed an unlikely relationship with a Slytherin girl, Octavia Morgan, two years his junior. They were secretly engaged the year he graduated. Josiah said he wouldn’t marry her proper until he had a career to support her.

It was no shock when he aced his N.E.W.Ts, nor when he pursued  a career as an auror. After his three years of training,  There, as he had in all his endeavors, Josiah flourished.  He kept his promise, too – he married Octavia on his 24th birthday.

As he grew in his career, as did his family. He was assigned among the dangerous ranks of the Hitwizards. Octavia wasn’t happy with this new job, having recently given birth to their first child, but Josiah enjoyed the new responsibility. He served in this position for over a decade, through the birth of his second child, and became numbered among the Senior Aurors. It was in this position that Josiah Inkwood went on his last job.

An illegal vampire was terrorizing small rural towns across the English countryside, but when pursued by the ministry she fled the country into France. Over the course of five years hunting her across Europe, the vampire had killed upwards of seventy muggles. On a tip given by a fellow dark creature, the Auror Corps discovered her hideout in a Ukrainian hamlet, and arranged for a group of Hitwizards to ambush her.

Too bad it was the other way around.

The little group of them, three in all, proceeded with hesitation at the dark farm house. Josiah was the senior among them, so he entered first. They were separated for but a moment, but a moment was all it took. It's not hard to finish it from here.

The two younger aurors dissolved into panicked violence; it was messy, but the vampire and her hideout were nothing more than a burnt husk by the end. Josiah Inkwood was the only mortality.

Well. Sort of.

The rest of the story is sad, yet simple. The two aurors apparated the body to St. Mungo's back in England, where Josiah was pronounced dead on arrival. But it wasn't the morgue for him, not just yet. When they told the circumstances of death to the orderlies, they wordlessly took the body to the first floor for creature-induced injuries and strapped his wrists to the bed. Josiah reanimated an hour or so later in total silence, and promptly bit off a healer's fingers. She'd been examining his neck wounds.

He kept ties with his auror friends, but there was a frigid distance between them now. Octavia and Josiah quietly divorced two months after the incident; though there was no need, they found, because her husband was legally dead.

These days, Josiah is unemployed and childless. At first his wife sent him money, until he told her to stop. He’s been working menial nightshift jobs, but it’s rarely enough to pay rent. He’s been squatting in abandoned houses around London. Josiah keeps up letter correspondence with his family, but Octavia’s obvious anxiety whenever he suggests seeing the boys is enough to keep him from ever coming around.


Sum up your character in one paragraph:

Josiah is a man -- well, hardly a man at all -- who's had four decades of wealth, love, respect, and power stripped from him to the bones. Once an esteemed member of wizarding society, he now lingers on the outskirts of London as a creature of the night. For one who once walked such a thin and lawful line, he's faintly surprised to find his sense of morality is slipped away.