In the spring of 1865, Miss Charlotte Lyra Potter joined the Potter household, the youngest of three and the only girl. Her mother, an avid fan of Pride and Prejudice, named her after one of the characters, though Charlotte forsook this name later in favor of her middle name, Lyra. Since she was born, Lyra was separated from her siblings by both gender and age, and as the older brothers tended to go about their own business, she had very little to do with them early in life. Lottie was, as an infant, a very demanding baby, requiring lots of attention. Her mother, who had apparently been hoping for a girl for some time, doted on her, and from a very early age Lottie quickly became spoiled.

When her oldest brother, Bennet, left for Hogwarts in the fall of 1871, Lyra decided that Darcy must be very lonesome now, and tried to incorporate him, whenever possible, into her games. The boy was not entirely keen on this, especially since she insisted in making (and changing) the rules in every case and reserved the right to banish him should he displease her. Since he was involved in his own studies (to an extent), these events occurred fairly infrequently. Meanwhile, Lyra was beginning to be subjected to her own tutoring and studies, which she loathed. She quickly took a disliking to authority, especially to the word "no," and would often do things simply because she had been told not to. Though sometimes chastised for this, her parents seemed to go easier on her than they might if Darcy or Bennet had affected the same attitude.

Learning how to read and write, however, had the advantage of being able to send letters, which she quickly developed an affinity for. She was especially fond of signing her name, and would practice different ways to sign for hours. During this period, she wrote letters to every relative or friend imaginable, sometimes just for the sake of being able to write something besides just Lottie Lyra Potter over and over again.

Two years later, in 1873, Darcy left for Hogwarts, which did not particularly phase Lyra; she lost an unwilling playmate but gained another person to write letters to, which was just as well. She started to develop her love of dresses, clothing, jewelry, and all things fancy or shiny at this point in her life, and spent her free time with her mother playing dress-up or going shopping, which both women loved. Her nurse made an offhand comment that she is treated like a princess, which she took to heart; for about a year she suspected that her parents actually stole her away from her real parents, the king and queen. Her mother thought that her princess attitude was adorable, and did nothing to discourage it.

In the fall of 1876, it was finally her turn to go away to Hogwarts. She was so excited by this prospect she failed to recognize her mother's failing health until she was already away at school and hearing about it through letters. At this point in her life, nothing had ever really gone seriously amiss for her, and so, though she did hope her mother would recover, she did not put much thought into it as she started school. She was sorted into Slytherin, which suited her fine, although she tended not to get on well with any of the girls who thought they were superior--she was clearly the only superior one. She was the princess.

In October of that same year, her mother died, which sobered Lyra. She saw the loss as an injury done to her, and wildly blamed anyone she could, mostly her father. To spite him, and to "get revenge" for him having "let" their mother die, she purposefully started hanging around with friends that she thought he might disapprove of. This phase lasted only until she grew tired of the mostly-older students. Although she keeps some "unsavory" friends around, she settled instead for rebelling by acting out in class and avoiding her homework like the plague.

1877 brought the Potter family to Hogsmeade. The new home seemed strange without her mother in it, and Lyra got the feeling that they had somehow accidentally left her behind; that perhaps if they could go back to the old house they would find her waiting there, not dead after all. She disliked the new house, and showed her dislike by doing most of her conversing via letter, choosing not to speak much to her father.

During her second year, Bennet graduated, which could make little difference to Lyra, since by now she was well-established with her own little clique of girls, of whom she was clearly the queen bee. The recovery from her mother's death saw a full return of her 'princess' attitude, and some reparations to her relationship with her father and, by extension, the rest of her family. The next year, her third year, her father left for Paris, which helped their relations immensely, since she could now write him (always her favorite method of communication) and request money for new shopping trips, or to complain about the woes of her life, which he responded to with appropriate fatherly concern.

Around 1879, in her fourth year, Lyra discovered boys, though they hadn't yet discovered her. She decided that this would be her new game, and set out to flirt with all the boys. Although she hadn't particularly caught their eye before, the fact that she was showing obvious interest, interest beyond the boundaries of social convention, caught the attention of many. During the first year, however, this lead no further than pseudo-dates in Hogsmeade and gifts of chocolate or candies from admirers. Lyra reveled in the attention, which only grew as she hit puberty and started to become marginally more attractive.

Unfortunately, "boy trouble" was not a suitable excuse when, at the end of firth year, her OWLs came off rather pathetically, with no grade exceeding an E and some of her worse marks reaching D. The girl even managed to secure a "Troll" in History of Magic when, instead of writing essays on the assigned topics, she wrote about why she thought the professor would look better with a slightly different nose and maybe some different hair.

That spring, her older brother Darcy was elected Minister of Magic, which, instead of instilling her with some sort of sense of propriety, only strengthened her feeling that she was invincible: too rich, too pretty, and too successful to ever be really hurt by her acts of rebellion. She started to tease the boys a little more, and went after progressively more "dangerous" targets, expanding her network of possible boy-toys outside of the student population. She enjoyed the more "adult" gifts she was able to get from admirers, though for a few months longer she was still holding onto her virginity. This was lost the fall of her sixth year, and once it was, she found herself engaging in the act more often than even she would have guessed, feeling there was now nothing holding her back.

After sneaking out into Hogsmeade on her own at night and meeting up with one of her male friends, Lyra was outed in the Daily Prophet as one of the eponymous "Hogwarts Hussies." She enjoyed the attention, at least until her brothers took measures to control the backlash and decided she would be betrothed to the rather questionable gentleman she'd been cavorting around with. Relieved that she wouldn't be of a marriageable age for at least another year, Lyra continued business as usual with her Hogwarts beaus. She presumed that once the attention had died down slightly, her brothers would dissolve the betrothal and she'd once again be free to do as she pleased.

As the Christmas holiday approached, Lyra came to a startling conclusion; she was pregnant. Hiding the signs as best she could and tightening her corset down daily in order to maintain her figure, she coasted through until December, but was unable to get through the holiday without a tearful confession to her oldest brother. She wasn't even entirely sure who the father was.

She had expected her brothers to have a magical fix, to be able to make the pregnancy go away just as they had always made her problems go away, and was shocked when they pulled her from school for the next semester. Under the guise of needing to help an aunt with failing health, Lyra Potter left school in the middle of her sixth year (though with a betrothal, everyone reasoned, there was hardly a need for her to acquire her NEWTs – not that she was likely to get many, anyway).

The following months at Aunt Griselda's home in the country sobered Lyra considerable and caused her to be much more serious. She began to grow very attached to the idea of her baby, and resented her brothers for planning to take him or her away after the birth, for deposit she knew not where. She was determined to fight for her child, but when the labor finally came, it was a non-issue; the baby died within hours. Her father's death shortly after gave her a convenient guise for her grief over the loss of her daughter, whom she called Estelle.

At the end of the summer of 1881, a fire raged through Hogwarts and resulted in the death of her betrothed; Lyra was unable to muster up any genuine emotion over his passing, even for the sake of the public. She did, however, worry that her wildness early in life coupled with her new lack of romantic attachment would lead her brothers to try and betroth her again when the family had exited the mourning period for her father. Surreptitiously, she began to correspond with a number of political liberals and eventually began writing to one Mr. Echelon-Arnost.

Although Lyra thought herself too world-weary at this point to believe in silly notions of love, she did like Mr. Echelon-Arnost quite a bit, and thought an arrangement between the two of them might be to both of their benefit. After explaining her situation and her rationale via letter, Lyra proposed marriage – a marriage of convenience, perhaps, but a marriage none the less – to a man she had never once seen in person. Mr. Echelon-Arnost (August, now) accepted, and she made the arrangements necessary to invite him to dinner, to break the news to her brothers.

To say the Potters did not take it well would have been an understatement, and August was banished from the premise and briefly threatened with legal action by Darcy, who was still Minister. Lyra was disappointed, but stubborn, despite the fact that he had failed to mention a few things in his letters that she thought she had a right to know as his fiancée – particularly, the fact that he was a cripple.

He'd also neglected to mention his connection to the by now notorious woman who had, at previous junctures, both tried to trick Lyra's oldest brother into marrying her and then been a part of a plot to kidnap Darcy. When rumors circulated that August had been to see Elsbeth Gisella, Lyra felt certain that he was using her in order to get close to her family and dissolved their arrangement. The resulting heartbreak was the first sign that she had become more attached to August than she had expected.

Lyra tried to move on, but found herself rekindling her conversations with August sooner or later every time they were apart. Her brothers remained adamantly opposed to the relationship – particularly after Amortentia-spiked chocolates from Elsbeth Gisella resulted in Lyra nearly eloping without a second thought in 1882. After some of her familiarity with intercourse reared its head and she attempted to do some very unladylike things, August caught on that she wasn't herself and took her back home, for which he received the barest thanks possible from Bennet before being shoved out the door again.

After a roller-coaster on-and-off affair, Lyra and August eventually mutually decided to quit each other, after meeting once (secretly) to say their goodbyes. Because they're absolute saps, that interaction didn't end as they'd intended, and the two made plans to elope instead, leaving their families and the problems associated with English society behind. On the appointed evening Lyra went to the Forbidden Forest to meet August – but before he arrived, she met a very different fate.

Lyra managed to fight off her attacker, but only after being bitten and severely weakened. Knowing what would happen next, she crawled off into the forest and collapsed—only the come back to consciousness several hours later with severe burns from the mild sunlight which filtered through the trees. She wasn't sure whether she would be disowned by her brothers, but did not want to risk ruining their lives and Darcy's political career – and she could not bear the thought of having to tell August what had happened. She lingered in the Forbidden Forest, hiding from the sun and expecting to die. The rest of the world, meanwhile, assumed that she was dead, and August, in his grief, took to writing lengthy letters to her.

Eventually, receiving his letters and not being able to respond drove her nearly mad, and Lyra sent the briefest letter she could to August. She asked him not to write. He did write, and was so insistent about wanting to see her that she eventually allowed it. Lyra assumed he would run when he discovered her secret, but he took the news… about as well as he could. Being in such close proximity to a human with real life blood, though (particularly one she didn't want to hurt) was dangerous, and she recognized that she needed to leave Hogsmeade. She tried to start a new life (such as it was, in her current condition), but her determination to move on was as short-lived in death as it had been in life. In the fall of 1883 she returned to Hogsmeade to try and see August – and, in doing so, broke her leg falling out of a tree near his window and had to be taken in for assistance. Against her better judgement, she stayed a few weeks as his lover (luckily August had never slept with someone who was alive and thus didn't seem to mind her coldness), but eventually forced herself to leave.

Lyra had no notion that she was still capable of becoming pregnant, but that was exactly what happened. She returned that winter to tell August what had happened, and he made arrangements for her to stay until spring, when she gave birth to a rather sickly, pale boy the pair named Lysander. Labor was difficult to Lyra – too much blood – and she ended up murdering the midwife. August took care of the clean-up, but Lyra didn't trust herself around people after that (and certainly not around someone as fragile as Lysander appeared to be), so she said her goodbyes and left to travel once again, this time more permanently.

Mostly in order to keep herself from being able to return so easily, Lyra went to America. She tried to establish a life for herself in a series of small Muggle towns, where the signs were not quite so visible. She became a nurse, who could work at night without it seeming too strange. From time to time she would receive letters from August, some of which she would respond to. Being a nurse also gave her the opportunity to sneak blood out of the hospital without having to deprive any living humans of it—though she was not above snacking on a few recently-dead bodies, if given the opportunity. Sooner or later, though, her resolution would thin and the façade would crack with a particularly grisly murder, necessitating that she move on and start over somewhere else.

As the years went on she moved north, where the nights were, generally speaking, longer. The periods between her 'slips' grew longer as she gained more self-control. Life moved on. Lyra was always acutely aware of how old August's child would be at various junctures. She forced herself to think of him that way; August's child. It made the fact that she didn't know what the boy looked like feel less like abandonment.

Lyra ventured into magical society only sparingly, but any time she did, she sought out news from Britain. She could occasionally get her hands on a copy of the Daily Prophet, imported and several weeks out of date, but she tried to keep abreast of what was going on as well as she could. She mourned the passing of her oldest brother (could she really be the last of her family left alive? alive,, of course, being only a partially applicable description), and as the years passed, took an increasing interest in politics. She had always been interested in politics, of course (at least since her departure from school), but her 'condition' gave her a new focus. Believing that with the proper support from the magical community, vampires ought to be able to do better than they have been (so many murders in England!), she tentatively started to imagine what life might be like for her were she to live as a vampire openly.

Of course, that would make life very difficult for August and his child, which was what deterred her—until the news of an election in 1887 presented what Lyra saw as the most viable opportunity to start anew in the magical community. Divesting the very meager possessions she'd managed to acquire in her latest town, Lyra set out for England.