1862 | Porphyria is born, the third child – and first daughter – to Eamon and Lowri, upper class Irish sort-of-eccentric poets. She is named after Robert Browning’s Porphyria’s Lover (published in 1836, originally as Porphyria), because naming one’s child after a psychopath’s murder victim is always a course of wise parenting. (She’s grown to rather like it, though. Besides, if one is to talk of Browning poems, she could have been Pauline, and what a soul-crushingly pitiful name that is!)
1863 | A year and a bit later, Don Juan is born. (Oh no. A future terror in the making.) As a one-year-old, she does not pay him much mind.
1865 | Christabel is born, a sister!
1867 | Shalott is born, another sister! Porphyria is now old enough to be of the ravenous reading age, and having managed to comprehend her name poem as more than a soothing bedtime story, she performs her first act of magic. (Which is to magically shear off most of her hair one morning, before she knows what she is doing, but clearly lest she give anyone the satisfaction of being strangled to death by it.)
Ozymandias also goes to Hogwarts this year.
1869 | Another sister, Lycoris!
1870 | Endymion goes to Hogwarts.
1873 | Time to go to Hogwarts, herself. Porphyria, very much a product of her parents with an inquiring mind and a penchant for individuality, is sorted into Ravenclaw. Despite her oddities, she finds some friends to whom, with the advantages of time, she becomes quite devoted.
1874 | Ozymandias graduates and Don Juan begins Hogwarts.
1875 | In third year, she adds Ancient Studies, Ghoul Studies and Care of Magical Creatures to her classload.
1876 | Christabel joins them at Hogwarts.
1877 | Endymion graduates.
1878 | Porphyria completes fifth year with a mixed bag of results; she continues with Ancient Studies, COMC, Herbology, Potions and Transfiguration for NEWTs. Shalott joins the Hogwarts crew.
1880 | She graduates with fairly impressive NEWTs, though without much intention to put them to any practical use. That does not mean, however, that Porphyria is amenable to the thought of marriage. Ew @ those dull Jane Austen ideals. Still, everyone seems to think it is a good idea to see her have a season. Which may have boded better had Porphyria actually turned up to her own Coming Out ball. (She gets dragged in from outside eventually, but all she can do is shrug and suppose at least it gave her an aura of mystery.)
The rest of the, er, season, sees a similar level of success. She likes costume events well enough to show up, doesn’t mind paying social calls to friends sometimes, and begrudgingly uses the more boring occasions (and gentlemen) as prime time to daydream and fish for poetic inspiration.
1881 | With nothing but continual – unsuccessful! – prodding to marry upon the horizon in season after season, Porphyria throws herself into proclaiming her will to be a spinster and writing poetry. The occupation of poet, after all, is a family affair, and certainly not one they can complain about! Although she is a raging perfectionist, on the whole Phyri has to conclude she’s quite good, and embarks on this career by getting a selection of poems published.
Don Juan graduates. The ‘Endymion, The Veela and The Hammock’ incident occurs. (Porphyria is both disappointed and Very Relieved not to have witnessed this.)
1882 | She publishes her first complete collection of poems.
1883 | Christabel graduates. After the unfortunate loss of her school-era pet owl (barn owl – Wolly; short for Wollstonecraft; after Mary – whose death, though she was fond of the creature, is greeted by more contemplation than mournfulness) Porphyria kidnaps discovers a baby raven and wheedles her parents into letting her keep it. The argument ‘but Charles Dickens had one’ works fairly well, and, well, everyone in the household knows about Byron’s pets. So. Any one of them could be much worse. (She names the raven Pluto.)
1884 | The season over in Hogsmeade is punctuated by plague and fire. Now that, in Porphyria’s opinion, is a much better representation of her feelings on the ‘season’. To cheer everyone up, her second anthology of poems is released, rife with gruesome dramatic monologues, satires, a few odes to death and a long, morbid ballad tale about a poor orphan, who, after a life of isolation and rejection, attempts to reanimate the corpses of their lost family: these quasi-inferi remember little of their former lives, and soon overthrow their creator’s will to kill the orphan, whose body is left alone once more to rot.
1885 | Shalott graduates – and is off to finishing school. Phyri does not envy her in the slightest, and makes a mental note to send her letters and packages and pray for her soul.
1887 | Her friends, unfortunately, are falling one by one – like dominoes – to marriage, a sort of epidemic to which she is perfectly immune. Even Ozy gets married this year, which is ridiculous. Porphyria, inching ever closer to official spinsterhood, is still hanging around writing poetry, and likes to think she has branded lost cause across her forehead rather competently by now. She perhaps wouldn’t say no to a tragic affair with a tortured spirit or a secret courtship with an unsuitable man six years her junior a la Emily and Robert Browning, nor would she mind ending up living in Italy. But marriage, bah! She’d rather a lover strangle her than settle for that.
What she gets, instead, at the end of this year is a forced kiss under the cursed mistletoe from one Auror, Enoch Rosier. She does not take this well.
1890 | In February, coming into contact with a cursed Pictish comb sees Phyri spending the better part of four months trapped as a talking wren before she is Untransfigured. It is an Experience. The poetry anthology published at the end of the year is much inspired by this, as macabre as usual, and entitled The Winter King.
1891 | Phyri accompanies Ophelia on the Santa Antonina cruise and when it is shipwrecked they are nearly drowned in the process, which, in her opinion, is a holiday well spent. She also gets to know Mrs. November Malfoy, who is... interesting.
