ZIEGLER, Emma Amelie

Amelie Dumas was a prominent Magizoologist in France, known for her study of creatures with medicinal properties. A recent graduate of Beauxbatons, she was quick-witted, adventurous and unafraid of the untamed. She often spent months backpacking around the mountainous landscapes of Europe in search of the most elusive key to her research: the Phoenix and its tears.

Sebastian Ziegler had dedicated himself to the study of the Merpeople after graduation from Hogwarts. From a very early age, he followed in his father’s footsteps, traveling to far off lands in his youth to study and chronicle a people unlike the witches and wizards he knew. A tried and true Hufflepuff graduate, he took his research on the road, returning to the highlands of Scotland to study the Merpeople indigenous to Scotland’s lochs.

It was there that the pair first crossed paths. A few years later, they found themselves running into each other in the Swiss Alps. After a third interaction in South America, it seemed to be fate that was bringing the pair together. They took a small break from their research and explored Rio de Janeiro together.

From that moment on, the pair was nearly inseparable. They traveled the world — Amelie in search of her animals, Sebastian studying the ancient language of Mermish. They married a few years later and settled down in the South of France with the news of Amelie’s pregnancy.

Amelie retired her hiking boots and her rucksacks to care for their first born, Emma. She was a firecracker of a child, constantly keeping her mother on her toes. Emma was often found digging into her mother’s old supplies in the attic, pulling out her old journals and pretending that she was the one off on an adventure. Her parents cultivated and encouraged her creativity, playing along with her little games.

As she grew older, Sebastian resumed his research, jetting off to the most unsavory parts of Merpeople waters to finish his papers on the politics of mer-colonies. It was dangerous work, but he was safe and always sent his daughter a long letter on Mondays to let her know what he had learned. Emma looked forward to those letters.

When Emma was nearly ten, her father went off on another one of his excursions and involved himself in the Merpeople Politics of the Baltic Sea. He came to know of the power struggle between the two competing colonies and found himself knee deep in the conflict himself. On a brisk December morning, there was a coup, the hierarchy was overthrown and Sebastian was assassinated.

It was Emma who noticed her father’s absence first, as no post arrived from him that day. Amelie called the Ministry and they were able to retrieve his body, but Emma’s mother was never the same, nor was Emma.

Her mother’s binoculars were packed away into storage along with her father’s research and the pair moved to a small cottage at the base of the Swiss Alps. It became a quiet and contemplative life for the pair of them: Amelie instilled in her daughter the importance of caution, observance and preservation. Emma seemed to lose some of the zest for life she once had — her sense of humor grew dead-pan and darker, her eyes lost some of their brightness. But buried deep beneath the surface was the young girl who sought adventure and something more.

At Beauregard Academy, Emma was sorted into Vulpecula. She grew into her own skin there, able to regain some of the creativity and sense of adventure that she had once had. She kept her father’s letters in her trunk, always referring to them when she needed a pick-me-up. Her prized possession was the small, broken piece of sea glass (now the ‘gem’ of a small silver bracelet) from the Mediterranean her father gave to her before his final excursion that fateful December month.