Anton Wulfram Elroark / Age 41 / Transfiguration Professor
It must be noted that Anton's appearance is somewhat deceptive, as explained under the History section.
Anton appears as if in poor health; he is gaunt, standing at 6'1", with hollow cheekbones and a livid complexion. His nose always has a pink tinge to it, especially when he is seen outdoors (a fairly rare phenomenon). His lips are pale and chapped. Several old scars run from his temples to his jaw. His long black hair, which is greying at the temples, is coarse and pulled back in a ponytail. His eyes, cool and pearl-grey, rest behind large, but thinly rimmed glasses. Taxed by the many years of his dogged self-discipline is Anton's wary visage, of which his often furrowed brows deepen the surrounding lines & wrinkles of his face.
He has a preference for fitted clothing that allows for free movement, and thus, avoids anything that drags, like most robes. As he is sensitive to the cold, he normally wears several layers: a high collared, dark burgundy jacket made of insulating lambskin leather over a pinstripe dress-shirt and some other layers. Yet, his hands remain clammy. He completes his attire with dark slacks and pointed, leather oxfords.
Anton speaks with a slight rasp and is found coughing every so often to clear his throat. His voice is relaxed and hollow, as if the words he speak come from somewhere distant. He is brief and to the point, even dismissive, to indicate indifference. To some students, he speaks with disdain.
"The-Man-Who-Appears-Out-of-Nowhere"
As Anton was trained briefly as an Auror and worked years as a Curse Breaker, he has keen reflexes and instincts. Despite giving off a sickly and frail impression, Anton simultaneous exudes a tough exterior characteristic of most Aurors and Curse Breakers. He is quite introverted and his presence is rather unsettling to others. He has an eerie manner of silently observing others and will not look away even when caught. In fact, he has never looked away before the other one has done so first. He walks slowly with shoulders drawn slightly forward, hands in his pants pockets; he does not like to create noise when he walks and is very careful to muffle his footsteps, especially when ascending a staircase. He does not wear robes due to the noise created by the flapping fabric. Perhaps as a result of this, he is often stated as "appearing out of nowhere," subsequently giving his victims a scare.
He is demeaning to his students and is quick to criticize. It is rare to hear a compliment from him. He cannot stand unfocused and slow-learners, and when he encounters such a student, he would raise his voice in frustration. Once, he had cried out to a poor, frightened first year, "Your performance is so egregious that I could inflict the death curse on myself!" And then he had turned away in disgust while some students, the ones who were not shocked, held back their giggles. These students were given detention.
However, he would feel strangely apologetic afterward and would stop to apologize to the student after class. He does it all with a kind of cold formality.
He is much more approachable outside of class, however. This is because he is very receptive to students who are willing to seek extra help, for in his view, these are the students who deserve his respect.
Lastly, Anton does not condone senseless chattering in class. He does not hesitate to deduct house points or even give detention to these students, and students often find him unfair in this. But once out of class, he merely walks away from troublemakers as though they are none of his business. To him, his job as a professor is strictly confined to the classroom.
Anton is erudite, self-sufficient (mistrustful), perceptive, and will go to great lengths to obtain what he is after. Though at one point he would often employ manipulative means, he now only retains the vestige of that and relies mostly on honest work. He is diligent and rarely seen resting, though at a cost to his health. Due to his dependable & efficient nature, he rarely breaks his promises. He does not play favorites in his classroom based on meritless factors, such as the house that the student belongs in. He will readily criticize & punish even those who have earned his respect if they frustrate him.
Anton is impersonal and somewhat misanthropic. He lacks patience with poorly performing students and often treats his students with disdain. This is because he sets extremely high standards for both himself and his students. These high standards put Anton in a perpetually sullen mood, with adverse effects on his health, which he cares very little for. Despite being a fair teacher, he is incredible discriminatory of vampires, werewolves, and other creatures he considers as below him. Thus, he also has a strong distaste for muggles, although that sentiment does not extend to muggle-born witches and wizards.
And here begins Anton's turbulant journey to unhappiness.
Part I: Born into the wrong family, the young & reclusive Anton learns of loneliness and his path in life.
Anton was born to parents who were both Aurors. They were rambunctious Gryffindors during their years at Hogwarts, and would name their first son Anton, a name meaning "to go into battle" in Russian. Indeed, combat was his parents' second nature. They would fight and make up all in a matter of seconds, and Anton often shut himself inside his bedroom to avoid having to listen. As for Anton's middle name, he was named after a colleague of his parents who had died on some high profile mission.
He grew up listening to his parents' recount of Wulfram, all the dangerous missions he had been on, and Anton came to believe that it was his life purpose to die in battle. Growing up, it was the only thing that he knew. He thought he would die young and so he made use of every second of his day in a sort of quiet solitude. He barely slept, as it was, to him, a waste of time. Through his keen perception, Anton could tell that his parents were uncomfortable with his reticence and were relieved when they later gave birth to two gregarious daughters.
When the third daughter arrived, Anton found that she was quiet like him. He spent much of his time with her, teaching her to read and telling her about the things he'd learned from the books he studied. But she, too, grew up to enjoy the outdoors with the rest of the family, and Anton, though he retained a fondness for her, was back to being alone. He would barely ever step out of the house.
At Hogwarts, Anton was sorted into Slytherin (though the Sorting Hat also mentioned a distinct streak of Hufflepuff), whereas all of his sisters would end up in Gryffindor like their parents.
Part II: His promising prospect as an Auror comes to a halt when he gets thrown behind the bars of Azkaban.
During Anton's time at Hogwarts, he appeared as a polite and mild-mannered boy who would study diligently and make the right friends - those whom he felt would benefit him. His favorite subject had been Arithmancy, which proved useful to him when he became a Curse Breaker. However, he had intended to become an Auror like his parents, as he craved for the respect of being one. But then he had planned to move onto serving as the Minister for Magic once the opportunity struck. Everyone saw him as a promising upstart.
As it were, he had all the right qualifications and was receiving training in "Stealth and Tracking" when his dreams came to a screeching halt. He was nineteen, young and brash then, and would make a stain on his criminal records the day he caught a young vampire sinking her fangs into somebody's cat (he had noticed the collar). In his eyes, a vampire who lacked such inhibition would go on to attack humans. The vampire had stopped feeding, dropping the cat that was still alive, upon noticing his presence. As she stepped forward towards him with blood smeared across her mouth, Anton felt only disgust and an instinct to kill...
His whole life he had been striving for the day he would become an Auror, but just one lapse of judgment and he was deemed unfit. He was deemed too rash and dangerous, unfit for the clearheaded judgment required of Aurors. They criticized his action, proclaiming that even in self-defense, there would have been a number of ways of going about it, and killing was not one of them.
He was prosecuted and his trial would last for quite awhile with fiery animal rights activists and vampire rights activists vying to influence his verdict. His trial had made headlines on the The Daily Prophet. The animal rights activists portrayed him as someone who championed a sense of justice for animals while the vampire rights activists portrayed him as a bigot who had prejudiced motives. The latter was correct; he did not view vampires as beings. The truth was, he had beheaded her due to the overwhelm of disgust he had felt. In that moment, he had felt convinced that she would go for him next. It chilled his bones to imagine his blood smeared across her mouth. He would not allow it. No...
While Anton burned inside with fear and anger at himself, at the situation, he presented himself to the Wizengamot in a composed manner throughout. Fortunately for Anton, the wizarding community at large still held an unfavorable view towards vampires, and because the vampire did in fact pose a threat, Anton was sentenced to merely five years in Azkaban. Those who fought for vampire rights were furious at the verdict.
Part III : Back into society, he becomes a Curse Breaker, finds false & depraved love, and ends with death & disfigurement.
Five years later and out of Azkaban, with no chance of becoming an Auror, Anton turned his heart to curse breaking, a job just as dangerous, if not more so. By now, he was estranged from his family.
For five years, he worked tirelessly as a Curse Breaker. During his job, he became intrigued by a Trainee Healer at St. Mungo's Hospital. Because it was common for him to end up at the hospital due to the dangerous nature of his job, he often watched her as she worked. She was unremarkable in every way save for the fact that she frequently stayed up late into the night tending to the patients. She did not make small talk or try to comfort the injured, but she did more than her job required of her. She reminded him of himself.
He began dreaming of their future together. He would buy a house and start a family of his own, perhaps a family he'd never had. He would try to become an Auror again and have children to boast to.
But the next year, a few months shy of his twenty-eighth birthday, either he or his colleague had miscalculated the nature of a curse that they were about to break at a crypt in Romania. During the incident, his partner was killed, but he alone survived with life-threatening trauma to his head. The Healers at St. Mungo's were stunned that Anton was able to apparate himself to the hospital under such conditions. It was that instinctive and fast reaction he had as a Trainee Auror that had saved him.
His face was badly shredded and the blunt force of the explosion that the curse had expelled damaged parts of his brain. He fell into a coma that lasted for half a year and was then put on life support. When he miraculously regained consciousness one day, Anton found that his memory was percolated with gaps and loopholes. He remembered his name and fragments of himself - not the reason he was at the hospital, not the little sister he was fond of, but when he saw the Trainee Healer, he recognized her.
But he could barely recognize himself in the mirror. Weeks and months would pass. Then years. He was out of the hospital by now and he had quit his job as a Curse Breaker. Due to his memory failure, he was no longer in the condition to do the job.
During this time, he began delving into Transfiguration, Potions, and spells that could possibly help revert his face to its previous condition. There was only so much that healing magic could do; he was missing chunks of his face, including an eyelid and a part of his lower lip. He looked like a monster.
And he remembered seeing the disgust on the Trainee Healer's face when she'd looked at him. Before this, they had been making such progress and it was only a matter of time that he would have asked her for her hand in marriage. But when she saw him disfigured and confused, she wanted nothing more to do with him.
At this, his heart turned stone cold.
Part IV : Struggling back onto his feet, he leaves his dreams behind and becomes a professor at Hogwarts, where he remains today.
It took him years before he felt comfortable enough to show his face to society again. By then, he was thirty-five. During this time in hiding behind shadows and living in squalid conditions, Anton was on the verge of giving up. He felt lonely and angry at the thought of how many years he had wasted in Azkaban and from hiding in shame. It was pathetic of him. He knew he could do better. When he finally emerged from his hermit hole, he looked as he did before the accident, but chose to leave some of the scars on his face as a reminder that it took only one mistake to take a life, to lose everything. As such, he became even more wary and hated those who were careless.
He had nothing and no one now. He thought, perhaps, after some more diligent work, he would be able to work his way back to his old status. It was not the end of his career. He had grown from his mistakes and was now quite different from the old Anton.
But when he had recurring flashbacks of his colleague's ravaged body, he felt like puking. He couldn't look at numbers without remembering.
"You don't have our courage," a familiar female's voice would ring in his head. He wondered whose it was, but he knew it was one of the many voices that had motivated him all along to prove himself as otherwise. But he knew himself that he'd always preferred the safety of studying in enclosed spaces over action, over putting his life on the line.
When Hogwarts had an opening for the Transfiguration Professor post, he would resign his old ambitions to apply for the position. He was no longer enticed by the prestige of dangerous jobs and felt a strange bitterness about it. At first, Headmistress Ithilwen had qualms about his sketchy past, but as time went and Headmistress Ithilwen grew to trust him and learn of his knowledge and skills over the summer, Anton got the job.
To this day, Anton continues to recast the magic that keeps his face from deforming back to its real, disfigured appearance.
Anton has had many wands, most of them splintered by curses. His most current one is 15 inches, made of Laurel wood, with a wand core of Boomslang venom - a core most prized for Transfiguration. Making a wand with such venomous properties is dangerous---such that there are very few wands of this core in circulation. Rumors have it that Anton's wand had once belonged to the late Transfiguration Professor, who had died mysteriously. Although Anton denies it, it is, in fact, true. But whether he had anything to do with the death of the past owner is unknown.
Arithmancy, observing others, and, in his bedchamber, he enjoys watering the rows of mistletoe berry and peppermint pots lining the windowsills. Due to this, Anton emits a distinct scent of peppermint.
A melanistic jaguar with gleaming, silver eyes.
