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_____My wand is a 12 inch long aspen wand with phoenix tail feather core. It is mildly flexible. My Patronis is a Marsh Harrier. I've had the same Tawny Owl for the last five years and the little thing is quite vocal; it has a habit of joining the music class when we start singing if some student is fool enough to leave the window or door open.

_____My strongest form of magic is Transfigurations. That's where I got the best grades, or marks. I'm also fairly good at magical languages like Mermish; obviously the ones that are magically locked such as Parseltongue or Bridtongue are out of my reach however.

_____By most standard I would be a pureblood, however if you take a careful look you'll see a few different nomajs or muggles in my family tree. My father is from the Lestrange family and they would never, knowingly, mix with anyone who had non-magical heritage. However, things weren't always so strict on my ma's side. The Graves didn't have any particular rule about not marrying people with non-magic heritage. It was just that my ma and her ma and da before her were also born from wizards. A generation before that was a muggle born though I can't remember which one it was supposed to be. For all I know something like that has happened often in my da's side too and they just covered it up.

_____Before the Graves family was established in America they actually came from a rather humble beginning. In fact, so humble that the family has more history than most know about. The first wizard that anyone can trace back to in the family was a young Frenchman. He was the first wizard in his family and he attended Hogwarts, as a Ravenclaw, in the late 1390's. His name was Melin. After he graduated from Hogwarts, he served a French Noble who decided that they wanted to travel and see exotic lands. Which meant that Melin the Stewart and the man they served were in Egypt in the early 1400's.

_____It was quite a unique experience for Melin as he got to see different magical legacies than he was used to. In fact, he took quite an interest in a form of necromancy centered around the human spirit. It was fascinating to him because what he saw seemed to supplement the information he found laid out by Herpo the Foul on horcrux. The more he delved into the study, the less Melin paid attention to the French Nobleman he was supposed to be working for. Which became quite unfortunate seeing as the man eventually died.

_____Melin knew that he couldn't go back to his homeland without the young nobleman so he tried everything he could to restore life to the man. He continued to try even as the man's corpse continued to rot. Eventually he made a break though, unfortunately not in the way that he was hoping. As he combined ancient Egyption magic with what he was taught in Hogwarts, Melin stumbled upon a new spell. Or rather, he created a new spell and the first inferius. He reanimated the corpse in something similar to a zombie like fashion. Unfortunately this create was violent and he had to put him down.

_____Due to his experience with the inferius, Melin kept trying many things by blending magic notes left by ancient egyptians with what he learned in Hogwarts. Eventually he gained the monicure Abramelin from some disapproving European wizards who passed by. Melin, now dubbed Abramelin, continued regardless of their ridicule. He went on to create one of the three unforgivable curses as an attempt to control the unperfected, as of that point, inferius. This was the imperius curse.

_____He continued to work on healing the sick as well as raising the dead during his time. Abramelin eventually made a name for himself in the Egyption region, even gaining the title 'the mage' from the non magical community. Eventually he had a child with a local witch. They named him Lamech. Instead of sending him off to Hogwarts or Uagadou, Abramelin schooled his son himself. Near the end of this period a non-magical scholar named Georg Dehn amused Abramelin enough that he gave Georg Dehn some false information as well as real information, just so he could see what the non-magical scholar did with such. It was this information that would later be published in the book "The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage."

_____Eventually Abramelin felt that those in Europe needed to identify the brilliance of his work. So he moved his family back to Europe. There were plenty of people who thought his work was groundbreaking in the field of necromancy; there were others who thought it was an abomination. The later of the two hunted Ambramelin down. He and his wife died which forced their son Lamech to go into hiding. He took a french name and hid in England using the sir name Greyve. Over the years and generations this turned into Graves. Not long after the name transitioned, Abramelin and Lamech's descendants made the crossing from England to America.

_____Gondulphus Graves was the descendant that made the crossing. He was one of the original twelve Aurors for the Magical Congress of the United States of America in 1693. He was not one of the twelve to live to old age. Despite this, he left a far better legacy for his family than his ancestors Ambramelin or Lamech ever had.

_____Eventually, Idris Graves was born and she married Randall Lestrange before the rise of Voldemort. At the time they married, Voldemort was still gaining power and supporters, which was exactly why Idris never really suspected what her dear love (Randall) was up to while in America.

__The Lestranges are an old wizarding family based from the United Kingdoms - old and powerful enough to make the so called list. They were one of the first families who started to follow You-Know-Who when he rose to power. It is also from this family that you get the infamous Lestrange brothers; one of which married Bellatrix Black. Since then most of the Lestrange have been either killed or thrown into Azkaban. The few that are still free in the world suffer from the stigma placed on their family.

_____In fact, Nik's own father Randall was a death eater. He was the overlooked older brother to Rodolphus Lestrange and Rabastan Lestrange. He met Idris Graves when he was trying to stir up support in America for Voldemort. And for a short amount of time as they got to know one another, Randall was almost a decent man. However, after Niklaus was born, the stress of being a new father with a young infant son put him right back into his old ways. Randall went back to being a devote death eater, leaving his small family with not much more than a last name to use to get money from plenty of wizarding communities.

_____After that, everyone knows the story of what happened to the Lestrange brothers.

_____The world was a slightly different place when I grew up. I was born in 1962; long before the rise and fall of You know Who. I was twenty when Harry Potter was born. A little before that everything was kind of hush hush and people danced around in fear, especially when dealing with my family. At that time my small family was kept under close watch by the Ministry of Magic.

_____Even before that, though, apparently it wasn't any better for us in America when I was growing up of course, with my mother having the last name of Graves and everyone associating her with Grindelwald seeing as he disguised himself as her cousin. But being in Scottland got worse the older I got. Being a Lestrange was both a blessing and a curse. On one hand we were a respected (and slightly feared) wizarding family. On the other hand the stronger You Know Who Got, the more of my relatives seemed to join him. My uncles Rabastan Lestrange and Rodolphus Lestrange among them. You might have heard of them since they were pretty famous for their torture of other witches and wizards. By that time, at least, I was fully grown and out of school. Otherwise life would have been a rockier road than it was.

_____In fact, I stayed out of the wizarding war as much as I could. My mom wasn't so lucky - she got pulled into it and a stray curse hit her in the chest during a duel. I didn't find out until later when an Auror brought her body to my flat in New York. I chose to bury her in my childhood home in Scotland. When my father and one of my uncles came limping to the house after the battle of Hogwarts, trying to avoid the Aurors that was the first time I'd ever seen him. They seemed a lot more pathetic than I'd imagined. I bound them and waited for the Aurors to show up. I don't regret the fact that dementors gave them their special kiss - my sire put my ma through too much s**t for me to care that a man I never knew suffered a fate worse than death.

_____Despite staying out of the war and even turning in my own father and uncle, my name blackened my prospects. As I got older I learned to deal with it; it wasn't as bad in the states as it was in Great Britain. In Europe, no matter how skilled I was it was obvious that I was still judged as being a Dark Wizard the moment they heard 'Lestrange'. Mainly I found work there while maintaining the house in the Highlands that ma loved so much. However, as the years wore on I realized that people were becoming such two faced little shits that I almost took pride in the fact that my name made people take a second look. I wanted them to be confronted by the uncomfortable history and truth of the world. The stigma only got worse after the second rise and fall of He Who Must Not Be Named.

_____One day I was approached by Minerva McGonagal and offered a position at Hogwarts. Considering that everything had seemed to calm down, regardless of the prejudice against me because of ma father's family, over there I decided to take the job offer. That was two years ago. And I got to say that the castle still has interesting things to see after all this time. This place will definitely keep you on your toes.