Pls share your abernant headcanons! I am unfortunately constantly thinking about them!

hii hello me too anon me too… this is another sort of appearance headcanon, but i think that adaine and aelwyn mirror and oppose each other in their appearances from freshman year to junior year in a way that’s beautiful and lovely but also tragic and heartbreaking..

freshman year:

aelwyn is thin, always dresses up, perfectly straight platinum blond hair down to her mid back and perfect makeup both to accentuate her appearance and also cover up any possible flaws. this is important both in an “abernant family” sense and also because of the work she’s doing for kalvaxus/kalina/the nightmare king - her persona needs to be irreproachable.

adaine, on the other hand, is chubby and freckly and covered in acne, her short dirty blond hair has unbecoming (to her family, anyway) streaks of brown in it, she has her big circle glasses and her ill-fitting hudol uniform. she’s awkward and nervous and childishly mean where aelwyn is polished and beautiful and wickedly cruel, at least until the house party fight and her arrest, when we see her frazzled (and see her roots coming in!)

sophomore year:

adaine is coming into her own! she has her own clothes, she has boggy, she wears her (still smudgy) glasses with more confidence. her hair is a bit longer, it curls a bit at the ends the way aelwyn’s never did. her acne is not so much clearing up as solidifying (i have a specific thing with adaine’s acne scars turning into a four-pointed star on her forehead at the end of fhfy lmk if you want to see it and i’ll doodle it!). she’s altogether more confident and more righteous and by the end of it she has a SWORD.

aelwyn, meanwhile, has been non-stop crawling in an orb for the better part of a year (<- ask me about this too i have Thoughts.). she has been unable to take care of herself. her hair is loooong, down to her waist and matted to hell. it’s only about 3/4ths blonde at this point as her roots grow out more and more. she’s exhausted, she’s unfocused, she’s unwell, she’s unhealthily thin from months of malnourishment. and even when that version of her is replaced, the physical effects of the orb still remain. i think while in the nightmare forest things get caught in her hair all the time and she just lets it - she’s completely given up on taking care of herself or maintaining her appearance at all.

and junior year:

aelwyn cuts her hair! goodbye, blonde. now she’s got brown or black hair and her brown eyes :) she still has permanent damage from sophomore year (i’m so serious ask me about this) but she’s healing as much as she can and learning to live around what injuries won’t heal. she’s stopped using as much makeup, so her acne actually shows! & to adaine, the mean curve of her mouth doesn’t seem cruel so much as affectionate, now. as she’s healing she gains weight, for now just up to where she was in freshman year but more in the future :)

adaine’s hair is longer than ever, at just past her shoulder blades, and as she settles into the role of oracle, it whitens more and more. her eyes get bluer and lighter, too, and her forehead acne scars and fades and fully appears as that four pointed star, glowing faintly whenever she uses divination magic. in contrast to aelwyn, she’s gotten taller and a bit thinner as the last of her baby fat fades.

so in the end we have an junior year adaine that looks similar to freshman year aelwyn, and a junior year aelwyn that’s similar to freshman year adaine. explodes into a million pieces