Once upon a time, there was a girl with an imagination.

In Austin, Texas, this was fostered by grandparents and parents who lacked money but no shortage of fantastical and historical curiosity. Lynna LePage listened to the bedtime stories — “ghost stories, druid stories, French stories,” she recalls.

With the attention and interest of someone beyond her age, she listened to other family stories, the Irish and Scottish stories. She came to understand a potential connection to the Stuart name, a name of once-great power.

In the 1500s, Mary Stuart would rise to be Mary, Queen of Scots. Hers is a story popularly told for her tragic, grisly demise at the order of her more famous cousin, Elizabeth I. This is a remembrance LePage cannot accept.

Mary’s, she believes, should be a glorious story.

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“I portray the one forgotten queen,” LePage says in her Colorado Springs home in full attire, from elaborate, self-made dress to the crown on her head to the goblet in her hand.

LePage, 57, goes by Mary, Queen of Scots of the Highland Rockies. She is a regular at Old World festivals around Colorado, her summer weekends occupied by those gatherings in which people embody people other than themselves.

The persona isn’t reserved for those weekends. LePage speaks with an accent, some blend of French and Scottish that Mary might’ve acquired. LePage’s home is filled with embellished garments, royal flags, royal-looking chairs and swords and other colorful relics.

LePage is almost always working on something to add to her wardrobe. There’s room, too, for her husband’s pirate things.

The characters are “so much in our personalities now,” Aaron says, “to where if we’re not doing it, we feel like we’re not being our true selves.”

Their other selves work as a server and bartender (Aaron) and seamstress (Lynna). Amid a lifetime of odd jobs — also in the restaurant industry along with Hobby Lobby and Walmart — Lynna LePage has gained a reputation for her sewing prowess. She fashions fantastic, heavily researched outfits for fellow festival- goers and others.

Since the pandemic, LePage says she’s been “swamped.” The thinking she’s gathered from clients: “Let’s just pop into another world.”

Mary’s was a hard world to step into, riddled with tragedy. LePage dove deep into the history of the woman widowed twice during her brief reign, once in France — where she fled from Scotland under invasion — and next in her home country, which had been torn by religion and politics upon her return in 1561.

Despite the social differences, Mary is remembered for her tolerance. Before her beheading, she only wanted peace, LePage believes.

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It was one aspect that LePage connected with, the possible family lineage aside. Ashley Ashman recalls her mother embracing the character: “It was like, She’s kind of an underdog, I feel like an underdog, let’s do this.”

•••

It cannot be called a rags-to-riches tale. Perhaps Mary was destined for luxury, but most of us, like LePage, are not.

When she and Aaron moved into their home in the city, they were both working at a doomed chain. Ruby Tuesday’s would soon close.

“There’s been extremely tight times,” Aaron says. “I think having these personas, having these characters to fall into, that really helped us through a lot of tough times. Even though we were struggling financially and having hardships, we could still go out in costume and have a blast and forget about our troubles for a few hours or so.”

Through it all, they’ve had each other. They’ve had each other since a big, pirate-themed wedding in 2010.

They married a year after meeting at a Cripple Creek grocery store, where LePage was working. Aaron, of course, walked in wearing the clothes he had come to feel most comfortable wearing.

“Along came Aaron, who had embraced this pirate vibe 24/7,” Ashman says. “That immediately caught her attention.”

Along came a man who embraced her creativity that ran wild. That needed to be set free.

Previously, in 1993, LePage moved to Teller County with a man. They would split not long after having a baby. She raised Ashley on some land, tending to horses with skills developed back in Texas. In the meantime, she told stories to her girl. She showed Ashley how to sew, draw, dance and grow flowers in the garden.

“For Easter,” Ashman recalls, “instead of doing the typical egg-dying thing, we’d crack the egg but keep it as whole as possible and paint the outside.”

There was a brokenness in her mother that Ashman only uncovered later. It was around the time Aaron came along. At the time, LePage was writing about a past, lost love.

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She was a teenage romantic, fresh out of high school theater and all of those grand, rosy worlds of chivalry. She fell head over heels for a boy at the park.

“He was singing and playing a guitar on a rock,” LePage says. “I was hiding behind a tree.”

He was a little older, into his early 20s. Far too young for his fate.

“He wanted to break up with me a couple weeks after we met. … He found a lump on the back of his head,” LePage says. “His one condition was I couldn’t tell anyone.”

So she kept the cancer quiet. And for the weeks leading up to his death and the years after, she quietly grieved. She let the trauma fester. It took all of her adulthood to finally put those feelings down on paper.

When she met Aaron, “she was processing,” he says. “She was finally coming to terms with the whole thing. I think in the process of writing and meeting me, it just triggered a whole domino effect of being able to finally let it all go.”

She let it all go, and she turned to the queen she long admired.

•••

There was some hesitancy at first. Some embarrassment, LePage admits. “Do I really want to put myself out there like that?”

Her daughter, for one, is glad she did. The queen has provided a social outlet, Ashman says.

“She’s actually very much an introvert,” she says. “There are days she can only handle being around people for so long, because people are generally overwhelming. But in character, you’d never know that.”

Aaron, as ever, is reassuring.

“If we enjoy it, why not?” he says. “And if it makes other people happy, all the better.”

That’s the best part, LePage says — the happiness that radiates around Mary. People look at her wide-eyed, like they’re witnessing a mirage.

“Like royalty,” she says. “It makes me feel good.”

The kids are her favorites. They gather around her at festivals.

Her highness is gracious, handing out sweets and blowing bubbles. Those come and go, but she also gifts the kids things that last, however fake: gems that shine bright in their little eyes.