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WHEN THE WORLD BEGAN, THERE WAS LIFE AND DEATH. The gray dominion betwixt the two was ravaged by vengeful spirits, returned to the land of the living by vicious dark magic. When the realm of the dead emptied itself into the waking world, the gods could no longer turn a blind eye. Juno called her goddesses forth, collecting from them a piece of their spirits. From Trivia, the goddess of magic and the realm of the dead, she took the left rib, for creation and boundless strength. From Melinoe, the goddess of ghosts, harbinger of nightmares and madness, she took the right eye, for wisdom, true sight, and clarity in darkness. And from Libitina, the goddess of death herself, Juno took the most important feature, plucking the tongue from the mouth of Death and silencing her for all eternity. With the power of the Parcae, three sisters who wove the threads of every being together, celestial or otherwise, the queen of the gods bound the pieces together, and from them created the guardians of the gates of death, Thanatos' assistants and second hands to the Parcae themselves.
They were known as the Thánatoi, the witches of death.
The Thánatoi were interwoven in the strands of fate as the bounty hunters of souls, collecting and taking their due to maintain the sacred balance between life and death. They succeed in their duty for millenia, practicing the magic of bone and beyond, answering only to themselves and the gods of their domain. The Deveroux coven emerged as the most prominent family of the Thánatoi, akin to royalty.
When a witch within the coven came of age, their magic was bound alongside their brothers and sisters, linked to everyone inside the coven. The Deverouxs had a simple creed: per os surgimus, osse decidimus.
By bone we rise, by bone we fall. Thus, the payment they took would be their rising and their ruination, ashes and dust alongside the souls they reaped as penance.
—
When the world was half formed, Tara and Alina Deveroux had come of age within the coven. The sisters joined their magic with the collective and watched their powers soar, closer than ever. When Alina fell in love and married, it was a joyous occasion. Yet it was not the fall that doomed her – it was the depths to which she dragged herself because of it. Her husband died, and she traded her soul to the king of the underworld for the power to bring him back. The cost was of no consequence to Alina, and it did not manifest until she returned to the coven. She had broken their singular principle rule, the very reason for which they had been created, and upset the balance of life and death. She betrayed her purpose, and for her punishment, Alina and her husband were exiled. Tara, maddened by the loss of her sister, called upon Ultio, the goddess of vengeance, the Parcae, and Juno herself, casting Alina's name and memory into the fire. She cursed her and her entire bloodline that they should never find peace within the Thánatoi and that the price of one witch should fall upon every head that bore her blood.
Alina, unknowing of the curse, was devastated by her exile. Her joy in life was multiplied with her two children and her husband, but tragedy soon befell the family. Late at night, while their parents slept, the little ones crawled off into the river that flowed near where the family had settled. Alina found them on the shore as the moon set, pale and cold. Lifeless.
The power she had traded for her husband evaded her, even as she reached into the very core of her being. She discovered a well of blinding rage and overwhelming grief instead. In that moment, something inside of her shattered. Alina screamed, a bloodcurdling, bone crushing sound. Earth shifted, stone cracked, and when the tears streaming from her eyes lessened, the river was leveled. She had become Other, no longer Thánatoi, but more than human.
She carved the name for what she was from her own spine, a single word that would call Death by its name and greet it as an old friend for centuries to come.
Henceforth, Alina Deveroux became a banshee.
She and her husband had four more children, but Tara's curse struck without fail. Between two sisters, one remained a witch and the other was cast out, a piercing screech their only comfort. Like Alina, the banshee was stripped of her magic and left with different abilities, further separating her from the Thánatoi.
—
The Parcae work in mysterious ways. The Deveroux coven was never the same after Alina and Tara, and as the centuries wound down, their power and influence went with it. They were struck down by rogue vampires, though many have whispered that Juno retracted her favor from them, bringing about their untimely demise.
Three Thánatoi survived, two young girls and an old woman. Drawn to Avellen for its connections with Salem, the magic in its bones and the spirits it speaks to, the Deveroux women (and their lone male cousin) have officially arrived. It is also rumored that their grimoire, supposedly lost as their influence dwindled over the centuries, lies somewhere in the town. Though the Banshee curse has yet to take effect in the latest generation, the time is upon the sisters to take it on.
The witches of death will always have an exiled soul, and the fragmented bones of their history have only just begun to scar over.
