The Mystic Falls Codex

It begins, as the oldest griefs do, with two people of extraordinary gift and no talent whatever for one another. The place is Greece and the century is the first before Christ, and both of them belong to a people called the Travelers — of whom they are, comfortably, the two most powerful ever produced.

Silas was a witch of the ancient world. Qetsiyah — a name the centuries would wear down to Tessa, and then to legend, and then to a marginal note in grimoires no living hand could read — was the most powerful witch then breathing, and she was to be his wife. He told her he wanted to be with her forever, and she was the one person alive capable of arranging it. Between them they accomplished what no witch had dared: an elixir that would put an end to death itself. She made it out of her own blood and her own spellcraft, and she intended them to drink it together at their wedding.

He drank it with Amara, her handmaiden — whose name means unfading, and who Silas held was his soulmate and not his betrayal. So the first immortal man and the first immortal woman in the history of the world are a bridegroom and a servant, and neither of them is the bride.

The Architecture of Her Revenge

A smaller woman would have killed them both and considered the account settled. Qetsiyah built instead. She sealed Silas alive in a tomb upon an island, and laid beside him the single dose of the cure she had also brewed — so that if ever he clawed his way free, or if ever the hunger grew past bearing, his only road out would be to become mortal, to die, and to arrive in a country she had raised for the express purpose of receiving him.

That country is the Other Side: a mirror held up to the living world, seeing everything and able to touch nothing, into which every supernatural creature falls when it dies. An entire afterlife, engineered as a cell for one man. Every ghost that lingers, every soul stranded at the glass, every resurrection of the next two thousand years is wreckage from a wedding that never took place.

Amara she did not kill either. She staged her death, so that Silas would have a body to grieve over, and then she used the one thing about Amara that could not be undone — that she could not die — and bound the working to her. Amara became the Anchor: the doorway itself, the seam between the living world and the dead, immortal and awake and compelled to feel the passage of every supernatural death that crossed her. Two thousand years of that, without pause and without company. Silas was shown a corpse and permitted to believe she had simply gone.

It is worth being plain about the shape of this. Qetsiyah did not build a prison and an afterlife and a doorway because she was cruel in general. She built them because she had been humiliated in particular, by two people, on what should have been her wedding day, and she had the power to make the arrangement permanent. Every ghost in this history is standing in the ruins of somebody else's engagement.

A revenge in three movements: the cure, the Other Side, and the doppelgängers. All three are still turning when the last of the story is told, two thousand years downstream, and all three exist because one man chose somebody else.

Nature Keeps Its Ledger

This world is governed by a single law, and it is Qetsiyah herself who pronounces it: nature demands balance. Two souls had slipped the noose, and so nature set about, patiently and without malice, striking their faces again — mortal shadows cast forward every few centuries, one for Silas and one for Amara. Doppelgängers.

There are three of Amara's, and it is worth naming them together because the chronicle otherwise meets them a thousand years apart and never lines them up: Tatia, who dies in the eleventh century so that six children can become the first vampires; Katerina Petrova, who is born in 1490 and runs for five hundred years rather than be spent; and Elena Gilbert, the third and the last of them, born in Virginia in the twentieth century into a family that has no idea what she is.

They are not ornament. Doppelgänger blood is the one fuel that will drive a working at the Original tier, and every expensive thing in this history runs upon it: a Bulgarian girl who will spend five centuries never being where she is expected; a girl of seventeen who is, without the least idea of it, the most valuable object on the face of the earth; and a man in a boarding house who wears the face of an ancient Greek immortal and never once thinks to ask why.

The Travelers, Cursed to Wander

Silas and Qetsiyah had themselves been Travelers — the two most powerful the people ever produced — and when her working tore the witch community in half, the surviving covens turned upon the Travelers entire. A people who could hold that much power, they reasoned, might unbalance nature as thoroughly as she had just done. So a curse was laid upon them: never to settle. Every hearth they build goes cold, every community they gather comes apart, and they have been walking for two thousand years. Their magic draws upon the massed will of their own kind rather than upon nature or upon the dead, and they do not so much die as move house, carrying consciousness from body to body.

Their long labour is Qetsiyah's inverted: to find the last two doppelgängers, to spill their blood together, to break the curse — and, as a consequence they regard less as a cost than as a dividend, to unmake every other kind of magic in the world.

They settled their own account with her first. The Travelers killed Qetsiyah — she had made immortality, and they of all people wanted it unmade — and then took Amara's body and kept it moving, century after century, so that nobody who came looking would ever find the one thing capable of ending any of it.

And, Quietly, a Second Afterlife

Somewhere before 750 BC — earlier than the sirens, earlier than vampires, earlier even than Silas — a true psychic named Arcadius was burned at the stake by men frightened of what he could see. The burning did not end him. His consciousness cooled and hardened into a dimension of its own, one that feeds upon the souls of the guilty: Hell in every practical particular, kept by a proprietor who would rather bargain than damn. For three thousand years and more, no one in this history knows that he is there at all. When the Other Side at last comes down, he is what has been lying underneath it the whole time.

A thousand years afterward and half a world away, a witch named Esther and a warrior named Mikael buried a child of theirs, taken by plague, in a village of the Old World. Esther's friend Ayana — a witch of formidable power in her own right — spoke of a country across the sea where the people grew tall and hale and where sickness was little more than a rumour. They gathered what family remained to them and went.

They ought never to have had that family at all. Esther was barren. Her elder sister Dahlia — the stronger witch by a considerable margin and the worse by a wider one — had made her fruitful, and set against it a price to be paid in advance and in perpetuity: the firstborn of every generation of their blood. Esther paid it once. She gave up her daughter Freya, told the world the child had died of plague, and spent the thousand years that followed concealing everyone who came after. Debts of that kind do not lapse. This one falls due upon a newborn, in New Orleans, in the twenty-first century.

The Village, the Wolves, and Henrik

They settled in the country that would one day be called Mystic Falls, in Virginia, alongside a people who took the shape of wolves at the full of the moon. The arrangement held. The wolves changed; the Mikaelsons kept indoors; by morning the matter was closed. It held for years.

Two things broke it. The first was that Esther took a lover from the wolf village, a man named Ansel, and her third son, Niklaus, was his. The second was that her youngest, Henrik, wished to see the changing, and Niklaus carried him out into the night to watch it. A wolf tore the boy apart.

Esther would not bury a second child. She went looking for a working that would make the rest of them impossible to kill.

The Working

The rite required four things: the life of the great white oak at the heart of the village, the strength of the sun, the blood of a doppelgänger in the wine, and Mikael to run a sword through each of his children so that the change would take. The doppelgänger was Tatia — Amara's shadow, arriving precisely when the story had need of her, and a woman whom both Elijah and Niklaus loved. Esther drained her blood for the wine; a newly turned Elijah, unable to stop himself, finished her; and Esther buried the memory behind a red door and let him believe the deed had been her own.

Ayana would take no part in it. She called it an abomination against nature and warned that the spirits would not suffer it. Esther took up Ayana's own talisman and cast the working regardless.

Mikael, Finn, Elijah, Niklaus, Kol and Rebekah woke needing blood — Esther cast the spell and remained a witch. They were the first vampires, and everything that has ever been a vampire since descends from one of them.

Nature renders its account. Sunlight. No threshold crossed uninvited. Vervain. Wood through the heart. And every feeling amplified past what a creature can reasonably carry — which is why the "humanity switch" exists at all, and why the sympathetic figures of this history each keep a body count in three figures.

What the Working Also Did

Niklaus's first kill woke the wolf he had inherited from Ansel. Mikael understood at once what it meant, and killed Ansel, and killed Ansel's family and half the wolves of the village in a single night. Esther, to keep Mikael from turning on her son as well, bound the wolf in Klaus — using Tatia's blood a second time, with a moonstone for a seal. Klaus spent the next thousand years labouring to undo it, and the entire first act of The Vampire Diaries is that labour arriving in Virginia.

Klaus learned the truth, killed his mother for it, and told his siblings that Mikael had done the thing. The lie held a thousand years. Mikael, who had been turned along with the rest, became the hunter of his own kind — feeding upon vampires rather than upon people, and pursuing his own children across nine centuries and three continents.

And the white oak, because nature charges for everything, is now the only thing in existence that can permanently kill what Esther made. They burned it. Pieces survived: a stake Mikael carried, and a tree replanted three centuries after the family had gone, felled around 1912 to raise Wickery Bridge — and its sign. Kill an Original with white oak and every vampire that Original ever sired dies with them.

The First of Their Making

Within a century the family had turned three people who would matter enormously nine hundred years later: Lucien, a servant of the de Martel household, turned by Klaus and compelled by Elijah to pass as him while the family hid from Mikael; Tristan de Martel, a nobleman, turned by Elijah; and Tristan's sister Aurora, whom Klaus loved and whom Rebekah turned against his wishes. Every vampire now walking traces back along one of those three lines.

And in 1110 a dying witch descended from Qetsiyah completed what her ancestor had begun: five supernatural hunters with a living map burned into their skin, the Brotherhood of the Five. The mark grows with every vampire they kill and, once whole, points to Silas and to the cure. She wanted someone — anyone — to dig him up.

Eight hundred years pass in which nothing structurally new is made, and the absence is the point. No fresh species is invented. No new law of nature is written down. What happens instead is that the things already made are carried forward — hidden, buried, daggered, inherited and abandoned — by a family who have nothing left to spend but time, and a father somewhere behind them who never tires and never stops.

The Originals do what immortals do when there is no longer anything to achieve. They scatter and reconvene. They put one another in boxes with a silver dagger and a length of white oak ash, which does not kill an Original but stops them for as long as the blade stays in, and they take the blades out again when they are lonely. They build houses, courts, cities and reputations, and they walk away from all of them the moment Mikael is sighted on the road.

It is a long, well-furnished middle. Three of its rooms matter.

Katerina Petrova, 1490

A girl in Bulgaria bore a child out of wedlock. The infant was carried out of the room before she could hold it, and her father put her out of the house for the shame of it. Her name was Katerina Petrova, and she had no notion that her face was an inheritance — that it had been struck once before, in the ancient world, on a woman named Amara, and that nature had been printing it forward down the centuries ever since.

Within months she was in England and being courted by an English lord of great charm and great patience, who intended to open her throat on an altar. That was the whole of his interest in her. The rite that would break the curse binding his wolf required a werewolf, a vampire, a moonstone and the blood of a Petrova doppelgänger, and Klaus had spent five hundred years waiting for a face to come round again.

She found out. What she did next is the most consequential improvisation in this entire history. She stole the moonstone and ran; she was sheltered by two vampires, Rose and Trevor, who had their own reasons for wanting Klaus thwarted; and then she did the single thing that would put her permanently beyond his use. Rose had healed a wound of hers with vampire blood, not understanding what she was being used for. Katerina hanged herself with it still in her.

The rite requires a living human doppelgänger. A vampire is worth nothing on that altar. In one night she made herself useless to the man who had waited half a millennium for her, and bought herself five hundred more years of running as the price.

The bill was rendered immediately and in full. Klaus went to Bulgaria and killed her mother, her father, and every other soul under that roof, and left her the knowledge of it to carry. Trevor was beheaded five centuries afterwards for the hours of help he gave her. Katerina became Katherine Pierce, and spent five hundred years never once being where anybody expected her to be — which, measured on its own terms, is the most competent sustained performance by anyone in this story.

New Orleans

In the 1700s Klaus, Elijah and Rebekah came to a young colonial port at the mouth of a river and did not merely settle in it. They built its order from the ground and wrote themselves in at the top: vampires held the streets, witches practised on sufferance and under licence, and wolves were kept outside the city altogether. For two hundred years there was no meaningful distinction between the Mikaelsons and New Orleans. The one was the government of the other.

Klaus took in a boy — the son of an enslaved woman and the man who owned her — and gave him a name that was his own joke and his own affection at once: Marcellus, the little warrior. He raised him, taught him everything he knew, and in time turned him. Rebekah loved him. For a while, and by the standards of that family, they were something close to happy.

In 1919 Mikael found them. He burned the opera house down around the family in the middle of a performance, and they ran from the city and did not come back for ninety years, leaving Marcel behind in the fire and believing him dead.

He was not dead. He took the city instead, and held it for a century — a boy the Originals had made, governing the place the Originals had built, on terms he set himself. It is the only time in a thousand years that anything the Mikaelsons made got out from under them and prospered.

And in 1991, long after the family had gone, Marcel had the Crescent wolves cursed: locked into wolf shape permanently, and permitted to be human for one night a month, at the full moon. It is the precise inversion of what a werewolf is, and it was designed to be. That is Hayley Marshall's family, cursed by the boy Klaus raised, two years after Hayley was born.

The Bennetts, Quietly, Throughout

Ayana's line runs on. It runs through Emily, and Sheila, and Abby, and at last to Bonnie, and behind Ayana it runs back further still, to Qetsiyah herself. They are the most powerful witch family in this history and the most consistently spent.

The pattern is not subtle once it is named. Nearly every working that holds the world together across eleven seasons is either cast by a Bennett or paid for with a Bennett — their magic, their sanity, their years, or their life. They are asked, and they consent, and the asking never stops. This codex is not the first place to notice it; the story eventually says it aloud itself.

The lie that ran for a thousand years. Klaus invented the Curse of the Sun and the Moon — a fabricated ancient curse binding vampires to the night and wolves to the moon — and seeded it into Aztec and Viking legend so that both species would spend centuries hunting the moonstone and the doppelgänger on his behalf, believing they were freeing themselves. Entire covens died chasing a story he made up.

Mystic Falls in 1864 had a vampire problem, and five families organised themselves to solve it: Salvatore, Gilbert, Fell, Forbes and Lockwood. The Founders' Council put vervain into the town's drink — the one herb a vampire cannot compel through — watched to see who flinched, identified twenty-seven of them, and herded them into a church to burn.

Living in the Salvatore house that season was a guest named Katherine Pierce, three hundred and seventy-four years into her running and entirely unbothered by it. She was compelling both Salvatore sons to be in love with her, feeding on both of them, and enjoying the arrangement thoroughly.

Giuseppe Salvatore learned what she was, and what his sons had become to her. He drugged them and shot them both for the crime of trying to protect her. They died with her blood already in their systems, which is the only way anyone becomes a vampire, and woke in transition: caught between, needing human blood within the day or dying for good.

Stefan fed first. He fed on their father. Then, unable to be alone in it, he made Damon complete the turn as well. Damon spent the hundred and forty-five years that followed promising his brother an eternity of misery, and delivered on the promise more often than not.

What Emily Bennett Actually Did

Katherine had a witch, as Katherine always did. Emily Bennett faked her mistress’s death in the fire, and then did something considerably larger than she was asked: she did not let the other twenty-six burn either. She sealed them into a tomb beneath the church instead, alive in the only sense that applies — not dead, merely desiccating, held under a working keyed to the passage of a comet that would not come over Mystic Falls again for a hundred and forty-five years.

Which is why Damon Salvatore comes home in 2009. He does not come home for a girl, or for his brother, or for the town. He comes home for one specific night in the sky and a door in the ground.

The Mother Nobody Mentioned

Stefan and Damon believed their mother had died of consumption in 1858. Lily Salvatore did not die. She was turned, and she was a ripper — a vampire who cannot stop once started, and who wakes afterwards to whatever is left — and rather than come home to her children as that, she went to Europe and let them keep the illusion of a grave.

She built another family there instead. She turned six siphoner witches into vampires — children born of a coven that regarded them as abominations — and called them hers, and they called her mother. The Gemini sealed all seven of them into a prison world in 1903 and left them there.

Her sons spent a hundred and fifty years grieving a woman who had chosen somebody else, and she comes back in 2015 to tell them so to their faces.

The Gemini, and the Worst Tradition in Fiction

The Gemini coven produce twins in every generation, and at a set age those twins merge. The stronger absorbs the weaker. The weaker dies. The survivor leads the coven, carrying both their power and the fact of what it cost. This is not a punishment or a curse laid on them by an enemy; it is their own custom, practised deliberately, generation after generation, and no one in the coven proposes stopping.

They also build prison worlds: a single day taken out of the past and set to loop forever, furnished with an entire empty America, and occupied by exactly one person. It is the most humane-sounding cruelty in this history.

A Gemini child born without magic of their own — able only to siphon it out of other magical things, and possessing none to spend — is called a siphoner, and treated as a defect. Malachai Parker was one. He murdered four of his siblings at twenty-two, and his coven put him into 1994 alone for eighteen years, and he is the most effective villain this franchise ever produced precisely because he is what the tradition made.

And the Humans, Doing Their Own Damage

Nothing supernatural is required to make this world worse, and the humans demonstrate it twice.

Augustine was a research society at Whitmore College which took vampires, kept them in cells, and cut them open for decades in the name of learning, on the reasoning that a subject who heals can be opened again tomorrow. Damon was subject 21051 in 1953. Enzo St. John was held for seventy years. Damon got out in 1958 by leaving Enzo behind in a burning building, and the bill for that arrives, with interest, sixty years later.

The Armory — a vault run by the St. John family through the same period — hoarded supernatural objects on the principle that a thing understood is a thing controlled. Among what they sealed in the basement was something nobody should ever have gone looking for. Somebody eventually does.

Nothing in this era is new magic. It is all consequence: of Esther's working, of Qetsiyah's revenge, of Klaus's invented curse. The nineteenth century is where two thousand years of wreckage settles into the particular shape that the modern story will dig up.

Elena Gilbert is seventeen years old, newly orphaned, and the last Petrova doppelgänger — the final impression of a face first struck two thousand years earlier on a girl in Greece, and she has no idea that this is what she is.

Her parentage is already a small conspiracy. Her mother is Isobel Flemming, who will shortly be a vampire; her father is John Gilbert. She was raised by John's brother Grayson and his wife Miranda as their own daughter and never told otherwise. The three of them went off Wickery Bridge in a car with Elena in the back. Stefan Salvatore pulled her unconscious out of the water — and could have taken Grayson first, because Grayson was the only one still awake, and Grayson refused. He would not go until his daughter was out. Then Stefan enrolled at her school, because she is wearing Katherine's face and he had to know.

Damon came home for the tomb. Neither errand survived contact with the town, and the two of them stayed for eight years.

The Comet and the Tomb

Everything in the first year is one question wearing several costumes: what is under the church. The answer is a hundred and forty-five years of Emily Bennett's work, and the key to it is in the sky. The comet whose passing sealed the tomb is coming round again, and Damon Salvatore has arranged his entire return around a single night.

He needs a Bennett to open it, and there is one to hand: Bonnie, Elena's closest friend, who is discovering in real time that the headaches and the flickering candles are an inheritance. Her grandmother Sheila knows exactly what the tomb is and exactly what opening it will cost, and helps anyway, and it kills her. This is the first instance of the pattern this codex has already named, and it is not remotely the last.

The tomb opens and Katherine is not in it. She was never in it — she walked out of Mystic Falls in 1864 and let two brothers spend a century and a half at war over a woman who had not bothered to stay. What is in it is twenty-six other vampires, starved to leather for a century and a half, and they come out hungry. Pearl and her daughter Anna walk out of that hole into a town that has forgotten what it built.

Meanwhile the descendants of the founders are doing precisely what their ancestors did. John Gilbert comes home with a family heirloom that is not an heirloom but a weapon: a device that, once a witch has charged it, drops every vampire in earshot with a sound that splits their skulls. He and Isobel intend to use it on Founder's Day, and John's plan does not distinguish between the vampires he hates and the ones his daughter loves. The device goes off in the middle of a parade.

And in the confusion Katherine Pierce walks back into Mystic Falls wearing Elena's face, chooses the first person she meets, and puts a knife in John Gilbert in his own kitchen. She has been away five hundred years. She is not away any more.

The Moonstone

The second year is the curse, and the curse is the reason for everything that has happened so far.

It begins with Mason Lockwood coming home to look for a family heirloom, which is a moonstone, and being revealed as something Mystic Falls had stopped believing in: a werewolf. The Lockwood gene is not active until it is triggered, and it is triggered by killing somebody — any death you cause, however accidental, and it is accidental for Tyler, as it usually is. It is the cruellest mechanic in the franchise, because it punishes the guilty and the unlucky identically.

Caroline Forbes is turned in the same stretch, and the manner of it matters: Damon's blood was in her from a hospital visit, and Katherine smothered her in that bed specifically to put a vampire in play. Caroline becomes, over eight years, the most functional person in the story, and she starts as somebody else's tactical convenience.

Then Elijah arrives, and the ceiling of the show goes up. Behind Elijah is Klaus, and behind Klaus is a thousand years of waiting. Klaus does not walk into town in his own body; he arrives wearing Alaric Saltzman, because a man who has been hunted by his father for nine centuries does not enter a room he has not already surveyed.

The rite needs four things on the night of a full moon: a werewolf, a vampire, the moonstone, and the doppelgänger. He uses Jules for the wolf. For the vampire he uses Jenna Sommers — Elena's aunt, turned into a vampire for the express purpose of being killed on the altar an hour later, which is the single coldest act of the series. And then Elena. It works. The curse breaks and the Original hybrid stands up in a stone circle with everything he wanted.

And then it fails, because Elena does not stay dead. John Gilbert — who spent a year being the worst man in Mystic Falls — trades his life for hers through a Bennett working, and dies on the lawn so his daughter can wake up. The consequence is permanent and inconvenient for everyone: Klaus's new hybrids need the blood of a living doppelgänger to survive the turn. Elena is now not a sacrifice but a supply, which is a far more dangerous thing to be.

The Family Arrives

Elijah, Rebekah, Kol and Finn follow Klaus into Virginia, and for a season the show is about a thousand-year-old family holding a grudge in a small American town.

Stefan spends most of it as Klaus's property. The ripper he has spent a century suppressing is not an affliction Klaus cures but a tool Klaus uses, and he uses it on a national scale. Meanwhile Klaus turns wolf after wolf and every one of them is sired to him — bound not by magic exactly but by gratitude for the end of a monthly agony, which is worse.

Mikael is summoned out of a tomb by people who think a father who hunts his own children can be aimed like a weapon. He can be, once. He is dead within the arc.

Esther comes back from the Other Side twice, and both times for the same reason: she made this, and she wants it unmade, and she is entirely willing to kill all six of her children to do it. She links them, so that killing one kills all. She turns Alaric Saltzman into an Enhanced Original — a vampire purpose-built to exterminate vampires, immune to the usual rules — and the only thing that stops him is that his life has been tied to Elena's, so he lives exactly as long as she does.

And Finn is killed with white oak, and every vampire descended from Finn dies in the same instant, all over the world, mid-sentence. That is how the rule enters the story. From this moment the entire population of the species is four stakes away from extinction, and every faction in the franchise organises itself around that fact.

The year ends where the story began. Elena goes off Wickery Bridge a second time, in a car, in the same water. She has Damon's blood in her. She wakes in transition.

The sireline rule. Kill an Original and every vampire descended from them dies too. It is the only law in this world that makes the oldest creatures alive worth protecting to the people who most want them dead, and every alliance from here to the end of both shows is negotiated in its shadow.

The Cure, and the Island

Elena wakes a vampire and sire-bonded to Damon — not in love with him by magic, which is the show's own careful distinction, but unable to refuse him anything, which is worse and which the show is unusually honest about.

Then the hunters surface. Connor Jordan arrives with a tattoo nobody else can see, and the mark turns out to be a map: the Brotherhood of the Five, commissioned in 1110 by a dying witch of Qetsiyah's line, carrying a chart that completes itself as its bearer kills and points, when whole, at Silas and at the cure buried with him. Jeremy Gilbert becomes a hunter and becomes the map.

Professor Atticus Shane supplies the scholarship and the manipulation. The map wants three massacres of twelve to charge the ground it is read from, and Shane arranges them and lets other people believe the arranging was theirs. It takes them to an island, and under the island to a cave, and in the cave to a desiccated man holding a cure that only one person can take.

Katherine Pierce, who has run for five hundred years on the single principle of never being the one who pays, is caught and has the cure forced down her throat. She ages five centuries in a matter of weeks. It is the cruellest possible ending for her and she survives even that.

And Silas gets up. Two thousand years desiccated in a tomb, and the first thing he does is wear Stefan Salvatore's face — because they have the same face, because Stefan is Silas's doppelgänger the way Elena is Amara's, which the show has been sitting on since its first season. He puts Stefan in a safe at the bottom of a quarry and leaves him there to drown and revive for three months.

Elsewhere, a man who has spent a thousand years being the most feared thing in any room learns that a werewolf he spent one night with is pregnant, and goes south to a city he built and abandoned, to see about it.

From here the chronicle has two floors and both are occupied at once.

What happens in Mystic Falls and what happens in New Orleans are not sequential. They are simultaneous, and they were made to be watched that way — one episode of each, alternating, for three straight years. Told one after the other, as though Virginia finished before Louisiana began, the history stops being true: the same seasons happen twice, the same months are lived through in two places by people who telephone one another across them, and a reader who takes them in order is asked to go back six years and start again.

So this chapter alternates, and each section says where it stands. The pairing is not invented for this codex; it is the order the two stories were built to be read in.

Mystic Falls · The Ancients Wake

Silas has one aim and it is not conquest: he wants to die. He has been immortal for two thousand years and everything he loved was taken out of the world at the beginning of it, and the only way to reach Amara is to dismantle the wall her jailer built. So he sets about tearing down the Other Side, which is a purgatory holding every supernatural death since the ancient world, in order to walk through the hole.

Qetsiyah comes back to stop him, and she comes back as "Tessa", and two thousand years have not cooled her by a single degree. Amara is found alive — the Anchor, conscious the entire time, having felt every supernatural death that passed through her since Greece — and is cured, and kills herself within days of being freed, because two millennia of that is not a thing anyone recovers from.

Both ancients are dead inside the year. The damage they did to the wall is not repaired.

Then the Travelers arrive in force under Markos, and they have been waiting for this since the schism: two living doppelgängers in one place, their blood spilled together, and the curse that has kept them homeless for two thousand years finally broken. It works. And the side effect they regarded as a dividend arrives with it — inside the town limits, every kind of magic that is not their own simply stops. Vampires in Mystic Falls begin dying of whatever originally killed them. Spells fail in the casting. It is the single best mechanic the show ever built, because it is the only threat that cannot be punched.

Undoing it costs Bonnie Bennett and Damon Salvatore their lives, at the precise moment the Other Side finishes collapsing — which means there is no longer anywhere for the dead to go.

New Orleans · The City He Built

Klaus goes back to a city he ruled for two hundred years and finds it in the hands of the boy he raised.

Marcel was born in New Orleans in 1810 to an enslaved woman and the Governor of Louisiana who owned her. His mother died of fever before she had let herself name him. Klaus first noticed him because the boy had been whipped and answered it by throwing an apple at the overseer, and Klaus — who recognised the gesture — took him into the family as his ward and gave him a name: Marcellus, little warrior. He raised him, taught him, and eventually turned him. Ninety years after the opera house burned and the family fled, Marcel is running the French Quarter on his own terms and doing it well.

The city stands on a three-way standoff. Marcel's vampires hold the streets. Nine witch covens hold the cemeteries and the ancestral magic. The wolves are outside the walls in the bayou, still under the curse Marcel ordered in 1991. Between them, in a seat that exists so somebody can say the obvious thing aloud, are the humans: Cami O'Connell and her uncle Kieran.

New Orleans witchcraft is its own tradition and the difference is load-bearing. It does not draw on nature at large or on spirits generally, but on the coven's own consecrated dead — the Ancestors, who are not a metaphor. They have opinions. They make demands. They can cut a witch off from magic entirely, and they torture the dead who displease them.

Marcel's hold on the covens runs through one girl. Davina Claire was one of four Harvest girls chosen by the elder Bastianna Natale for a ritual that required their deaths and promised their return. Marcel stopped it partway through, which saved her and broke it, and left her carrying magic that was meant to be shared out among four — more power than any one witch should hold and no training for it. Her hatred of her own coven is what enforces his rule, and he knows it.

And in the bayou, in a hurricane, Hayley Marshall gives birth to a daughter. Hope Mikaelson is witch by Esther's blood, wolf by Ansel's and by her mother's — her mother's Labonair line makes her werewolf royalty in her own right — and vampire by the spell Esther cast a thousand years ago. The first tribrid. Half the factions in the city want her dead and the other half want her owned, so her death is faked and Rebekah takes her away to be raised in secret: away from the Guerrera wolves, away from Esther, and away from a great-aunt with a thousand-year-old claim on the firstborn of every generation.

The hinge. Before the Other Side falls, death in this world is administrative — a waiting room with a view of the living, and a queue to come back. After it falls there is nowhere to put anyone, and the story has to go and find somewhere. What it finds has been sitting underneath the whole time.

Mystic Falls · The Prison World

Damon and Bonnie do not die. They wake in 1994, on the tenth of May, in a Mystic Falls containing no one at all, and the day ends and begins again, and again. It is a Gemini prison world, and it has a prisoner already in it.

Malachai Parker is a siphoner: born into a coven that produces twins and merges them, born without magic of his own and able only to take it out of other magical things, and treated from birth as a defect rather than a son. At twenty-two he murdered four of his siblings. His coven put him in a single day and locked the door.

He gets out with them. What he does next is a straight line from what was done to him: he goes to his sister Jo's wedding — Josette Laughlin, who is marrying Alaric Saltzman — and stabs her to death at the altar, because a merge requires a twin and he intends to be the one who survives it. The Gemini move her unborn twins into Caroline Forbes rather than lose them. Those two children will carry the entire last act of this history.

Kai's parting work is a spell that ties Elena's life to Bonnie's: Elena sleeps, and does not age, and does not wake until Bonnie Bennett dies. The show takes its lead character off the board for two full seasons and keeps going, which almost nothing else would survive.

And Lily Salvatore comes out of a prison world of her own, a hundred and twelve years after the Gemini put her in one, with six siphoners she turned into vampires and calls her children. The Heretics are witches who are also vampires — the one combination nature is supposed to forbid — and they take Mystic Falls and empty it. The town is evacuated. Its own founders' descendants abandon it.

New Orleans · The Mother, the Aunt, the Firstborn

Esther is back, in a new body, and her proposition to her children is the same one she has been making for a thousand years: let her undo it. Let her put them in mortal bodies and let them die properly. Finn is with her. Mikael is dragged back too, and a family that has spent nine centuries running from him has to be in the same house as him.

And then a woman walks in claiming to be their sister.

Freya Mikaelson is the firstborn Esther sold to Dahlia before any of them were born, and she is not dead and never was. She survived a millennium in hundred-year cycles of enforced sleep, waking for a year at a time — the last of them ending on the final day of 1912 — which is the price Dahlia set on immortality for them both. Her family disbelieve her for most of a year, which is reasonable, and she is telling the truth.

Dahlia comes for Hope, because the bargain was never for one child but for the firstborn of every generation in perpetuity, and Hope is the firstborn of hers. Killing her requires the entire Mikaelson family to cooperate completely and without reservation, which is a thing they have never once managed in a thousand years, and which is precisely why it works as an ending.

Mystic Falls · The Huntress and the Vault

Rayna Cruz is a hunter made by shamans, carrying a sword and the Phoenix Stone, and what she does is not kill vampires but file them: a vampire she stabs goes into the stone, into a hell of its own memories, and stays there. She has lifetimes to spend and no other purpose, and she is after the Heretics.

The Armory reopens. It is a vault the St. John family have run for generations on the reasoning that a thing understood is a thing controlled, and it has been hoarding the supernatural for centuries. In its basement, behind a door built to stay shut, is something that has been there long enough for everyone who sealed it to have died.

The show cuts three years into the future, shows the wreckage first and explains it afterwards, and it works far better than it has any business working.

New Orleans · The Trinity and the Prophecy

The prophecy is four lines long and the family spends a year failing to outrun it: the Mikaelsons will fall — one by friend, one by foe, one by family.

The three who come to make it true are the first three vampires they ever made. Lucien Castle was the first vampire Klaus turned, and the first vampire turned by anyone. Tristan de Martel was the first Elijah turned, and has spent the centuries since building the Strix into a society of vampires more organised than any Original ever bothered to be. Aurora de Martel was the first Rebekah turned, and Klaus loved her, and Rebekah turned her against his express wishes and lost him for a century over it.

Lucien takes Esther's original work and refines it, and comes out the other side an Upgraded Original — venom in the bite that kills even a Mikaelson, and no white oak required. Marcel takes the same serum afterwards, which puts the only other way of killing an Original permanently into the hands of a man the family have spent a hundred years underestimating.

Tristan ends in a container at the bottom of the ocean, drowning and reviving and drowning again, on a schedule with no end — which was Elijah's punishment and not an accident, and which stops only when Elijah himself dies, because Tristan was sired to him and goes when he goes.

Aurora survives everything, is sealed away, and is still furious about all of it a thousand years later. She gets out.

Mystic Falls · The Devil

What was in the Armory vault is a siren, and behind the siren is the oldest thing in this entire history.

Arcadius was born before 750 BC in a village on an island in the Mediterranean, the first psychic the world produced. He could see into the minds of others and he used it to help people, and they burned him at the stake for it. He did not stop. What was left of him hardened into a dimension that feeds on the souls of the wicked, and he has been collecting them ever since, and he is what has been underneath the Other Side the whole time.

The sirens are his, and their making is the cruellest thing in the chronicle. After his death, others born with his gift were driven out and exiled to the same island and left there to die. Sybil and Seline were two of them. Cade offered them eternity on one condition — that they eat the flesh of mortals forever, while he took the souls — and Seline accepted, for herself and for her sister, who did not get a say.

They take Damon and Stefan and turn them into collectors, which is not a possession but a job, and the show is careful about the difference. Katherine Pierce comes back out of Hell to run the place and to burn the town on her way through.

It ends on a bell. Matt Donovan — the only significant character in eight years who never became anything, and the show's quiet argument that this was the braver option — rings the Maxwell bell. Eleven strikes; Cade steps through the boundary of Hell on the eleventh. The twelfth is rung by Matt's dead sister Vicki, sent back by Katherine, and Matt lets her finish it so that she can stop.

Damon takes the cure out of Stefan's blood and lives. Stefan — human only until he passes it on, and a vampire again the instant he does — walks into the fire. And Bonnie Bennett, channelling every dead witch of her line at once, destroys Hell from a street corner in a small Virginia town.

After that the dead simply find peace. Elena wakes. She and Damon grow old and die of nothing supernatural whatever. Stefan finds Lexi. Damon finds Stefan. The last thing the story shows you is the two brothers, because that is what all eight years were actually about.

New Orleans · The Hollow

Inadu was a witch of extraordinary power, born to a people who had never produced anything like her, and her own mother killed her with an axe the elders had charged for the purpose. Her dying working is what laid the werewolf curse on the region in the first place — which means the wolves of Louisiana, and Klaus's own wolf blood by inheritance, trace back to a murdered child's last spiteful act.

She is not alive and she is not dead. She is older than the Ancestors, and the covens who now fear her once summoned her. She wants a body, and the body she wants is Hope's.

What she needs first is sacrifice: five young New Orleans witches, and Hope Mikaelson is to be the fifth. Her power cannot be destroyed. It can only be divided — so Klaus, Elijah, Rebekah and Kol each take a quarter of her into themselves and scatter to opposite ends of the earth, because if any two of them stand in the same room she begins to reassemble.

The family that spent a thousand years saying "always and forever" to each other is now forbidden from being in the same country. Hope grows up writing letters to a father who cannot come near her. And Hayley Marshall — who walked into this story as a werewolf with no family and became the one adult in it who consistently chose her child over her advantage — is killed before it is over.

Seven years pass in which the most dangerous family in the world does nothing at all, because doing nothing is the only thing keeping the world intact. Klaus is in one hemisphere and Elijah in another. Rebekah and Kol are further off again. Each of them is carrying a quarter of a dead witch and none of them may be in the same room as another.

It is the cruellest sentence the story could have passed on them, and it is the correct one. A thousand years of "always and forever" — a promise made by five children standing over a sixth one's grave — answered at last by a punishment that is simply the promise made impossible to keep.

Elijah does not spend the seven years waiting. He spends them with his memories stripped out, at his own request, living in Marseille under another name and playing piano in a bar, because being Elijah Mikaelson without his family turned out to be worse than not being him at all.

The Daughter Comes of Age

Hope Mikaelson grows up at a boarding school in Virginia, which is the one part of her father's planning that works exactly as intended. She is a Mikaelson, which means she is clever and furious and better at being alone than a child should be, and she has spent her life writing to a man who answers and cannot come.

She is also, at this point, two-thirds of what she is. The witch is awake and the wolf is awake. The vampire in her is dormant and stays dormant, because a tribrid's vampire nature will not activate until she dies with vampire blood in her system, and everyone who loves her is arranging their lives around making sure she does not.

What brings the family home is the Hollow, doing what the Hollow does: refusing to stay divided. Hope takes all four quarters back into herself to spare them, which is the most Mikaelson decision available to her, and it is killing her.

The Only Way Out

The arithmetic is short and there is no third option in it. The Hollow cannot be destroyed and cannot stay in Hope. It can be moved — into a body strong enough to hold it and then destroyed with that body. There is exactly one body in the world strong enough, and it belongs to her father.

So Klaus Mikaelson takes his daughter's death into himself in order to die of it, which is a thing nobody who knew him at any point in the preceding thousand years would have predicted, and which the story has spent five seasons earning.

And Elijah will not let him go alone. The last white oak stake in existence is broken in half so that there are two, and the brothers run each other through in the same moment, in the city they built, in the century after everyone who might have stopped them had already gone.

"Always and forever" is finally kept. It is kept at the only price that could ever have made it mean anything, which is that keeping it costs both of them everything, and neither hesitates.

Klaus's estate. Rebekah takes the cure and a mortal life with Marcel, which is the ending she asked for in the eleventh century and was refused. Kol leaves with Davina. Freya marries Keelin. And Hope inherits a fortune, a place at a school in Virginia, and a letter from her father that will not be delivered for another ten years.

The Salvatore boarding house became a school. Caroline Forbes had the idea, Klaus Mikaelson paid for it, and Alaric Saltzman runs it. It takes in witches, vampires and werewolves and teaches them to live hidden in plain sight rather than be hunted, behind a cloaking spell and a prospectus plausible enough to satisfy a county inspector.

It is the one genuinely optimistic idea this entire history produces. Two thousand years of people being killed for what they were born as, and the answer that finally works is a curriculum and a dormitory and somebody to tell you that the thing inside you has a name and a management plan.

The Twins

Josie and Lizzie Saltzman are the daughters of Alaric Saltzman and Josette Laughlin, and they were moved by magic out of a murdered woman and into Caroline Forbes before they were born. They are Gemini twins. They are also siphoners — no magic of their own, able only to take it out of other magical things — which in their mother's coven was a defect worth exiling a child for.

Which means the Merge is coming for them. At twenty-two the twins must merge; the stronger absorbs the weaker; the weaker dies. The rule was written by a coven that Kai Parker wiped out in a single working. The coven is gone. The rule is not, because that is how rules work in this world — the people who made them are long dead and the machinery grinds on regardless.

Alaric spends four years failing to break it, which is the correct and painful shape for that story, and in the end the girls solve it themselves.

Malivore

Malivore is a golem, made from black magic by a triad of the three species — one witch, one vampire, one werewolf — for the purpose of removing monsters from the world. Not killing them: erasing them. Anything Malivore swallows is not merely dead but never was, wiped out of every memory and every record, surviving only as folklore that nobody can source.

It is a very tidy explanation for why nobody in the preceding eleven years ever mentioned dragons.

By its own construction the three species that made it cannot be harmed by it, and when it is contained it reverts to what it looks like at rest: a black pit in the ground in Kansas. Every monster the school fights is something Malivore already ate once and is trying to reclaim, which makes the entire final act of the franchise a matter of consequences returning — which is what this franchise has always been about.

Landon Kirby is Malivore's son and a phoenix, and dies more times than anyone bothers to count. Clarke is his half-brother and considerably worse at being a person. And Hope is erased by it for a stretch — out of the world and out of the memory of every single person who loves her — and has to earn her own existence back from people who have no idea who she is. It is the best use the show ever makes of its central idea.

The Tribrid

Hope resists her vampire nature for two years, because activating it requires dying with vampire blood in her, and because everyone who has ever loved her has arranged their life around preventing exactly that.

When she finally becomes what she is, she is the first fully realised tribrid: witch and wolf and vampire at once, stronger than any Original ever was, and — because a vampire's nature comes with a humanity switch — able to turn off the part of her that would stop her using it.

Klaus Mikaelson's daughter switching off her humanity to survive a grief she cannot carry is the single most on-theme event in two thousand years of this story. She is her father's child in the specific way he most feared and most understood.

The End of It

With Malivore gone, everything it ever swallowed comes back, and the gods who slept through the centuries inside sarcophagi wake up with it. Aurora de Martel — turned by Rebekah in the eleventh century, sealed away, still incandescent about a slight from the first millennium — arrives separately and on her own account. The oldest characters in the franchise turn up at an American high school, which should not work and largely does.

Josie and Lizzie never merge. The rule is beaten, by them, which is the only ending that would have been worth four years of setup.

Hope keeps what she is. She does not get to put it down, and she does not die, and the show's closing argument is that she has to go on living as the thing two thousand years of other people's decisions made her. The loop Esther opened when she refused to bury a second child does not close. It is simply carried, by somebody willing to carry it.

Alaric steps down to write the history of the supernatural, which is this codex's in-universe counterpart and a joke the franchise has earned. Caroline Forbes comes home as headmistress.

And Klaus's last message to his daughter is finally delivered — a recording pulled out of Limbo and played for her on a conjured screen at the Old Mill. He tells her that she will lose the people she loves because she does not die; that she is his peace; and that he regrets not one moment of her. Two thousand years from one badly cast immortality spell, and the whole of it ends with a school staying open and a father getting a message through.