The Coven

The origins of the Coven stretch farther backward in time than anyone can imagine. Before the beginnings of recorded history, our dimension was the final battleground in a war between two other dimensions: the Cherubim and the Daemons. These two factions strode god-like across our reality before the Cherubim ended the war. In the final battles, they locked off all other dimensional exits from the Daemons' home plane, imprisoning this once pan-universal culture into a single confining reality. This imprisonment was later referred to by humans as the Daemongrid. And (as in all good super-hero universes) there was a point of weakness that corresponded with Earth's bio-aura; Earth had been a staging base for the Daemons, where their created worshipers, the Kraken, lived, and they had hidden a trap door here through which they might someday escape.
    The Coven were agents that the Daemons empowered and manipulated in hopes of opening that trap door. The flaw's mere presence was enough to give the Daemons some power on Earth; their agents could draw that power from them, mimic their vast abilities, or sometimes allow them escape from the grid by binding the Daemons into their own bodies. The Cherubim were unaware of these actions, and apparently uncaring; they had no further discernable contact with Earth, and the Coven's power grew.
    Unfortunately, the grid was too strong, even with the flaw, for the Coven to easily open the doorway for the Daemonic masters. Millennia passed as the Coven sometimes flourished, sometimes faltered. On several occasions they nearly opened the door, but were stopped at the last minute by some interruption or another. In many more cases smaller ceremonies were interrupted by self-assured and self-righteous adventurers who believed that they were saving the world. None of them understood the true nature of the situation as the Coven saw it; true, the Daemons were a means of personal power to them, but they were also sentient beings trapped and imprisoned for having a philosophy different than the victors of a particular war. The Daemons were chaotic, but that didn't make them evil.
    Unfortunately, the aeons of confinement had made them slightly mad. And when Daemons did sometimes get free, they were so crazed by their confinement that they could not be counted on for rational behavior, but went mad with freedom for months, years, decades, before their true nature reasserted itself. This was a bit of a PR problem for the philosophical members of the Coven. And that made the Coven more and more dangerous. The people drawn to it were less often scholars and philosophers and more often seekers of power and glory. Many didn't want the grid opened at all, knowing that such a catastrophic change of affairs would topple their own gains and powers.
    The Coven became a vast international conspiracy dedicated to advancing their own power and paying lip service to the desires of the Daemons, who were now more a convenient power source than masters or supplicants. It is impossible to know how much of world affairs they manipulated, and how much their presence spawned other groups—the Illuminators, the Whitemantles—who were dedicated to opposing the Coven (while advancing their own philosophy, of course). These groups lacked the Coven's raw magical power, and had to content themselves with subtle abilities and human agents. While they never gained much control of world events, they did manage to check the Coven's advances on several fronts.
    In the second half of the 20th century, the leaders of the Coven decided to move to wipe these groups out; they would force the flaw in the grid slightly, increasing the flow of power and releasing more Daemons that they could control. Their rival groups got wind of this, but were unable to do anything directly to stop it. If the Coven succeeded in the ceremony, they would become unstoppable. If they botched it the grid would tear open and the Daemons would run rampant in our dimension, an event that would surely kill all life on Earth. Unsure what else to do, the Whitemantles lied. They contacted members of the US government through various agents and told them that there was organized communist activity in the States. (The nature of the flaw meant that this century the ceremonies had to be performed in that quarter of the world, and the Whitemantles felt certain that it would be in the US somewhere.)
    Scared of the growing "Red menace," the United States government sicced the Great Hunt, their anti-Communist super-team, on these anti-Christian Stalinists. The Great Hunt was tenacious and implacable, and after a few encounters with the Coven they discovered that the threat was not from the USSR, but from somewhere much worse. Knowing that they couldn't publicize the fact that they were fighting Daemon-worshippers, the existence of the Coven became another government secret, and the Great Hunt continued to battle Ritual Magic Using, ummm, Communists, as far as the press was concerned. In 1954 the Hunt found and destroyed the ritual power base of the Coven, at the cost of many of their lives. The government was convinced that the Coven was destroyed, and closed the file—probably at the instigation of Coven agents.
    Naturally, the Coven had survived, though their plans of the last few centuries had been severely weakened. They kept to the shadows learning to adapt to the new world of variants. The Coven had been used to dominance for centuries: none of their rivals could match their powers since the Sorcerous Exodus over a thousand years ago. The new presence of variants threw the whole nature of the game off balance, and the Coven needed time to readjust its perspective. They were patient, and despite the apparent disappearance of variants after their cataclysimic final battle in '54, they knew that the world had changed. They would change with it, but slowly, patiently. When Dolphin's appearance marked the return of variants in 1963, they knew that they had made the correct decision.
    Over the next seventeen years they moved people into position, manipulated events and kept to the shadows. They also started some aggressive recruitment drives, and began the questionable practice of bonding freed Daemons to non-magi. Without the carefully trained willpower that the Coven taught its members, these people became little more than husks for Daemons of varying power levels. These monsters were then magically bound under the control of the Coven, to be used as troops against any variants that might get in their way. These were minor ceremonies, but delicate, requiring several Coven masters in one place at one time, for a suitable number of people to be possessed to make it worth the expenditure of energy.
    In the middle of 1980, one of these rituals was occurring at Cerrifin Cove, a short distance up the coast from Harborview, CT. Some of the victims were Chinese immigrants with significant magical potential, and their kidnapping had drawn the attention of the Chinese hero Black Dragon and his disciple. The Black Dragon was one of the few mystical forces that could best a Coven Master. His presence disrupted the whole ceremony, and the magi began to panic. Then Dragon's disciple betrayed and killed him in the confusion in a futile bid to become the next Black Dragon, and the entire situation exploded. None of the Coven present survived the clash of magical energy, the only survivor to the incident was the Dragon's former heir apparent, now murderer.
    What no one outside the Coven knew was that the Coven's Grand Patriarch and his three most trusted masters had been overseeing the ceremony. Their deaths left a power vacuum in the Coven, which those young and impatient new recruits rushed to fill. The old masters found themselves outnumbered and overwhelmed, being either swept along in the tides or eliminated out of hand by those who wanted the power that had been promised and wanted it now.
    This sudden change in the nature of the game left everyone off guard, and led to two forcings of the Daemongrid over the next seven years, one in Harborview in 1984, and the actual sundering in 1986. It was this sudden change in tactics, this sudden exposure to the waking world, that destroyed the Coven in the end. Not only did North America's Variant population rise against them, but it is thought that they attracted Cherubim attention. By the end of the 1986 forcing, someone or something (no doubt through Cherubim intervention) had discovered a way to mend the flaw. This not only ended the so called Daemonwar, but it totally cut the Coven off from its main source of power. Shattered and crippled, the Coven barely existed after that.
    There are some Coven Masters still alive, limping by on the strength of their bound daemons and their truncated power, but they are being slowly eliminated in mopping up actions by the world's variants, subtly directed by the Illuminated and the Whitemantles. The era of the Coven is over, and their power is destroyed. While something may rise from their ashes, it will never be the threat or the force that it once was.

Coven Acolytes
These were the least of the Coven, normal men and women who had been corrupted by promises or threats, and who had mastered some minor level of ritual magic. They were the Coven's cannon fodder and infiltrators. Of the levels of the Coven now, these are the most numerous, but many have gone back to their own lives, or are forming groups that are parodies of their former glory, masked in a new plethora of ritual social organizations.

Coven Apprentices
These were the order of lesser magi, who had mastered one or more basic spells, but were not considered potent enough to have any say in the organization's functions. Dependent almost entirely on Daemonic magic, the Apprentices are now all but powerless; possessing some ritual magic, they have no true sorcery at their hands any longer. It matters little, for 95% of them were obliterated in the '86 Daemonwar.

Coven Magi
This is the level where things become dangerous. A Coven Mage is the equivalent of a mid-beta variant, and has mastered roughly a dozen potent sorcerous magics in addition to simple rituals. Like the apprentices, the vast majority of these were wiped out in 1986.

Coven Monsters
People with no magical ability at all, these are normal people turned into unfortunate receptacles for Daemons. These are the Coven's shock troops, and their power level ranges from mid-beta to mid-gamma. The amount of the receptacle's original personality remaining depends on the strength of the Daemon; the weaker the Daemon, the more their core existence is intact. In some cases the core personality is all but undamaged, and is in more control than the Daemon. There are hundreds of these things scattered across the world, some under the control of surviving Coven members, some roaming free, and some acting as heroes.

Coven Masters
These are the greatest of the Coven, Magi who became powerful enough to bind a Daemon to themselves, giving them two distinctly different sources of magical power. Masters of a score of sorceries, they are also controlling powerful Daemons, making them at least equal to gamma level variants. There were only a few score of these before the events of 1986, and roughly a dozen remain alive and at large. Unlike the other Coven remnants, they are serious threats.

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