Candra

Details

Name: Candra Redivenir

Aliases: Candra Bin Loa

Affiliation: Jumbie Obeah cult

First appearance: May 27, 2007

Family:

Biography

Candra Redivenir is an ancient witch with a strange power. Originally born in 1680, she has lived through a process of recurrent reincarnation since that time. Brought to Louisiana as a child bride, she became connected with Anton Vielle, a disgraced voudon practitioner turned Bokor or black sorcerer. She became his student, learned all that she could. Once she felt the man had no more to teach her, she killed him and stole a process that he claimed brought immortality.

Candra first died from cholera ten years later. She was born soon after to another French family, and was nearly killed as a child for her unnaturally advanced speech and mind. She swiftly learned how to hide her knowledge of her past life, and survived to have a small family before dying in her thirties, only to be reborn yet again.

Each time she died and returned, she would remember a percentage of her past life. With her new powers, she discovered methods in which to help preserve more of her memories during the rebirth process. Using both, she began to slowly amass wealth and power through each life.

She established a small offshoot voudoun cult inside of New Orleans, The Jumbie Obeah cult, and while shunned by the traditional houngans, built themselves into a useful body of bokor servants. Her cult was based around the idea of her as an ancient loa, who is reborn and binds them to her over generations. The group is not part of the New Orleans Guilds, but often is hired for magical assistance when dealing with elements of the voudoun culture. Candra has also become a sort of mysterious resource to them, her existence passed along as a secret between the top leaders of each guild.

It was through the cult that Selene first discovered Candra. While she had become a power in New Orleans and the surrounding area, her actual wealth and knowledge was tiny next to the other woman. Candra's abilities offered an intriguing possibility, and Selene made an offer; in return for serving as her apprentice and tying her own goals in with Selene's larger ones, the witch would teach Candra more magic and skills.

Through the Hellfire Club, Candra was able to create a series of governorships that would speed the transfer of assets between lives, and strengthen her power in New Orleans. She divided her time between there and New York, working with Selene to increase her cult powerbase, and learning from the more powerful woman.

With Selene's disappearance, and the sudden fractioning of the cult, Candra has seen the opportunity to take the next step. She, unlike the others in the cult, holds no real loyalty to Selene. After having lived a dozen lifetimes, the idea of a 'dark god' is hard to take seriously. Her plan is to use the cult's ritual to try and bring Selene back as a way to betray her, siphoning her considerable power into herself, neatly supplanting her as the leader of the cult, and seizing the wealth and power she has built.

However, Candra is almost as cunning and cautious as her former master. She knows the X-Men are a formidable force, who defeated both her power and that of the Hellfire Club simultaneously. They also shattered one of her oldest and strongest cult centres in Brazil with little effort.

Her plan was complex, but not impossible to accomplish, and served to allow her to reap the benefits, avoid detection and get the X-Men to do her dirty work at the same time. Unfortunately for her, and her allies, they had discounted the resilliance of Xavier's staff and students, and the existance of X-Force. While the X-Men extradiated themselves from each trap, Remy LeBeau's contacts in the Thieves Guild successfully tied Belladonna Boudreaux-LeBeau's activities to Candra, sending X-Force down to raid her estate. In the ensuing confrontation, the Jumbie Obeah cult was almost completely wiped out, and Candra herself killed by Pete Wisdom.

Whether or not she has been reborn again is a mystery.

Powers/Abilities

Candra's main power is her recurrent reincarnation, the product of a spell that granted immortality, but did not confere any sort of protection for the body from aging or death. Each time Candra has died, her mind instantly transfers to a new born child. It takes years for the memories to properly reform, and the transfer is never fully complete. Over the years, Candra has used a number of spell and techniques to increase her ability to retain her memories and skills, but still she normally will lose at least a third of the memories of her previous life. Curiously, to date, Candra has always been born into a prodiminantly caucasian family of French descent in the New Orleans region.

Candra is also a powerful magic user in her own right, although she loses much of that knowledge with each reborn, forcing her to start her learning over each time. While Selene was the stronger sorcoress, Candra's powers are strongly influenced by the bokor and voudon traditions.

Plots

Voodoo Child

Meta

Socked by: Dex

PB: Joanna Lumley

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