Candra
| Candra Redivender - deceased | |
|---|---|
 Portrayed by Joanna Lumley | |
| Known Aliases: | Candra Bin Loa |
| Affiliations: | Selene, then independent |
| Socked By: | Dex |
| Introduction: | Voodoo Child |
"It's all right to scream."
A former pupil of Selene, Candra sought the vampire witch's power for her own, using the magical energy channeler, Amanda Sefton as the means. Able to be reborn as the result of a curse, her death at the hands of X-Force and Pete Wisdom seems unlikely to be the end of things. With her 'acquisition' of Selene's body, it's only a matter of time.
Contents
Details
Name: Candra Redivenir
Aliases: Candra Bin Loa
Affiliation: Jumbie Obeah cult, former student of Selene
First appearance: May 27, 2007
Family:
Biography
Candra Redivenir is a houdon witch who has lived a very long time. 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 Candra 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's power base, and learning from the more powerful woman.
With Selene's disappearance, and the sudden fracturing of the cult, Candra saw the opportunity to take the next step. She, unlike the others in the cult, held no real loyalty to Selene: after having lived a dozen lifetimes, the idea of a 'dark god' was hard to take seriously. Her plan was 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 had built.
However, Candra was almost as cunning and cautious as her former master. She knew the X-Men are a formidable force, who defeated both Selene's power and that of the Hellfire Club simultaneously. They also shattered one of Selene's 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 resilience of Xavier's staff and students, and the existence of X-Force. While the X-Men extricated 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.
Following the death of Selene in Revenant, it was discovered by Heinrich Klar, Selene's faithful manservant, that Candra had taken over her former mentor's dead body, breaking the cycle of death and rebirth she had previously been chained to.
Powers/Abilities
Candra's main power is her recurrent reincarnation, the product of a spell that granted immortality, but did not confer 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 spells 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 predominantly 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 sorceress, Candra's powers are strongly influenced by the bokor and voudon traditions.
Plots
Meta
Socked by: Dex
PB: Joanna Lumley
