Doppelgänger

**Doppelgängers** (or a Shadow-Self) are individuals whom happen to be a supernatural double of a person that has lived before them. They are nature's way of balancing itself by consistently creating mortal counterparts of truly immortal beings to live and eventually die in their place. For over two thousands years, their have been shadows of the original individual whom have appeared over the centuries to take their places as mortal human beings. While their lives don't always follow an exact pattern, they tend to find each other and fall in love with one another over the centuries.

## History

According to legend, millenniums ago when vampires and werewolves wreaked havoc upon the mortal individuals upon the earth, a powerful and indestructible witch used a moonstone and the sacrifice of a specific lineage's blood to cast a curse on them. This was known as The Sun & The Moon Curse which is based on making vampires powerless against the sun and rendering werewolves unable to transform unless there is a full moon. The legend says that if the curse was lifted by a vampire, then the werewolves would be stuck servants of the moon forever. But if the curse was broken by a werewolf they would be able to turn at will and remain in control, whereas the vampires would then be slaves to the sun forever. As it turned out, the legend of The Sun & The Moon Curse was created by Lorena in whom is also the original witch in order to keep the supernatural entities slaves to their numerations which is due to her severe manifestations of creating the species of vampires.

## Powers and Abilities

**Blood:** Doppelgängers, being mystical and recurrent, are massive sources of magical power.

* The blood of a doppelgänger can be used to linksupernatural beings to kinship with the help of magic conducted by any witch.
* Their blood can also be used to bind an extremely powerful curse or spell or to use as a power source in spells that require more magic than the witch in question possesses on their own.
* For some spells, the blood must come from a human doppelgänger. For other spells, the blood of a doppelgänger can still be used even if they've been turned into a vampire, as seen in *Death and the Maiden* when Qetsiyah used Elena's blood (along with Katherine and Amara's blood) to transfer theAnchor from Amara to Bonnie. There are certain spells and uses that require the doppelgänger to be "pure" and human, however, like the undoing of the Hybrid Curse and the siring of hybrids.
* The blood of the last two "living" doppelgängers can be used to reverse spells cast using non-traditional forms of magic, especially spirit magic (e.g. turning a vampire back into a (dead) human, undoing the spell that bound the Other Side, reversing the spells cast on daylight rings for vampires, removing a triggered gene in those cursed with lycanthropy, etc).
* **Linking:** Doppelgängers, being modeled after immortals and other doppelgängers, have an inherently strong mystical connection to each other that can be used to invoke linking spells.
* **Intermixing:** Doppelgängers are fully capable of being turned into vampires, and can retain the mystical properties of their blood despite their vampiric abilities. Since they can also be born witches, as in the case of Katerina Petrova, it can be assumed that doppelgängers could theoretically also be born as other supernatural species, such werewolves or Brotherhood of the Five hunters.