Timeline

**Notice:** This **article** uses content directly taken from the Timeline **article** at the Vampire Diaries Wiki, and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License.
This page contains the **Timeline** which displays all events that happened on *The Vampire Diaries*, *The Originals*, and *Legacies* in chronological order. This includes events affecting characters found in Flashbacks and Flashforwards that have already come to pass.

* Ancient
* Middle Ages

## 8th Millennium B.C.

* At some point in time circa the 8th millennium B.C. the gods were happy, all except for Ken. His insatiable desire for conquest led him to find new places where he could be feared and loved. Along with his sister Lynn, and the other gods, they crossed into the mortal world and that's when wars intensified. More and more humans started arriving in Limbo, a slow trickle became a flood. Lynn thought it was unfair and saw the poor souls lost to wander in the darkness forever. She took pity on them. She found a mother and child who died for no reason, and she thought, since the gods had taken away their happiness, she should ferry them across into Peace, their home. Since they colonized their world, she settled them in theirs. When Ken discovered this, he cursed her. If she was so interested in helping humans, he would force her to do it for all eternity, never to return home. Always reaching the shore, but never able to actually set foot there. Lynn continued to ferry souls for the next 10,000 years, give or take.

## 30th Century B.C.

* Ben was born to a mortal mother and a divine father in a village at the base of the Caucasus Mountains. His village loved the gods, but he was living proof of that love. His birthright explained his invincibility in battle, which he fought to keep their village safe. Despite his father, he had no use for the gods. They had never revealed themselves to him, nor did he ever ask anything of them until the day that Ashur, his best friend and lover, fell ill. The gods of their village lived atop the high mountain and Ben attempted to bring Ashur to the threshold beyond which mortals could not pass. Denied by his father, Ben took matters into his own hands.
* Leaving Ashur at the threshold as he crossed past the barrier, he claimed his birthright and stole the fire that mortals would come to know as magic, hoping it would save Ashur's life. Though it was too late and Ashur died. Out of spite, he gave the magic he stole to the village, believing that the people could help themselves instead of worshiping fickle, uncaring gods. He was foolish, however, and humans sought the same power and privilege the gods abused. They didn't want to stop worshiping the gods, but, in turn, they wanted to become them and in their lust for that power, monsters were born, along with many of the world's ills.
* At some point, he was cursed to this day because he trusted them; cursed to heal and attacked by monsters.

## 23nd Century BC

* Arcadius, the world's first psychic, was born in the Mediterranean region.

## 22nd Century BC

* Around 2200 BC, Arcadius accidentally used his psychic gift to read the mind of a powerful village leader and learned his impure thoughts for very young girls, a revelation that caused the leader and the rest of the village to turn against him. Upon being bound and burned at the stake, Arcadius, in excruciating physical pain from the flames and emotionally distressed by the villagers betraying him, inadvertently unleashed a blast of psychic energy moments prior to his death that was so powerful, it created a new dimension called Hell.
* After Arcadius created Hell, he began bringing in the spirits of those who had committed heinous sins in their lives, feasting on and tormenting their souls for eternity. This cycle would continue for another thousand years or so, when the Traveler witch Qetsiyah created her own afterlife dimension, which was a purgatory that trapped the souls of supernatural creatures. In most, but not all cases, this prevented anyone who was supernatural from finding peace or going to Hell until the Other Side's destruction in the 21st century.
* Some time after Arcadius' death, his enemies forged a weapon known as the Staff of Arcadius. This weapon has the ability to disrupt a psychic's powers and inflicts them with an extremely painful headache.

## 8th Century BC

* Seline, a powerful young psychic, was exiled to an island when villagers discovered her supernatural identity. Shortly afterward, another young psychic, Sybil, met the same fate, ending up on the same island and befriending Seline. The two then became so close that they referred to each other as "sisters" due to being the only family they had.
* Due to their new home being scarce in resources, Seline showed her how to use her psychic abilities to both amplify each other's power level while also attracting ships in order to be rescued. However, when the first ship crashed into the jagged rocks on the coast, everyone on the ship perished, and Sybil vowed never to use her powers in that way again, believing that if they couldn't live on what "God" provided, then they didn't deserve to live at all. Seline, who had secretly become a cannibal in order to survive on the island, raided the ships for needed items and passed off the flesh of the dead sailors as being animal meat, deceiving Sybil while converting her to a cannibalistic diet.

### 750 BC

* When Sybil learned that she had been feeding on the flesh of innocent men all of her life, she became so distraught that she attempted to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff. When Seline found her dying in the forest, she prayed to "God" to save her, only for the spirit of Arcadius, a deceased psychic and ruler of Hell, to approach them instead. Seline, recognizing Cade by the stories they had heard about him, begged him to save Sybil's life at any cost. Cade ultimately agreed to given the sisters eternal life and youth, on the condition that they feed on the flesh of evildoers who were sent to hell upon death while bringing him their souls for eternal punishment.

## 1st Century BC

* The oldest known ancestor of the Salvatore Family, Silas, was born. He was born into a very wealthy and noble family of witches, and eventually became one of the more gifted witches in his community, alongside of Qetsiyah, the most powerful witch in all of history. He, his former fiancée Qetsiyah, and his true love Amara shaped the majority of the events that created the present day world. Silas eventually became the progenitor of the Salvatore bloodline, as well as the Salvatore line of doppelgängers.
* The oldest known ancestor of the Bennett Family, Qetsiyah, was born. She was born into a very wealthy and noble family of witches. Qetsiyah is known to be one of the most powerful witches in history, rivaled only by Silas. It's argued that Qetsiyah, along with Silas and Amara, helped to shape the future of all of the characters and events in the series.
* The oldest known ancestor of the Petrova Family, Amara, was born. Unlike Silas and Qetsiyah, Amara was born into a poor and downtrodden human family, and eventually grew up to be Qetsiyah's handmaiden. Amara eventually became the progenitor of the Petrova doppelgängers.
* Silas and Qetsiyah, two of the most powerful witches in their community, worked together to create the first spell of immortality.
* At some point in their early adulthood, Silas became engaged to Qetsiyah, who was described on several occasions as being his best friend. However, unbeknownst to Qetsiyah, Silas was also engaging in an affair with her handmaiden, Amara, a mortal with whom he was truly in love.
* Silas and Amara became the very first immortal beings in the world, created with the use of magic, aside from the pre-existing immortal Sirens, who are a similar but different type of immortal monster, created with the use of magic. Qetsiyah and Silas were originally intended to drink the immortality elixir that Qetsiyah had created at their wedding, but Silas instead ended up stealing it and drinking it with Amara, his true soulmate and love of his life, so that they could spend eternity together.
* An angry, vengeful, and jealous Qetsiyah used her magic to desiccate Amara before using her indestructible and eternal body as the mystical anchor to the Other Side, a new purgatory dimension of her own creation that acted as a sort of afterlife for the spirits of deceased supernatural beings. ("Original Sin")
* Qetsiyah then magically petrified Silas as well before sealing him in a tomb in a cave on an island off of what is now Nova Scotia, Canada. Qetsiyah also created a cure for immortality, and buried it along with Silas in this tomb.
	+ Qetsiyah's intention was to force Silas to have to choose between living in agony as a starving immortal for the rest of his life, or taking the cure and dying a mortal death as a witch. Regardless of which choice Silas made, he would spend eternity without Amara in the peaceful human afterlife where he believed she resided; he would either spend the rest of his immortal life as a statue on earth, or would spend it on the Other Side with Qetsiyah, the outcome she wanted most.
* Sometime after Qetsiyah created the immortality spell, a schism formed in the magical community, and caused many witches, including the group of witches who became known as the Gemini Coven, to fear the amount of power witches like Qetsiyah possessed in order to be able to create such spells. This led to the Travelers killing Qetsiyah in anger for the trouble she had wrought to their group by essentially creating the magical basis from which all forms of immortality would be derived in the future.
* The aforementioned witches then cursed Qetsiyah and Silas' community of witches, who from then on became known as the Travelers due to the fact that they were forced to live as nomads as a side effect of the curse, unable to settle as a community for longer than a few days or perform rituals and spells in groups without risking their homes being devastated by natural disasters such as earthquakes and plagues. This curse also cut the Travelers off from Nature, so they were unable to practice traditional magic, their preferred form of witchcraft. ("Resident Evil")
	+ As a result of this curse, the Travelers improvised by creating their own form of magic later known as Traveler Magic, a cruder form of their beloved traditional magic that had many more limitations. They also developed an affinity for a form of spirit possession known as Passenger spells, which allowed them to bypass the restriction in their curse that prevented them from congregating as a group by possessing the bodies of non-Travelers; this allowed them to gather and perform spells as a group with no adverse side effects.
* The Travelers eventually came into possession of the literally-petrified Amara and spent over two thousand years constantly moving her body around so she wouldn't fall into the wrong hands. All the while, the Travelers sought Silas' location and the cure to finally destroy the immortals Qetsiyah had unknowingly created with her spell.

### Consequences of the Spells on Future Generations

* The Salvatore doppelgänger bloodline and the Petrova doppelgänger bloodline was created as a result of Silas, a very powerful witch, and Amara, a mortal, ingesting the immortality elixir, since their nigh-invulnerability caused an imbalance in Nature. Nature found a balance to the law that they had broken, which stated that every living thing must die by creating what became known as "shadow-selves," or "doppelgängers." These exact duplicates of Silas and Amara acted as a version of the immortal beings who could actually die in their place, though they could gain lesser forms of immortality by becoming vampires.
* Silas' betrayal of Qetsiyah by sharing the immortality elixir with Amara is what caused Qetsiyah to create the Other Side to act as a purgatory for supernatural creatures. As the anchor to the Other Side, Amara was forced her to spend her immortal life frozen in stone and acting as a tollbooth for the spirits of dead supernatural beings. Whenever a supernatural being died, their spirit would pass through Amara's body on their way to the purgatory dimension, and Amara would feel the pain of each of their deaths as they crossed over. This fate ultimately drove her to psychological instability, as the immense pain caused by the spirits crossing over — in addition to the confusion of having a foothold in two different planes of existence, which caused her to be unable to distinguish ghosts from the living became too overwhelming for her to bear over the many centuries she was alive. This dimension existed for over two thousand years, during which time it became home to the spirits of countless witches, werewolves, vampires, doppelgängers, and supernatural hunters who had died and were then forced to watch their loved ones and enemies live on without them in near-solitude until it was ultimately destroyed in 2013.

## Before 5th Century AD

* The noble Green Knight wielded Excalibur, though his body and soul was corrupted and decayed as a result of the power. He became unworthy to wield the sword and his thirst for more made him a scourge upon mankind. Wielding the sword, Camelot fell and the Dark Ages began. Eventually, Nimue, Lady of the Lake, became the sword's protector and was bound by duty to find a worthy champion and fell the Green Knight.
	+ At an unknown point in time, both the Green Knight and Nimue encountered Malivore and were consumed.

## 5th Century AD

* In Europe, Markos, leader of the Travelers, was born.
* Markos, upon growing up to become a powerful Traveler witch and leader of their clan, cast a spell on the first pair of doppelgängers spawned as a result of Silas and Amara's immortality. This spell caused the two doppelgänger lines to be mystically drawn to one another so that, when the time came, it would be easier for the Travelers to find them and use their combined blood to break the curse that was placed on them by the witches.
* In what would become the United States of America, a Native American man and woman, both powerful witches and members of two warring tribes, were married together to create a unified coven.
	+ The couple then went on to conceive a child together. For nine months, the tribal Elders came to the the mother, using magic to grant the child great power in hopes that the newborn would become a symbol of prosperity.
	+ After the child was born, it became clear that Inadu was even more powerful than they could have imagined. However, this power came with an insatiable hunger for more power, channeling life in all its forms. Eventually she loved the fear she inspired in others and became ruthless, unfeeling, empty, the define trait gave rise to her nickname, "The Hollow."
* Years later, after Inadu, now a young woman, had performed numerous sacrifices in the name of taking their power for herself, the Elders of her coven, along with her own mother, used wolves to ambush Inadu so that they could take her down once and for all. Knowing that they would have to kill her via dismemberment to ensure that she would be truly dead, the witches held her down as they enchanted an axe with the power to end her life. Knowing that her time was limited, Inadu cast one final spell, empowered by her death.
	+ Once she had been killed, the nature of the spell was finally revealed — she cursed every witch present for her execution to be bound to the full moon, at which time they would be forced to shapeshift into wolves, the same animals they used to hunt her, thus causing the creation of the werewolf species and curse. Inadu's mother, who bore the Crescent mark just like her daughter, then became the progenitor of the Labonair bloodline of werewolves, who shared her lineage with Inadu.
* The other cursed witches in attendance then became the progenitors of the remaining six original werewolf bloodlines — Malraux, Deep Water, Barry, BasRoq, Paxon, and Poldark.
	+ At some point, Inadu's spirit was locked away by the New Orleans Ancestral Witches, remaining a prisoner, in an unknown dimension, for centuries until the link between the ancestors and the living world was destroyed in 2014 and she used the massive release of energy to escape.

## 950s AD

### Between 951 and 956

* Mikael was born to his two unnamed parents in the Kingdom of Norway.
* Dahlia was born into an unnamed family to her two parents in the Kingdom of Norway.
* Ansel was born into an unnamed family to his two unnamed parents in present-day Mystic Falls.
* Esther was born into an unnamed family to her two parents in the Kingdom of Norway.

## 960s AD

### 960 AD

* **June 21:** Erika Claire was born into the Claire Family to an unnamed mother.

### 968-969 AD

* In the Kingdom of Norway, a large group of viking warriors attacked a village where two young witches, Esther and Dahlia, were raised. The vikings easily slaughtered all of the villagers except for the two witches, whom they decided to capture after they saw Dahlia using magic to neutralize the viking who attempted to attack her younger sister. Before they were captured, the sisters promised each other that they would stand by one another, "always and forever", no matter what happened. It was this vow that would also later be adopted by Esther's children; Finn, Elijah, Niklaus, Kol, and Rebekah Mikaelson and her daughter-in-law, Athena Claire Mikaelson in the early 11th century.
* In order to spare Esther from the horrible physical and psychological abuse she herself would eventually endure from the vikings, Dahlia agreed to perform the dark magic they demanded in exchange for Esther's protection. As a result of this deal, she was forced to work for them all day in a cramped hovel while Esther was able to spend most of her day outside collecting magical herbs for her.
* At some point during their captivity, Esther began to grow closer to one of her viking captors, Mikael, and after some time, they fell in love and planned to get married and start a family.
	+ When Dahlia informed her of a plan she had created to allow them to escape the vikings' control using potent sage and serpent's blood, Esther confessed that she had decided to stop practicing witchcraft, as she believed she would no longer need it because Mikael would protect her from any harm. Dahlia felt incredibly betrayed by Esther's decision to leave her in favor of marrying one of their captors, believing that she was breaking their vow to always stick together. In her grief, she began sobbing on the floor after Esther left with Mikael. It is believed that this moment is what led to Dahlia swearing to never be oppressed again.

## 970s AD

### 971 AD

* Some time in 971, Mikael and Esther were married and began to try to have children of their own.

### 972 AD

* In Norway, a barren Esther Mikaelson asked her sister Dahlia to help her conceive a child with magic. Dahlia initially rejected her pleas, as she was still resentful that Esther had abandoned witchcraft and believed if she hadn't, Esther would be able to help herself, but after some convincing, she ultimately agreed. However, Dahlia warned her that it would require heavy sacrifice, which Esther was desperate enough to agree to pay.
* A short time afterward, Mikael and Esther conceived their first child together, and within the year, their daughter, Freya, became their firstborn child.

### 974 AD

* In Norway, Mikael and Esther had a second child, Finn Mikaelson; who would grow up to be the best friend of his older sister, Freya.

### 977-978 AD

* When Freya was five years old and just starting to come into her magical abilities, Dahlia sensed her power and came to take her, Esther's firstborn child, as payment for casting the fertility spell in 972. Esther attempted to resist the price of the spell, which caused Dahlia to remind Esther that she hadn't just agreed to give up her own firstborn child to her — she had also agreed to give up the firstborn witch child of each and every one of Esther's witch descendants for as long as her bloodline existed.
	+ Esther was so devastated by this event (despite knowing what she was agreeing to when she requested Dahlia cast the spell) that she vowed to return to the dark arts and grow in experience and magical strength until she was powerful enough to rival Dahlia herself. Shortly after Freya was taken, Esther made good on this threat and began practicing witchcraft again.
* Mikael, who was away in battle at the time Freya was taken, was told a lie that Freya died from plague upon his return to their home in Norway. This news ultimately had a permanent effect on the future of his family, as the "death" of his beloved daughter caused Mikael to become withdrawn from Esther and his later children.
* Esther was also pregnant with her third child, Elijah, when Freya was taken away by Dahlia, indicating that Elijah was born later this year or earlier in the following year.
* Freya, now in Dahlia's possession, was immediately taught to use her powers by her new guardian. After a short period of instructing Freya in witchcraft, Dahlia created her own brand of connective magic and bound herself to young Freya in a way that allowed her to augment Freya's powers while still giving herself the ability to also channel her young niece and increase her own power as well.
* Armed with Freya and the immense magical power they shared, Dahlia set out to use it to vanquish her enemies. She began this mission right away by slaying an entire village of viking men, women, and children with a wave of her hand; as the village was led by a chief who wanted to run her out of the encampment for practicing witchcraft.
* The witch Ayana, Esther's friend and mentor, informed Esther of a far-away place where "everybody is healthy and blessed with the gifts of speed and strength." This place was in the New World, and the people she was describing were werewolves.