Gemini Coven

**The Gemini Coven** were a powerful coven of witches from the Pacific Northwestern United States, specifically Portland, Oregon. They are known for their penchant for cloaking spells and their unique means of selecting a leader from a set of twins.

The Geminis were also notorious for their ability to create Prison Worlds, and were known to have found a way to contact their dead ancestors before the Other Side collapsed.

The coven has died out as a result of the death of their leader, Malachai Parker. Its only surviving member is Josette's daughter, Josie Saltzman. Valerie Tulle and Lizzie Saltzman are the only remaining former members of this coven due to their deaths and subsequent transition into witch-vampire hybrids, whose link to the Gemini broke when they were turned into vampires.

## Throughout The Vampire Diaries Series

The Gemini Coven's tradition is rooted in a ritual called The Merge. This is how they select their leader; when a pair of twins are born into the coven, they undergo the Merge ceremony once they reach the age of twenty-two. During this ceremony, the stronger of the two would claim their twin's power and emerge with double the strength they previously held. Their weaker twin dies as a result, leaving the survivor to become the new leader of the Coven. The various members of the Gemini Coven apparently all bind their magic and life to the success of the Merge ritual, as it has been said that, should the leader of the Gemini Coven die before a new leader can replace them, then the rest of the coven will die as well. Additionally, the major spells cast by the coven, such as the one that created the Prison Worlds, are also bound to the leader's life, if the leader dies, the spells are no longer bound and cease to exist.

For 2,000 years the Gemini Coven kept track of The Travelers so that they would be unable to break the curse put on them as punishment for Silas and Qetsiyah creating The Immortality Spell. Their mission was to keep them from getting their hands on Silas and Amara's doppelgängers to break the curse.

In 1903, the Geminis became aware of a violent Ripper vampire named Lily Salvatore, who slaughtered as many as 3,000 people in Europe on a blood-crazed bender. They made it their task to stop her, and, when she returned to the United States (presumably to see her sons, Damon and Stefan), the Geminis were waiting for her when she docked in Manhattan. They then trapped her in a prison world, and afterward, they were forced to burn down the ship in which she came to the country when they found she had drained the entire crew of their blood. As a result of her crimes, Lily became the first person to be imprisoned in a Gemini prison world.

At some point, Joshua Parker survived the Merge ceremony and became the Coven's leader. Joshua's first born children were twins; Josette and Malachai Parker. As such, they were meant to undergo the Merge, after which the strongest would succeed Joshua as leader. However, Malachai was born with a rare affliction; he could not generate his own magic. Instead, he could only practice magic when he siphoned it from another witch through tactile contact, and this power was typically used up quickly. Seeing this as an abomination of nature, Joshua and the rest of the coven decreed that Malachai could not become the Coven's leader. Joshua and his wife then continued to have more children until they finally had another set of twins, Lucas and Olivia Parker. However, when Malachai realized his parents' plans, he was furious that he was being robbed of his place as future leader of the Coven. Desperate to be able to possess his own magic and to no longer have to rely on others to give it to him, Malachai slaughtered three of his siblings in an effort to find and kill Lucas and Olivia. He also seriously wounded his sister, Jo, by removing her spleen with a large hunting knife. However, Jo was able to use a cloaking spell to save her brother and sister from Malachai. Afterwards, she hid her magic by sealing it in the same blade her brother used to butcher her body and told Malachai that she was willing to perform the Merge so long as he didn't harm any more of their siblings. Later, as they attempted the ceremony, Malachai realized his sister had tricked him when he could not feel her magic as he held her hands. Joshua and the rest of the Coven then used the passing of a solar eclipse on the 10th of May, 1994, to imprison Malachai in a prison world, which trapped him in a temporal time loop where he was forced to relive the same day over and over again and be forever alone, as he was incapable of killing himself to escape his punishment. As a price for locking her brother away, Jo was allowed to leave the Coven and she became a doctor, leaving her magic sealed in the kitchen knife at the Parker house in Portland.

The Gemini Coven sent Luke and Liv to Mystic Falls when rumors that The Travelers were preparing something big began to travel around the witch community. Knowing of the importance of the doppelgängers to the Travelers' plans, and the potential importance of Bonnie Bennett as the Anchor to the Other Side, Liv and Luke were tasked with protecting them, or, if that should fail, killing them if the Travelers got too close to them. Another member of the Coven, Hazel, was sent to Atlanta to protect Tom Avery, the last of the Silas doppelgängers after Silas was killed in Mystic Falls. Hazel magically induced him into a coma, hooked him up to a naso-gastric feeding machine, and masked him with a cloaking spell to prevent the Travelers from finding him and killing him, as the Travelers' plans required there to be only one living doppelgänger from each line.

After the Travelers located Tom using Stefan as a link, Caroline Forbes and Enzo were sent to kill him. Hazel and Tom were both killed by Enzo, which led the Parker twins to try and kill Elena Gilbert to prevent the Travelers from using her blood or the power of the last two doppelgängers. However, they were unable to kill her after Damon intervened to save her, and instead, Elena's brother, Jeremy Gilbert, and his friends, Matt Donovan and Tyler Lockwood, offer to help them find and stop the Travelers to protect their doppelgänger loved ones. Liv explained to them that the Travelers could already have begun assembling in Mystic Falls by placing Passengers in the bodies of the locals, and stated that only Jeremy could resist them due to his Hunter abilities which gives him an immunity to spirit possession, mind compulsion, and other psychic powers. They later tried to cloak the doppelgängers to protect them, but due to circumstances beyond their control, Elena and Stefan were lured outside of the cloaking range, which allowed the Travelers to find them and take them. Realizing they no longer had another choice if they wanted to fulfill their coven's mission, Liv and Luke tried to kill Stefan and Elena to stop the Travelers from casting a spell which would destroy all Spirit Magic. However, the Travelers began their spell before they could succeed, which caused them to lose access to their magic within the bounds of the town and forced them to flee.

Eventually, Stefan was killed by the renegade Traveler Julian, halting the spell and limiting the total coverage of the magical purification effects to just around the borders of Mystic Falls. Intercepted by Elena and Caroline, Liv was coerced into helping them accomplish their goal of bringing their friends back from the rapidly-disintegrating Other Side and stopping the Travelers after Caroline killed Luke in order to motivate her, trapping him on the Other Side. Learning the spell needed to overwhelm the Anchor from Silas' ghost, Liv performed the spell, using the power from all of the Travelers that were killed after Damon and Elena triggered a gas explosion in the Mystic Grill, opening the door to the Other Side and allowing all their friends to return. However, Luke stopped the spell to save Liv's life before Damon could return, trapping him on the Other Side with Bonnie as it collapsed and was ultimately destroyed for good.

The Gemini Coven's name was first mentioned in *Yellow Ledbetter*, as a possible lead in finding wherever Damon and Bonnie's spirits were sent after the Other Side was destroyed. In *Black Hole Sun*, Kai revealed that he killed his entire family, and act that, along with his ability to siphon magic rather than possessing his own, he was considered an abomination by the coven and was banished to the dimension in which he, Bonnie, and Damon were trapped—a metaphysical prison created solely for him.

In *Fade Into You*, more information was learned about the Gemini Coven from Luke, Liv, and Jo Parker, all of whom were invited to Caroline and Elena's Friendsgiving get-together. They briefly explained the massacre of their siblings committed by their brother Kai in 1994 before revealing that not only were the twins in their family determined to be the coven' leader, but that they had to perform a ceremony called the Merge after the twins' twenty-second birthday which would cause the stronger twin to kill the weaker one, merging their strength into one of the twins that would determine who became the leader. Later, Liv explained to Tyler that he didn't understand their custom because he wasn't in their coven, and lamented that she was in the situation where she would either have to die and have her spirit and magic merged with Luke's body, or have to kill her brother and become leader of the coven with his magic.

Meanwhile, Stefan, Damon, and Alaric had traveled to Portland to look for the Gemini Coven to find out how they could free Bonnie from the prison world. Joshua, realizing that Damon had managed to escape the prison world, and that Kai had all of the ingredients necessary to get out himself, tried to kill Jo for the good of the coven, as he knew Kai would easily overpower Jo if it came down to it and couldn't risk Kai coming back and trying to perform the Merge ceremony with her. Though Damon, Alaric, and Stefan tried to interfere in the spell, Joshua cast a cloaking spell which prevent him from being hurt by them. Fortunately for Jo, Elena healed her with her Blood and saved her from death.

In *Prayer For the Dying*, Joshua, after learning that Luke and Liv were planning on preparing Jo so that she could perform the Merge ceremony with Kai, tried to forcibly perform the Merge ceremony on the younger twins, as he was sure that Kai would overpower Jo and he was not willing to risk Kai being the leader of their coven. Tyler intervened at the last second to save them, and Luke, desperate to protect Liv and the coven, came up with a last-ditch effort to perform the Merge once and for all. He tracked Kai down to a park and pointed out that since they were both twins (though not each others twin) and the same biological age (due to Kai's imprisonment in the 1994 Prison World keeping him from aging), they should be able to do the ceremony without Liv or Jo. Kai was hesitant, but after Luke stated that he believed that Kai was too afraid he would lose, Kai decided to see what happened. Despite Jo's attempts to intervene, the two brothers completed the Merge ceremony, which was ultimately won by Kai, causing Luke to die. Along with absorbing Luke's magical power and his ability to possess his own magic, he also gained leadership of the Gemini Coven, and once Joshua realized Luke was dead and Kai was their leader, he pleaded with Liv to go into hiding with him. She refused, so Joshua left on his own, clearly afraid of what would happen with Kai in charge of the coven.

In *The Day I Tried To Live*, Kai revealed that when he merged with Luke, he also adapted some of his other qualities, including his empathy, his ability to feel remorse; he even suggested that he had gained Luke's his attraction to men along with his own attraction to women, though he could have been being facetious. He then used his power as the leader of the Gemini Coven to help Elena, Damon, and Bonnie travel to the 1994 Prison World to try to help bring Bonnie back to the living world.

In *Let Her Go*, Kai began feeling extremely sick, which made him weak, dizzy, and vomit blood, so he desperately went to the apartment of his sister Jo's boyfriend, Alaric, to beg for her help to heal him, reminding her that if he died, so would she, along with Liv, Joshua, and the rest of their coven. Additionally, his death would also cause the destruction of the coven's prison worlds, a fact that surprised them, as Alaric was not aware that there was more than one. When Kai accidentally grabbed onto Jo's wrist while he was vomiting, he inadvertently absorbed her magic, which he realized actually made him feel better. This led him to realize that the sickness was a result of the fact that the Merge ceremony wasn't performed correctly, due to Kai and Luke not being each other's actual twins. Since Luke had fulfilled part of the ceremony, he assumed that if Jo voluntarily gave him her magic, he would be healed. Not wanting herself or her coven to die, Jo agreed to give him her magic, saving the coven from death and the prison worlds from destruction.

While this was underway, Bonnie was trying to come back to the living world from the 1994 Prison World. Because of Kai's illness, the prison world she was wrongly trapped in collided with another prison world that was created in 1903, revealing that there was, in fact, another prison world created by the Gemini Coven that was bound by the Aurora Borealis. Even more surprisingly, Bonnie learned that this prison world was inhabited by someone who was staying in the Salvatore Boarding House. She managed to get video footage of the woman, and when she reviewed the video with Damon in the real world, it was revealed that the prisoner in the 1903 Prison World was Lily Salvatore, his mother.

In *The Downward Spiral*, Kai, who was helping Damon learn more about the 1903 Prison World in exchange for his help in getting Bonnie to forgive him for his past actions against her, researched into the Gemini Coven's files and learned that Lily had been turned into a vampire in 1858, after which point she fled Mystic Falls and went to Europe. Once there, she quickly became a Ripper and gave into her bloodlust full-throttle, killing as many as 3,000 people over the decades until she finally returned to America in 1903. The Gemini Coven, who had heard of her actions overseas and felt compelled to step in and stop her, caught her at the port of New York and used the power of the overhead Aurora Borealis to trap her into the newly-created prison world for the safety of humankind.

In *I'll Wed You in the Golden Summertime*, the entire coven gathers for Jo and Alaric's wedding, however, they are joined by their leader, Kai who destroys the barn.

In *I'm Thinking Of You All The While*, after the aftermath of the wedding, everyone starts to awake. They all surround Kai, and start chanting the prison world spell go send Kai back to the prison world, however, Kai kills himself by shoving a shard of glass in his neck, subsequently killing the entire coven. The coven however, didn't die straight away, their death was slow and painful. Kai completed his transformation into a vampire by drinking the blood of his father, Joshua.

## Trivia

* Gemini is Latin for "twins", and is both a constellation as well as an astrological sign. It is also a reference to the twins Castor and Pollux from Greek mythology.
* Jo reveals to Alaric that she was once a member of the Gemini Coven but quit because of family problems.
	+ Though she did temporarily rejoin the coven in an effort to try to win leadership of the coven so Liv and Luke wouldn't have to do the Merge, she ultimately gave up her magic to Kai for good in *Let Her Go* to save the coven from death.
* The coven used a Bennett Family spell to create Kai's prison world. They were close with Sheila Bennett, who helped with this spell.
	+ It is also likely the spell was bound with Sheila's blood, as it would explain why Bennett blood is needed to open the dimension.
	+ The spell may have also been based off the spell used by Qetsiyah, a Bennett ancestor to create the Other Side, as both were dimensional planes used to trap people, and were bound to someone, just like the way that Esther's creation of the Originals is also a variation of Qetsiyah's original Immortality Spell.
* The Gemini Coven is confirmed to be one of the oldest known witch covens as they have been stated to track the Travelers for 2,000 years so they wouldn't break the curse that the earliest incarnation of their coven put on them in *Fade Into You*.
* The process to become a leader of the coven requires a pair of twins to fuse their magic before the stronger twin absorbs it. This results in the death of the weaker twin.
	+ Through a loophole, Luke managed to merge with Kai, but he unfortunately didn't survive.
	+ It was shown in *Let Her Go*, that the merge, although successful, was causing Kai to degenerate magically as they were not truly twins. However, this condition was ultimately remedied when Jo voluntarily gave him her magic to properly complete the ritual.
* Cloaking spells are a signature of the coven, according to Josette Parker, because they are the basis of their witchcraft knowledge. Because of this, its members are taught how to do them from a young age.
* The Gemini Coven are considered 'weird' even by witch standards, according to the witch Enzo was deducing in *Yellow Ledbetter*.
* The prison worlds created by the Gemini Coven are bound to their current leader. The death of their current leader risks the collapse of the prison worlds.
	+ In *The Downward Spiral*, it is confirmed that there are only two prison worlds built by the Gemini Cove; the 1903 Prison World bound by the Aurora Borealis to imprison Lily, and the 1994 Prison World bound to a solar eclipse to imprison Kai. If they had succeeded in imprisoning Kai in *I'm Thinking Of You All The While*, the new prison world would have been bound to the full moon.
	+ Though not active with the Coven or even a Leader, in *It's Been a Hell of a Ride*, a third prison world was created by Josie and Lizzie with Bonnie; the 2018 prison world to incarcerate Kai Parker. Bonnie mentions that there was no eclipse used to cast the spell, though that does not exclude the possibility of another celestial event. It is also unclear as to who the spell is bound to, though presumably it would be bound to both Josie and Lizzie.
* The twins of the Gemini Coven go by shortened versions of their names. e.g Liv (Olivia), Luke (Lucas), Jo (Josette) and Kai (Malachai).
	+ This is continued with Josie (Josette) and Lizzie (Elizabeth) Saltzman.
* If the leader of the Gemini Coven dies, subsequently, all members die.
* Although rarely, or never used before, the Gemini Coven possess a spell with the ability to move twins in utero to another person.
	+ The only time this was ever seen was when the coven relocated Josette Parker's twins into Caroline's body.