Phoenix Stone

**The Phoenix Stone** is a pinkish-red, round-cut gemstone with several veins of colors similar to that of an opal. It is also a mystical relic sought out by Lillian Salvatore and of unknown significance to the Salvatore Family. It made its first appearance in *Day One of Twenty-Two Thousand, Give or Take*. It was initially believed byAlaric Saltzman that the stone had the ability to bring a person back to life. However, in *Live Through This*, it was revealed that the Phoenix Stone was actually created to be a supernatural prison, and that it was full of the souls of numerous, very-old vampires.

As such, the stone can also be used to magically reunite a vampire soul trapped inside of it with the soul's body. However, if it is not reunited with the proper body (that is, their original body), the revived vampire spirit can experience amnesia, confusion, and overwhelming, insatiable hunger for human blood while inside their new host. This mistake is known to have happened at least twice; in the first case, the vampire soul resurrected in the body of one of theHeretics, Oscar, experienced disorienting confusion and an unquenchable hunger for human blood that caused the vampire to feed on and kill over a dozen people in a violent frenzy. In the case of the vampire spirit revived in the human/former witch Jo Laughlin's body, the spirit was apparently free of the intense bloodlust that the one in Oscar's body felt, likely due to the fact that they were not in a body that needed blood to survive, though the spirit did seem to suffer from memory loss as well.

As of now, the only known successful case of a witch reuniting a vampire soul trapped in the Phoenix Stone with the vampire's original body is Julian, Stefan and Damon. The former whose deceased body had been preserved with magic for one hundred years until the Heretics Beau, Mary Louise, and Nora Hildegard were able to use the stone to cast the correct spell to resuscitate him. Upon his resurrection, he recognized his lover,Lily Salvatore, as well as the rest of the Heretics, with seemingly no negative consequences.

In *Mommie Dearest*, Bonnie and Enzo found a sword in Oscar's abandoned car that Bonnie recognized. Upon reading about the dagger in Alaric's book, Bonnie realized that the Phoenix Stone was meant to be housed in the hilt of the dagger; if the stone and the sword are put together and the blade is stabbed into the heart of a vampire, it will kill the vampire's body and trap their soul in the stone.

In *Cold as Ice*, Julian reunited the Phoenix Stone with the sword and brought it with him to confront Damon andStefan Salvatore in a bar. It was there that Julian revealed that the Phoenix Stone has the ability to create a perfect hellscape for each individual vampire soul inside by using every sin the vampire has ever committed in order to torture them. Julian used the sword attached to the Phoenix Stone to stab Damon in the heart and trap his soul within it as his had been trapped a century earlier. He then gave the sword to Nora, who used it to stab Stefan and trap his soul within the stone as well.

## Description

Precious little is known about the history of the Phoenix Stone, and even fewer written accounts regarding the stone's creation and use as a weapon seems to be available on the subject, as none of the books Alaric sought out had any concrete information regarding the relic and its purpose. Bonnie mentioned in passing that the Phoenix Stone was a powerful artifact of Native American origin, but this has yet to be confirmed by anyone who is knowledgeable about the stone. Other information that remains a mystery for now is who created the stone, what form of magic was used, why it was created in the first place, and exactly how many vampire souls are held inside of it.

What is known about the stone is that it is a metaphysical prison for the souls of what are described to be numerous "very old" vampires who were trapped inside. It has recently been revealed that the stone is paired with an shortsword with an X-shaped blade at the end. When the stone is affixed to the end of the sword's hilt, the stone's magic is shared with the blade, allowing it to be used to trap a vampire's soul inside the prison within when the blade is pierced through the heart of the vampire in question. When this occurs, the stone begins to glow from within, and the bubbles under the surface start to move rapidly as the vampire's soul is essentially sucked inside. However, the sword must have the Phoenix Stone attached to its hilt in order to be used for this task, otherwise the sword is just an ordinary blade that cannot kill a vampire if stabbed through the heart. Because of the powerful magic in the blade, any vampire who is stabbed with it will develop an X-shaped scar that even their enhanced cellular regeneration cannot heal, regardless of where they were stabbed. The sword must pierce the heart of the vampire the wielder intends to trap inside the Phoenix Stone, otherwise the vampire in question will just be injured and scarred for the blade. For example, Beau seems to have been stabbed with the blade near his neck, but it missed his heart and prevented his soul from being trapped inside; however, the blade did severe his vocal cords, and the magic from the blade kept them from repairing themselves, causing Beau to lose the ability to speak.

### The Phoenix Sword

Once a vampire has been stabbed in the heart with the stone-clad sword, their soul is trapped inside the Phoenix Stone's inner metaphysical prison. Because of the magic used to create the stone, each individual vampire trapped inside will experience their own personal hell that is created based on every sin the vampire has ever committed. For example, Julian described his hell as having several illusions, including a constant attempt to escape the stone, only to find that none of it was actually real, and continually being forced to kill the love of his life, Lily Salvatore. The brief glimpse of Damon's hellscape showed him trapped in an illusion/flashback of his time in the Civil War, though in this version, he has been hit in the stomach by shrapnel and seriously wounded, and is forced to watch the Confederate soldiers around him be shot down by gunfire and explosions. According to Julian, time has no meaning in the stone's prison, suggesting that the prison dimension exists outside of time and space, or otherwise manipulates the vampire soul's ability to sense the passage of time.

## History

It is said that many vampire souls have been trapped within the Phoenix Stone, including Florence and the soul of the vampire who briefly possessed the Heretic Oscar's body.

In 1903, the vampire boyfriend of Lily Salvatore, Julian, had his soul imprisoned somehow within the stone by an unknown person. As a result of his imprisonment, his body was left with an X-shaped scar on the his chest, and the Heretics cast a spell on his body to preserve it until his spirit could be reunited with it. The stone then somehow came into Lily's possession, and she eventually brought it with her when she and the Heretics,Malcolm, Beau, Valerie Tulle, Mary Louise, Nora Hildegard, and Oscar, were traveling to New York from London in late October of 1903. It can be presumed that Lily intended to use the stone to reunite Julian's spirit with his body, and that their reasoning for traveling to America was to do so, along with their plan to fulfill their revenge against the Gemini Coven, who had exiled the six Heretics as a result of their Siphoner nature in the years between the mid-1800s and early 1900s.

However, as soon as they landed in the New York harbor, the family was confronted by the Gemini Coven, who had heard rumors of the 3,000+ humans Lily and the Heretics had slaughtered in Europe since 1863 and sought to prevent them from massacring any more people. The coven used a mystical relic called the Ascendant to channel the power of the Aurora Borealis to trap Lily and the Heretics in a prison world using a spell of a Bennett witch's design, sealing them away in an alternate dimension that existed as a snapshot of November 1st, 1903 for the next one hundred years. The coven then burnt down the ship upon which Lily and the Heretics had traveled to America, which was full of the bodies of the human passengers they had fed on and left behind. Once the ship had been destroyed, the Phoenix Stone fell with the wreckage into the Atlantic Ocean, where, decades later, it would eventually be retrieved by scuba divers. Afterward, the stone was displayed in the Maritime Museum in New York until 2013.

Also in 2013, Lily and the Heretics were freed from their prison world -- the former by her son Damon, hisgirlfriend Elena, and their friend Bonnie, and the latter six by then-Gemini Coven leader Malachai Parker. Afterward, Lily resumed her plan to resurrect Julian by searching for the Phoenix Stone and sending Oscar out to locate Julian's body, which had become lost during their imprisonment.