BIOGRAPHY - Page 2
During the dynasties of the pharaohs in Egypt, Chthon used his aspect as Keku to bend a sorcerer named Heka-Nut to his service. Just as Chthon corrupted Varuna, Oshtur once purified one of his demons called the Pale Horseman with the Sword of Bone, her contribution to the Cornerstones of Creation. Heka-Nut sought the Sword of Bone because Chthon willed it. Heka-Nut's efforts were undone by the time-traveling Illyana Rasputin and Ashake, descendant of the Sorceress Supreme Ayesha and ancestor of Ororo. The Soulsword shattered Heka-Nut's mind, and his accumulated power was sealed away by Ashake and blessed Ma'at, the Bright Lady, another form of Oshtur. [Mystic Arcana: Magik #1]
In the times of King Arthur, Morgan le Fay gathered her own cult of black magicians, including her lover Magnus. Morgan was a fallen priestess of Gaea, corrupted by Chthon, and the first to bind the Chthonic scrolls together into a single tome, which was officially known as the Darkhold from this point forward. Morgan believed she could summon Chthon to Earth and compel him to do her 
bidding against her foes, Arthur and Merlin. Already corrupted by the Darkhold's use, she did not see her mistake until it was nearly too late. As the essence of Chthon began to form on Earth, it became clear he would take no orders from a mere mortal.
Morgan and Magnus were not powerful enough to send Chthon back into the Flickering Realms entirely after summoning him. Instead, they bound his power to a single location, trapping him inside the rock and earth of Wundagore Mountain. While Morgan still coveted the power of the Darkhold, Magnus realized his lover's madness and stole the book, magically sealing it inside a tower that no one of evil or selfish intent could enter. His physical body was murdered by Morgan for this treachery, however, leaving his spirit form to wander the astral plane for ages. [Avengers (1st series) #187, Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme #11] In the centuries that followed, the essence of Chthon would bestow magical properties to many items forged from Wundagore Mountain, including the clay sculptures of Puppet Master, the wooden figurines of Django Maximoff and the effigies of the Brothers Grimm. Next to the Darkhold, Wundagore became Chthon's second major touchstone to the realm of Earth. [Fantastic Four (1st series) #8, Marvel Two-In-One #74, Spider-Woman (1st series) #12, Avengers (1st series) #181-182]
At the end of the age of Camelot, the apprentice mystic named Modred arrived at the Tower of Darkhold, flush with noble intent. Modred thought he could harness the power of the Darkhold for good, and so he struggled with Chthon's demonic "Other" as it manifested. Modred initially 
resisted the Other's temptations, seeking the means to wield the Darkhold without forfeiting his soul. However, his fiancé the Lady Janice followed Modred to the tower. When the "Other" threatened Janice, Modred willingly gave over to the Darkhold to protect her. With that action, Modred's soul was claimed by Chthon for all time. With Modred as a vessel, the God of Chaos began to rise from the Darkhold anew.
In order to prevent Modred's valiant but foolish actions from causing further harm, Merlin called upon the Catholic Church to send one of their holy mystic knights to assist him. The future Saint Brendan and Merlin cast Modred into stasis and contained Chthon's essence in the Darkhold again before he could return. His body preserved by arcane power, Modred was sealed up in a crypt until such a time as he would walk the Earth again. In an effort to limit its potency, Brendan magically scattered the indestructible pages of the Darkhold throughout the globe so they were no longer contained in one volume. [Marvel Chillers #1, Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme #11]
The Darkhold remained scattered for 600 years until a worshipper of Chthon named Aelfric succeeded in reassembling most of the pages in 1149 A.D. The "Mad Monk" was uncovered by the Church doing the work of "Satan." He was burned at the stake with his cursed parchments. The indestructible word of Chthon survived the fire, however, and was recovered. [Werewolf by Night (1st series) #3]
It made its way back to the Church and into the hands of Paolo Montesi, curator of the occult section of the Vatican's library. Montesi read from the Darkhold and uncovered the Malachy Prophecy. A series of predictions, the Malachy allegedly charted the future of the Church for more than a millennium but, like the Book of Revelations, concluded with the ultimate rise of Chthon on Earth through events known as the Saeculum Atrum. One verse of particular concern held that...
A child born of no man;
And of a woman marked by sin;
Daughter becomes mother;
Then will the Dark Return begin!
Montesi sought an audience with the Pope to share what he had learned. The Pope and Montesi agreed that his soul was at risk by the very act of reading the book, but his faith was strong. 
Therefore, by special dispensation, Paolo Montesi was to be the sole holder of the Darkhold in the church, and allowed to father children so that the Montesi line would remain the Church's official guardians of the Book of Sins. Indeed, Varnae resurfaced in Rome with his legion of vampires, hoping to seize the Darkhold. Paolo Montesi led the faithful in driving back the vampires, but Varnae killed the monk in the final moments of the battle. Still, Montesi had already fathered a son, and so the Montesi dynasty lived on. [Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme #12, Darkhold: Pages from the Book of Sins #5-6]
The Montesis were blessed with greatly extended lifespans as a result of their exposure to the Darkhold. Still, Paolo's son Giacomo Montesi came to realize the Darkhold was incomplete from the time when Aelfric reassembled it, missing a crucial spell that could be used to destroy vampires. Seeing it as a personal crusade as well as a holy one after the death of his father, Giacomo made several pilgrimages east in search of the lost pages, eventually narrowing the field to Tibet. Giacomo was killed by agents of Varnae, but his son Marcello Montesi made contact with Kamar-Taj itself in an effort to find the Chthonic scrolls.
To deprive the Montesis of allies against Chthon and the vampires, Varnae shared his arcane knowledge with Kaluu of Kamar-Taj. The arrogant mystic seized control of his homeland but was ultimately unseated by his former classmate Yao, the future Ancient One, who renewed correspondence with the Montesis and the Vatican. Through this communication, many lost scrolls were apparently found and provided to the Catholic Church, including the spell to destroy 
vampires, which came to be known as "the Montesi Formula" in the mid-15th century. Weary of his long struggle with the Montesis, Varnae passed on the role of Lord of the Vampires to a new ruler, Vlad Dracula. Varnae's last act before choosing to die was to kill Marcello Montesi, but this spiteful revenge did nothing to prevent the Montesis and the Formula from living on to oppose Chthon and his Darkhold. [Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme #13, Strange Tales (1st series) #147]
Dracula soon learned of the Darkhold and the Montesi Formula as well, and compelled a thief to enter the Vatican and steal it for him. The thief was successful, but was killed by the sorcerer Cagliostro who made off with the Darkhold for his own purposes. Thus, both the Catholic Church and the vampires were deprived of the Darkhold for centuries, although copies of several pages remained in the Montesi archives. [Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme #15]
Vampires were not the only unwitting minions Chthon unleashed on the world. In the mid-17th century, the slaver pirate Boute-Feu clashed with the French freebooter Captain Tyger and his Haitian free men compatriots, the twins Laurent and Alexandre. The people of Haiti practiced a religion and magic called voodoo, based in part on the worship of the Loa and older Vodu Gods of the African continent from which they hailed. Boute-Feu kidnapped Alexandre and brought him to 
the witch-doctor Schango. Boute-Feu sought the ultimate slaves to become an invincible army at his side, and Schango entreated the Vodu God Sagbada, alias Baron Samedi, for the power to do it. Samedi, in turn, approached Chthon in the Flickering Realms to lend his dark power to the rituals. Seeing a new avenue for chaos on the Earthly realm, Chthon agreed.
And so, Schango sacrificed Alexandre and brought him back as the first Zuvembie. This zombie spell rose others of the undead for Boute-Feu, and he attempted to conquer the island. The other Vodu were sickened by what Sagbada had unleashed, but were unable to counter the spell as it was reinforced by the greater power of Chthon. They instead empowered Laurent as Lord of the Loa, giving him the power to fight back against Schango. With his ultimate spell (reportedly a gift from Gaea to the Vodu), Laurent summoned the spirit of his dead twin Alexandre to double his strength, defeating Schango and returning the zombies to their graves. Still, the war between the Elder Gods continued on Earth in this new form, with Chthon's zombies opposed by the lineage of the Lord of the Loa, Brother Voodoo. [Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme #17, 20]
By the 1930s, the Darkhold had passed from Cagliostro, to the wizard Taboo to Baron Russoff of Transylvania. Russoff's ancestor had suffered the curse of the werewolf. By reading from the Darkhold under the light of the full moon, the current Baron Russoff rekindled the curse in himself, and ensured it would pass to his children as well. The baron was desperate to rid himself of this affliction, and sold off much of his property and estate to build funds in search of a cure. The Baron's holdings included land in the neighboring Transia, on Wundagore Mountain. He sold his share of the lands of Wundagore to Herbert Edgar Wyndham, a reclusive geneticist seeking privacy for his research, and his assistant Jonathon Drew, whose wife Miriam had inherited a small tract of land neighboring Russoff's, alerting her to his desire to sell.
Russoff's nocturnal prowling under the light of the moon led to the murder of Miriam Drew. With his wife dead and his daughter Jessica in stasis due to radiation exposure, Jonathon Drew was a broken man. He was soon possessed by the spirit of the former Darkholder Magnus, who contacted Wyndham and Russoff and warned them of Chthon's malignant presence inside Wundagore. Wyndham was still a man of science and didn't believe Drew WAS Magnus, much less heed his warnings. Still, as Wyndham stylized himself as the High Evolutionary over his experimental humanoid animals, Magnus counseled him to provide them a structure and code of honor to tame their bestiality, and so the New Men became the Knights of Wundagore.
Unfortunately, Magnus's warnings had the opposite effect on Russoff. Having gotten nowhere with Wyndham's attempts to treat his lycanthropy, Russoff decided to read the Spell of Ascension from the Darkhold, releasing Chthon from his prison in Wundagore in the hopes that the Elder God would free him from his curse. This was the first great trial of the Knights of Wundagore, who gathered their forces to do war with the essence of Chthon as it attempted to enter the physical 
plane. But neither they nor Magnus's spell-casting proved effective. Magnus abandoned Drew as a host and found Baron Russoff. By possessing him, Magnus used the Darkhold to cast the Spell of Binding, turning Chthon's power against him and once again returning the Elder God to imprisonment inside Wundagore.
In his last act, Chthon reached out and left his mark on the child Wanda, who was born that very night in the halls of the Evolutionary's citadel on Wundagore. Wanda would have been born with energy-manipulation powers, but they were influenced by Chthon's "mark" to make her a natural wielder of chaos magic. By reintroducing chaos magic to the world through this secret vessel, Chthon could weaken the Great Lie by Sorcerers Supreme than his signature form of magic didn't exist. It also meant Wanda's power could one day allow him to pull back the veil of reality and return to Earth. [Avengers (1st series) #187, Uncanny X-Men Annual #12]
[Note: The sliding timescale and repeated retcons have made the connection between Chthon and Wanda more complicated with time. In the Avengers story from 1979 that revealed Wanda's parentage and connection to Chthon, everything seemed to line up. A little over 20 years earlier in the 1950's, Magnus and Magda had been living together for some years since Auschwitz was freed. When their daughter Anya was killed by villagers and Magnus killed them in turn, a secretly pregnant Magda fled from her husband and eventually gave birth on Wundagore on the night the New Men battled Chthon.
However, as decades passed, it no longer makes sense for Wanda and Pietro to be born in the 1950s due to the sliding timescale. But the story of Magneto firmly bound it to that time period. It was often suggested by fans (and eventually codified in the Handbooks) that the High Evolutionary put the two children in stasis, like Jessica Drew, for some reason until giving them to the Maximoffs in the modern era. Recent revelations that Wanda and Pietro were NOT the children of Magda and Magneto help on one front, as their birth was no longer tied to Magda leaving Magnus a few years after World War II. But Wanda was still touched by Chthon during his fight with the New Men. Moving THAT event up from the 1950's would stir OTHER continuity issues regarding Spider-Woman, Werewolf by Night, etc. Of course, perhaps all this chaos is exactly what Chthon wanted...]
Chthon kept watch over Wanda Maximoff as she grew, and was enraged when his brother Set attempted to claim her. A coven of witches lived in Wanda's native Transia, including the Baroness Maria Russoff, Margali Szardos and the Gypsy Queen Lilia Calderu. Set retrieved his lost Serpent Crown and bestowed that power on Lilia, allowing her the gift of foresight so that she could see what Wanda would one day become. Lilia, Maria and Margali sought to bring Wanda into their coven, but doing so would bind her powers to the group, which in turn was bound to the Serpent Crown through Lilia's possession of it. Set would have dominion over the girl, superseding Chthon's own.
To prevent this, Chthon reached out to the dreams of Taboo, Lilia's uncle. Chthon imposed his will on Taboo to seize Wanda before the ceremony bound her to the coven. Taboo recruited the 
houngan Damballah, whose power would naturally grow in the presence of the Serpent Crown. The two sorcerers matched themselves against the witches' coven, but the stress of the moment caused Wanda's inherent power to manifest early. Her first hex was strong enough to allow Chthon a moment's foothold on Earth, validating his claim on Wanda and cursing those present with the birth of mystically relevant children in the years to come. [Mystic Arcana: Scarlet Witch #1]