There once lived an incredibly unlucky man. It was often a laughing matter how terrible his luck was. Little did they know, he was truly cursed to be eternally misfortunate. In his youth, a witch had cursed him to suffer through hell both on earth and in the afterlife. However, it was not just any witch that had cursed him. It was the first of their kind: the original witch. When he died, for reasons unknown, a twisted man drank some of his blood. He, too, died, but the cursed blood brought him back to life—a cursed life. Drunk with his newfound powers, he went after a man with whom he had long held a grudge: his wife’s lover. That night, he traveled to their house in the woods to kill the man and his family. Before he could finish the job, something strange occurred. One of the sons began to transform and he realized the stories of werewolves were more than just tales told to frighten little children into good behavior. He fled back to his own house and sought to turn his entire family to protect himself. It is a witch’s duty to maintain balance, so the original witch stopped him, but not before he had turned his wife. She forbade him to turn his children, for they were too young, and ordered the wolves to keep their distance, hoping to prevent a war between the two creatures of the night. Both sides grudgingly agreed to her demands, but over the years they found loopholes. As a rite of passage, the father turned his children once they were grown. The last to be turned was his wife’s bastard, after much pleading on her behalf, and so the family was immortalized. The father refused to turn anyone else. They were special, he claimed. They were the Originals. Unbeknownst to the father, his illegitimate son, Klaus, wholly agreed with him. He, too, considered himself as special, even more so than the rest of his family, for he was both a werewolf and a vampire. Since discovering his true heritage, he bided his time to trigger the gene, knowing his father would never turn him if he was a wolf, but when he was finally a vampire, he waited longer still. There was one more thing he wanted: Cecilia, the daughter of the original witch and the only person who had never treated him like the outcast bastard he was. They were to be special together, the vampire wolf and the to-be vampire witch. He waited for her return to town and fed her his blood, though her hesitation grew and she no longer wanted to live an eternal life. He was convinced that she was just frightened and would eventually come around so he killed her—his first kill. He had been saving it for her. Upon the completion of her transition, he attempted to display his new wolf form for her beneath the full moon, but he was unable to do so. The tears she had been fighting back came forth as she explained her mother’s curse to him. Hybrids were not natural, her mother claimed, and she had cursed him many years ago, knowing it was only a matter of time before his father would turn him into a vampire. Furious, Klaus sought out the witch and demanded that she reverse the curse. When she refused, he descended into a blind rage and mistakenly killed her. Shocked, Cecilia left him, abandoning their childhood dream of a hybrid alliance and taking with her the secret of what he needed to break the Sun and Moon Curse—her.