CASSANDRA NOVA: Page 4 of 4

BIOGRAPHY - PAGE 4

A new day dawned for mutants soon after this incident and Cassandra’s brother Charles Xavier banded together with both friends and foes to create the mutant paradise island nation of Krakoa. Unknown to anyone other than Xavier, even Krakoa itself had its memory erased and Nova had been hidden away on a secret archipelago on the island nation to keep her away from both the human and mutant population. This came to light when Kate Pryde, leader of a team of mutants called the Marauders, found an ancient box made of the new mutant metal Mysterium. Inside the box, which only Kate’s phasing powers could access, was a note in Kate’s own handwriting from two billion years ago stating, “The first blood spilled.” Additionally, a map was included that led Kate straight to Cassandra’s secret part of the island.

Cassandra was found by Kate engaging in some light vivisection of Krakoa, stating that she had to make her own fun ever since Xavier had placed her there. Despite the disgusting and homicidal tendencies, Krakoa allowed all mutants amnesty for past transgressions and Cassandra reiterated that she had been “fixed” by Jean Grey and wouldn’t harm any mutant. Slightly later, once Cassandra had been drafted onto Kate’s team to help solve the mystery of the fate of the first generation of mutants, Jean visited her to remind her not to step out of line, lest she face Jean’s power yet again. Nova astonished Jean in admitting that she still relished in atrocities and in fact should thank her for allowing her to enjoy them even more, now that she understood the horrors associated with them. However, she could no longer visit those actions upon mutants. The rest of the Marauders crew were understandably horrified at their teammate, but Cassandra was undeterred. She even allowed a distrusting Psylocke to thrust her psychic knife into her brain and confirm that she knew that the first mutants were prisoners of the Shi’ar Empire. [Marauders (2nd series) #1]

The Shi’ar soon became alerted to the approaching Marauders and a secret sect of enforcers called the Kin Crimson resolved to inform the Shi’ar empress, Xavier’s daughter Xandra, of the truth of the first blood spilled. Normally an ally of mutants, Xandra ordered that the Marauders be stopped from learning the truth, lest war break out. Kin Crimson member Erik the Red boarded the space vessel of the Marauders and engaged the crew with his hard light powers, until pinning Cassandra and forcing Kate to save her. Eric called upon two of his fellow Kin to distract the crew while he escaped with the mysterium box. Everyone other than Nova was sucked out into open space and then captured by the Shi’ar. Therefore, Nova was left to single-handedly defeat the two members of the Kin Crimson herself. First, she breached the containment suit of one of the Kin, causing gravity to collapse upon itself. This enraged the other Kin, an alien dragon who was wielding a brain dead symbiote. Cassandra thus awakened its prisoner symbiote and caused it to eat the brain of its captor.

Cassandra took it upon herself to find her way onto the space vessel containing the rest of her team and was delighted to find Gladiator of the Imperial Guard decimating them. Gladiator referred to the woman as the “great disease” and, after she waived her Krakoan status, was happy to fight the woman who had once destroyed the empire he held dear. However, this fight was quickly interrupted by the arrival of Xandra and the head of the Kin Crimson, Delphos. Kate was annoyed to hear that Cassandra had killed two of the Kin but she countered that, technically, the two had killed themselves. Xandra agreed to Kate’s request for an audience and, at this hearing, Nova explained that, back when she conquered the empire, the Kin Crimson had sent an assassin to kill her quite unsuccessfully. However, in that assassin’s mind was where Cassandra had learned of the first blood spilled. Kate was able to sway Xandra into taking the mutants to the secret prison the Krag in order to reveal the mystery of the fates of the first mutants, even using her mental powers to subdue Delphos and her protests. Unfortunately, this cost Xandra her life in a successful assassination once they had reached the Krag. [Marauders (2nd series) #2-3]

After a brawl that took Kate’s life, Cassandra led the rest of the crew down to the Chronicle to find the answers they had come for. It turned out that the Chronicle was a self-generating, practically immortal member of the Kin, with their secrets stored inside his brain. Upon infiltrating his thoughts, it was revealed that, back in the ancient days of the Shi’ar’s nomadic age, they had stumbled across the first mutant society on Earth, the Threshold. This group of Shi’ar had come to raid the planet but the mutants drove them off. This defeat could not stand for the Shi’ar and thus a violent contingency was sent to wipe out the mutants, leading to massive losses on both sides. The events of this genocide would be known as the First Blood Spilled and, over the next 2 billion years, the Kin Crimson formed and worked to keep this information secret. One other piece of information was gleaned by Nova from the Chronicle’s mind. Some years back, a timedrive was destroyed on an abandoned Shi’ar base that held some of the original Thresholders prisoner.

It was resolved by the team that they would use the time-travel powers of member Tempo to obtain this timedrive from the past. Thus, Nova and the team returned to Magneto’s old Shi’ar-powered Avalon space station at the point that it had been destroyed by the powerful mutant Nemesis. This force of nature grabbed Nova by her head and slammed into the wall, knocking her unconscious. While her team fought for survival and attempted to track down the timedrive, the symbiote that had once belonged to the dragon Kin revealed that it had bonded to Nova, after making a deal with her for its freedom. Thus, the symbiote en-wrapped Cassandra’s injured body and puppeted it to attack Nemesis. This provided enough of a distraction for her team member Bishop to put down the threat and soon after the timedrive was recovered. Cassandra formed a mutant circuit with a few of her teammates to wipe these events from all people in this past before Tempo returned them to their proper time. Events wrapped up nicely after this, with Delphos being executed for killing Xandra. Nevertheless, the young empress was luckily able to be resurrected by her father on Krakoa using mutant technology, as was Captain Pryde. Finally, Nova kept her word about freeing the symbiote and thus handed it over to a new Shi’ar host. [Marauders (2nd series) #4-5]

In a brief aside from the events involving the Threshold, Cassandra Nova helped participate in the resistance against the Celestials’ judgment of Earth and the ruling Eternals attempt to wipe out the deviation of mutants. Teaming with some defecting members of the Eternals and the Avengers against this force, Cassandra participated, along with every other mutant telepath, in infiltrating the Eternals Uni-mind. They were thus incorporated in a vote to elect a different Eternal into power sympathetic to mutants. [A.X.E. Judgment Day #4]

With the threat of the Eternals and Celestials behind them, the team was successfully able to resurrect the three Thresholders held in the timedrive. They detailed the beauty of their ancient society and requested aid in defending their doomed, ancient society. While Kate was quick to respond that they would help, Cassandra was not willing to listen to her captain’s orders of keeping silent. Thus, she revealed to the team that going back in time to save this society was a suicide mission, given their destruction was at the hands of the Unbreathing, which in modern times were known as the sentient bacteria strains Sublime and Arkea. The rest of the team debated the merits of going back to help Threshold, while Nova had a deep conversation with the Thresholder Amass. After mocking them for their unimpressed opinions of Krakoa next to their extinct society, Nova suggested being more like herself if they truly wanted to survive. Cassandra considered survival her power, given all of the forces that had tried to end her and her way of thinking. Finally, she hinted that her reveal of the opposition that faced them in the past was part of some sort of power play on her part.

The team requested custom suits prior to their trip back 2 billion years, both to protect the old times from their modern pathogens and to protect themselves from the Sublime and Arkea bacteria. Wearing these suits, the team merged with the three Thresholders, using Amass’ power of combination, and then traveled back with Tempo’s power. However, the target window of two weeks prior to the Unbreathing taking over was missed and the Threshold citizens were already at war with the Unbreathing. One of the infected attacked Nova and used its powers to make her recall her worst memory of being attacked by Xavier in the womb. The team managed to escape the carnage but not without a few casualties. They managed to make it to the last safehouse, where they learned that they needed to purge the Unbreathing from the Threshold’s birthing pool. This was accomplished with a combination of Bishop’s energy absorbing power and Nova tricking the two strains of Sublime and Arkea to fight each other over her exposed body. The two both entered her, determined to be the one to control her vast psionic powers, but unwittingly opened themselves up to Cassandra, who merged with their minds. Thus, she was able to touch every part of both Sublime and Arkea in all of the infected at once, and supernova-purge them in an instant.

Despite Cassandra Nova acting so heroically for the first time in her life and being instrumental to the victory, she soon caught on that there was something sinister on Kate’s mind. Just before prying open the captain’s mind, she was blindsided by team member Somnus with a powerful weapon strong enough to incapacitate her. Somnus was the only one who could conceal Kate and Emma Frost’s plan from Nova. The rest of the team was now allowed to remember that Cassandra would be left in the past in the Threshold’s Zero cells. In the end, Kate refused to let Nova get away with the murder of her father while he was in Genosha. She happily reported back to Emma upon returning to the present that revenge had finally been obtained for the horrors the White Queen had personally suffered during Cassandra’s attack on Genosha. As a final cap on the legacy of Cassandra Nova, Kate used the mysterium box, actually a cradle that could store genetic information, to encode the millions of mutants that had died on Genosha upon it. Then the team formed a mutant circuit to send the cradle back in time to before the Threshold and seed the birthing pool with the genetic material of these mutants. Thus, the mutants once killed by the homicidal Cassandra Nova in a callous and cowardly act would be reborn to form the first generation of mutants. [Marauders (2nd series) #7-12]