BIOGRAPHY - Page 3
Selene needn’t have worried about them, though, as the Hellfire Club soon fell apart once more. Madelyne left to return to Nate’s life again, dying soon after, Pierce was thrown out, Fitzroy left for the future, and Shaw left after receiving a mysterious letter. With all of them gone, the Hellfire Club was just where Selene wanted it – in her hands.
Selene eventually put the “Hellfire” back into the Club. With Shaw out of the picture, she planned to shape the Inner Circle after her own dreams and started an alliance with the demon Blackheart, son of Mephisto. Using the Hellfire Club as a base, Blackheart intended to carve his own hellish empire on Earth. The two abducted and imprisoned Daimon Hellstrom, Son of Satan and ruler of 
a hell dimension at the time. They also attempted to kill Margali Szardos, another sorceress powerful enough to disturb their plans. To bolster their numbers, Selene stole the souls of people, allowing them to be replaced by demons.
When a friend of the Reed Richards, Alyssa Moy, investigated the Hellfire Club, she too became a victim of Selene. The Fantastic Four investigated and, while they managed to free Margali from jail, they fell prey to the same soul-corrupting virus that afflicted Alyssa. With the help of Margali and a mysterious armored sorceress named Mecha-mage, the Fantastic Four infiltrated the Hellfire Club on its Halloween celebration. Selene had intended for the numerous guests, most of whom were evil anyway, to become slaves of her consort Blackheart. However, the heroes prevented this, freed Hellstrom and managed to banish Selene and Blackheart to the lower levels of the Club Building. [Fantastic Four Annual ‘99]
Selene found a loophole to free herself of that entrapment and abandoned Blackheart’s plan. A short time later she crossed swords with X-Force at an alternative rock festival, where the X-Forcers were hanging out. She planned to get the power of an Asgardian runestaff for herself, 
which could only be freed from its encasing at a certain cosmic alignment and with the blood of an Asgardian. With her not daring to approach Thor, she simply took the blood of Dani Moonstar, an adopted Asgardian of sorts, thanks to her Valkyrie status. Thanks to X-Force’s intervention, the spell went awry, the awesome energy of the runestaff was wasted in animating a metal statue, which acted as a symbol for the festival, instead. Angered by the outcome, Selene attacked X-Force but soon fled when Moonstar showed the sorceress her greatest fear… growing old and losing her power. [X-Force (1st series) #75]
Having established herself as leader of the Hellfire Club, Selene went on another recruiting mission. She approached Roberto daCosta, the X-Force member know as Sunspot, who had just been deported from the United States. After playing damsel in distress to gain his interest, she asked for his help in stopping the Damocles Foundation from reviving the unimaginable power of a Celestial construct. Of course, in the confusion that ensued, Roberto and Selene were captured and the rest of X-Force joined the fight. Selene, being Selene, made a bid to control the construct herself, once more prevented by Dani Moonstar. Angrily, Selene knocked out all of X-Force, promising revenge on them and Moonstar in particular.
Back at the Club, Selene let all the X-Forcers live through nightmare scenarios, save for Sunspot whom she still wanted to recruit and seduce to her side. Deeming Moonstar too much of a threat at her current power level, she handed the young girl over to Blackheart for his amusement. Selene was particularly interested in Roberto, because, as she claimed, she and his father had been at odds when they were together in the Inner Circle. Turning his only son into her lackey was her form of revenge against the dead Emmanuel daCosta. Sunspot refused to fall for her enticements and eventually broke free the other X-Forcers, including Dani. Having failed to seduce Sunspot with the promise of power or even the opportunity to use the Club as a platform to do good, Selene finally played one card he couldn’t ignore. She revealed that Roberto’s first love Juliana Sandoval, who had sacrificed her life for him, hadn’t been meant to die back then and that Selene could put her soul into the body of another comatose girl to give her a second chance at life. Feeling he had no choice, Roberto agreed to become Selene’s Black Rook. [X-Force (1st series) #96-99]
What Selene had planned for Sunspot may never be known as Sebastian Shaw soon came back to the Hellfire Club. He reluctantly let the young boy rise to the position of Black King, but Selene was nowhere to be seen. Instead, she was across the world in Hong Kong, fighting against Rachel Grey, in another failed attempt to corrupt the telepath. Rachel proved to be the stronger mind yet again and she forcibly stopped Selene schemes. [Uncanny X-Men (1st series) #452-454]
Despite Selene killing them months before, the rest of the Externals soon found themselves in the land of the living, proving that death is nothing but an inconvenience for an immortal. When Candra was once again killed, Selene felt her death telepathically and knew someone else was 
hunting the group down. Even though she had killed them last time, some of the other Externals met with Selene to figure out who their latest attacker was. Selene was soon approached by a time-travelling Cable, who had been alerted to Candra’s untimely death and was investigating it. After a brief fight, both sides realized neither knew who the assailant was and they went their separate ways, for now. Knowing she had to act fast, Selene recruited the teleporter Blink and set off to find the remaining Externals who were unaccounted for.
With each encounter, she found her fellow External slain with their heart missing, and her investigations soon pointed towards her fellow External Gideon being the perpetrator. Meeting up with Gideon, Selene was prepared to kill him once more but she was betrayed by another External, Absolom. Selene was badly injured in the ensuing fight and only managed to escape thanks to Blink. Teleporting to Cable and his team, she offered to join forces to stop Gideon killing all the Externals and absorbing their powers for himself. As he came from the future, Cable knew what Selene had planned for Blink, and so he bargained for the young girl’s release in return for his help. Selene accepted as Gideon had caught up with them, more powerful than ever. In the subsequent battle, Gideon was decapitated by Blink, and Selene quickly slipped away in the ensuing chaos. [Cable (1st series) #150-154]
[Note: This story creates a few continuity problems with the following Necrosha crossover. Cable (1st series) #150-154 was released a number of years after Necrosha was published, in which Selene pulls Blink from another dimension and uses her as part of her Inner Circle. Blink is a key figure in the crossover as she teleports Selene’s army around the world. However, with the Cable arc taking place before Necrosha and Blink being saved, she wouldn’t be available to do that anymore. The only explanation would be that, sometime after the Cable arc, Blink is mindwiped and placed back in the other dimension for Selene to use later on.]
After realizing the power that she was promised would never materialize, Selene turned her back on the Hellfire Club and looked towards her original goal of becoming a true goddess. The mutant world had recently been rocked by M-Day, a mass depowerment, resulting in almost all the 
world’s mutants losing their powers. One of the few to keep his was Kevin Ford aka Wither, a student at the Xavier Institute with the ability to destroy living tissue with a touch. Whilst Kevin despised his deadly powers, Selene saw them as a beautiful gift that she could harness. After injuring a fellow student, Kevin had fled the Institute and was sleeping rough in Mutant Town. In the guise of an old woman, Selene befriended Kevin and the two got closer over a number of weeks. Eventually, she revealed who she truly was and encouraged Kevin to celebrate his ability rather than fear it. After draining the life forces of some policeman looking for Kevin, Selene regained her youthful appearance and kissed Kevin, becoming the first person to touch him without dying for a very long time. With the young man happily under her influence, Selene and Wither departed to enact the next step in her plans. [New X-Men (2nd series) #32]
Like the Cult of Fire in Nova Roma, Selene needed a close group of followers to do the dirty work for her and she set about recruiting them. Locating Blink, Senyaka and Mortis, she convinced 
each of them to follow her by appealing to what they wanted the most. The surprise arrival of Eliphas, now calling himself Eli Bard, completed her Inner Circle, although his presence was initially an unwelcome one. Having let Selene down thousands of years before, Eli had escaped from his grave and set out on his own journey of revenge. Desperate to please Selene once more, he travelled the world finding a way to help her become a goddess. After infiltrating a group of religious zealots called the Purifiers, Eli was infected with a techno-organic virus, which allowed him to resurrect the dead as obedient zombies. Eli approached Selene with this information, as well as the mutant-tracking Caliban, whom he had resurrected as proof. Despite Selene’s threat to punish him if she ever saw Eli again, she saw the benefit of his gifts and welcomed him back. Selene now had the means to enact the ritual she had tried to do thousands of years before. [X-Necrosha: The Gathering, X-Force (3rd series) #11]
Selene and her Inner Circle travelled around the world, bringing selected mutants back to life and, using the TO virus, coercing them to do her bidding. Whilst her goal to become a goddess was her primary concern, she couldn’t resist taking revenge on those that had thwarted her over the years. Resurrecting Cypher, she sent him after his former New Mutant teammate Magma, whom Selene held a particular grudge against. Emma Frost was also targeted by the Hellions, a group 
of students who had died under Emma’s watch. The rest of the TO army were sent to attack the X-Men on their island base of Utopia, keeping them busy long enough for Selene to complete her ritual.
Selene travelled to the island of Genosha, which now served as a graveyard to the 16 million mutants who had died during the Mega-Sentinal attacks there. Eli used the TO virus and brought them all back, but Selene quickly discovered many of them had been depowered on M-Day, even though they were dead at the time. Despite this setback, a million mutants still possessed their X-gene, more than enough for Selene to achieve her goal. With an army of 16 million under her control, she had them rebuild the city, now dubbed “Necrosha.” The next stage of her plan was to create the sigils around the city using the blade forged from her mother’s bones. She had given it to Eli for safe keeping but, unbeknownst to her, he had lost it in battle, and it was now in the possession of the X-Men. Eli lied to Selene and went behind her back to try to retrieve it, but he was betrayed by Blink, who revealed his deception to their mistress. Disappointed by Eli, she sent him and the rest of the Inner Circle to Utopia to retrieve the blade. They managed to succeed in their mission, killing a few X-Men and capturing Warpath for good measure.
Eli triumphantly presented the blade to Selene, professing his millennia-long love for her in the process. However, her patience with him had run out and she stabbed him through the heart with the blade, killing him instantly. She gave the blade to Blink and the young woman teleported the Inner Circle around Necrosha, writing the sigils in their own blood.
Caliban informed Selene that X-Force, the X-Men’s black-ops team, was on the island looking to stop her. She was not concerned though, as she was finally able to cast the spell that she had 
waited thousands of years to do. In an instant, she absorbed the life-force of all 16 million souls she had brought back and ascended to the godhood she had long craved.
Basking in her newfound power, she was caught off guard by the arrival of X-Force, who had slain most of her Inner Circle. Still confident in her abilities, she fought the team but was unable to steal their souls as they had protected themselves with a spell of their own. Unbeknownst to Selene, Warpath had acquired the blade made from her mother’s bones and he stabbed her in the chest with it. Stunned for a few seconds, Selene could barely comprehend what was happening as she exploded, releasing all the souls she had absorbed into her. The explosion was so intense that Selene was literally vaporized and the so-called immortal mutant had final met her end. [Necrosha crossover]