Doppelgänger

Doppelgängers, also known as Shadow Selves, are a supernatural occurrence that came as result of Silas and Amarabecoming true immortals. Their purpose is to maintain the natural balance by dying in place of their immortal progenitors, and for this reason, doppelgängers have existed for 2,000 years continuously being born and dying.

There are two known doppelgänger lines stemming from Silas and Amara respectively, of which Stefan Salvatore, Elena Gilbert, and Katherine Pierce belong to.

Introduction of Dopplegangers
It was first believed that doppelgängers are related to one another through a bloodline; however, it was later revealed that doppelgängers appear after the creation of a truly immortal being, and are a recurrent and mystical supernatural being. Because they're supernatural, their blood can be used as a binding agent for powerful spells, such as the spell that created  the Originals. Because they have no actual supernatural powers, the only way that it has been confirmed that doppelgängers are supernatural was the fact that Elena killed Alaric while wearing a  Gilbert Ring and he came back to life a short time later. This also confirmed Elijah's suspicion that the Gilbert Ring wouldn't work on Elena because she was technically a supernatural being. Though doppelgängers are supposed to represent mortality in the place of an otherwise immortal being, they can achieve immortality through  vampirism, as was in the case of Katherine,  Stefan, and  Elena.

Creation
The phenomenon of the shadow-self occurs to counterbalance a disruption to nature's law that all living things must die. Qetsiyah, one of the most powerful witches and member of a very gifted people called  the Travelers, created a  spell for immortality with the intention that she and Silas would drink it together at their wedding. However,  Silas stole the immortality elixir and used it on himself and his lover,  Amara, so that the two could be together for eternity. Disrupting the balance of Nature when they became truly immortal, Nature created copies of Silas and Amara that could die to balance itself.

Silas and Amara: The World's First Immortals
<p class="caption" style="color:rgb(133,127,127);"> <p style="color:rgb(213,212,212);">Over two thousand years ago in ancient Greece, a young witchnamed Silas was engaged to be married to Qetsiyah, also a fellow witch. Together, they were the most powerful members of a gifted people called the Travelers. Silas told Qetsiyah that he wanted their love to last forever, even beyond death, and he convinced her to create a spell that would make them immortal. On the night that their wedding ceremony was to take place, Silas absconded with the elixir Qetsiyah had created, and as Qetsiyah watched the plant life around her wither before her eyes, she knew that not only had Silas taken the elixir, he had also given her portion to someone else. She sought out Silas and found him in the wilderness with another woman – her handmaiden, Amara - who had taken Qetsiyah's share of the immortality elixir.

<p style="color:rgb(213,212,212);">Silas, having left Amara alone, returned to their hiding place to find Qetsiyah crouching over the chalice that had held the elixir they were to drink at their wedding. He cautiously enquired after Qetsiyah's purpose for being there, so she explained that, to follow up her first gift of the immortality elixir, she had brought a second gift: the cure for immortality. Silas was dumbfounded, hardly believing her, but she insisted that it worked, as she had already used it on another immortal. Filled with dread, Silas ran into the tent he had shared with Amara, only to find blood soaked into every surface, as though someone had been brutally slaughtered there. Qetsiyah followed him into the tent and lifted a bloody human heart out of the chalice, admitting that she had slit Amara's throat before ripping her heart out. After Silas refused to take the cure and live the rest of his mortal life with Qetsiyah, she trapped him on a desolate island in an underground cave, where he desiccated for two thousand years, entombed with the cure.

<p style="color:rgb(213,212,212);">One major consequence of Silas and Amara becoming immortal was the creation of two lines of shadows, or doppelgängers. Their immortality had violated nature's law that all living things must die, and so the doppelgängers came to exist as versions of Silas and Amara that can die. According to Qetsiyah, many identical replicas of Silas and Amara have been born over the centuries, finding each other time and time again as though drawn together by destiny. However, the exact number of doppelgängers that have existed is not certain, as only Two doppelgängers have been identified by name: Stefan Salvatore  is the only identified doppelgänger of Silas, while  Katerina Petrova, and Elena Gilbert are the only two women identified as Amara's shadows.

Katerina, Elena, and the Hybrid Curse
<p style="color:rgb(213,212,212);">The notion of the doppelgänger as a class of supernatural beings was introduced in the episode Roseby the character of the same name. Until that point, the term was used simply to describe Elena's uncanny resemblance to the vampire Katherine, but Rose explained that Elena is a "Petrova doppelgänger" and that she is one of the necessary components in a ritual to break the Sun and the Moon curse, which allegedly caused vampires to be ruled by the sun and werewolves to be ruled by the moon. Rose had originally tried to hand Elena over to Elijah, in an effort to earn back his and Klaus' favor, but after Elijah killed her friend Trevor, Rose decided to tell Elena and the Salvatores what she knew about Klaus. Rose's story was corroborated by Katherine, who told Elena about how Klaus had wanted to use her in the sacrifice five hundred years before, which involved his intention to "drain every single drop of blood" from her body.

<p style="color:rgb(213,212,212);">In the episode Klaus, Elijah revealed to Elena that the Sun and the Moon curse was actually fake, and that the real curse was one that had been placed on Klaus to suppress his werewolf nature in order to keep him from becoming a true hybrid. He continued to explain that five hundred years ago, Klaus had intended to sacrifice Katerina in the ritual, but she thwarted him by turning herself into a vampire, thus rendering her blood and sacrifice useless – the doppelgänger had to be human for the ritual to break the curse.

<p style="color:rgb(213,212,212);">In The Last Day, Elena surrendered herself to Klaus, and in The Sun Also Rises, after Jules the werewolf and Jenna the vampire had been sacrificed and their blood spilled over the moonstone by the witch Greta, Klaus drained Elena of her blood until she died, and thus successfully broke the Hybrid Curse.

<p style="color:rgb(213,212,212);">Fortunately for Klaus, Elena actually survived the sacrifice, and, in The Reckoning, Klaus discovered from Esther (via Bonnie and Matt, who had contacted Vicki on the Other Side) that the blood of the human doppelgänger is required to create more hybrids like himself. After a werewolf drinks Klaus' blood and is killed, they must drink Elena's blood after they reawaken in order to complete the transition and become a hybrid.

Silas' Return and Qetsiyah's Resurrection
<p style="color:rgb(213,212,212);">In the twenty-first century, a man named Atticus Shane set in motion a series of events that led to the releasing of the immortal Silas from his desiccated state in his tomb. Once he had regained his strength, Silas manipulated those around him to further his agenda: Bonnie was tasked with the creation of the Expression Triangle and destruction of the veil, while Klaus was forced to find the cure and return it to Silas. These things all occurred according to Silas' plan, to some extent – Bonnie completed the triangle and drops the veil, though only within the borders of Mystic Falls, while Silas gained possession of the cure – but Silas' plan went awry when Bonnie subdued him and turned him to stone, allowing Alaric to steal back the cure and give it to Damon.

<p style="color:rgb(213,212,212);">Later, while trying to resurrect Jeremy, Bonnie died, and with her death, the spell desiccating Silas broke. When Stefan was about to dump Silas' body into the quarry, Silas appeared and revealed to Stefan his true form; Stefan was shocked to see that they look exactly alike, so Silas explained that Stefan is his shadow self, before locking Stefan in a safe and dropping it into the quarry.

<p style="color:rgb(213,212,212);">Sometime during the period of time that the veil was down over Mystic Falls, Qetsiyah managed to resurrect herself from the Other Side in order to take matters into her own hands. After freeing Stefan and telling him her version of the story between her, Silas, and Amara, she used Stefan in a spell to link him to Silas, then fried his brain, which in turn deprived Silas of his mind control abilities.

The Doppelgänger Prophecy
<p class="caption" style="color:rgb(133,127,127);">

<p style="margin-top:0.4em;margin-bottom:0.5em;color:rgb(213,212,212);">In Season Five, Qetsiyah explained that over the centuries, she witnessed the doppelgängers of Silasand Amara being drawn to one another, whether by fate, the universe, or some other mystical phenomenon. She surmised that she and Damon were merely obstacles in the doppelgängers' destined true love. Whether she had been deliberately giving misdirection or not, it was later revealed that this is not exactly what the prophecy foretold. Markos, the leader of the Travelers, explained to Damon that the prophecy regarding the doppelgängers was not about them being destined to fall in love; rather, there was a prophecy that the blood of the last two remaining doppelgängers could be used to undo spirit magic, and thus could remove the curse that the witches placed upon the Travelers. Markos had cast a spell 1,500 years ago that would draw the doppelgängers together, as the Travelers needed the doppelgängers to be in one place in order to use them to break the curse, so he used the lure of true love to make this happen. The Travelers tested this prophecy by using Stefan and Elena's blood to create a way to undo the spirit magic used to turn a human into a vampire. They turned Sloan into a vampire using Tyler Lockwood's blood, and then used the mixed doppelgänger blood to undo her vampirism. It worked, but Sloan is reverted to her last human state – that is, when she died from a slit throat. Having discovered that the prophecy is true, the Travelers then left to get more blood from Stefan and Elena to undo the witches' curse upon their people, which prevented them from settling in one place and reaching the full potential of their power.

Powers and Abilities

 * Blood - Because they are mystical and recurrent, doppelgängers are a source of massive magical power.
 * The blood of a doppelgänger can be used to linksupernatural beings to kinship with the help of magic conducted by any witch.
 * Their blood can also be used to bind a en extremely powerful curse or spell.
 * For some spells, the blood must come from a human doppelgänger. For other spells, the blood of a doppelgänger can still be used even if they've been turned into a vampire, as seen in Death and the Maiden when Qetsiyah used Elena's blood to transfer the Anchor from Amara to Bonnie. There are certain spells and uses that require the doppelgänger to be "pure" and human, however, like the undoing of the Hybrid Curse and the siring of hybrids.
 * The blood of the last two "living" doppelgängers can be used to reverse spells cast using spirit magic (e.g. turning a vampire back into a [dead] human, undoing the spell that bound the Other Side, reversing the spells cast on daylight rings for vampires, etc).
 * Linking - Because dopplegangers are modelled after Immortals and other dopplegangers, they have an inherently strong mystical connection to each other that can be used to invoke Linking Spells.

Silas
<p class="caption" style="color:rgb(133,127,127);"> <span style="color:rgb(213,212,212);">Silas or Silvanus ( Ancient Greek:<span style="color:rgb(213,212,212);"> Σίλας or Σιλουανός,  Latin:<span style="color:rgb(213,212,212);">Silvanus,  Modern Greek:<span style="color:rgb(213,212,212);"> Silouanos) was born some time in the 1st century BC, during the Biblical Times. His origins are from Ancient Greece. Silas was the world's very first immortal being and was the earliest known ancestor of the Salvatore family bloodline, as well as the progenitor of the Salvatore doppelgänger bloodline which spawned Stefan Salvatore and several others, and was also a very distant ancestor of the Salvatore Family. Before becoming an immortal, he was a very gifted and powerful warlock. Silas was deeply and passionately in love with his true love and soulmate; a young lady named Amara. Silas' love for Amara was so strong that his love for her was the major motivator behind him wanting to create the very first spell of immortality with the help of his best friend, who was also a powerful witch and also madly in love with Silas, Qetsiyah. Silas and Amara's love, even though powerful and strong, was also forbidden as Silas was engaged to be married to Qetsiyah and Amara was the personal handmaiden of Qetsiyah. In order for Silas to get help to create the spell, Silas manipulated and convinced Qetsiyah that he loved her and wanted to spend an eternity with her. Out of love for Silas, she created the spell of immortality. The spell was to be consumed on Silas and Qetsiyah's wedding night. However, Silas did not intend to give immortality to Qetsiyah and wanted to give immortality to Amara instead so that Silas and Amara could spend eternity together. On Silas and Qetsiyah's wedding night, Silas stole the immortality elixir and made himself and Amara the world's first immortal beings. After Qetsiyah discovered that Silas had granted the gift of immortality to his true love Amara and not her, she supposedly cured Amara of her immortality and then brutally killed her out of jealous rage by slitting her throat and cutting out her heart. Silas was completely and utterly devastated. Qetsiyah then lured Silas to an isolated island and entombed him in darkness, leaving him to starve and desiccate for eternity. Buried with Silas was the cure for immortality, in which Qetsiyah created. Silas had two choices: either take the cure, die a mortal death and be on The Other Side, which is a purgatory meant for dead supernatural beings, with her for eternity or stay entombed in darkness and desiccate forever. Out of spite, anger and vengeance towards Qetsiyah murdering Amara, Silas chose to not take the cure and ended up staying entombed in darkness and starving for over 2,000 years. Because Silas refused to take the cure and die out of spite, Qetsiyah ended up creating the Other Side in order to trap Silas should he take the cure and die. Creating the Other Side would prevent Silas from finding eternal peace and being together in death with Amara on the earth's metaphysical plane, which is where human souls go after they die. Qetsiyah also created The Five, a group of supernatural hunters whose main goal and mission was to find Silas, cure him of his immortality and kill him, so that Silas would end up on the Other Side with Qetsiyah instead of with Amara as she wanted. After over 2,000 years of being entombed in darkness, Silas has risen and plans on wreaking havoc everywhere he goes. He is determined to join his true love Amara in death by getting Bonnie, who is a very distant descendant of Qetsiyah, to drop the veil so that he could take the cure and die a mortal death and cross over to be with Amara. It was revealed after 2,000 years that Qetsiyah had lied to Silas about Amara and had faked her death. Qetsiyah had actually desiccated and entombed Amara and then used her as the physical anchor for the Other Side spell in which Qetsiyah had created in order to trap Silas' soul shall Silas die a mortal death. Silas reunites with Amara after she is re-awakened, Qetsiyah having lied about her death. Amara tells Silas that she loves him and that she is sorry. She then stabs Silas in the neck in order to obtain the cure for immortality which is running through Silas' veins as she doesn't wish to live anymore. Silas still intends on destroying the Other Side so that he could be with Amara in peace in true eternal death. Silas and Amara reunite once more and Amara begs Silas to kill her so that her suffering can end for good and she can find peace. Amara tells Silas that she loves him and that she will always love him but that she cannot live for another day and wants to end her suffering. Silas tells Amara that he understands. Amara stabs herself and dies, crossing over to the metaphysical plane where humans go to after they die. Afterwards, Silas is stabbed by Stefan, his doppelganger and descendant, and he dies. Unfortunately, Silas dies before he ever had a chance to destroy the Other Side. Silas ends up crossing over to the Other Side, which means that he is separated from Amara forever. To make matters worse and more tragic, Qetsiyah ends up killing herself after transferring the anchor from Amara to Bonnie. Qetsiyah crosses over to the Other Side, where Silas is stuck with her for all eternity. This means that Qetsiyah got her 2,000 year old wish; Silas being stuck with her on the Other Side and beinf separated from his soulmate for all time and for all eternity. When Silas made himself truly immortal, he created an imbalance in nature and nature needed a loophole, a version or versions of Silas that could die. Therefore, shadow selves, doppelgängers or a doppelgänger bloodline of Silas was created in order to maintain the balance of nature. Silas was a distant ancestor to the Salvatore family.

Amara
<p class="caption" style="color:rgb(133,127,127);"> <span style="color:rgb(213,212,212);">Amara ( Ancient Greek:<span style="color:rgb(213,212,212);"> Αμάρα,  Latin:<span style="color:rgb(213,212,212);"> Amarantha) was born some time in the 1st century BC, during the Biblical Times. Her origins are from Ancient Greece. She is the oldest known ancestor of the Petrova family bloodline. Personality wise, Amara comes off as gentle, docile, and innocent, similar to that of Katherine before she became evil. Her age is unknown but it could be assumed that she was anywhere between fourteen to eighteen years old. As a human, she was the handmaiden to Qetsiyah, a very powerful witch. Amara fell deeply and passionately in love with a young, gifted and powerful warlock named Silas. Amara's love for Silas was so strong that she desired to be with him forever. However, her love for Silas was also strongly forbidden as Silas was engaged to be married to Qetsiyah. Therefore, Silas and Amara had a secret relationship. Silas also strongly loved Amara, so much that he desired immortality so that he and Amara could be together for eternity. Silas manipulated Qetsiyah into creating the spell of immortality with the intention of sharing the gift of eternal life with Amara, instead of Qetsiyah. However, after betraying Qetsiyah's trust after she created the spell, Qetsiyah became filled with anger and rage and she wanted revenge. After Silas and Amara drank the immortality elixir, Qetsiyah found the latter by faking her death and forced her to become the phyiscal Anchor to The Other Side, binding it's existence to her immortal life and desiccating her. After her awakening two thousand years later, the pain of her existence was too much to bear and she wished to die. She consumed the Cure in order to become mortal again. Amara reunites with Silas after 2,000 years of being apart from him adn she confesses her undying love for him but says that although she loves Silas, she desires to die just as much. Amara then asks Silas to kill her and end her 2,000 years of suffering. Silas is hesitant to do so at first but he then understands. Unexpectedly, Silas is killed by Stefan after he is stabbed with a blade. Silas passes through Amara as she was still currently the anchor before Qetsiyah had transferred the spell and made Bonnie the anchor instead. Amara, realizing that she has officially nothing to live for now that her beloved is dead and she has endured endless suffering for centuries and centuries, tells a dead Silas that their eternity together would start with her death. She then takes the same knife that killed Silas and stabs herself, killing her and ending her endless suffering. She is presumed to have found peace and has passed on to the afterlife where human souls go to once theyr die. Unfortunately for Amara, she did not get her dying wish which was to be reunited with Silas in true death as Silas ended up stuck on The Other Side with Qetsiyah, who ended up killing herself to be with Silas.

<span style="color:rgb(213,212,212);">Known Petrova Dopplegangers
<span style="color:rgb(213,212,212);">Katerina Petrova

<span style="color:rgb(213,212,212);">Elena Gilbert

<span style="color:rgb(213,212,212);">Known Salvatore Dopplegangers
<span style="color:rgb(213,212,212);">Stefan Salvatore

<span style="color:rgb(213,212,212);">Trivia
<span style="color:rgb(213,212,212);">TBA