Brightwell Coven

Evil is not an enemy for you to fight, nor a burden for you to endure. It is a gift.

The Brightwell Coven is a secret society originally founded in Gothic Earth's city of London in England during the late 18th century. It is currently headquartered in the city of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, but has possibly also been introduced to the Demiplane of Dread (see the Brightwell Legacy in volume 22 of Quoth the Raven). In spite of being named a coven, the society welcomes all manner of spellcasters, not merely Witches. It is not even a typical qabal, in that it accepts and even welcomes non-spellcasters, so long as they are willing and able to contribute to the cause.

The Coven was first mentioned in Quoth the Raven Issue 22, the Brightwell Legacy.

Early History

The Brightwell Coven seeks ultimate power through complete knowledge. Since its creation by aristocratic young men who attended the University of Cambridge and there taught themselves how to be Adepts, the Coven has been constantly striving to gather any kind of knowledge it could broker into power, with no regard for its source, nor the nature of the beings associated with it. As should be expected, many of the Coven's members were touched and corrupted by the Red Death - a fact which the Coven recognised and disregarded, so long as their power continued to increase.

The Coven's first generations were heavily involved in infiltrating libraries, universities, and centers of knowledge such as the British Museum and the Museum of Natural History, as well as infiltrating archaeological digs. Whatever magical, alchemical or other power the Coven's agents managed to gather, they collected in a grand grimoire, the Libre des Ombres Sécrètes (Book of Secret Shadows).

The Coven's fortunes had seemed to be on the rise, when their headquarters in London's Highgate district came under attack from unidentified assailants in the mid-19th century. The attackers set the building on fire and raided its basement archive before fleeing and scattering into London. The Coven could not prevent fire services from breaching the building and discovering some of their arcane paraphernalia. Forced to flee before the authorities, the Coven's elders commanded the care of their prized grimoire to some junior members while they took their remaining source texts and scattered to the four winds.

Contrary to what the juniors believed, this was not a sign of responsibility and trust, meant to draw the enemy away from the priceless grimoire and the junior members. Rather, the elders fully expected the completed grimoire to attract more hostile attention than its source texts, and anticipated that their juniors would be hunted down and massacred. Meanwhile, the elders planned to regroup in Alexandria and there reconstitute the Libres des Ombres Sécrètes in safety. The only elder to reach the Coven's Alexandria hideout was unpleasantly surprised to discover he was the only one to have made it that far -- and to find himself 'warmly' awaited by troops allied with the enemy which had originally raided the London headquarters.

Recent History

With the elders dead and the source texts lost, presumed destroyed, the Libre des Ombres Sécrètes carried to Amsterdam by junior members of the Coven was now unique on Gothic Earth. It was also written in dozens of antique languages, many of which had not been spoken by a living being outside of a ritual circle in centuries -- and in which the surviving agents of the Coven had not yet been initiated. Fully committed to increasing their power and add to the grimoire, the Coven went underground and sought to once again infiltrate great centers of knowledge, but found itself stymied by the fact that their fortunes had vastly decreased with the death of the elders, who had taken access to the Coven's finances with them. The Coven's new leaders sought to better their station and capital by getting people into education and tithing its membership, and reached out to hedge-witches and witch-doctors in a bid to at least add some power to the grimoire, but their successes were vastly outweighed by their decline.

Only in the late 20th century did the Coven receive a stroke of good fortune which seemed capable of reversing their fortunes once more. For a long time, the Coven's elders had the habit of recruiting the very young; children young enough to yearn for magic, but just barely old enough to be useful. These children, they would expose to the little bit of magic they could still muster, slowly initiating them and corrupting their morals until they were fully complicit with the Coven's morally bankrupt mission. One of the youngsters they recruited, a young woman who would later become known as Mu, turned out to have a knack for languages that allowed her to not only learn to translate the ancient languages found in the Libre des Ombres Sécrètes, but also to crack the codes the early elders had used. As the new recruit slowly gave the Coven access to the deeper secrets they had craved for so long, the elders rejoiced. Then, to their anguish, the child recruit discovered something in the Libre that she should not have been allowed to know yet, and she disappeared before she had restored their access to the full power of the grimoire. Still, the Coven had access to more of its lore than it had enjoyed for a long time. Energised by their (limited) luck, the Coven strove to contact entities which might increase their power even further, offering heinous sacrifices in trade for more spells, more secrets... and history repeated itself. A fire broke out in the Coven's headquarters, set by unidentified assailants. After the flames were finally doused, the Libres desOmbres Sécrètes was gone without a trace.

Today

In spite of the most recent blow, the Brightwell Coven soldiers on. The new generation of elders still has access to the knowledge gathered since the Coven's relocation to Amsterdam, as well as the knowledge unlocked by young Mu, because their direct predecessors had the foresight to make multiple copies and keep them hidden in multiple locations throughout the city. With the turn of the century and the ongoing changes to society, the Coven continues to increase in power as education becomes more freely available and communication improves. The original Libre des Ombres Sécrètes may be lost, but the Coven is once again infiltrating centers of learning and repositories of history, seeking to add to their stores. Having learned from their past failures, the Coven now maintains multiple copies of their grimoire, each in a different location, and strives to keep its membership scattered over a wide area of the planet.

Hierarchy

The first two iterations of the Brightwell Coven worked with a strict pyramid structure; the elders were on top, decided who and when to recruit, and initiated members in the Coven's deeper secrets on a timetable of their own choosing. Junior members either accepted or were weeded out with lethal means. In the 21st century, the Coven works on a more egalitarian basis. With the membership scattered into cells, each cell votes in three seniors, who reach decisions based on a vote. Decisions involving multiple cells within a certain region, or indeed the whole Coven, are achieved by vote as cell leaders gather for secret meetings.

Other

There is currently no proof of any connection between the Coven and the goddess Brightwell.