Mother Righteous (Moira VII.1)

Preface[]

The life of this Mother Righteous was similar to her Earth-616 counterpart's, with the only difference being that she had an assistant in Vox Ignis (the composite form of Banshee and the Spirit of Variance) before and after Mister Sinister's machinations allowed him to seize control over the Quiet Council of Krakoa and later the world.^[1][2]

Sins of Sinister[]

Year 10[]

By corrupting the Resurrection Protocols, Mister Sinister was able to introduce his vile genome into the organisms of uncountable victims to pervert them.^[1] Mother Righteous proved to be an opposition to his rule, planning to eradicate his strain from the hearts of many mutants. Her goal was to build the Reliquary Perilous, made with many mystic artifacts that could purge Sinister's influence with the white-hot fire of faith. To accomplish that, Mother Righteous had to sacrifice Margali Szardos to break the spell she had cast to corrupt the genetics of some mutants. Through her herald Vox Ignis, she was able to recruit the Legion of the Night, chimeras created by Mister Sinister with Nightcrawler's bewitched genetics.

One of Mother Righteous' first moves was to contact her fellow Essex clones, Doctor Stasis and Orbis Stellaris. After having her Legion of the Night assassinate Stasis, she learned Orbis Stellaris had stolen Mister Sinister's laboratory, which had a collection of clones of Moira that could reset reality: the Moira Engine. For weeks, Vox Ignis and the Legion of the Night tackled Sinister's operations for Mother Righteous, strengthening their ranks. After sharing her intentions of infiltrating Orbis Stellaris' World Farm to access Sinister's laboratory, Mother Righteous assigned her Legion of the Night the mission of stealing the necessary treasures to create the Reliquary Perilous to destroy Mister Sinister.^[3]

Year 100[]

The Sinister mutants asserted their influence all over the universe in the decades that came. Mother Righteous maintained her resistance with the Legion of the Night as her loyal followers. Through the years, she used Nightcrawler's religious philosophy, the Spark, to reinforce her influence over her adorers. Parallel to this, Mother Righteous also tried to interact with rebels to Sinister's corruption, including Legion, who rejected her ways and ascended to an ethereal plane with other mutants. Almost a hundred years after Mister Sinister conquered Earth, the numbers of the Legion of the Night drastically plummeted as they were not being created any longer, since Mother Righteous would recruit them to her cult. Their reduction challenged the possibility of completing the Reliquary Perilous. In an attempt to remedy that, the Legion of the Night attempted natural reproduction, although they were designed to be infertile. The first of the converted, Wagnerine, miraculously gave birth to a baby girl who immediately vanished after being born in a horrible event.

As an alternative plan, Wagnerine had Vox Ignis convince Mother Righteous to recruit the genius Doctor Nemesis, who resisted Sinister for years in the Graymalkin Habitat. In secrecy, she also retrieved the original Nightcrawler, who was still monstrously perverted by Szardos' spell, to strengthen their operation. Seeing the Spark defiled by Mother Righteous, Nightcrawler violently attacked her, but was met with a swift death. Her heretic action against Nightcrawler sparked doubt within the Legion of the Night, and Wagnerine chose to defect, abandoning her mistress after learning her lost baby daughter actually resided in Reliquary Perilous.^[4] Around this era, in an opportune moment, Mother Righteous happened upon Mister Sinister, informing him about hers and Orbis Stellaris' existence. With this revelation, it was made evident that there was a race to achieve a dominion state between the three Essex clones to stop the machines. Mister Sinister was motivated to abandon his own Empire and go on a quest for the Moira Engine.^[5]

Year 1000[]

Over the following nine hundred years, Mother Righteous secretly completed the Reliquary Perilous as her Legion of the Night continued to serve her faithfully. After detecting the arrival of Mister Sinister at the World Farm where the Moira Engine was housed, Mother Righteous put her plan into motion by bidding all of her servants to sacrifice themselves into the barrier. Just as they finished, Vox Ignis arrived after fifty years fleeing from the Spirits of Vengeance-possessed Galactus. Just as she had planned, Galactus was positioned right in the trajectory of the Juggernaut, who had been fired into space a millenium ago. The streaking Juggernaut killed Galactus and further weakened the barrier protecting the World Farm, and with the sacrifice of her final Nightkin Auntie Fortune, Mother Righteous finally had access to the Moira Engine.

She revealed to Vox Ignis her intentions to use the Reliquary Perilous to send all the knowledge she had accumulated in the last thousand years back in time to herself, ensuring she would retain this knowledge upon the Moira clone's death and the subsequent reset of the timeline. Mother Righteous only needed one more thing to complete her plan: the Spirit of Variance, so she separated it from Banshee and used it as fuel for her spell. As she was poised to complete her scheme, however, Wagnerine, who had come to free her child from the Reliquary, mortally wounded Mother Righteous.^[6] The original Moira came upon the scene, killed Banshee and claimed the Reliquary Perilous. She fed Mother Righteous into the Reliquary in place of Wagnerine's infant and used it on the clone, fulfilling Mother Righteous' plan. Consequently, Mother Righteous' younger self gained a new section in her library at the Sanctum Malefica that contained a multitude of books chronicling the events of the aborted future. Having studied the life of her alternate version, the Mother Righteous of Earth-616 was granted a vast amount of privileged knowledge.^[7]

• Reliquary Perilous