Are the Travelers Stupid?
So, the Travelers are cursed after the fallout of Qetsiyah's immortality spell.
The Travelers' Curse was designed to weaken her coven permanently and ensure they could never again threaten the natural order. It enforced two restrictions:
- The curse permanently cut the Travelers off from Nature, preventing them from ever drawing power from the Earth. This stripped them of their ability to practice Traditional Magic, which was their preferred and most powerful form of witchcraft.
- To prevent them from uniting as a powerful force, the curse ensured that Nature would actively turn against them if they ever attempted to settle down or gather together in groups. Any attempt to congregate as a tribe or establish a permanent home would trigger immediate, localized natural disasters, such as earthquakes, plagues, hurricanes, fires, and tornadoes.
The Travelers would later discover a loophole in their curse. While they couldn't settle down or practice collective magic within their own physical bodies, the curse didn't restrict them from gathering if they inhabited the bodies of others. This led to the invention of Passenger spells, which allowed them to bypass the curse entirely by placing their spirits inside the bodies of non-Traveler hosts.
The Travelers also developed a spell that allowed a Passenger to permanently seize control of their host's body.
So why did the Travelers choose to remain in their cursed bodies for 2,000 years? Their ultimate goal was to break the ancient curse placed on their coven by conventional witches, but they had already found a way to circumvent it altogether since they could simply body-jump into humans and practice magic freely. So that problem was solved.
And with that problem solved, they could've cast the anti-magic barrier at any point during the last 2,000 years. The anti-magic unification spell required the blood of the last two doppelgängers, meaning only those two doppelgängers could exist, and Silas and Amara had to be dead.
In the 5th century A.D., the Traveler leader Markos cast a mystical spell over the doppelgänger lines spawned from Silas and Amara. This spell created a mystical attraction that drew the doppelgängers of each generation together, ensuring the Travelers would eventually be able to locate them when the time was right.
The Travelers killed Qetsiyah in retribution for the curse and stole her mystical Anchor to the Other Side (the petrified, immortal body of Amara). For over 2,000 years, they carried Amara's mummified body from place to place to keep her hidden, all while searching for Silas's location and the Cure so they could eventually destroy the original Immortals. Nadia Petrova also revealed that, because of their nomadic existence, the Travelers often survived by selling their services as mercenary witches.
We find out that the Travelers can track down both doppelgängers using a pyromancy spell to conjure visions of their targets' exact locations within the fire.
All the Travelers needed to access Silas was a Bennett witch, and there was a whole coven full of them at one point.
Meaning that, at any point in time, the Travelers could've tracked down the most current doppelgängers, held them captive, captured a young Bennett witch à la Dahlia, used Amara to track down Silas, had the Bennett witch unlock his tomb, force-fed him and Amara the Cure, and performed their anti-magic spell.
So why did the Travelers choose to remain in their cursed bodies for 2,000 years, limiting their effectiveness in completing this mission? Why allow the doppelgängers to run helter-skelter instead of locking them down when they could track them? And why wait so long to perform the anti-magic ritual?
Are they stupid?