Wundagore

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Wundagore, or Mount Wundagore, is a fictional location in the Marvel Universe.

Wundagore is a mountain in the fictional Eastern European nation of Transia. The history of Chthon and the Darkhold are strongly tied to the mountain of Wundagore. In the Sixth Century, a cult of Darkholders led by the sorceress Morgan le Fey attempted to summon Chthon but found him to be uncontrollable. While the Darkholders were incapable of banishing him altogether, they bound him to Mount Wundagore, in what would one day become Transia.

In the late 1940s, Herbert Wyndham, the man who became the High Evolutionary made his laboratory base at the foot of Wundagore Mountain with the assistance of Dr. Horace Grayson (the father of the superhero Marvel Boy). Wyndham found uranium in and around Mount Wundagore and funded a national non-profit trust with the money gathered from his uranium mine, which has become Transia's main source of income. A number of smaller villages are now located at the base of Mount Wundagore.

Years later, a young Philip Masters (the Puppet Master) obtained clay from the mountain that had been granted mystical power by Chthon's presence; he would use this clay in his attempts to conquer the Fantastic Four.

A colleague of Herbert Wyndham's, Jonathan Drew with his wife Miriam and daughter Jessica arrived during this time. The werewolf Gregor Russoff, a Darkholder whose grandson (birth name Jacob Russoff, legal name Jack Russell) would become the Werewolf by Night, attacked and killed Drew's wife, Miriam. Jessica was placed in suspended animation.

The High Evolutionary also created a race of artificially evolved humanoid animals called the New Men, whose elite members were entitled the "Knights of Wundagore". The New Men were the results of Wyndham's first experiments in accelerated evolution. When Wyndham learned from Magnus that Wundagore Mountain, on which his advanced genetics research citadel was based, was the prison of Chthon, he decided to train his creations in chivalry and battle tactics and equip them with advanced weaponry and armor. Wyndham later converted his citadel into a spaceship, and he and most of his New Men left to explore the stars. They eventually settled on a planet, which they named Wundagore II, with the High Evolutionary staying on the planet's moon in order to look after them.

A pregnant gypsy woman named Magda arrived at Wundagore, on the verge of giving birth (unknown to all, she was the wife of the man who would become Magneto). While Magda was giving birth with the assistance of a bovine female midwife, Lady Bova of the New Men, Chthon sent a part of his essence into one of Magda's twin children, Wanda, whose mutation was transformed into the ability to manipulate chaos and probability and, later, to manipulate reality itself. Magda died, and her children were placed into suspended animation.

Several years later, Robert Frank and his pregnant wife Madeline (formerly the superheroes Whizzer and Miss America) came to Wundagore. Madeline died giving birth to a stillborn child. When the Whizzer asked to see his child, Lady Bova, to spare Frank’s grief presented the late Magda's two children to him as his children, but when the Whizzer learned of his wife's death, he fled. The twins were returned to suspended animation until Bova brought them to a Transian gypsy named Django Maximoff, who raised the children as his own. While the twins would become the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver; Jessica Drew was also freed from suspended animation; she would become the first Spider-Woman. As adults, the twins would later confront Chthon at Wundagore with the assistance of the Avengers.

Later still, the High Evolutionary returned to Wundagore and re-established a citadel there. He evolved more New Men, and for a time Quicksilver lived there and ruled the New Men. Quicksilver and the New Men repelled attacks on Wundagore by the Acolytes led by Exodus as well as the rogue New Man, the Man Beast.