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Strange Fate
The Victorian Meonia Group hoped to change the world with mysticism.
The First Wave
The ancient Bridestones tomb, where reality seemed to change.
In the 1850s, the first leaders of the Meonia group were Maria Bateman, the lady of Biddulph Grange, and a neighbor, Barbara Bodichon, editor of The English Woman's Journal, a magazine advocating female rights. In 1851, when the Meonia group began, there were virtually no organized feminist movements anywhere in the world. Within a couple of decades, however, not only did dozens of such influential groups spring up in countries around the globe, but in Britain alone, laws were passed to allow women to legally keep the money they earned and enable them to own property and assets and directly inherit wealth. Even male-dominated trade unions accepted that women had the right to equal pay, and in 1891 it was finally outlawed for a husband to beat his wife. These fundamental human rights were adopted worldwide, including in the USA, Canada, mainland Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand. It soon led to female suffrage and women in government. Although there was, and still is, a long way to go, it was an extraordinary beginning. Known as the First Wave of feminism, it all seems to have begun with the Meonia group. Was it just an astonishing coincidence, or did they mystically influence word afairs as they belived?
In the late 1890s, a mysterious fire gutted Biddulph Grange; the order was disbanded, and the last head of the Meonia group, the artist Jane Morris, hid the Heart of the Rose. Recently, authors Graham Phillips and Jodi Russell started to investigate the Meonia group together and search for the lost relic. Almost at once, strange things began to occur. On visiting the Bridestones, the Celtic tomb where Mary Heath had found the relic, a bizarre storm occurred immediately about them when all around remained calm. Shortly after, they discovered that reality seemed to have impossibly changed. Certain people they knew no longer remembered them, the names of local landmarks changed, a café and a theme park existed where neither had existed before, and a ceremonial sword that had belonged to the Meonia group, which had been in the hands of a private collector for years, was now on public display – and had been since it was discovered in 1979.
Jane Morris, the last leader of the Meonia group.
The Multiverse