What a marvel Flavius had been.

No one in the courts of the old Queen would have dared to give the Blood to one marked with deformity. Not even to the ugly or the badly proportioned was the Blood given. Indeed every human offered to the remorseless appetite of the spirit of Amel had been a lamb without blemish and indeed with beauty and gifts of strength and talent that his maker must witness and approve.

Yet here was Flavius crippled in his mortal years but burning brightly with the Blood, a meditative and well-spoken Athenian reciting the tales of Homer by memory as he played his lute, a poet and a philosopher who’d understood law courts and judgments, and who had memorized whole histories of peoples of the Earth he’d never known or seen. Gregory had imbibed so much from Flavius, sitting at his feet by the hour, prodding him with questions, committing to memory the stories and songs that came from his lips. And how grateful had been this honorable scholar. “You have my loyalty for all time,” he’d said to Gregory and Chrysanthe, “as you have loved me for what I am.”

And to think, this gracious blood drinker knew the very location of the Mother and the Father. He had seen them in the eyes of Pandora who made him; he had lived beneath the very roof of Marius and Pandora where the Divine Pair were kept.

How amazed Gregory—Nebamun of old—had been by Flavius’s stories of King Enkil and Akasha, now mute and blind living statues who never showed the slightest sign of sentience as they sat on a throne above banks of flowers and fragrant lamps in a gilded shrine. And it was Marius, the Roman, who had stolen the unresisting King and Queen out of Egypt, from the old blood drinker priesthood that had thrived there for four thousand years. The elders of the priesthood had sought to destroy the Mother and the Father, as they had come to be called, by placing them in the killing rays of the sun. And indeed—as the King and Queen had suffered this blasphemous indignity—countless blood drinkers around the world had perished in flames. But the oldest had been doomed to continue, though their skin was darkened, even blackened, and their every breath was taken in pain. Akasha and Enkil had only been bronzed by this foolish attempt at immolation and indeed the elder himself had survived to share the torture of those he had hoped would all be burnt to death.

But priceless as this history was to Gregory—that his old sovereign endured without power—it was not the Blood history that mattered to him, but the new Roman world.

“Teach me, teach me everything,” Gregory had said over and over again to Flavius and to Chrysanthe, and wandering the busy streets of Carthage, filled now with a mélange of Romans and Greeks and Vandals, he struggled to explain to his two devoted teachers how astonishing was the wealth of this world which they took for granted, where common people had gold in their pockets, and plenty to eat on their tables, and spoke of “eternal salvation” as belonging to the most humbly born.

In his time, so very long ago, only the royal court and a handful of nobles had lived in rooms with floors. Eternity had been the property of only that same handful of persons living and breathing under the stars.

But what did it matter? He didn’t expect Chrysanthe and Flavius to understand him. He wanted to understand them. And as always he drew knowledge from his victims, feeding on their minds as surely as he fed on their blood. What a vast world the common people inhabited, and how small and arid had been that geography belonging to him so very long ago.

Less than two hundred years had passed before two more blood drinkers joined his Blood Kindred at Gregory’s invitation. Carthage was no more. He and his family lived then in the Italian city of Venice. These newcomers had also known the infamous Marius, keeper of the King and Queen, as had Flavius. Their names were Avicus and Zenobia and they came from the city of Byzantium and were glad of Gregory’s invitation to find safety and hospitality beneath his roof.

Avicus had been a blood god of Egypt same as Gregory, and indeed Avicus had been told tales of the great Nebamun and how he’d led the Queens Blood to drive the First Brood from Egypt, and they had much to talk about of those dark and dreary times and the torture of being blood gods encased within stone shrines, forced to dream and starve between great feast days when the faithful would bring them blood sacrifice and ask them to look into hearts and judge the innocent from the guilty with their blood drinker minds. How could the Queen have doomed so many to such misery and drudgery, such wretched heartbreaking isolation? Nebanum had had his own taste of that “Divine Service” in the end.

No wonder Marius, forced into the priesthood, had stolen the Mother and the Father—rejecting out of hand the ancient superstition—and returned to a willful, rational Roman life of his own.

Avicus was Egyptian, tall, dark skinned, and half mad still after a thousand years of serving the old blood cult. He had been a slave to the old religion right into the Common Era, whereas Nebamun had fled it thousands of years before. His Blood Wife, Zenobia, was a delicately built female with voluminous black hair and exquisite features; she brought into the house a universe of new learning, having been brought up in the palace of the Emperor of the East before being brought into the Blood by a wicked female named Eudoxia who had made war on Marius and ultimately lost.

Zenobia had been left to the mercy of Marius, but he’d loved her, making her Blood Kin, and he had taught her how to survive on her own. He had approved her love for Avicus.

Zenobia cut her long hair nightly, and went forth in the garb of a man. Only in the quiet sanctuary of the home did she revert to female garments and let her black hair flow over her shoulders.

Both would never lift a finger against Marius, or so they told their new mentor. Marius was the sworn protector of the Mother and the Father. He maintained them in a magnificent shrine, filled with flowers, and lamps, its walls painted with verdant gardens.

“Yes, he’s the clever and educated Roman all right,” said Flavius. “And a philosopher of sorts, and every ounce the patrician. But he has done all in his power to make existence bearable for the Divine Parents.”

“Yes, I have come to understand all this,” Gregory had told them. “The story of this Marius becomes ever more clear. Nothing evil must ever befall him. Not while he protects the Divine Parents. But one thing I vow, my friends, and do listen. I will never ask that you bring harm to any blood drinker, unless that blood drinker seeks to bring direct harm to us. We hunt the evildoer, and we seek to feed as well upon the beauty we see all around us, the marvels we are privileged to witness, don’t you understand?”