Out of the pages of the Vampire Chronicles steps the golden-haired Marius, true Child of the Millennia, once mentor to the Vampire Lestat, always and forever the conscientious slayer of the evildoer, and now ready to reveal the secrets of his two-thousand-year-long existence in his own intense yet intimate voice. Born in Imperial Rome, imprisoned and made a "blood god" by the ancient Druids, Marius is the baffled yet powerful protector of Akasha and Enkil, Queen and King of the vampires, in whom the core of the race resides. We follow him through his tragic loss of the vampire Pandora, his lover and fledgling creation. Through him we see the fall of pagan Rome to the Christendom of Constantine, and the sack of the Eternal City by the Visigoths. We see him sailing to the glittering city of Constantinople. Worlds within worlds unfold as Marius, surviving the Dark Ages and the Black Death, emerges in the midst of the Italian Renaissance to create magnificent paintings and a vampire -- the boy Armand. Moving from Florence, Venice, Dresden, Paris, and the English castle of the secret and scholarly order of the Talamasca, the novel