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Dooarbled songs of bits and pieces of old truths She had seen countless young ones rise and fall

Yet his audacity intrigued her, even as it shocked her Could it be that the alarm she heard was sos?

Akasha, Enkil

Hearken to your children

How dare he speak the ancient names to the mortal world? It seemed impossible, an offense to reason, that such a creature not be dis in improbable celebrity, revealed secrets he could have learned only from Marius himself And where was Marius, who for t

wo thousand years had taken Those Who Must Be Kept from one secret sanctuary to another? Her heart would break if she let herself think of Marius, of the quarrels that had long ago divided them

But the recorded voice of Lestat was gone noed by other faint electric voices, vibrations rising froes, and the ever audible cry of mortal souls As so often happened, her powerful ears could separate no one signal The rising tide had overwhelmed her-shapeless, horrific-so that she closed herself off Only the wind again

Ah, what must the collective voices of the earth be to the Mother and the Father whose powers had grown, inevitably, from the dawn of recorded time? Had they the power, as she had still, to shut off the flow, or to select froht hear? Perhaps they were as passive in this regard as in any other, and it was the unstoppable din that kept them fixed, unable to reason, as they heard the endless cries, mortal and immortal, of the entire world

She looked at the great jagged peak before her Sheover her face She walked on

And as the trail led her to a small prolacier, the teh cliff, a stone structure of near invisible whiteness, its bell tower disappearing into the swirling snow that had just begun to fall

How long would it take her to reach it, even fast as she could walk? She knehat she must do, yet she dreaded it She must lift her arms, defy the laws of nature and her own reason, and rise over the gulf that separated her fro only when she had reached the other side of the frozen gorge No other power she possessed could nificant, so inhu she had once been

But she wanted to reach the temple She had to And so she did raise her arrace Her eyes closed for the moment as she willed herself upwards, and she felt her body rising ily unfettered by substance, riding by sheer intention the wind itself

For a long moment she let the winds buffet her; she let her body twist, drift She rose higher and higher, allowing herself to turn away fro past her, as she faced the stars How heavy her garments felt; was she not ready to become invisible? Would that not be the next step? A speck of dust in the eye of God, she thought Her heart was aching The horror of this, to be utterly unconnectedThe tears welled in her eyes

And as always happened in suchto seemed more than ever a myth to be cherished as all practical belief died away That I lived, that I loved, that my flesh arm She saw Marius, herwith a supernatural secret: "Pandora,you " "Pandora, co of the Mother and the Father Come into the shrine "

Unanchored, in despair, she otten her destination She could have let herself drift towards the rising sun But the alarer, to remind her of her purpose She spread out her arain, and saw the te fires directly below Yes, there