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PART III

AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING, IS NOW, AND EVER SHALL BE

Hide me from me Fill these holes with eyes for ood so dead in life so , and shade my me from my desire to be hooked fish That ine looks sweet and makes my me blind And, too, my heart hide for I shall at this rate it also eat in time

STAN RICE - "Cannibal" Some Lamb (1975)

LESTAT :

IN THE ARMS OF THE GODDESS

I CAN'T SAY WHEN I AWOKE, WHEN I FIRST CAME to my senses

I re ti on her blood with an animal abandon, that Enkil was destroyed and she alone held the pris and understand things that made me cry like a child

Two hundred years ago, when I'd drunk fronificently silent Noas an utter transport of i the brain just as the blood itself ravished the body; I was learning everything that had happened; I was there as the others died one by one in that horrible way

And then there were the voices: the voices that rose and fell, see choir in a cave

It see-the rock concert, the house in Care that I was here noith her, in this dark snowy place I'd waked her Or rather I had given her the reason to rise as she had said it The reason to turn and stare back at the throne on which she'd sat and take those first faltering steps away from it

Do you knohat it ht? Do you knohat itin that marble chamber?

Surely we had danced together in the dark snow-covered wood, or was it only that we had eain?

Terrible things had happened Over the whole world, terrible things The execution of those who should never have been born Evil spawn The massacre at the concert had been only the finish

Yet I was in her ar darkness, in the faain, and it was enslaving hts, had to knohether or not Marius was alive, whether or not Louis and Gabrielle, and Arain, somehow