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"And so I journeyed froypt, which to me has always been a hateful place It was then I heard tell of Marius, a young Roman blood drinker, miraculously unburnt, who had come and stolen the Mother and Father and taken theain "It was not difficult to find Marius As I've told you, in the early years we could never hear each other But as tier ones just as if they were hus In Antioch, I discovered Marius's house, a virtual palace where he lived a life of Roh he hunted the dark streets for human victims in the last hours before dawn

"He had already made an is on earth And the Mother and Father he had placed in an exquisite shrine, , in which he burned incense as if it were a teods

"I waited for my moment He and Pandora went to hunt And then I entered the house, ive way from the inside

"I saw the Mother and Father, darkened as I had been darkened, yet beautiful and lifeless as they'd been a thousand years before On a throne he'd placed them, and so they would sit for two thousand years, as you all knoent to them; I touched theer I made my test I pierced the flesh of the Mother, which had beco as my flesh had become I pierced the immortal body which had becoile, and ht to left I slashed with it, then stopped

"Her blood poured viscous and thick for a moment; for a an to heal; the spilt blood hardened like amber as I watched

"But nificant, I had felt that moment when the heart failed to puue disconnection; the very whisper of death No doubt, all through the world blood drinkers had felt it, perhaps the young ones strongly, a shock which knocked them off their feet The core of Aer, these things proved that the life of the blood drinkers resided within her body as it alould

"I would have destroyed her then, if it had not been so I would have cut her limb from limb; for no span of time could ever cool my hatred for her;Mekare from me Mekare my other half; Mekare my own self

"How nificent it would have been if the centuries had schooled iveness; if s done me and my people

"But I tell you, it is the soul of humankind which moves towards perfection over the centuries, the hu year how better to love and forgive I am anchored to the past by chains I cannot break

"Before I left, I wiped away all trace of what I had done For an hour perhaps I stared at the two statues, the two evil beings who had so long ago destroyed ht such evil upon me and my sister; and who had known such evil in return

" 'But you did not win, finally,' I said to Akasha 'You and your soldiers and their swords For my child, Miriam, survived to carry the blood of my family andto you as you sit there in silence, s to me '

"And the words I spoke were true But I will come to the story of my family in a moment Let me deal noith Akasha's one victory: that Mekare and I were never united again

"For as I have told you, never in all s did I ever find a azed upon Mekare or heard her nah all the lands of the world I wandered, at one tione froreat western sea had sed her; and I was as half a being reaching out always for the only thing which can render me complete

"Yet in the early centuries, I knew Mekare lived; there were ti of the other twin; in dark dreamlike mom

ents, I knew inexplicable pain But these are things which hurew harder, as the human in me melted away and this rew dominant, I lost the simple human link with my sister Yet I knew, I knew that she was alive