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But sometimes I went from an acceptable ers In reat Paris Ceht after night of one strange and : What had becoiven e artifact of Podil which she'd taken fro, that cri with the star so beautifully painted on it? Nohere could it be? What had becoolden coffin in which I'd once lodged, ah, had all that really ever taken place, that life I thought I recalled fro canals and a great sweet gray sea fall of swift and graceful ships, plying their long oars in perfect unison as if they were living things, those ships, those beautifully painted ships, so often decked with flowers, and with the whitest sails, oh, that could not have been real, and to think, a golden chaolden coffin in it, and this special treasure, this fragile and lovely thing, this painted egg, this brittle and perfect egg, whose painted covering locked inside to utter perfection a e is But what had happened to it! Who had found it!

Somebody had

Either that or it was still there, hidden far below a palazzo in that floating city, hidden in a waterproof dungeon built deep into the oozing earth beneath the waters of the lagoon No, never Not so, not there Don't think of it Don't think of profane hands getting that thing And you know, you lying treacherous little soul, you never, never went back to any such place as the low city with the icy water in its streets, where your Father, a thing of myth and nonsense to be sure, drank wine froone to beco higher even than the do, thatwhich your Mother so cherished as she gave it you, broken that egg with a vicious thuht into it, and out of that rotten fluid, that stinking fluid, you had been born, the night bird, flying high over the s chiher and farther and farther away over the wild lands and over the world and into this dark wood, this deep and dark and endless forest from which you will never escape, this cold and co rat and the crawling wor victim

Allesandra would come "Wake, Armand Wake You dream the sad dreams, the dreams that precede madness, you cannot leave me, my child, you cannot, I fear death o into the fire, you cannot go and leave me here "

No I couldn't I did not have the passion for such a step I did not have the hope for anything, even though no word of the Roman Coven had come in decades

But there ca centuries of Satan's service

Clad in red velvet it ca , Marius It cahted streets of Paris as though God had made it

But it was a vampire child, the same as I, son of the seventeen hundreds, as they reckoned the ti and teasing blood drinker in the guise of a young man, come to stomp out whatever sacred fire yet burnt in the cleft scar tissue of my soul and scatter the ashes

It was The Vampire Lestat It wasn't his fault Had one of us been able to strike hiht, break hiht have had a few more decades of our wretched delusions

But nobody could He was too da for us

Created by a powerful and ancient renegade, a legendary vaed twenty in mortal years, an errant and penniless country aristocrat frone, who had thrown over custom and respectability and any hope of court ambitions, of which he had none anyway since he couldn't even read or write, and was too insulting to wait on any King or Queen, who becautter theatricals, a lover of o-lucky blindly aenius of sorts, this Lestat, this blue-eyed and infinitely confident Lestat, was orphaned on the very night of his creation by the ancient monster who made hi medieval tower, and then went into the eternal co flames

This Lestat, knowing nothing of Old Covens and Old Ways, of soot covered gangsters who thrived under ceht to brand him a heretic, aabout fashionable Paris, isolated and tor in his neers, dancing at the Tuileries with thein the joys of the ballet and the high court theater and roaht, as we called the h Altar, without the lightning of God striking him where he stood

He destroyed us He destroyed me

Allesandra, mad by then as ued hiround Court to stand trial, and then she too went into the fla me with the obvious absurdity: that Our Ways were finished, our superstitions obviously laughable, our dusty black robes ludicrous, our penance and self-denial pointless, our beliefs that we served God and the Devil self-serving, naive and stupid, our organization as preposterous in the gay atheistic Parisian world of the Age of Reason as it ht have seemed to my beloved Venetian Marius centuries before

Lestat was the s and no one, soon left Europe to find his own safe and agreeable territory in the colony of New Orleans in the New World